Month: January 2023

At the start of a new work week I am reminded of how frail all of this really is. We, as a NATO country, may be getting into direct conflict with Russia, which means a dramatic change in the world order and something that could really put the world at risk of Russia decides to play it tough and drop real bombs.

this feels like a hot war and a bit of a proxy one at that. As Russia grapples for the respect it’s lost we must recognize how we ourselves risk that turn sooner than later.

I’m worried about these things. Is that because I’m maturing or simply paying attention?

Football can be really exciting–even if your team is already done. Today I watched the Eagles play very bad ball against a depleted 49rs squad and make it to the show. Then I watched a depleted Chiefs squad do the same. We’ll see how the ‘show’ goes….

Some Thoughts:

1. Madden is going badly. I got mollywhopped by my kid and I think I learned but one defensive thing from the entire situation. I gotta be faster on the sticks in terms of adjustments and I really need to learn how to play offense and read the D ALOT better than I do. I see an 8 man rush and I still try to run the ball–I have no way to hurt him for committing that many because my Wrs and TE still cannot get open in the man or the thin zone coverage. This is me failing.
2. In the athletic world of children, both the boys are in HS training to play at the DB position. The younger still wants to do RB and hopefully gets a chance to play at the freshman level and perhaps develop into a sold back. He has the frame and size to be a terrifying corner right now. Does he have the technique, speed, and instinct? Not yet. His big bro does, and I’m hoping for a good Senior year for him. Because of the way High School Football works, he has already started getting ready and serious practice is coming up early summer.
3. I don’t have a lot to say tonight. Not about anything really. Sometimes it be like that.

The Tyre situation was really heavy to talk about, so I am going to talk about something utterly frivolous: how to win at Madden.

The answer is practice and research. I learned that from the kids. Of course, having 99 speed on everyone in the secondary helps. They watch a lot of YouTube pros like Throne and TD Barrett, taking the lessons they learn from watching superior gameplay. Throne, I notice, doesn’t often walk viewers through all of his stuff. He just shows them live games and they love it. The key, it seems, is to understand a defense. A secondary key is practice. You gotta know your plays and know the 9 areas of the field and how each type of man and zone player will react based on the type of coverage (and type of zone specifically) they are in.

I’m learning. It takes a lot of time. I don’t know how much time I am truly willing to commit to the situation. Not as much as I need in order to be really great–that’s for sure. At this point though, I just want to be able to beat the kids.

A lot of lives are going to be changed as a result of a life being lost as a result of a deadly beating by a handful of police officers in the Memphis area. A lot happened that night that Tyre Nichols ran from the cops. The scene here is far from unbelievable. In truth it feels expected. It reflects everything we see and have come to expect from TV shows about cops . The cops were punching him for running. They weren’t trying to put him into custody, they were treating him the way you treat a member of a rival gang when you finally catch them–you punish them for making you chase them.

It is wrong. It is someone in power feeling that power and losing all sense of humanity while they beat a restrained man senseless. What’s worse is they know the script for self-defense. They are talking about the things they are acting like he did to put them in harm, however it is clear that this was not the case at any point, and they were simply hyped up after the chase and beat a man to death like a pack of animals who’ve caught their prey.

This is bad. This is instructionally bad. This is us seeing the results of how we train our society and how we train our officers. It is entirely debatable why he was stopped and why he ran. I’ve heard things ranging from him being armed and dangerous and fleeing in commission of a crime from him not using a turn signal and the cops coming for him. I don’t know why he ran. If I had to speculate I would say he was afraid he had warrants or something of the sort. I don’t believe someone who runs from the police is entirely innocent, and I don’t believe what happened to him was in any way justified.

This is going to be a story for a long time.

Crunching through my evening salad I realized that my life has changed. I’m actively working towards becoming a healthier person. That is not to say I don’t need assistance. I have serious cardiovascular issues that I will be working to address with a specialist. I want to be alive. I want to love, to create, to enjoy the world. All of this I want to continue doing for as long as possible. I am happy, and happiness makes me want to keep going and get better and be better for everyone around me.

All that being said, I really wish I hadn’t allowed it to get this bad. Being a black man, I ought to know about the serious heart and blood pressure stuff that is common to those like me. I should’ve made better choices, as I am finally making better choices now. I need to continue making better choices and moving myself towards a place of continued joy. This is all.

Some Thoughts:

1. I love being me. Sometimes being me annoys others I love to no end. This is a problem. Still, I gotta be me. If I were not I would not be the person that they and I love.

Another day goes by listening to the constant thrum of YouTube videos in the background and trying to find some mental space away from all that noise. It’s working a little–enough so that I’m on the verge of understanding the magical system of my fantasy world from the top down. I know where magic comes from, but not how it arrives or is channeled or traversed. These reveals will not appear on these pages, because the world and its connection to the magic is central to story and plot. By the dang book, y’all!

I will offer NFL predictions freely now.

Niners. There, I said it. People insist the team greatly struggled against the Cowboys given the 19-12 final score, but you have to consider how those two squads actually stack up. Dak is going to be able to find success through the air to Lamb. Period. The two picks are are a troubling statistic largely because of the power of the Dallas run D. Eagles lack that run D. Sure, they can blitz and sack with the best of them–in fact they ARE the best of them, but McCaffery is gonna gouge them with runs and that is what this game turns on. The end.

Honestly, I like the Chiefs. I like Mahomes. I want to cheer him on. I want to see my guy K. Toney show out. Unfortunately, the league’s biggest villains, the Bengals, will be going back to the show, because they are flat out too good. It will be close. The emergence of a KC run game reshapes the conflict, but the injury to Mahomes–if as serious as indicated–will limit his ability to scramble and create and that is what this game turns on. The end.

Don’t you hate it when you’re all clean and warm from the shower and snuggled up in bed and realize, ‘shit, I didn’t blog’. So you (read: me) have to pull out your phone and smash your Oscar Mayer thick thumbs against a screen that wants none of that action. It’s not pretty.

yet here we are. Going back a short distance this evening to a week ago when I was full of excitement about the coming semester—before the workload descended like mountain snow. I’ll tell you this: if you love what you do, it’s still work but it is also manageable. I’m having fun managing it. I’m happy with the workload and enjoying the students in spite of not always being fully on top of the content game. I’m doing me and I’ve got my mind on a dozen tasks including games.

all of it works for me and makes me happy, so all of it is all good. The key here is personal joy in my work life and my home life. So long as those two stay steady my life will be golden.

This is going to be a Madden blog, because I’ve been thinking about the game today and realizing how difficult it is to build a team when you start with the Browns in their present (draft pick) condition, don’t fantasy draft well, and cannot lure people to your town with free agency because you only get to play games against the other users (3) in the league, which leaves you with a max of 6 user games and the rest are sim based on the quality of your team… which isn’t good. I am coming off a 4-win season and definitely in a rebuild type of year. I don’t know what is going to happen moving forward with the team, but I seriously worry about getting fired, because we won’t win more games than we won last year. We might not win any at all and still won’t get more than a second round pick. The Browns are ruined for a while.

Needless to say this has me needing to up my stick skills. I’ve talked about this a little already, but I am working on getting better–especially this week with my boys around and the opportunity to play a few games. I’m not expecting wins, but I have to be able to compete. I have to be able to hold on to the meager talent I already have on the roster at the very least.

Part of what I need to be doing is getting my team locked in with playbooks that are aligned to their skills. I don’t think I’ve done a good enough job setting up the game to be simmed. Maybe my QB (Brock Purdy) takes some steps forward. The way our league works he does have a shot to grow given the 4 boosts a season I can delegate to my team. Not sure I can skip using one on him this year, though I do need to work on his offense line first. My defense has hopes… maybe. There is a lot for me to see what happens in this new season. I’ll get to that tomorrow.

Got sloppy with the publish button again. Sorry about that. I can draw a correlation to how late I post to how often I miss the publish button. I’m not the night guy I used to be. I’m listening to the Madden Academy cast in the background as I write this. I’m trying the basic 101 to get some of the basic mindset back as opposed to falling into relying on the glitch game like the kids. I cannot abide that. I gotta get better at fundamentals and teach them that this is how you win the game–stick skills. Beyond that the fundamentals of a solid game plan and knowing what the opponent is doing and giving you. In other words, I’m back to the basics and back to the lab–trying to get good again; first at running the rock and then short passes and then longer. This is the way.

Some Thoughts:

1. Week two of 18/8 for school and I am excited to get back into it. This slate of classes is challenging, because these students are hungry and the majority of the material is new build. I’m teaching three entirely new classes and that makes me a hard working man in the classroom for the first time in a while. I’m definitely feeling it.

I keep having this moment where I think that the people and programs I love are on the edge of a breakthrough and then… collapse. I just finished watching the Giants do it. I watched my youngest do it earlier today. I realized in him that he doesn’t want to play football, he wants to be the star without grinding. It is a difficult thing to recognize in a kid. He begged forever for a chance to play seven on seven and I found him a spot and the first ting he said was, “Is there a better team I can play for?” He isn’t willing to be on a bad team anymore. he just wants to be on a spotlight squad winning championships. That makes me feel like he isn’t going to make it through high school and certainly not college ball. He isn’t the guy who is going to grind from the ground up to earn that smoke.

On the other hand, the Giants just aren’t there yet. They don’t have the talent and may not for another year or two. Yet they have the foundations and they have the people who want to work their asses off to be good. That matters the most in my book.

Some Thoughts:

1. On a major losing streak in Madden. Cannot win against the boys anymore. I’m struggling to even make the games competitive. I’m finally resorting to deep research to figure out the best plays to run and pass the ball and I’m trying to put those together into a cohesive system, but these sure fire plays just don’t work for me. I have to face the fact that I am predictable as a play caller and not very good at the game.