#we beat three runs and has like maybe four deaths per run total

[gayrika]

I hate that whenever splatoons maps updates it kicks you outta of the group. i was just in the best group for salmon run we were kicking ass!! bro pls!

[the-silentium]

Trial by Fire

Masterlist - Chapter 1

Fors is an Original planet. I do not give permission to people to use it for their own fics, the planet, the animals, the Nightmares, the lore or anything related to Fors. Thank you.

Pairing: Bad Batch x Reader

Words: 4020 words

Warnings: Blood, gore, monsters (yay).

A/N: Woohoo, action chap! From this point on, the will be blood on almost every chap. Be warned.

Taglist:  @haloangel391​ /  @lightning-wolffe​​ / @cherrydemon5​​ / @and-claudia​​

_____________________

"Something happened." One of the members spoke up, addressing the problem from his position at the end of the long table. "The planet is angry again." 

"Why would they come back now?" Another asked, finger nervously tapping at his tight. 

The man leading the council took a second, to release the armchair from his deadly grip, allowing blood to return to his white fingertips. 

"We all know how it started." He didn't know why they were back, but he certainly knew who was the cause. 

Whispers erupted from the dozen of people sitting at the table, accusations, hateful exclamations, worried questions, they all blended in a cacophony that beat at the leader's growing headache. 

"Enough." He barked, effectively bringing silence back into the closed room. 

"She's back and we need to find her. Send half of our available hunters into the jungle for a retrieval mission. No one is allowed back in until she's here."

"But Arlan," the head of the scouts paused, unsure of his own next words, "she's dead." 

No one dared to breathe, in fear that they may be chosen to venture the darkness away from the village's protection if they dared to make a sound to disturb the stillness of the room. 

"Apparently not." Arlan growled, frustrated that the thorn in his side was back. 

____________________

You took a deep breath in to calm your buzzing nerves, they couldn't control you right now, not when everyone's lives, your family, was in danger. They needed you strong and in control, something you hoped you could be long enough to get the whole group to safety. It was your only chance. You had your instincts, they were sharp and trustworthy so you had to rely on them and not let panic overflow again. 

You exhaled slowly, wiggling your fingers and toes to relax every inch of yourself. You could do it. You were an experienced hunter in these jungles and they were highly trained commandos with a flawless success rate. Let's not forget the fact that they had blasters. You were good with your knife, but it clearly wasn't the best weapon out there. Maybe the odds were in your favor. 

But they were used to droids, not unpredictable monsters that loved to tear beings apart limb by limb. Tonight would be your trial by fire. For all of you. 

"We need to be ready to meet them." You cracked your knuckles unconsciously, already picturing yourself in front of one of your nightmares. 

You acknowledged Hunter's comment with a nod, already walking to the nearest tree to stab it with your knife and insert your loyal tap into the hole.

"We all drink before it's no longer possible. It's gonna be a long night and this is our last chance to do it." You pointed to Wrecker. "You first." 

He obeyed in a beat, trusting your survival skills. You knew you'd need all the energy available and the sugary water would provide you just that. Also, you needed to be as hydrated as possible. 

"Okay." You turned towards the rest of them, all their visors fixated on you. "So, I don't know much about them. There are different species that are common beliefs in my village and other species that are proper to other villages. But they all have in common to eat whatever cross their path and to roam solely at night." 

Wrecker moved away from the tree, wiping his mouth with his wrist to make place for Tech who removed his helmet to drink. 

"This planet is a trap." The grey-haired clone grumbled at your unhelpful lack of information. 

"I know, I've lived here my whole life." You glared at him before concentrating again. "No one in my village ever came back from a night outside, so I don't know for sure what species are around. All I know is that there are Algax roaming around."

You signaled to Cross to take Tech's place. 

"They are taaaall creature, with dark blue-ish skin and really long arms and legs. They are shy," you gesticulated your hands around to find the right word, but couldn't find it so you went with the first word that came to your mind, "things that tend to hide along the trees and grab their prey when they don't look. They don't eat the prey, just crush it to death and let it there for the other things." 

You were losing time fast, the jungle was darkening with each passing minute and you were far from ready. There was too much to cover and so little time. Plus, there was the fact that what you knew wasn't 100% reliable. Beliefs change from people to people, from village to village, who knows what version of the stories these beasts really came from?

"And they're super sneaky and silent. Hunter your turn." You announced a tad too dryly, but no one called you out on it, maybe because they were as on edge as you were, mentally preparing themselves for what was to come as best as they could considering they didn't really know what was to come. 

"I'll do this quick so listen. And Tech, listen really really carefully. Rule number one, if you see a light, something cute, something scary, hear a sound or hear your name being called, you. Do. Not. Follow it." 

"They know our names?" Tech's hands stopped mid-air, his helmet almost back on his head, eyes wide in surprise. 

"The planet hears us talk. Of course they know." You almost rolled your eyes at the stupid question coming from the team's genius. Ears everywhere duuh. 

"Rule number two, don't eat or drink anything from now on. Can't have one of us puke their guts or get poisoned or paralyzed." Out of the corner of your eyes, you clearly saw a shiver shake the sniper's body. Lesson learned. 

"Number three, if I say run, you all run. In the same direction would be best, but if it comes down to it, you run and don't stop. We'll regroup afterward. You have trackers on us, right?" 

"If you keep your comlink on you, yes." You patted your pockets in reflex, hand closing around the small object to confirm its presence and alleviate your concerns. 

"Last rule, if I do this," the index, middle and ring finger of your free-hand closed to let only your thumb and pinky pointing to the ground, "you have to hide, absolutely don't run. Hide. Some of them are guided by movements and you'll only attract them." 

"Hide? But we can blast 'em!" Wrecker's enthusiasm didn't affect you this time around. It was a first. 

" 'm just no sure they'll stop moving if you do. Best to make our way around unnoticed." 

He grumbled his disappointment at having to be silent, it never has been his forte. Plus, he had the added difficulty to hide his imposing stature, so this would be a challenge. Thankfully their armors were almost entirely black, would they have been the usual white with color stripes, it certainly would have been even more difficult to blend in with the vegetation. 

It felt weird giving them orders, like you were totally out of place. And in a sense you were. The newbie wasn't supposed to command the trained soldiers. The newbie followed behind and shut its mouth. 

Well, at least that's what you've always been told and that's what you've always done. It was no use to fight with the other hunters. They were a group of dickheads that deserved hell, but they had more muscles than you. And they were outnumbering. Aaand they were watching each other's back, whereas you were alone without any backup. All that being said, it didn't stop you from making them pay for their hurtful words, harsh treatments, condescending tones and constant bullying, one way or the other. 

For the first time, people let you lead them and it was unsettling. A part of your mind waited for the inevitable low blow to hit you square in the face. You knew the commandos weren't like that, but you couldn't help it. It was a defensive reflex you developed over the years of trying to fit in a world that you were too different to live in. It was totally foreign to be listened to and not berated down, it felt good and terrifying at the same time. 

"Understood?" Your voice softened into an unsure tone, its once imperativeness melted under the weight of your anxiety of being listened to. 

One after the other, they all nodded, gazes full of determination and something else that almost made you sweat. They all showed their trust in you, even Crosshair who you thought didn't like you much, offered you his trust. It meant way too much and stressed you beyond measure. You couldn't let them down and have them killed. Any single one of them. 

Nodding in return, you walked to the tap beside Hunter and forced yourself to swallow the water, pushing down the lump that formed in your throat. You could do it. You could survive the night if you played your cards right. With your knowledge and their excellent combat skills surely you could defend yourselves. Right?

"Blasters ready gentlemen. We have to find a shelter as quickly as possible." You removed the tap from the tree and hid it back into a pocket. 

"A den should be alright or a small cave." 

With one last look at the four of them, you noded to yourself. 

"Good night, good luck." You told them as per habit and hope that the saying would somehow protect you all. Your usual joking self was nowhere to be seen, letting you wear a mask of complete seriousness.

They tensed, apparently getting on the fact that this was an important custom on this planet. 

"Good night, good luck." They repeated, one after the other, causing you to smile tightly at the gesture. 

You took North, continuing away from the ship and into unknown territory. You knew that after a while you'd eventually fall into Forsians hunting territories and then you'd have a better knowledge of the terrain, but those parts of the jungle were still hours away. Hopefully, you'll be able to climb up and make your way back to the ship before getting there. 

"Will you be alright to walk in the dark?" Crosshair's voice erupted from your pocket and you knew this wouldn't work. Each time they'd speak the whole jungle would hear. 

"I'll be fine. Like I said, the best mutate to survive." You winked at the white crosshair on the sniper's helmet. "I can see in the dark. Not full 10/10 on the chart, but enough so I won't ram into a tree."

You fished the comlink out of your pocket and showed it to Tech who was rummaging around in his utility belt pockets.

"Can't have it screaming my position every time someone spea-" 

"I know." He cut you off, presenting you an earpiece.

"This will do." He took your device to connect them together, or so you think. "There. You'll hear us through the earpiece but you still need the comlink to talk." 

He gave you back the electronics and you quickly put the earbud on, comlink returning to your satisfyingly deep pocket. 

"Thanks. We should continue to follow the ravine and hope that we can climb it at some point and return to the ship." 

Agreements resonated in your right ear and you got on your way. It got darker and darker until the only colors you could see were different shades of blue and black. 

The silence around was nerve-wracking, every tree seemed like it would turn around and jump at you at each and every step you took. 

It was nice to quickly fall back in your old habits, feet barely making a sound, eyes recognizing every scratches and marks on the trees let by multiple species marking their territories; Dire bears, Lacergans, Fu-

You almost jumped at the low rumbling whisper right in your ear. Thankfully, your scream stayed in your mind and the only thing jumping was your heartbeat. 

"Movement ahead." You couldn't hear shit, but you trusted Hunter's heightened senses. 

You stopped, the boys getting into their shooting positions at your sides. You could do it. 

"Smell like death." Hunter added with a grunt of displeasure. 

The new information registered like a cold bath, freezing every muscle in your body. The ice-cold bath that just fell over your head paralyzed any transfer of information between the neurons in your brain, leaving you totally helpless for a whole second. Your brain was still out of service when your body just moved on its own, already knowing what to do despite the lack of orders from above. 

The three middle fingers of your free hand closed, letting only your thumb and pinky pointing to the ground, clearly informing the clones of the course of action. Thankfully, all their gazes got attracted by your moving hand, immediately changing the formation. 

Twiggs broke a bit to the right, still far enough for you to dodge behind a tree undetected, soon joined by Tech who as opposed to you, faced the tree. His chest plate pushed on your torso to get closer to the tree, one of his blasters raised right next to your head, the other grazing your upper arm, caging you in a position that would be extremely hot in totally different circumstances and with a totally different clone. 

At the corner of your eyes, you thankfully noticed Wrecker's imposing form hiding as best as he could behind a particularly thick bush, Hunter standing behind a tree next to him, weapon pointed towards the sky above. Crosshair was nowhere to be seen, so you hoped it meant he found a good spot. 

Rustling leaves and moving grass made you freeze completely. No one moved as the footsteps got nearer and nearer. Of course, this was the first creature you'd encounter. Kribats were the worst creature one could run into. 

They were told to feast on human flesh like there was no tomorrow. They were starved, walking the jungle every night in hope of biting down on some stupidly brave human who ventured the night, but these times were rare nowadays. Almost no one got out at night, reinforcing their desperation for human blood.

It was told that they could paralyze you in fear at simply one glance to their wicked red eyes, allowing the beast to pound on its victims and take their life. It wasn't clear how it killed its preys, but all the versions were unanimous, it was a bloodbath. 

Fors really seemed to hate the Bad Batch. 

If it wasn't enough that the most dangerous monster was hot on your asses, Tech's recording light flashed to life, illuminating your position and burning your retina like a mighty beacon. With a fast but careful movement, you reached around his arm encasing your body into the tree to cover the red traitorous light. 

Blinking the tears away, you really hoped your glare got the message perfectly clear to the engineer. Forget about your hobby for one night, you dumbass!

The rustling grass behind Hunter's tree stopped your breathing, all senses focussed on the beast's movements to know if it detected your group or not. 

Tech's eyes visibly widen behind his visor at the ungodly sight of the creature's emaciated body, the skull of a cervid posed atop a male human body rivaling Wrecker's height was disturbing, but not as disturbing as the sight of all the blood covering its dark skin. There was so much blood that it pooled at its feet, leaving behind a river-like path in the grass. 

The low ragged rumble of the monster passed your tree, surprising you that he hadn't bounced on it to grab you from behind. You glanced at its retreating form and oh this is new. Your version of a Kribat didn't have a feathery tail trailing behind. Now, what could this be useful for? They couldn't fly, could they? 

The Kribat wandered deeper into the depth of the jungle, leaving its imprint on everyone's mind as well as on the jungle floor and all your noses and mouths. 

You waited for a little longer, just to be sure that it was far enough to not catch its attention before nodding to Tech. 

"Clear." He whispered through the comm. 

The first breath you took in almost pulled you to your knees. The smell was atrocious, grabbing you at your throat. Decomposition, blood, acids, they all mixed to form a rancid smell that you could almost taste. 

"What in the Nine Corellian Hells is that?" Crosshair stood from behind a dead trunk on the ground to join everyone at the dark trail. 

"Human blood, flesh and organs." The shredded pieces of meat here and there turned your stomach upside down. 

You were used to flesh and blood. Heck. You were a hunter and often butched your meals yourself. But this flesh was human and the state of it only left you to imagine was it must have felt like to be ripped apart. You didn't want to speculate if the victim was alive or not when it happened. 

"Kribats are craving human flesh but they don't have a digestive system. It gets in and gets out, so they're never satiated." 

"So this one just ate?" Wrecker approached behind you. Now faced with what these beasts were capable of, his enthusiasm disappeared somewhere, letting him wary and if only a little bit scared. 

"It looks like it." You fixed the blood, deep in thoughts. Why were there humans out tonight? 

"I thought no one was supposed to be out at night." Tech inquired while disconnecting the red light on his helmet. 

"They're not supposed to be. It means that something's wrong." You sighed. Tonight couldn't get any better. The planet was throwing a tantrum. 

There was nothing you could do about it, so you focussed back on the present. You swallowed to keep yourself from puking as you dropped to your knees before the red river. 

"And what are you doing?" Crosshair asked, not daring to approach the thing himself. 

"Camouflaging my smell of a juicy living being." With shaky hands, you plunged your fingers through the sticky mixture. You gaged at the feeling but covered your sleeves nonetheless. 

"You guys should cover your armor too. Lucky bastards." At least it wouldn't touch their skin. 

"No way." Crosshair groaned as Tech walked over asking "Why?" 

"Because I want us to survive the night." You deadpanned. There was no time to explain the how and why. 

You stopped breathing for a second to cover your torso and pants, cringing at the warm wetness soaking the fabric. You allowed yourself a second to mourn your once perfect clothes that you loved so much. You'd have to burn them after only one day wearing them. 

At your sides the boys reluctantly followed your lead, grunting in disgust every two seconds. 

You decided to forget your face, this would end badly for your stomach. 

Turning around as you wiped your hands on a clean spot on your pants, you noticed Hunter's clean body leaning on a tree for support, head tilted down with a hand over his heart. You didn't need to be a Jedi to feel his distress at the overwhelmingly nauseating smell. 

"You okay?" His visor lifted to meet your eyes at your worry. You controlled yourself and refrained from pulling him in a hug, you'd only make it worse. 

"Yeah." But he sounded far from okay. 

"We have to continue, but if you stay close, we all should be able to hide your smell without rolling you into the stuff." He grunted in agreement. 

Tech, Crosshair and Wrecker joined your sides, covered in the mixture. 

"Okay. We continue." 

Hoping that your sergeant would get used to the smell, you took the lead once more. You didn't know if his mutation would allow his brain to stop registering the smell after a couple of minutes like everyone else. You mentally crossed your fingers for him. 

The trees seemed taller into the dead of night. The occasional moon rays passing through the leaves made the heavy ambiance slightly more bearable. 

You wondered what a night outside looked like on another planet where no monsters crept their way around. Where you could lay down and watch the stars, not through a tiny crack in the rock like you used to in your village and fully admire the high sky, illuminated by a sea of sparkling orbs. You deeply wanted to experience it with your team who would definitely think you stupidly simple. 

But they would understand. After tonight, they would. 

Your progression was steady for a while, every ears and eyes were focussed around to detect any unwanted creature lurking in the shadows. 

Back to his collected usual self, Hunter finally seemed used to the smell plaguing his nose. To add to the good news, you spotted a mature tree, particularly large. At first glance, it looked like it reached the top of the ravine.

Excitement flooded your veins, a hand lifting to stop the group who tensed in alert. 

"I think this one could get us up." You whispered to them, pointing at the tree.

"It definitely could." Tech scanned the tree, the others still watching the surroundings. 

"I'll go check." You broke away from the formation to get to the closest branch. 

"Wait-" A hand caught your upper arm. 

"Hunter, I'm the best climber here. Plus, you guys will make too much sound for a recon with your armor. I'll make it quick." Your determined eyes met his visor, not willing to get back on your position.  

"Be careful." He released you to position his team around the tree. 

You send him a quick salute before pulling yourself up the tree. You kept your knife in one hand and climbed up several branches. The next one was pretty high, too high for you to reach it without jumping. Your knife found its home at the side of your boot and you focussed on your jump. Crouching slightly, you suddenly extended your legs and pushed with considerable force. Both hands grabbed the top of the desired branch before letting your biceps do the rest of the work. 

"Are you okay?" Hunter called through the comm. 

Leaning on the trunk, you reached in your pocket to retrieve the communication device. 

"Yeah, had to jump to continue. Think I'm almost at the top. I'll be down soon." You answered, looking up to the thinning branches where more moonlight pierced the darkness. 

"Copy that." 

Your comm returned to your pocket to free your hands. Up. Up. Up. In the same minute, you made it to the top. The moon was still low, not fully visible above the line of trees obstructing your vision. 

Now, you noticed that the edge of the damn ravine seemed barely close enough for you to jump there. Maybe Wrecker could throw you there. But how would he reach the top? Checking under the edge, the lack of roots keeping the ground stable was highly disappointing. Even if you were to jump all the way there, the chance of the dirt crumbling under your fingers was too high. 

Quickly, you grabbed your comm to let the boys know that you were coming back. 

With a grumble, you started to descend, moving gracefully from branch to branch without making a sound. The gap you jumped looked pretty big from above, causing you to hesitate for the shortest of seconds. The need to get down was more pressing than your unease so you braced yourself and pushed yourself off your perch to the one below. 

You landed perfectly, both feet on the hard surface, hands wrapped around it tightly to not move further. 

For a second, you were perfectly stable. The next you were falling through the air, propelled by the body hitting you full force. Wood painfully came in contact with your shoulders, arms and back, emptying your lungs before a scream could escape your lips.

[grimoiregirlsbook]

01:

A Lament For Al’s Pancake World

A wind carries with it no voices, no songs, no texture whatsoever. This distilled breath finds its way through crevices unknown to even rats, and how desperately have they burrowed their way into this derelict building. Even as four individuals covered in grime-laden flesh feel the welcomed lick of cool air, any sound is refused.

Characterized by a pout and straight black hair stuck to her skull, Lorelai sits at a table where two companions occupy where her parents once had sat. Across from her would be her daughter, missing, though presumably safe. Instead, there is a man consumed by heat but who can no longer sweat.

Formerly the owner of his town’s only soda shop, the elderly Taylor Doose remains proud of his inability to succumb to death.

Occasionally the man will peer down at his wrist and remember the moment he had lost a majority of his left hand. Chewed away and wrapped up in cloth moistened with blood, he has virtually become useless to his party. To his left, Lorelei’s right, is a thin lad encumbered with exhaustion and a fidgeting leg.

“Oh, Kirk. Would you please stop that incessant…” Taylor exhales and is unable to finish his sentence. His head bobs forward when a chill runs through his body. “That incessant…”

“It’s restless leg syndrome, Taylor, and it’s a common ailment of men between the ages of fourteen and seventy-two.” His tort does not inspire a response. “If we’re really going there, I’d ask you to stop breathing so heavily. The rhythm of my lungs naturally attunes to those who are nearest to me, and if you’re exhaling at a rate above a-hundred-four beats per minute, my anxiety tends to…”

Lorelai raises her hand. Her eyes are shut so tight she can remember what fireworks look like. All three look to her with expectation, perhaps some wisdom or comforting words. “Everybody needs to shut up. Like, right now.”

The fourth occupant of the dinner table pipes up. “I agree. Everyone is bickering like little annoying dogs. Chihuahuas.”

“For once, I think I agree with Mrs. Kim. You are all acting like chihuahuas, the mutant rejects of the animal kingdom.”

Kirk shrugs. “I think they’re sweet.”

“I had a chihuahua growing up,” Taylor’s voice breaks. The three are silent. This is the first time Lorelai paid attention to his tongue: dry, scaly. Something resembling empathy rises in her and she flutters her eyelashes after feeling a lump grow in her throat. “A sweet dog, yes,” he continued. “But infamously difficult to train.

“I remember I must have been ten, maybe twelve. No, eleven. Eleven…” His mind trails away and the story ceases like a water hose gradually losing pressure.

The four return their attention to themselves and the ever-growing hunger in the pit of their stomachs. Lorelai knows she must have lost weight. The way they look at her anymore spikes her self-image issues. She notices how she inadvertently covers her arms and avoids eye contact, more-so now than she ever had in high school.

Another gentle gust rolls in. Her mouth parts to breathe in this cool air that cuts through their sweltering sanctuary. “I think it’s going to rain.”

“Rain always excites me,” Kirk claims with a croak. “Something about the electricity in the air. My body is sensitive enough to feel the change of electromagnetic pressure in the atmosphere. My mother always used to call me her little thunder rod.”

Mrs. Kim frowns, and Lorelai verbalizes what she is unable to muster the strength to say. “Don’t you mean ‘lightning rod’?”

He looks down at the table and creases his browline. “I don’t know.” This distant memory, no longer relevant or clear. “Maybe.”

There is a sound from the other room that stirs them from an incoming depression. Each look to the hallway that connects to the kitchen, sans Taylor who is, instead, viewing a movie under his eyelids. A man, unshaved and tired, emerges with a tray of cold sandwiches. “I scraped the mold off of the bread the best I could. What, you’re going to be picky now?”

Lorelai crosses her arms and watches as the serving tray is placed in the center of the table. This stirs Taylor from his rest. Kirk cocks his head. “Is that safe to eat?”

“Safe?” Luke scoffs. “Nothing’s going to be safe for a while, Kirk. Might as well fast if you’re worried about contamination, especially here. What, have your parents ever heard of canned goods?”

Spawn of Gilmore rolls her eyes. “Well, there. That’s the thing. My parents believe that, by default, nothing from a can is good.”

“Try telling Budweiser that. Here,” he bites down into the corner of a sandwich that was cut in half. Through a full mouth, he insists, “Perfectly safe. Delicious. Eat it.”

Kirk removes himself from the table without a word. Luke frowns. “What, too good for a little bit of mold?”

“Oh, no, never. I am going to wash up, though.”

“You’re going to wash up before eating mold?”

“Even while society falls, we must maintain our dignity by living as we would. Civilized, sanitized. Also,” his shoulders straighten. “I have to pee.”

Mrs. Kim shakes her head and Lorelai turns to her with a dim smile. Mentally, she considers how difficult it has been to comfort the woman who is separated from her daughter as well. Though the bond is different and at times estranged, there is no terror as specific as being uncertain about a loved one’s fate.

She can ascertain, however, that Lane is perfectly fine and more-than-likely holed up in the same stead as Rory. Perhaps they are regaling each other with stories of the olden days. It is possible that they are laughing at a strangely specific observation. It is possible that they are able to survive in the same way her mother is, the same way this room full of people are.

Luke’s voice breaks her from this trance. “Is he okay?” She looks to Taylor, who is now shivering in violent throngs.

“Looks like a totally normal reaction to a zombie bite.”

“Oh, zombie this, zombie that. Spare me. Those are just - just sick people who have gone crazy or something.”

Lorelai’s eyes reduce to a sliver. “You can tell that to my mom. No, feel free! She’s upstairs, waiting for you to tell her that the flesh-craving is just a minor symptom of the common cold.”

He is silent for a moment. Taylor’s groans of pain fill the empty space. “I’m not saying it’s the cold, but…”

“Luke.” She shakes her head, telepathically forcing a suggestion to drop the conversation. He agrees with a snarl and a silent mock. Lorelai ignores her sandwich and focuses her attention to the man opposite her. “Taylor, sweetie, can you hear me?”

The old man blinks, disoriented. His eyes are not trained to any specific point. “Hm. Huh?”

“Do you feel good enough to eat something? It’s no pancake from Al’s Pancake World, but it’s something. Are you thirsty? The taps in the bathrooms still work.” Though there is no verbal response, the state of the man is enough to elicit action. Luke shakes his head when the woman begins to shift in her seat.

“I’ll get it. No, sit. Eat the moldwich.” With confidence -- because at least one of them must have some amount of it -- he quickly walks to the bathroom after grabbing a scotch glass from the late Richard Gilmore’s liquor cart. Remembering the escapade of his companion, he knocks on the door. “Kirk, you gotta let me in.”

There is no response. Luke frowns and tries at the handle, and to his surprise, it opens with ease. He peeks in. “Kirk?” Even though the man is gone, there is evidence of his brief visitation.

Luke cranes his neck and looks into the toilet. He suppresses a gag, rolls his eyes, and turns on the faucet. Nothing comes out.

Back in the dining room, Lorelai is pacing. She attempts to calm herself down by refusing the interior dialogue that struggles to become exterior. She tries to remember how to breathe let alone exhale slow, deep breaths. The panting of Taylor increases over time, and so does her anxiety.

Ms. Kim slams the table with either palm and knocks Lorelai from her trance. The exhausted woman points to the injured man. “Would you stop that? Always breathing -- heh, heh, heh. Just die already!”

“Mrs. Kim!” Lorelai finally allows her lungs to clear from stagnant breath. “That is - that is so mean.”

“I don’t understand why we must keep him around. Look at him! Pale and sick and dying. Where is the gun?”

“No. We’re not… Taylor, hush, sweetie. Nothing’s going to happen.”

Luke passes through the threshold with a still-empty cup. “Uh, everything okay, guys?”

“No!” Mrs. Kim stands up from her seat. “We must kill Mr. Doose before he becomes a monster like the others, like your mother.” She directs a hard glare to Lorelai, who quickly looks away after feeling a paralyzing shock run through her body.

“Oh, nope. No, you don’t.” Luke approaches the hysteric woman and places the empty glass on the table. “You’re not allowed to emotionally torment us when we already have very real, physical torment just outside of these doors.”

Lorelai runs her hands through her thick, graying hair and cups her ears. The voices come muffled now. He continues: “There are solutions other than violence. Plus, between you and me, I’d rather not waste one of our precious bullets on a man that looks like a strong breeze could evaporate him.”

Mrs. Kim raises her chin. “Go on.”

“Okay, good,” he says, relieved. “We can start delegating in a totally cool-headed way. I’m glad to see that we can communicate with each other about this instead of resorting to, you know, murder. There’s always a simple solution.”

“You have no idea what to do, Luke Danes.” The sound of Mrs. Kim’s voice has always cut through him as she was one of the few women to completely intimidate him. Lorelai creases her brow and unlatches her hands from her ears. She crosses them and cocks her hips.

“Oh, come on, Mrs. Kim. Luke of all people not having a plan?” The woman laughs and looks to an unconvinced Mrs. Kim and a nearly comatose Taylor Doose. “That’s - that’s why they call him the man with the plan. Right?”

Not receiving an answer, she verbally prods him once more. “Right, Luke?” He begins to cock his shoulders in a slow shrug. “What? No, no, no.” She rounds the sharp corner of the dinner table, cuts in front of Mrs. Kim, and closes in on the uncertain man.

“Listen, Lorelai,” he begins while rubbing the back of his neck. His voice reduces. “Maybe we should do something about Taylor. I mean, look at the state of him.” She humors him by examining the man; bereft of color, gasping for one of the few instances a breeze could be felt.

She does not respond immediately. Her gaze floats like a transient yellow rubber duck upon a freshly drawn bath. “We have two more bathrooms.”

Luke blinks. “One more time?”

“Two more bathrooms. Mom’s in the upstairs master. The guest bathroom in the hallway is free. I don’t want to put him down here, because, you know, just in case, I guess.”

He looks at her creased face and empathizes with what little energy she has left. This compromise saps her remaining reserves of hope.

Luke chews on the inside of his lower lip and straightens his posture. “I’ll need help getting him upstairs. No, you can stay here. I’ll find Kirk.” An uninvolved Mrs. Kim re-seats herself, but not before grabbing the empty scotch glass. She stares into the bottom and imagines the taste of every liquor it has once held.

“Find Kirk?” Lorelai tilts her head. Her voice still holds passivity. “I thought he was just using the bathroom.”

He shrugs and pulls away from the conversation without another word, leaving Lorelai to stand alone, idly bobbing like the useless rubber duck she hated imagining herself as.

Once again, Luke disappears from the room but his voice can still be heard calling for the missing companion.

He travels up the flight of stairs and knocks on the wall as he does. “Kirk?” His voice projects and cuts through the cement maze that is the Gilmore mansion. “You gotta help me out here.”

Intuitively, he approaches the guest bathroom. Even as his body contours around a wall he is able to see the door cracked and the lights off. He hums inquisitively and feels worry crease his forehead. “Kirk, buddy, you better not be doing anything stupid.”

He waits for a response but instinctively knows that somewhere within this building, Kirk was indeed doing something stupid and perhaps even dangerous. The man considers a mental archive of each possibility and flares his nostrils when one resonates particularly so.

Luke sets off to the master bedroom where a disoriented Emily Gilmore resides. Excommunicated, alone, infected.

He keeps his footsteps quiet as to not alert his companions downstairs. Heel to toe, he deftly navigates the tight labyrinth and eventually happens upon the master bedroom where a soft voice speaks with child-like innocence.

Kirk speaks to the bathroom door. “It’s okay, Mrs. Gilmore. I’m just going to use your sink for a few seconds. Maybe use a hand towel if you have a clean one you’re not using.” He feels a new presence and turns to an angry Luke.

“Jesus, Kirk! Are you insane?”

“I just need to get in there for just a moment, you know? Just a quick moment.” He reaches for the door handle and Luke lurches to swat his hand away. The frail man observes the back of his left hand. “Ow. That’ll probably bruise.”

Luke’s nostrils flare and his mouth parts open to further admonish him, but a thump against the bathroom door causes either man to jump. “Okay. We have to get out of here.”

“That’s probably a fair assessment, but, Luke, the downstairs faucet isn’t working.”

“Don’t wash your hands, then.” Another thump, this time with more force. “I don’t think that door is going to hold. We need to lock her in here.”

Kirk nods and claps his hands together with excitement. “Great! I’ll open this right up and you can distract her while I run in and wash up.”

Incredulous, Luke is unable to prevent Kirk from following through with his own asinine plan. His eyes widen and feels time slow around him as he watches the door swing open to reveal Emily Gilmore.

Sunken cheeks and dim eyes are fixtures on a canvas of skin that has since lost any familiar color. Makeup is smeared from her lips up to just below her right temple. A concave eye is made beauteous by uneven liner and a nude eyeshadow.

As Kirk brings the door to a full pivot, Luke is able to see the damage on the inside of the door: expensive makeup residue patterned within the splintered wood. Dark, unhealthy blood had been exhaled on the walls inside of the bathroom. The shower curtain is mostly dislocated, with few rings remaining intact.

Emily Gilmore locks her remaining eye on the man in front of her. Somewhere deep within her skull spins the few gears that belong to lucidity.

Backward hat, the corpse churns this recursive thought through sickness induced mania. Backward hat, backward hat.

She lunges forward and pauses to regain control of her failing nervous system. Luke backs up in short strides with his hands positioned just inches ahead of his chest. “Emily, Mrs. Gilmore,” he attempts to reason with the woman in a quiet, synthetically calm voice. “Kirk just has to use the bathroom. You can have it back after he’s done…” He cranes his neck around her to watch him hovering over the sink. “After he’s done washing his hands.”

Her lips curl and reveal shattered teeth. The force of her clenched jaw coupled with a bereft of pain receiving faculties has resulted in a loss of all of her front teeth. Her hair, however, is still in pristine form.

Another step forward and she trips over her own feet. This opening is enough for Luke to make an executive decision.

The toe of his boot, having known soil both dry and moist as well as the grease-slicked tiles of his restaurant for decades, is now introduced to the underside of Emily Gilmore’s throat.

The force of his response tears a hole in the woman’s neck. Her weak flesh rips away and Luke’s foot is shallowly burrowed. The woman squelches in pain, the sound muffled and reduced, garbled from the blood that she chokes on through this.

Kirk pokes his head out of the door as Luke heaves the woman off of his shoe. He looks up and furrows his brow with such intensity the man thought it would be better for him to find new residence in the decimated bathroom.

“You son of a bitch,” he barks through gritted teeth. For just a second, he watches the infected woman struggle against the ground. She claws at his ankles, but he steps over her to avoid the simple attacks. As Luke approaches, Kirk reaches to shut the door. “Don’t you dare, Kirk. Don’t you --”

“Get away, you lunatic!”

“Me? I’m the lunatic?”

Just as the metal lock connects with its home and the wooden door meets its frame, the same bloody boot connects with the mullion and collapses the door inwards. Kirk strafes away to avoid the intruder he once considered an ally.

While Luke’s boots are familiar with the concept of hard work and have been purchased with the idea of friction in mind, Kirk’s shoes have only known the feeling of escapism. Loosely connected activities, incomplete schemes. Never once grounded in a shared reality.

They do know now, however, the taste of old blood.

As the heel licks the metallic paste left over from somewhere in Emily’s lungs, the man is able to feel himself fall backward. The nape of his neck wraps over the side of the exposed bathtub where within many jets were installed to provide a comfortable yet exciting bathing experience.

Luke is frozen. He feels the cold drip of terror work its way through his lungs, and then into his esophagus. Dehydrated as he already was, there was even less moisture left on his tongue and none in the back of his throat. He speaks, but his words are made of dust: “Kirk? Are you okay, buddy?”

The man’s body is limp and impossibly contorted. “Kirk?” He hesitates before stepping forward. Luke’s head bobs forward like an unsure cat in an empty alleyway. His heart thrums in triplets -- each third beat further closing his throat.

Kirk’s hands and feet simultaneously twitch. Luke can feel all collected air escape from his lungs in the manner of one second. He is lightheaded and clutches his chest to calm his flailing heart. “Oh, my God. I was really worried there. Here, let me - let me help you up.”

He extends his left hand and uses his right for support against the cool wall. Another full-body twitch from Kirk, but no verbal response. Luke’s fingers wilt and he slowly pulls away. Two more twitches, then a seizure. His nostrils flare and, as if by divine timing, he turns away from Kirk to witness another stressor.

The body of Emily Gilmore had dragged its way out of the bedroom and left with it a trail of mucus and blood. He resolves to deal with her as his top priority but first tries to seal the door to the best of his ability. The hinges were destroyed in his breach and he is still able to clearly see Kirk’s spazzing body.

Luke does not have to travel far to meet up with the tenacious corpse. She hears his footfall and turns to face him. He is not able to look at her for more than a second before feeling nausea overwhelm him.

With a deep breath, he moves to grab her ankles and drag her back into her bedroom. Flecks of loose skin and crumbled teeth are left in her wake.

As he re-enters the room, he notices Kirk has dislodged himself from his previous position. While gripping Emily’s ankles, he keeps a close eye on the ostensibly dead man. “Kirk?” He calls once more. There is a belch as a reply. Luke drops Emily’s feet and quickly shuts the bedroom door before returning to Kirk with anxiety in his chest.

The man is not dead, nor is he alive. The same look as the late Emily Gilmore is etched on his face, sculpted deep within his eyes where there is no intelligent luster, but a drained well of lost sentience. “You too, huh?” Luke breathes this out and feels wasps of guilt swarm his thoughts.

Behind him is a snarling Emily Gilmore, the first of their party to be lost to the terrible and unknown disease. Several feet from Luke is the second, a man whose death could be somewhat beneficial for their longevity. He frowns and idles for a long moment. There is a sharp voice that calls his name.

Lorelai is at the bottom step, too weak to continue more than this. “Luke, are you okay?” There is minor panic in her voice after having heard a strange commotion. In the next room, Taylor’s pained heaving has reduced to calm, short breaths. She thinks about the sick man and wonders if she should feel relieved or even more worried.

Soft steps alert her, but she recovers with a genuine smile as she sets her eyes upon the grizzled but handsome Luke Danes. He tries to smile but his words do not carry with them the confidence they should have. “Hey. You okay?” They travel back to the kitchen with a quickened pace.

“Yes, but you aren’t. Obviously.” Lorelai looks behind her shoulder to examine the staircase. “What’s going on? Where’s Kirk?”

“Alright.” Luke clears his throat. He examines Mrs. Kim from the end of the room staring them down, and then Taylor with raised eyebrows. “He’s looking better.”

Lorelai’s smile acts more as a grimace. She is waiting for him to communicate with her and he picks up on this. “Kirk, erm, he… Yeah, do I really have to say it?”

“What? Yes, you do,” Lorelai’s voice raises and the neurotic woman stands up from her seat once again. He huffs and crosses his arms as Mrs. Kim joins the conversation with wide, speculative eyes. “What happened to him?”

Mrs. Kim scoffs. “Kirk?” He nods with a short sigh.

“Best to just tell you, I suppose. Alright! He freed Emily and -- no, Lorelai, listen. He wanted to wash his hands, and…”

The daughter of the household’s pet corpse looks up. A chandelier catches the corner of her eye. Cobwebs connect to multiple bulbs, once acting as a bridge for eight-legged critters. “She bit him.”

Luke freezes. He examines the woman he had known for as long as he could remember.

Even as many old memories have begun to fade -- holidays, festivals, birthdays, Lorelai remains a fixture in his mind. Every moment he closes his eyes, no matter how tired or distracted, the woman eventually finds her way into his mental cinema.

He sucks his lips for a long time before replying with a slow nod. Luke is unable to bring himself to lie, not out loud, not in his own voice.

[josephlrushing]

Thanks to Seagate and LaCie, I Don’t Have to Purchase a New MacBook Pro

Back in 2016, when I purchased my MacBook, I thought that 1TB of storage would go far. At the time, I was using Dropbox to store larger files in an attempt to go all-in on cloud storage. Four years later, and I once again find value in having my crucial documents and files readily available without having to use a browser to get to them. And thanks to these LaCie and Seagate portable storage solutions, I’ve been able to do just that.

Over the past two months, I’ve been exclusively using LaCie’s Rugged SSD Pro and Backup Plus Portable hard drive. Both portable drives allow me to house all of those confidential and personal files and photos, but they are compact enough that all I have to do is toss one in my bag if I have to leave the house. LaCie was kind enough to allow me to pick not only the sizes but the colors that I wanted for each of these review units, but I tend to stick with black portable drives for no particular reason.

Lacie Rugged SSD Pro

The Rugged SSD Pro is available in Black only, with the Standard Rugged SSD model available in Orange. The Lacie Rugged SSD Pro is a secure and fast SSD system that allows you to not only have consistent performance but 256-bit hardware encryption for all of your personal information. This is typically my GO-TO hard drive for holding my work data, all of my backup GearDiary contacts, and personal photos.

Coming complete with a Thunderbolt 3 cable in the box, the Rugged SSD Pro can perform up to 2.8 Gbps, perfect for those more extensive libraries that you have taking up precious desktop space. Working from home, having this functionality allows me to quickly take large zip files, extract, and even combine them faster than I ever could using my alternatives of Dropbox or Google Drive — both of those require an internet connection and a monthly subscription. If I were to ever run out of space on the Rugged SSD Pro, I’d simply purchase another larger model for my stockpile.

The 1TB model that I have not only matches the 1TB of storage in my MacBook, but it manages storage like a champ. Being the first-ever SSD I’ve reviewed, coming from more traditional hard drives, this has been a delight to use. One caveat that I should mention, though, is that at ~5″, the included Thunderbolt 3 cable is pretty short. I found myself purchasing a separate cable for when I’m on the go until I had a friend show me how they attach their SSD to the back of their MacBook so they always have storage readily available and so they always know where the SSD is.

Just thinking that Apple would’ve charged me another $6-700 to add more storage to my MacBook was enough for me to consider SSD. What I enjoyed the most about it, though, is it has password protection, which allows me to secure my files properly. Family Photos, Passwords, and any other data that don’t want just sitting up in the cloud, in a service that could potentially end up hacked or canceled.

Thanks to LaCie’s ToolKit feature, not only can you sync with your computer and use it for Time Machine, but you can individually back up essential files, restore lost files, as well as continuously sync. But, of course, to do that, the drive would have to stay plugged into the laptop.

A lot of my friends use their SSDs for photo and video editing. But in my case, I use it for when we podcast weekly using Zoom. When I have the rugged SSD plugged into my MacBook, I can have our podcast shows automatically go into the SSD, which makes it easier to store without compromising any data speeds transfers or potentially losing the file. Before this, I had Zoom connected to Google Drive, which could be a potential disaster if Drive were to crash completely, or if my internet speeds caused the file not to upload correctly. I also can’t tell you how many times have attempted to download a large document or just a large file that could have been maybe 2-300 gigabytes, not realizing that my MacBook only had around 400 gigabytes left. Now with the Rugged SSD Pro, I never have these problems.

The Rugged SSD Pro by LaCie comes in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB. My next goal is to get the 2TB or wait until LaCie eventually puts out more massive storage for the SSD Pro so I can use it to catalog my Plex Server with movies and TV shows on the go. The 1TB that I ve been using has a sequential read and write of 1000 MBps per second and a write of 950 MBps per second, which is pretty impressive.

Measuring 3.9″ long by 2.6″ wide by 0.7″ thick and weighing in at just under 100 grams, it is easy to see this is the “get up and go” SSD to beat. Not only is it able to survive drops, but its grippy design keeps it from sliding around on a desk or table. According to LaCie, it can handle drops up to three meters and even can be run over by a car, which is more than AppleCare covers on my relatively delicate MacBook Pro, so I’ll take it. The SSD is also waterproof, which I appreciate, especially when I’m working in a coffee shop. The waterproof USB-C port sits on the long end of the hard drive.

To test speeds, I copied my iPhone Pro Max Cloud backup folder from my desktop to the Lacie Rugged SSD Pro to see how long it would take. For the 8GB backup, it took a total of six minutes to download on standard internet. I’ve taken advantage of the workaround shown above to attach the SSD to my MacBook — using the cable and some 3M Adhesive tape that I stuck to the back of my MacBook case. So when I’m in a coffee shop, it’s not sitting on the table; it’s attached to the MacBook itself.

It’s worth mentioning that LaCie gives everyone who purchases the Rugged SSD Pro a one-month complimentary membership to Adobe’s Creative Cloud “All Apps” plan, which is fantastic. Adobe’s subscription model is overpriced, in my opinion, however. I haven’t used my complimentary membership yet, but I’m sure later down the line, I’ll check it out.

I like the fact that LaCie opted for putting the Thunderbolt 3 port at the top of the device versus on the side, because for some reason, I’ve had a habit of accidentally pulling the cables out while sitting at a desk, and that’s certainly not a good thing. On the side of the device, there’s a white power indicator that lets you know when it is connected to the computer and when it’s not, so that helps out a huge deal. The Lacie Rugged SSD is my go-to everyday SSD, and it travels with me in my tech bag everywhere I go. I used it while camped out in the hospital, and I found it to be durable and versatile. It got me through almost a week of horribly-postured typing sessions, including this article.

The Lacie Rugged SSD Pro retails for $401, and it is available from Amazon [affiliate link] and other retailers. 

Source: Manufacturer supplied review sample

What I Like: Ultra-portable, and I can use interchangeably with my MacBook and iPad

What Needs Improvement: Thunderbolt 3 cable is a bit too short at 5 inches — Lacie should include a longer cable

  Seagate Backup Plus Portable

When I’m using my standing desk at home, though, I tend to use my Seagate Backup Plus Portable. Available in a variety of sizes in terms of onboard storage, I opted for the 5TB model. I’ve been attempting to set up my very own Plex Server since I’ve been home, and over the past month, it’s been going relatively well. I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with portable hard drives because of their internal spinning, constant overheating, and the eventual death and loss of everything stored on them.

The Seagate Backup Plus Portable comes with a trial for Adobe CC Photography and a one-year Mylio “Create” plan, both of which I completely disregarded but might be of use to someone else. Aside from that, the 5TB hard drive has a smaller footprint than many other hard drives at 4.5″ long by 3.15″ wide by 0.8″ thick.

The Backup Plus Portable works with both macOS and Windows 7 or higher. I almost exclusively use this hard drive to house all of my media, including videos and shows for Plex. The Backup Plus Portable can house up to 500,000 high-resolution photos, which Jess and I will likely do within three years, at the rate we’ve been taking pictures of baby Skylar. If you are storing video media, you can expect it to hold about 165 hours worth. This is great if you’re beginning your cable-cutting journey, or you decide you want to go fully digital and get rid of that collection of DVDs sitting in your basement.

We all know that external hard drives are useful tools for housing all of your files and data, but I’ve been impressed by what I’ve seen out of Seagate and Lacie. Their ability to give you a mobile solution like the Rugged SSD or allow you to hoard all of your photos, playlists, and documents on the Backup Plus is truly remarkable considering their prices are modest these days, especially compared to cloud services. Instead of paying the reoccurring monthly or yearly fees on these services, either of these backup solutions would be a great choice.

The 5TB Seagate Backup Plus Portable retails for $104.99, and it is available from Amazon [affiliate link] and other retailers.

Source: Manufacturer supplied review sample

What I Like: 5TB is an insane amount of storage for the price; Small footprint, can easily slide into a back pocket or backpack

What Needs Improvement: Nothing

The post Thanks to Seagate and LaCie, I Don’t Have to Purchase a New MacBook Pro first appeared on GearDiary.

from Joseph Rushing https://geardiary.com/2020/09/16/thanks-to-seagate-and-lacie-i-dont-have-to-purchase-a-new-macbook-pro/

[junker-town]

Life and death: The true cost of inequality in high school football

The true cost of inequality in high school football

The last time she spoke to her son, Lashona Williams was sitting alone in the bleachers of Greenville High School’s football stadium, near midfield and a few rows up from the team bench. The school band, banging drums and cymbals and decked out in Hornet black and gold, had just marched from the parking lot. The scent of barbecue and tamales swirled from under the stands into the night air.

Usually a contingent of family — siblings, a godsister, godmothers — went to the games with Williams to watch Jeremiah. Not on Nov. 2, 2018. An afternoon cold front had plunged the temperature to 50 degrees at the time of the 7 p.m. kickoff, unseasonably cool for the Mississippi Delta. Greenville, which had lost every game since the season opener in August, was playing its last regular-season game against Madison Central, a perennial power from the Jackson suburbs headed for the state playoffs.

Despite the challenge, Jeremiah Williams was more optimistic about the outcome than his family and many of his peers. Between classes in the white-tiled hallways of Greenville High, he wore headphones over his ears, zoning out to music by NBA Young Boy. In the south end zone, just before gametime, he kept slapping his teammate Rufino Griffin’s hand, trying to hype him up. “That day he was so excited,” says Jokayah Sanders, his close friend. “He was like, ‘we finna win.’”

Jeremiah was known to friends and family as Dugg, a shortened version of his childhood nickname “Dugga Wugga.” “When you first meet Dugg you’d think he was mean or antisocial,” says Errick Simmons, Jr., a Greenville football player. “But once you really got to know him, with us, we really knew how he really acted. He was goofy, playful, really sneaky.”

When Sanders met Jeremiah in the second grade, she says she and Jeremiah made a pact to go steady. Not long after, he sat next to another girl on the school bus. Sanders said she would never speak to him again, a vow that lasted for only a few days. “We couldn’t stay mad at each other,” she says. When he wasn’t playing sports at the local YMCA or the Elwyn Ward Recreation Center, he was hanging out with Sanders. They liked watching old movies like Baby Boy and Love & Basketball, and she’d make them noodles with Ro-Tel cheese.

Jeremiah had beaming brown eyes and a buzzcut, and his face often expressed a warm, knowing smile. Despite standing no taller than 5’8 and weighing perhaps 165 pounds, he had blossomed into Greenville’s star player, a junior defensive back tasked with stopping the opposing team’s top receiver. His status on the team was evident from the gold numeral emblazoned on his jersey: No. 1.

But with Greenville fielding the opening kickoff, he began the game on the bench. Before the offense had run a play, Jeremiah turned around to the bleachers, facing his mother.

Mom, can you get me a Gatorade?

Yeah, son.

At the concession stand, nobody was in line. Williams bought Jeremiah his drink and, for herself, some nachos. She had no idea what was happening on the field.

“He just laid on the ground. No movement. No nothing. I called his name, shaking him. Nothing.” - Lashona Williams, mother of Jeremiah

Then-Greenville coach Sherrod Gideon remembers the play clearly. “It sticks with me every day,” he says. “I go back and watch the video and look at it (and wonder) what could’ve happened on that play to have a different outcome.” Greenville threw an interception on the first play of the game. Jeremiah entered the field from the sidelines. On what Gideon recalls as the next play, a Madison Central player broke loose on a run after Greenville’s defense overcommitted to the inside. Jeremiah freed himself from blockers as the ball carrier was about to score. At the same time that Jeremiah went in for the hit, the player, who was taller, lowered his shoulder, and the top of Jeremiah’s head collided with the player’s body.

When Lashona Williams returned from the concession stand, the stadium had fallen quiet. “I could see a player down on the field,” she says. “I knew that it couldn’t be him because he was just on the sideline. And I come up and the cheerleaders turn around. They looking. Now my heart is beating. I’m looking for a ‘1.’ It’s like everybody’s looking at me now.

“He just laid on the ground. No movement. No nothing. I called his name, shaking him. Nothing.”

Jeremiah Williams was airlifted from the stadium to a hospital in Jackson, suffering from fractured vertebrae. A ventilator kept him alive for seven days. He never regained consciousness, and his brain never showed any signs of activity. He was the third player to die during a high school football game in Mississippi in the fall of 2018.

On Sept. 10, 2018, Houston High School’s William Anderson, a 15-year-old offensive lineman, removed himself from a JV game and collapsed on the sideline. He died three hours later from an embolism. Doctors at the hospital in Tupelo, a 45-minute drive from Houston, had to wait for Anderson to stabilize before transferring him to a trauma center in Memphis. Two weeks earlier, he and his mother had been discussing the death of another player. Dennis Mitchell, a 16-year-old defensive lineman for Byhalia High School collapsed and died on Aug. 24 while playing at Coahoma County High School, in the Delta. Byhalia did not have an athletic trainer on hand.

According to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, 218 middle school and high school boys died from football between 2000 and 2018, an average of 11 deaths per year. One-hundred-fifty boys suffered indirect deaths, from cardiac arrest, blood clots, heat stroke or similar causes. Sixty-eight of the deaths were direct. Like Williams, most of these 68 boys died after sustaining blows to the head and neck.

Football deaths are occurring in an era in which improved tackling techniques, athletic trainers, AEDs and helmets have supposedly made football safer than ever. At the college and professional level, death is much rarer. But the high school level is plagued by inequality, crippling budget cuts and de facto school segregation, factors that prevent underserved schools from affording athletic trainers, new helmets and lessons in the latest tackling advancements. Since 2009, the districts encompassing Houston, Greenville and Byhalia have faced annual state funding shortfalls that cumulatively total $55 million. Bereft of resources, underserved urban and rural high schools often fail to provide basic equipment and safety measures, or are located far from trauma centers. These shortcomings, a disturbing wedge between the haves and have-nots, add greater risk to a game that leads to catastrophic injury and death every fall.

Although nobody has completed an academic study examining the characteristics of high school football deaths, a pattern has emerged over the last several years: Most of the boys who have died are young men of color from distressed communities, like Williams, Mitchell and Anderson.

In the January/February 2019 issue of the journal Sports Health, University of Washington sports medicine professor Jon Drezner published a study on sudden cardiac arrest, one of the leading causes of indirect deaths in high school football. Drezner examined athletes in all sports between the ages of 11 and 27. It found that though almost half of athletes who suffered sudden cardiac arrest (SCA) survived, black athletes were twice as likely to die from SCA as white athletes. The study spurred Drezner to explore connections between race and socioeconomics in SCA. The socioeconomic data did not return a statistically significant correlation with death over the four-year period. “However,” Drezner says, “they all trended in that direction, suggesting that maybe there’s a relationship.”

And in the first two years of the data, socioeconomic factors did correlate with death. “If you had SCA you were more likely to die of SCA if you were in a school with a higher percentage of students on free and reduced lunch,” he says.

In 2019, at least six high school boys were reported to have died from football, in Florida, West Virginia, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Missouri and Louisiana. Lashona Williams has heard about many on the news. When a player named Jacquez Welch died during a football game in September in Florida, the news was a particularly hard reminder of Jeremiah. “Son o son how I miss you so very much,” she posted on Facebook. “My heart is so heavy. Momma is trying her hardest to keep it together but Lord knows it’s hard and it seems like ever since you left me all I see is young men passing away in the same sport.”

Shortly before he died, William Anderson discussed quitting football with his parents. He preferred basketball, ATV rides on his family’s wooded property and perfecting his hair: William’s goal was to one day be an entrepreneur in the hair industry. But going to college was going to be an obstacle, given the middle-class salaries of his stepfather Jamarcus Smith, a truck driver, and his mother Vida Anderson-Smith, a bank teller. When William brought up the possibility of quitting football, Jamarcus Smith remembers telling his son, “‘If you don’t want to play football just think about that football can get you to a scholarship and you can try to start your own hair product.’” Although William was a freshman, Houston coach Ty Hardin says that William’s size and talent projected him to become a college player.

Jeremiah Williams, the sixth of Lashona Williams’s eight children, was on a similar trajectory. He was dribbling balls before he could walk, and would talk to his friends about playing Division I. In a September 2018 game, Jeremiah held the top wide receiver in the state to 37 yards, and Gideon realized Jeremiah was becoming a college prospect.

Even as the risks of football become better understood, black children, who often come from middle- and lower-income families, continue to play the sport, while white children, who are often from wealthier families, are giving it up. About 24 percent of white high school boys play football, according to estimates from a 2018 Monitoring the Future survey of 10th grade boys by University of Michigan professor Philip Veliz, a number that has fallen steadily from 30 percent since 2014. But 35 percent of black high school boys play football, almost the same as the 37 percent who played in 2014. White athletes still account for the majority of total high school football players, at 56 percent, according to Veliz, with black athletes representing 22 percent.

The lure of football is particularly strong in Mississippi, where nearly one-third of children grow up in poverty, and the sport has long been a way to earn college scholarships. It is one of only eight states where high school football participation has not declined since 2010. The end of every fall week is a three-day celebration: The state’s numerous junior colleges play on Thursdays, high schools on Fridays and Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss on Saturdays, along with storied HBCU’s like Jackson State and Mississippi Valley State.

Seemingly every school district — from the Gulf Coast in the south, to the Piney Woods of the east, to the Delta of the west — boasts star alumni. A Mississippi statistician found that, as of 2016, 44 of the state’s 82 counties had sent at least one player to the NFL. In 2018, Mississippi ranked fourth in the country in current NFL players per capita, ahead of Florida, Texas and California.

Gideon, the former Greenville coach, is an example of a Mississippi local using football to change his life. He was a top recruit and honor student at Greenwood High School in the Delta, an All-American wide receiver at Southern Mississippi and an NFL Draft pick (he was selected one spot behind Tom Brady in 2000). In Greenville and other high poverty Delta communities, according to Gideon, “There’s really nothing to do if you’re not playing sports. You really can get into some type of trouble if that’s not what you doing.”

Outside of sports like lacrosse, baseball and ice hockey, which are often not offered at rural and urban schools and often require athletes to join expensive club teams, football gives high school athletes the highest percentage chance of making an NCAA team. Thousands more roster spots are also available at the NAIA and community college level. The current coach of Greenville High School, Quintarus McCray, estimates 10 of his senior players can advance to play in junior colleges. “I’m just trying to get them away from here,” he says, “even a couple hours away.”

But the resources available to Mississippi’s rural and urban public schools don’t match the importance that players and their families attach to the game. When Gideon arrived at Greenville High School in 2017, he says the high school didn’t have blocking sleds or tackling rings, which players use to improve tackling technique while avoiding physical contact at practice. The helmets, which must be replaced every 10 years per guidelines from the National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment, were still usable but nearing their expiration date. On the lower end, helmets go for $150 to $200 each, and $500 for top of the line models. Outfitting a full team of 60 to 70 players would have cost the school approximately $14,000, the entirety of Greenville’s annual football budget, Gideon says.

Greenville High School, where almost every student is black and every student is eligible for free lunch, plays at the 6A level of athletics. Its district opponents in 2018 included suburban Northwest Rankin and Madison Central. Both schools have racially diverse student bodies but are majority white. For athletics, Greenville budgeted $78,000 in 2018-19, or about $64 per student. Northwest Rankin budgeted $215,000 ($127 per student) and Madison Central budgeted $339,000 ($261 per student). Northwest Rankin and Madison Central also typically receive mid-six figure contributions from booster clubs, according to Form-990 tax filings, and have modern weight rooms and training programs, sleek uniforms, doctors on the sidelines and video scoreboards.

“Look at they facilities and then come to Greenville,” Gideon says, “and you think there’s no way these two teams are playing against each other.”

Greenville also did not employ a staff athletic trainer or use one on a contract basis when Gideon started coaching, he says. He reached an agreement with an athletic trainer at Mississippi Valley State to attend games when she wasn’t on the road. Gideon says he paid the athletic trainer $200 for each game out of his pocket or with funds from the school’s modest booster club. “Especially competing against those types of teams you have to have [athletic trainers, quality helmets and tackling rings] in order for those kids to be safe,” he says.

“There’s really nothing to do if you’re not playing sports. You really can get into some type of trouble if that’s not what you doing.” - Sherrod Gideon, former Greenville High School football coach

Gideon left Greenville at the end of the 2018-19 school year for an assistant coaching position at Yazoo City High School, whose district was taken over by the state after receiving the Mississippi Department of Education’s lowest accountability rating. There, he again found a school lacking in proper safety measures, including an athletic trainer. The school, he says, now contracts an athletic trainer who works for the county. Yazoo City alumnus Fletcher Cox, who plays for the Philadelphia Eagles, donated money that will help the school purchase new helmets and refurbish the locker room.

I asked several of the people interviewed for this story what they hoped would happen after a year in which three Mississippi boys died playing football. Many offered immeasurable goals like community togetherness and school spirit. Others, like Gideon and Errick Simmons, the mayor of Greenville, were more pragmatic. Simmons says that in the aftermath of Jeremiah Williams’s death the whole community rallied (a GoFundMe raised $40,000 from black and white residents, including a prominent Republican business owner), but longer-term changes are needed. “The state needs to get involved to have consistency from school to school,” he says. “Between black schools and predominantly white schools, the state should be involved to ensure safety across the board for football players.”

The failure of Mississippi to adequately protect football players is tied to decades of abandonment and neglect that trace back to the end of segregation. After Brown v. Board in 1954, white Mississippi legislators, seeking to avoid desegregation, wanted an option to dissolve public education entirely. They rewrote the state constitution so the legislature was no longer required to provide public education funding. In Greenville, private segregation academies sprung up in churches and hotels. Although newspaper accounts at the time cited college prep as motivation, white parents freely expressed concern about their children attending school with black children at whites-only meetings. Local historian Benjy Nelken, who had recently returned from college, recalls attending one of these meetings and warning that abandoning the public schools would be bad for Greenville.

Nelken runs Greenville’s history museum, which is adorned with old maps, newspaper clippings and photos of Archie Manning and Louis Armstrong. When I visited with him on a September afternoon, he took a framed picture off the wall featuring the first graduating class of Greenville’s Washington School, a segregation academy that opened in 1970. Grayscale portraits of six white girls are arranged in a circle. “Those are the first ones that parents wanted to be removed,” he says, “because of fear of the black males.”

Today the vast majority of white children in Greenville (the city is about 20 percent white and 80 percent black) attend Washington School, St. Joseph’s Catholic School or Greenville Christian Academy. According to research by Jake McGraw, project coordinator at the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, roughly 40 percent of Mississippi schools feature student bodies that are at least 90 percent of one race. Last year, a Center for Public Integrity analysis found that no Mississippi public school district that was made up of 75 percent or more black students was rated “A” or “B” in the state’s accountability ratings. And no school district with a proportion of white students 75 percent or higher was rated “D” or “F.” Greenville High School received an “F” in accountability ratings for the 2018-19 school year. Majority-black Byhalia High School and Houston High School received a “D” and “C,” respectively.

“Race has always been the principal dividing line of who gets an education in Mississippi and who doesn’t,” McGraw says. “While the systems and laws have changed and progressed, in many ways we still in 2019 have a fundamentally segregated system.”

In the last decade, Mississippi lawmakers failed to reach the mandated funding level of the Mississippi Adequate Education Program (MAEP), which was passed in 1997 to ensure greater support at lower-income schools. Statewide since FY 2009, school districts have been shortchanged by an estimated $2.5 billion, according to The Parents’ Campaign Research & Education Fund. The pinch is particularly severe in urban and rural areas that can’t rely on wealthy local tax bases.

In 2015, the Greenville school district was one of nearly two dozen districts to legally challenge the state’s failure to fund schools through MAEP, but the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled the government did not have to fully fund the schools. McGraw says the majority of Republican state leaders “fought tooth and nail” against the lawsuit, and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves, who is now governor, later tried, but failed, to eliminate MAEP.

“The state and the current leadership have not taken an active role, an aggressive role, and have not shown great concern in public education,” Simmons says. “The policies of the last eight years have been vouchers and taking money from the public schools and getting money for the academies or creating a charter school system. If we really invest taxpayers’ money in the public school system, you will see an improvement.”

Facing shortages, schools have been forced to make sacrifices. Byhalia High School did not provide an athletic trainer at the game when Dennis Mitchell died because it could not afford one. Principal James Kimbrough, who was at the game, says Byhalia still does not contract or employ an athletic trainer, and its rural location away from major hospitals and universities gives it scant options for finding volunteers. “If you look throughout Mississippi, most of the rural schools or less affluent schools, they’re not going to have that,” he says. Kimbrough described state government officials as being unaware of the needs of schools like Byhalia: “They don’t realize that kids with less need more. That’s the golden rule. And I don’t think a lot of them understand that rule.”

The nonprofit governing body of state athletics, the Mississippi High School Activities Association, does not require athletic trainers or even AEDs, although it encourages both. Don Hinton, the association’s executive director, says the limited budgets and rural locations of many schools would make mandates difficult. In 2015, a state legislature committee audited the MHSAA over concerns about athletic eligibility requirements and financial transparency, but not for safety.

As of late January, more than 17 months after Mitchell died, the state medical examiner’s office, beset by funding cuts, has not returned a cause of death. Scotty Meredith, the coroner in the county where Mitchell died, says cases can take up to three years to be resolved. He says Mitchell’s mother has called him two to three times a month seeking an update. “There’s nothing in the system for me to give her closure,” Meredith says. “It’s pitiful.”

In northeast Mississippi, William Anderson had to be taken to a hospital in Tupelo because the local emergency room of Houston’s Trace Regional Hospital closed in 2014 due to financial distress. William’s mother, Vida Anderson-Smith, says the Tupelo staff wanted to airlift him to a higher-level trauma hospital in Memphis. Before he was stable for the transfer, about three hours after leaving the football game, William lost consciousness when an undiagnosed blood clot traveled to his heart.

“Race has always been the principal dividing line of who gets an education in Mississippi and who doesn’t.” - Jake McGraw, William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation

Trace Regional was one of five rural hospitals to close in the state since 2010, and a February 2019 study placed nearly half of Mississippi’s remaining rural hospitals at high financial risk. Former Houston State Rep. Russell Jolly has attributed the closure of Trace to Mississippi’s failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Ryan Kelly, executive director of the Mississippi Rural Health Association, says Medicaid expansion would shore up hospital finances and help patients, but numerous other problems, including the downcoding of emergency room visits by insurance companies and Mississippi’s lack of a universal credentialing system for doctors, have contributed to the crisis.

Hardin, the Houston coach, says a volunteer athletic trainer who attends most of the high school’s live sporting events, sprung into action when William collapsed. But Hardin still thinks about the ways William’s life could have been saved, and fears for future emergencies involving Houston athletes. “What if something else happens?” he says. “What could’ve been different that day if we could have taken him to the emergency room a mile, five miles down the road?”

As schools, hospitals, and other institutions reel from a lack of public investment, legislators and former Gov. Phil Bryant have filled the state’s rainy day fund to its highest level ever. In 2016, they passed the largest tax break in Mississippi history.

Football has been used as a public relations tool for the state. Gov. Bryant’s attachment to the sport is so well known that he has appeared as a guest analyst on the SEC Network. He routinely attends college football games. When Jeremiah Williams was in the hospital after suffering his neck injury, Bryant implored his Twitter followers to pray for the student-athlete. Months later, Bryant signed an education budget that was $200 million lower than the state is obligated to provide under the Mississippi Adequate Education Program. The Greenville district’s shortfall for the year was $2 million below the mandated funding level and its budget was $1.8 million below what it received the previous fiscal year.

Anderson-Smith doesn’t blame football for her son’s death. She wanted to talk to SB Nation in part to raise awareness about the danger of missed diagnoses of blood clots among children.

William is buried in a cemetery located on 500-plus acres of family land on Houston’s outskirts. Before William died, he roamed the countryside, criss-crossing trails on a blue Polaris ATV that his mother and stepfather had recently bought him. On Sundays at Missionary Baptist Church, William was an usher and sang in the top row of the choir, fourth spot from the left. He was fearless: The family heard stories of how he stood up for kids who were bullied.

In the last 17 months, life without William hasn’t gotten easier for William’s mother and stepfather. Smith thinks about his son when he’s behind the wheel of his truck, driving alone. Weeks before William died, they went to Abilene, Texas, on their first trip together. Anderson-Smith thinks about William all the time — when she’s cooking, when she’s buying home freshener products because he always wanted the house to smell good. He was the baby of the family for about 10 years, until his younger sister, Madison, came along. “My oldest daughter would always say, ‘he’s so spoiled,’” Anderson-Smith says. “I’d say, ‘but you know he’s the baby.’ And you look at it now I got to spoil him because he didn’t get to stay here as long.”

A few months ago, Anderson-Smith spotted “Share a Coke” bottles featuring the University of Alabama logo, her son’s favorite college team, and with the names William and Anderson. She bought the bottles with both names and set them up in his room near his PlayStation 4 and Houston High School uniform.

In the weeks after Jeremiah’s death, Lashona Williams replayed a gut-wrenching conversation they had earlier in the season when she questioned whether he was tackling too much with his head. “He was like, ‘Momma, I’m tackling right. I know what I’m doing. I know what I’m doing,’” Williams says.

According to Hinton, the MHSAA has encouraged football coaches to take courses on tackling techniques but does not require certification as other states do, like Texas. The coaching staff at the private Washington School in Greenville recently attended a rugby-style tackling clinic in Alabama that featured lessons from Seattle Seahawks staff. The coaches at the grade school level at Washington Day are closely supervised by the high school staff and teach the same techniques. Those kinds of tackling lessons — that emphasize keeping the head up and out of the way during tackles — are missing for many young children in the Delta, Gideon says. When they get to high school, they often face a curve in learning how to properly tackle. Gideon says Jeremiah “had more knowledge than anyone on the team.”

When Jeremiah’s teammates and their parents expressed the possibility of leaving the game after her son’s death, Williams says she told them to keep playing. Almost all the players in Jeremiah’s class returned for a 2019 season that featured the highest attendance and community support in years, as well as new helmets and uniforms purchased by the school.

Greenville had bigger concerns than safety on its football field. Three weeks before Jeremiah’s death, another child, a 15-year-old Greenville High School student, had been gunned down while riding a bike. And two weeks after his death, a 17-year-old was found fatally shot in a home on a Saturday morning. Between random violence, drug-related violence and accidents, so many Greenville High School students died during Jeremiah’s time as a student that administrators can’t give an exact count off the top of their heads. They say it was between 10 and 12.

“It hurt to the core to lose my child,” Williams says. “But it’s a different hurt than his life being taken by a gun.”

In Byhalia, at a memorial assembly for Dennis Mitchell reported on by the Memphis Commercial Appeal, his sister Kiara Mitchell said the fact he died playing the game he loved hurt less than another frightening possibility: “I’ve told his football team that. I wanted that to get to them because that’s how this is helping me get through this situation. There wasn’t no other way. It wasn’t violent, it wasn’t in the streets. That’s why it sits well for me.”

On a Friday night in late September, Williams is back at Greenville’s stadium for the team’s game against Murrah High School. Her seat is behind the home bench, surrounded by family and friends, but she stands on her feet for much of the game. She stomps in disapproval at penalties against Greenville High. When a player tweaks an ankle, she draws closer to the bench to ask how he is doing.

Greenville rushes out to an early lead, but Murrah storms back in the fourth quarter. Trailing, 14-9, Murrah has the ball in the red zone and appears poised to score. But Greenville’s defense stuffs the running back behind the line of scrimmage. The next play is a sack. Then, with about 10 seconds left, Murrah’s quarterback apparently means to spike the football but instead kneels. The clock runs out.

Williams hustles down the bleachers and onto the patchy green field for the celebration. The players rush toward her, and she hugs as many as four at a time. Many of the boys spent 2018 Thanksgiving and 2019 Mother’s Day with her. At the season opener, they pronounced her captain, and she led them onto the field while wearing a No. 1 jersey. Getting back to the games required prayer and counseling from her pastor, but Williams decided she wanted to provide support, too. “I feel like it’s my duty as Jeremiah’s mom to walk the walk with them,” she says. “They were there. They’re damaged as well. It wasn’t just me and my kids or sisters, aunts, brothers. Those kids were there. They witnessed all that.

“I pray daily for them and not just them but for football players all over the world to just be safe.”

Twenty minutes later, after the fans have returned to their cars and the players to the locker room, Williams is one of the last to leave. She walks with her sister through a chain-link gate that is adjacent to several homemade signs decorated by students. Most are the usual sort seen at football games nationwide: “Push ‘Em, Sack ‘Em, Attack ‘Em” and “It’s Tackle Time.”

One sign is a reminder of the tragic losses Williams and other mothers endure every year from football. It says, “Ashes to Ashes. Dust to Dust.”

[nickelbackfanfiction]

Part II

The sun sets on an empty stretch of forgotten highway.  There, amidst the downed sycamores and overturned cars, stands the silhouette of a man outlined in the red fury of evening sun.  

From his back he pulls a guitar, void black and etched in the shimmering gold characters of a language long since forgotten by modern man.  

His arm raises high into the dying light, pausing for a moment as a white moth chances to land upon his outstretched fingertips.  He strikes the guitar with a force strong enough to send shockwaves rippling down the road, debris and detritus sent bouncing toward the heavens before crashing back down in a heap.  

A lightning bolt cracks the sky and slams into him, sending outward a sparking crazed collective of electric blue tendrils.  

Suddenly the sun shoots violently skyward, growing redder and larger as it reaches a zenith directly above the man’s head.  Birds explode upward from unseen hiding places, threatening to blot out the unnatural daylight.  

A voice tears through the cacophony, holding a commanding tone of total clarity, echoing and building, shattering asphalt, glass and animal alike.  In the moments before overwhelming awe and resonating frequencies collaborate to break the rhythm of beating hearts, creatures large and small alike place the beginnings of the chorus of their oblivion.  

“Look at this photograph,”  

Nickelback has returned.

---

It was crazy to see Nickelback again after all this time.  Especially since I was doing about ninety miles per hour down the highway, and Nickelback was running twenty over the speed limit alongside my car.  

I waved at Nickelback and he waved back at me and then he reached down and when he came back up he was holding up a baby diaper full of PCP and pointing at it and while winking repeatedly and suggestively.  

‘That wiley Nickelback, still up to all his old tomfoolery.’ I thought with faux-exasperation and like a cutesy scrunched up face and head nod at the camera so you know my expression is fake exasperated and not real exasperated.

I knew it was time to hang out with my best friend Nickelback again when my car careened through a barrier and Nickelback and me were flying through the sky over the city and Nickelback pulled out his guitar and super-slammed out the opening chords of Nickelback’s hit famous song Photograph and that’s when I saw it flashing across the sky in the fireworks flying out of Nickelback’s guitar,

‘THE TIME I DID PCP WITH NICKELBACK PART II: THE NICKELBACKENING’

---

Shit was about to get real.  

At least that’s what Nickelback kept shouting in my ear over and over.  

Nickelback was holding me in a reverse bearhug and we were torpedoing toward the dorms of the College School for Adults.  What PCP Nickelback couldn’t cram down my throat he was violently inhaling up his own nose so he didn’t have to stop shouting at me while he did it.  

Me and Nickelback must have crashed through like at least eight floors before we stopped RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE GIRLS LOCKER ROOM.  

FOR REAL.  

We knew we were in Boob City, USA right away.  

Me and Nickelback immediately got up and started flexing immediately.  We must have high fived like four thousand times.  At least.  All the girls were naked and cheering the entire time.  Nickelback saw so many boobs he went Super Saiyan for a minute.  Somewhere around the third hour of cheering and flexing and comparing boners, the cops came in the locker room to tell Nickelback to play Photograph.  Everyone knew all the lyrics.  It was awesome.

Pretty soon the whole building collapsed because word got around town that Nickelback was in the girls locker room and everyone kept trying to get into the building to hear Nickelback play Photograph.  Nickelback still probably played it like 34 times.  No one got tired of it.  

Most of the people were twitching on the floor in a state of involuntary religious ecstasy from being so close to Nickelback when the building collapsed so it's not a big deal because that’s how most people say that they want to die anyways according to National Polling.  Me and Nickelback were fine though cause of the PCP and also we know you’re supposed to flex hard as fuck in a building collapse to survive and we both flex hard as fuck.  

Me and Nickelback fist bumped back and forth with both hands in the rubble and it looked super cool but after about fifteen minutes of checking to see if anyone was watching we decided to stop.  

Nickelback said he knew about a hard rocking rock and roller rock party happening across town and if anyone knows about a hard rocking rock and roller rock party it's for sure Nickelback the undisputed by anyone number one hard rocking rock and roller rocker on the entire planet.

Nickelback ran in front of a passing city bus and launched himself like a magnificent dolphin-man through the windshield and then out of the back of the bus and then through the windshield of a bus behind it and I guess that somehow kept happening for a minute despite how unrealistic it sounds cause Nickelback pushed off real hard with his legs which are like pythons or a strong animal that’s more leg shaped than a python.  

Eventually Nickelback got slowed down enough and crashed through one more bus windshield and landed next to the driver.  Pretty soon, the bus rolled over to me and the door opened up and fog spilled down the stairs and confetti shot everywhere and when it cleared there was Nickelback.  

Nickelback was covered in glass and when the light hit him just right he looked like disco ball made out of sweaty meat.  I swear on a brutal awful prolonged death to all my closest friends and family that it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.  

Nickelback threw the driver down at my feet and beckoned me onto the bus, taking the now unoccupied seat behind the wheel.  

Someone started to ask to get off the bus but Nickelback turned around and spit right in her stupid mouth.  

Fuck you Sharon.  

“Come with me if you want to rock and roll.”  Nickelback said to me from the driver’s seat before explaining to everyone that it was a Terminator reference.  The whole bus did Arnold impressions for like an hour and one guy definitely was doing a Tim Allen but it was a good impression so no one minded.  

Nickelback peeled out with the bus and the back end fishtailed it super hard like in The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Drift and this one guy who was in the way got swatted into next week.

It was crazy when we saw him again on another crazy adventure that we had next week.  

---

It wasn’t looking like things were gonna end well for the passengers on the bus.  Most of them were already unconscious or concussed from all the sick ramps that Nickelback was ramping off of rampantly.  Ramps.  But now we were about to hit a Hot Wheelz style loop de loop that the taxpayer bailout essentially paid for when Nickelback told me “Better bail out if you want to live,” and then explained that it was a Terminator reference.  

That’s when I saw that the lousy SOCIALIST HITLER GOVERNMENT still hadn’t finished installing the boost pads that you absolutely need to have on a loop de loop track like this if you ever want to get a bus or a semi or like a dinosaur with race car wheels to fully clear the loop.

We bailed a big one.

And we weren’t going to make it.  

I didn’t know what was going to hurt more, the impact onto the concrete below or the loss of faith in the inner workings of our government I was sure to have later on once I started considering all the bureaucratic red tape that had so clearly failed us and every citizen of this fine nation who wants to wang hard around loop de loops.  

The bus, to it’s credit, was hard working and AMERICAN made before it inevitably exploded into a searing inferno about twenty feet behind where me and Nickelback landed.  It looked pretty cool but I guess me and Nickelback had probably seen bigger explosions.  

Both our legs had sunk to the knee into the concrete when we landed because we were flexing hard as fuck.  We looked at each other, each clearly contemplating the chaotic scene before them.  

Nickelback high fived me so hard he broke my arm in three places.

We set off on foot.  Well, I did.  Nickelback insisted on riding my shoulders.  It was like that Jesus poster with the footprints but maybe the opposite because while I’m not sure that Nickelback is the literal son of God, I know for sure that if he put a gun to my head I’d for sure say that he is.  For sure.

Me and Nickelback decided that it was probably time for Nickelback to go incognito because too many people were always going “Hey that’s Nickelback!” and then trying to follow us and get Nickelback to play Photograph.  

Then we did a montage of Nickelback trying on all sorts of different outfits and the camera would cut to me every time and I’d like shrug or shake my head or something like really exaggerated until one of them I gave a knowing nod to like ‘hey that look that you’re wearing is the look that you should get Nickelback.’  

Walking on Sunshine was playing the whole time.  I don’t know where it was coming from.

Nickelback had picked out one of the potted plants from the front entrance of the mall as his incognito outfit that I helped pick out in the montage I just talked about.  Nickelback put his legs through holes he made in the bottom and the lip of the clay pot came up to just under his nipples.  His face came out through the fern in the pot and he was wearing one of those explorer hats because we both thought that was the fashion look that most suited him and also our needs to be outside as Nickelback without everyone asking you to play Photograph all the time.

Also Nickelback could pull his arms and legs into the pot and it was like he was a turtle and shit fuck if Nickelback doesn’t love turtles I swear to god he is always yelling at the top of his lungs at homeless people about how much he fucking loves turtles.

Nickelback couldn’t believe how normal life was when he was a potted plant instead of Nickelback.  I showed him all the normal guy things that I do and no one bothered us because it wasn’t weird and they didn’t know he was actually Nickelback because his disguise was so good.

Eventually Nickelback said that we needed to find some wheels and shades.  I agreed wholeheartedly with Nickelback because it’s impossible to say no to Nickelback because he’ll just spit in your mouth before you can get the word out.  

We found a bunch of skater punks skating and Nickelback challenged them to a skate off for their skateboards.  They didn’t know he was Nickelback or otherwise they probably would have never accepted.

I’d never even seen half the tricks that Nickelback was doing to shred gnar at the skate off.  

All the skaters had their expectations subverted because before this they all thought that a potted plant couldn’t skateboard but later they realized that they were just prejudiced and Nickelback showed them something ugly inside of themselves.  

They were never mean to potted plants again.  

At one point Nickelback did a kickflip so hard that it broke open a hole in spacetime that we had to staple shut like pretty quick once the screams coming out of it got too annoying for Nickelback to concentrate.  

Nickelback finally locked in his win with a trick called the Nickel Backflip which was so cool that one of the skaters literally pooped their pants and some say is still pooping their pants to this very day.  

One by one all the skaters gave Nickelback their skateboards and Nickelback told them that we needed their shades too and we got the sweetest shades they were like the Blues Brothers ones.

After we shackled all the boards to the bottom of Nickelback’s newly coined Nickelpot we put on our sweet shades and took off to find the biggest hill in town which was right where we were anyway.  We didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything interesting or grow at all as people to achieve our goal.

I asked Nickelback if this was the way to the hard rocking rock and roll party and Nickelback said “Where we’re going we don’t need no stinking party,” and I started to ask if that was a Scarface reference but Nickelback spit in my mouth.

While I was fastening myself hard to the back of the Nickelpot like one of those Garfield window things Nickelback was like “Come with me if you want to rock,” and pushed us off down the biggest hill in town and then explained that he was doing a Terminator reference.  

The biggest hill in town was called 8 Mile Hill after the Eminem movie but was actually only six miles long on a good day.  The city government got real into the real Slim Shady for a minute and was always bleaching their hair and quoting Slim at meetings and stuff.  

It was the best government this city has ever elected.  Over and over and over again.

8 Mile Hill was so steep that when Guinness came to measure how steep it was their steepness measuring machine exploded and they decided to go home and get another one to replace it but then got distracted by the new Nintendo and never came back.  

It was steep as fucking fuck.

We were probably breaking the sound barrier by the time we hit mile three down 8 Mile Hill in the Nickelpot judging by all the car alarms and glass exploding like a hurricane behind us.  A lot of people’s ears were bleeding which was terrible because they’d never be able to listen to Nickelback but also maybe a good thing because Nickelback did it to them.  Also we were leaving those cool flame strips in the ground behind our wheels cause of how fast we were going.  

Nickelback was hard core doing that thing where your cheeks go all wobbly from air hitting them and must have eaten like a hundred bugs accidentally outside of the ones he kept eating on purpose.  

Right when I felt like my grip on the Nickelpot and my own sanity was at it’s limit Nickelback looked back at me and gave me a thumbs up snapping me back to reality right before leaning back and vomiting up a torrent of living flies into the evolving chaos behind the Nickelpot.  I lost count of how many flies there were even though I was definitely trying real hard because Nickelback tends to get irrationally angry and specific about the amounts of things that people remember him doing.

Somewhere around mile four of 8 Mile Hill I saw Nickelback like concentrating real hard and clenching his fists and I was pretty sure he was either pushing out a doo doo brown or trying to go Super Saiyan again.

Imagine my surprise when a pair of moths wings made from pure white light burst from Nickelback’s shoulder blades.

His new Nickelwings kept growing larger and larger until eventually they stretched the entire width of the road.  Pretty soon they were so massive that they were cutting their way through all the buildings on either side of 8 Mile Hill.  When they’d reached about a hundred feet each Nickelback looked back at me and tipped his sunglasses.  Nickelback was like “Come with me if you want to fly,” and then explained that it was a Terminator reference as his Nickelwings started flapping and the Nickelpot took off into the skies above the city gaining supernatural speed and altitude with every passing second.

I clung onto the Nickelpot with my suction cup hands as I looked down on the city below us.  Nickelback had produced an acoustic guitar from somewhere within the Nickelpot.  The night was still, save the lulling sound of Nickelback’s giant gossamer Nickelwings slowly flapping through the sparse cloud cover, of Nickelback methodically tuning his guitar to the tune that Photograph is in.

It was the most at peace I have ever been with myself that moment.  I felt like this was probably what the Buddha felt underneath the tree and then I decided that the Buddha was probably a Nickelback fan because he could see the future and therefore Nickelback and from there it was basically a given.

Slowly, Nickelback looked back at me, his head trimmed by the moonlight streaming in from behind him.  Smiling, he took his glasses and flung them down at the city below.

I watched them tumble for an eternity.  The moon's reflection bouncing its way across their glossy surface.  Growing smaller and smaller still as they fell away from me.

And then they were gone.  

Looking back up at Nickelback I noticed that his pupils had dilated to fill almost the entirety of the visible space behind his eyelids.  I found my breath catch in my throat as I felt some part of myself pulled deep into the dark pools on his face.

Nickelback started speaking to me in every language at once.  

Nickelback’s black hole eyes bore into and past me, past even the me I knew of as myself.  I could feel Nickelback connecting with some form of myself disconnected from time.  

Myself as a child searching a dark room only to find eyes staring back at me from some recessed space.  

A sea of future selves feeling a piercing but unseen glare from some shadowy treeline or darkened alleyway as they succeed or fail in a universe of infinite possibilities.

And I could feel myself start sinking inward toward some primordial core of being, even as somewhere, some me, felt my hands slowly losing their grip on the big Garfield plungers tethering me to the Nickelpot.  

And there, infinitely deep down, I saw it, the essence of existence itself, clear as day.  So simple.

And suddenly I was Buddha, I was Christ, I was a disconnected soul reuniting with the Godhead.  

And all the while Nickelback’s raving in infinite languages became louder and more manic, becoming a frantic shriek, a madman’s rush of words pouring forth, a deafening roar.  

Somewhere inside me I was aware that I was screaming too, my face now barely an inch from Nickelback’s, my vocal cords being driven to the point of snapping.  I could feel my body about to shatter from the pressure as every atom of my being began to vibrate violently.  

I lose my grip and slowly begin falling back away from the ascending Nickelpot.  

Time slows.

Way the fuck down.

Nickelback’s eyes never leave mine as he straps on his guitar.  It’s void black and covered in the an incomprehensible gold lettering.  In slow motion I watch him twist one last tuning peg in place, sending a wave of light cascading down through the gold etchings of the instrument.

Nickelback’s wings are so big, how did they ever get so big?  

Suddenly the torrent of words erupting from Nickelback’s mouth ceases, his pupils shrink back down, revert to normal but continue shrinking to sharp black points before disappearing entirely.  

The night is so still again.  A comet lazily arcs its way down to earth and I fall with it.

“It’s time.”  Nickelback says, smiling down at me as I careen through the wispy cloud cover below him.

As Nickelback brings his hand down on the guitar for the opening part of Photograph his Nickelpot explodes off of him like an improvised explosive device.  And I don’t have time to register the first pressure wave from the blast before the concussive force rockets up through his wings and shatters them into a billion pieces.  

Nickelback rides naked atop eight skateboards in an arc past the moon surrounded by a swarm of iridescent feathers hovering in the abyss like a starfield.  

His guitar echoes out into the expanse above the city, causing the points of light around him to dance in an eerie rhythm as they defy gravity and logic to become a swirling gyre around the man within their mass.  

And suddenly the feathers race inward and coalesce around Nickelback’s naked form, a brilliant sphere of light masking the man underneath.

As I tumble through the clouds I watch that sphere of light explode outward from Nickelback, carried by a wave of the song Photograph emanating from its core, played as if ripped from a realm of platonic ideals.

I watch a flock of passing birds evaporate as the pure unadulterated Nickelbackening overtakes and consumes them.  

I can’t know if it’s the ground or that sphere of destruction that I’ll meet first, but I no longer care.  

Just as it seems I’m about to make contact with mother earth, I’m finally caught by that bubble of rapidly expanding light.  

Photograph resonates deep down into the vibrating pieces that constitute my existence.  I have become Photograph.  I have become a part of Nickelback itself.  I am at peace before annihilation.  

For a brief moment I watch as the city around me is ripped apart by the forces of Nickelback’s power.  

My world is light and a roar of white noise.  

I am gone.  

I am in my car.  

In a ditch.  

I hang stupidly upside down from my seat looking at a small white flower peeking through my broken windshield.  A moth emerges from it’s inner folds.  I watch it flutter out through my passenger window and up toward the moon.

[racingtoaredlight]

The degenerate’s guide to college football TV watch ‘em ups, 2019 season, week 6

Not sure if anybody has reminded you lately but there is only one OCTOBER!!! And we’re in it. October is breast cancer awareness month and one of only four annual truck months. The first football weekend of October features three top 25 matchups, which isn’t terrible, but two of them are B1G conference games. And they each feature a team from the state of Michigan who probably won’t be in the top 25 come tomorrow.

So now that I have you all pumped up for it, let’s get to the games! As per usual, the schedule is copied and pasted from FBSchedules and gambling info, where it’s provided, is from Vegas Insider. NOW ARE YOU READY FOR SOME FOOTBALL!????!???? IT DOESN’T REALLY MATTER!!!!

Saturday, October 5

Matchup                                                          Time (ET)               TV/Mobile

TCU at Iowa State                                           12:00pm                   ESPN2

TCU is tough to figure out. So is Iowa State for that matter. But I think Gary Patterson got back on track last week and the Cyclones -3.5 looks bad to me so... load up the Cyclones, I guess.

14 Iowa at 19 Michigan                                   12:00pm                     FOX

The line is moving towards Iowa but it’s still Michigan -4. I think the sharps are on Iowa here but I don’t trust it. This looks like a horrible game for purposes of watching.

Kent State at 8 Wisconsin                               12:00pm                 ESPNU

Wisconsin’s defense might be great but the Badgers still kept it close against Northwestern last week. That’s a big red flag for me but not so big that I think Kent State +35 is smart money. I hope Chryst runs it up like crazy.

Maryland at Rutgers                                         12:00pm                   BTN

It’s been a long couple of weeks since Maryland’s offense looked good. But I bet Rutgers can get them back in the swing of things. Terps and the over.

6 Oklahoma at Kansas                                      12:00pm                  ABC

The line has moved towards Kansas and I’ve got nothing. I love Les Miles and those plucky Jayhawks but come the fuck on. Oklahoma’s gunning for 80. Also, I love KU football for all the failure so I’m in the bag for either 95-0 Oklahoma or KU pulling one of the more monumental regular season upsets in memory.

21 Oklahoma State at Texas Tech                    12:00pm                   FS1

TIRED: Bet the over. WIRED: Chuba Hubbard hits the over by himself.

Purdue at 12 Penn State                                    12:00pm                 ESPN

Rondale Moore won’t play but he’s not out for the year. Supposedly. He should be, though, right? No reason to chance it with one of the best players in the country on a garbage program like Purdue. Penn State is favored by 28 and, as much as I hate to say this, they’re wildly undervalued even though that’s up 11.5 from where the line opened. This is going to be an all out splatterfest.

Tulane at Army                                                    12:00pm              CBSSN

This game is a metaphor. The environment vs. the troops. The environment is favored.

USF at UConn                                                      12:00pm      CBSSports.com

As godawful as USF has been this year they’re still favored by 11 on the road in a conference game. UConn should consider dropping football.

Utah State at 5 LSU                                             12:00pm              SECN

Jordan Love goes to Death Valley to face a bunch of future first round picks in the LSU secondary. That’s fun for scouting but LSU should destroy USU. 

Boston College at Louisville                               12:30pm              RSN

No idea what to say here.

Eastern Michigan at Central Michigan                3:00pm              ESPN+

We’re about to run through a bunch of MAC games.

Virginia Tech at Miami (FL)                                   3:30pm              ESPN

But before we get to all that MAC first we have to deal with this MAC-level disaster. Miami has pretty much sucked so far this year but maybe they fixed everything in the week off. More likely, Justin Fuente will get off the hotseat for a week after winning on the road against a Miami team dressed up as pumpkins.

Western Michigan at Toledo                                 3:30pm             ESPN+

O/u 74, 1.5-point line. These teams are interchangeable. Not just Toledo and Western Michigan - the entire MAC is a jumble of teams that are exactly the same and Buffalo. Buffalo sucks way differently than the rest of the MAC.

Ohio at Buffalo                                                        3:30pm           ESPN+

Buffalo sucks differently than the rest of the MAC but they still suck.

Marshall at Middle Tennessee                                3:30pm        Facebook

I want to love this game but it looks fucking horrible.

Arkansas State at Georgia State                            3:30pm         ESPN+

ESPN+ is definitely a government conspiracy. Real deep state channels over here. The other Arkansas is favored on the road in a matchup of two middling offenses and two of the worst defenses in the country. I’m tempted to say hit that over of 69.5 with the Red Wolves winning. I don’t know about that line, though.

11 Texas at West Virginia                                         3:30pm           ABC

I am not enjoying Heisman hype for Texas’ QB but I don’t think WFV is the team to bring him back down to earth.

Illinois at Minnesota                                                  3:30pm          BTN

Minnesota may be the worst 4-0 team in the country but if they are you can put money on them being the worst 5-0 team in the country, too. I think Tanner Morgan is pretty good as far as B1G passers go and the “worst...” unbeaten team thing could very easily extend to the worst 8-0 team in the country.

Bowling Green at 9 Notre Dame                              3:30pm          NBC

I very strongly disliked Notre Dame for a long time before they bought their coach’s way out of a murder trial but the line for this game is laugh out loud shit and I’m fully on board with it. Domers by 46 with an o/u of 63 is a thing of beauty even if it glorifies pure evil.

Baylor at Kansas State                                             3:30pm        ESPN2

Kansas State’s mimicry of a good team might be breaking down after getting run over by Chuba Hubbard & Co. last week but a win by Baylor could get the Bears into the top 25. I need the ghost of Taco Bill (yes, I’m aware) to rouse the Wildcats for a stomping of Baylor.

Ball State at NIU                                                        3:30pm         ESPN3

Do whatever you want with this.

7 Auburn at 10 Florida                                              3:30pm          CBS

Fantastic uniform matchup featuring some almost great Florida throwbacks to Steve Spurrier’s Heisman season. I wish the stripes on the shoulders went all the way around. Otherwise they’re perfect.

Air Force at Navy                                                      3:30pm           CBSSN

I haven’t gotten a handle on Air Force this year but this is not a good Navy team. Maybe the Paul Johnson offense has finally run its course in Annapolis? Usually you can count on a senior QB to make the option hum for the Middies but they aren’t looking like anything special through three games in 2019. Here’s hoping they can find their rhythm as home dogs.

Memphis at ULM                                                       3:45pm            ESPNU

Kenny Gainwell came very close to making the RTARLsman list this week but he needs some bigger highlights to get back on there. ULM running back Josh Johnson’s production has gotten worse every week this year. Memphis is a pretty big road favorite and they should be bowl eligible by the time they dip back into conference games.

Troy at Missouri                                                        4:00pm             SECN

Kelly Bryant has been OK so far as Missouri’s QB. Which is fine, that’s what Kelly Bryant is: an OK QB. But if he can get more confidence in Derek Dooley’s system he could get a real shot at an NFL roster next year. Games like this one are the best way to build confidence.

North Carolina at Georgia Tech                               4:00pm            ACCN

UNC has looked well-coached but talent-deficient so far this year while Georgia Tech has looked untalented and undisciplined. Here in the ACC that means this game is a tossup.

Northwestern at Nebraska                                        4:00pm             FOX

I’d like to think Nebraska can never climb out of their 15 years-long rut but maybe Scott Frost is the real deal. If he is then this game should be a walkover for the Huskers. Look for a close game that hinges on some comically bad execution.

Arizona at Colorado                                                   4:30pm        Pac-12N

Khalil Tate and Laviska Shenault are still cool. That brings a tear to my eye.

WKU at Old Dominion                                               6:00pm         ESPN+

This is the kind of football we live for in these posts. All gambling, no sentimentality, weird uniforms, and a matchup that would look great in the March Madness First Four. But it’s part of the Disney plot to overthrow Ukraine.

3 Georgia at Tennessee                                             7:00pm         ESPN

By what right do I hate Tennessee? And yet, my desire to see them keep falling to deeper and deeper depths is boundless. I don’t particularly like Georgia but I want them to win by 60+. They can do it but are they cool enough to do it? I doubt it. Look at their coach’s haircut. He must use a woodchipper like a Flowbee to get that look. Maybe he found a barber in the countryside of 12th century France.

Rice at UAB                                                                 7:00pm        ESPN+

UAB is dead to me. Favored by only 10 at home against Rice? That’s disgusting.

UMass at FIU                                                               7:00pm         ESPN3

Butch Davis is having quite the struggle trying to put FIU together as a program. Things are in a very bad place for FL Int’l (pronounced “Flinn-tull”) even though the school is in a very nice place.

25 Michigan State at 4 Ohio State                             7:30pm           ABC

I know Mark D’Antonio has gotten some crazy results in his time as Michigan State’s head coach but this looks bleak. Brian Lewerke truly sucks and Chase Young is getting Myles Garrett comparisons. 20-points is a huge number for a game like this but I’ll be pretty surprised if the Buckeyes of An Ohio State University don’t beat the spread.

Tulsa at 24 SMU                                                         7:30pm          ESPNU

SMU with that little number next to it is a sight to behold. So last week I guessed that it had been since 1986 that the Mustangs were ranked and that was correct. How smart I must be. I’m really curious how they deal with that success. It seems silly but that ranking is a really big deal for the Ponyfuckers. Here’s hoping they sprint right past 13-points and pull away from Tulsa for a decisive win.

Vanderbilt at Mississippi                                           7:30pm           SECN

AJ Brown and DK Metcalf already look like stars in the NFL. Remember the offense they were in last year that struggled getting them the ball and had them run a combined four total routes? Haha. Fuck both of these teams, though. Nobody cares what happens here.

UTSA at UTEP                                                             8:00pm          ESPN+

El Paso versus San Antonio, aka “The Bigger Even Boringer El Paso.” Everything is bigger in Texas. Even Texas.

Liberty at New Mexico State                                      8:00pm        FloSports

Put some prop money on Antonio Gandy-Golden and ignore everything else in this game. Maybe even ignore Gandy-Golden.

Pitt at Duke                                                                   8:00pm         ACCN

Goddamn does this game suck. Go Panthers.

California at 13 Oregon                                               8:00pm         FOX

The Berkeley Bears don’t have much of an offense but their defense is good enough to keep things within 20 here. I’d put money on Justin Herbert throwing his first pick of the year, Cal to cover, and Oregon to win.

Oregon State at UCLA                                                9:00pm        Pac-12N

Chip Kelly’s revival as a football genius lasted exactly one half. Here the Bruins and Beavers matchup in the Rose Bowl to sully the reputation of that great stadium.

San Diego State at Colorado State                           10:00pm       ESPN2

MWC, baby! Fun stuff for me even if CSU is a trash heap. SDSU is no great shakes this year but at least the setting and the uniforms clash are cool.

16 Boise State at UNLV                                              10:30pm        CBSSN

Boise by 100. Book it.

15 Washington at Stanford                                        10:30pm         ESPN

Stanford was one of the biggest disappointments of the season’s first month. This is the perfect spot for David Shaw and his team of sleepmakers to bore Washington to death and, at least, keep it closer than 15. 

[hermanwatts]

Sensor Sweep: Hall of the Giant King, Henry Kuttner, William Stout, Alex Nino

RPG (Grodog): Thinking through the mega-dungeons I’m familiar with, the stand out qualities that I love to play through, and the mega-dungeons that bring that to the table are:     Best Environments to Explore and Map:  Castle El Raja Key, Maure Castle, Caverns of Thracia, Foolsgrave.                              Most-Fun Encounters:  Castle Greyhawk, Foolsgrave, Rich Franks’ mega-dungeon. Most-Fun Puzzles, Enigmas, and Centerpiece Encounters:  Castle Greyhawk, Maure Castle, WG5, ASE1/2-3, Undermountain.

Science Fiction (Alexandra Rowland): I was groomed and abused by Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear for several years. For a long time, I never wanted to talk about this in public. I didn’t want anybody to know about this. I only began rethinking yesterday and I was still considering what to do about it, but… …Apparently I don’t have that luxury anymore.

Art (Modiphius): The Art of Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of features a selection of some of the most incredible art associated with the classic barbarian hero ever assembled into one set of covers. With one of the most successful gaming Kickstarter campaigns of all time, Conan set out to be the definitive treatment of Conan in games: central to that was recruiting a stellar lineup of artists for covers and interior illustrations. The Art of Conan presents a variety of art drawn from the incredible core rulebook and the expansive line of sourcebooks and supplements, organized by book, allowing players and fans of amazing sword-and-sorcery art to enjoy this fantastic art on its own.

New Release (DMR Books): Cahena is a historical novel (with fantasy elements) dealing with the brave and beautiful warrior queen who reigned over the Berbers in the seventh century. The Cahena, as she was known, was believed to be a sorceress and prophetess. She led an army forty thousand strong, wielding javelins and scimitars, in a valiant struggle against the Mohammedan invaders who were fresh from their conquest of Carthage. Rich in historical detail and dramatic action, this is a story to rival the great war epics of all time.

Publishing (Amatopia): There’s been talk on social media by Big Prominent Authors who’ve been paid a lot of money to write stuff about how hard it is to stay prolific in these totally unprecedented and difficult times. These writers–whose only job is to write–can’t seem to squeeze in a page or two amidst the chaos. It’s emotionally taxing do perform their job, you see. It’s so hard because evil bad people who may or may not be orange keep them from focusing. What a bunch of weenies.

Genre (Pulprev): Today when people think of science fiction and fantasy, chances are, they think of two separate genres. Science fiction, the genre of starships and computers and technology. Fantasy, the genre of knights and dragons and castles. Two distinct genres, and never the twain shall meet. The meeting of the two, science fantasy, was the exception, the red-headed stepchild, never part of the mainstream. This wasn’t always the case.

Art (Heavy Metal): William Stout has had a long and eventful career as an illustrator and production designer—you can read all about it in the biography on his official website. His work has run in numerous publications, including Heavy Metal. And then there was Masters of the Universe. The 1987 movie seemed like a good idea, given the popularity of the toys, but the Cannon Films production, starring Dolph Lundgren as He-Man and Frank Langella as Skeletor, was a flop.

Paleontology (Phys.org): Lions were once far more widespread than they are now, with several subspecies of lions dividing the world between them. They were found in much of Europe and Asia including the Middle East, in Africa, North America and maybe South America. Previously, the cave lion Panthera leo spelaea was found across much of Eurasia and as far as Alaska and Canada. But cave lions died out 13 000 years ago, perhaps partly due to humans, although paleontologists suspect that climate change played a major role. The American lion P. leo atrox suffered the same fate.

T.V. (Kairos): Loyal readers know that a key mission of this blog is shedding light on Hollywood’s hatred of their audience. Much as A Bridge Too Far proves Pigman’s Caine-Hackman hypothesis, the1998 movie Pleasantville epitomizes Hollywood Death Cultism. YouTuber Devon Stack, who reviews movies with a keen eye for both literary criticism and propaganda, explains this superficially innocent film’s subversive depths. “As much as the baby boomers fought to overturn and rebel against and eventually destroy the American culture that existed before them, one thing that I have always found interesting is how much the same champions of counterculture that sadistically dismembered their heritage and mocked every tradition their parents have gifted them, but at the same time romanticize this same culture they worked so hard to undo.”

Science Fiction (Adventures Fantastic): “Trog” appeared in the June 1944 issue of Astounding. It has never been reprinted. The story is set in 1956.  Civilization has been collapsing for four years. The general consensus is that humanity has a collective, mass consciousness that has tired of civilization. It takes over people at random and causes them to destroy things. Supply lines have been disrupted. Food is scarce. Things that break cannot be replaced. People destroy things. Those that do are called trogs, short for troglodytes.

Book Review (Marzaat): In the summer of 1565 on the parched ground of Malta, the future of Western Civilization was decided. Would the Moslems continue their expansion into the Mediterranean, preying on European ships and taking Christian slaves as far away as England? Or could they be held back? It was an epic struggle, an astounding tale of resolve and leadership, of disunity in command and disunity among allies.

Tolkien (Notion Club Papers): Tolkien and The Silmarillion by Clyde Kilby. Lion Publishing, Berkhamsted, Kent, UK. 1977 pp 89. (US edition, 1976.) This is a hardly-known, slim, minor, but fascinating contribution to the writings about Tolkien. Its centre is an account of the summer of 1966 which the author spent meeting with the seventy-four year old Tolkien a few times per week, ostensibly to provide him with informed and enthusiastic secretarial assistance to get The Silmarillion ready for publication.

Pulp Magazines (Black Gate): This third installment of the Weird Tales deep read covers the eleven stories in the October 1934 issue, including the first Jirel of Joiry story by C. L. Moore. Her flame didn’t burn as long in the Unique Magazine as the Lovecraft-Howard-Smith trinity’s did, but it did burn as brightly. Moore had sixteen stories in Weird Tales between 1933-1939, twelve in an incredible burst of creativity in the years 1934-1936.

Travel (Last Stand on Zombie Island): Outside of Moscow, reportedly on the location of one of the principal stavkas of the 1941 defense of the city from the German invasion, now stands the so-called Main Cathedral of Russian Armed Forces. Built by popular subscription (with lots of help from the military and government) the immense Eastern Orthodox church is a living, breathing memory to the Russian (not Soviet) effort against Hitler in the Great Patriotic War.

Art (DMR Books): The result was The Fantasy Worlds of Alex Nino, which came out in 1975, just a few short years after Alex began doing work for American comics. The publisher was Christopher Enterprises, a somewhat shadowy company about which I’ve been able to discover little. They emerged on the scene in 1975, put out portfolios by Nino and Michael Kaluta, then followed that with a Bernie Wrightson portfolio in 1976. Also in 1976, Christopher Enterprises published several awesome posters by Wrightson and Stephen Hickman.

Weird Tales (Tellers of Weird Tales): I first wrote about Earl Peirce, Jr., on May 17, 2017. I misidentified him then as Earl Monroe Pierce, Jr., based on his age and his residency in Washington, D.C., where Peirce/Pierce is known to have lived. A month later, an anonymous commenter let me know that I had the wrong person and provided a link to an online discussion about the right one. I removed what I had written and promised an update and correction. By then it was too late: my mistake was memorialized in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDb) and you can still find it there today. I pride myself on doing good work.

Old Science Fiction (M Porcius): Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are beating the heat and staying off the streets by reading old issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories at the internet archive.  In our last episode we read three stories by Leigh Brackett; those tales of rough men trying to master their environments and find or create a place where they belonged–and the women who loved them–were later reprinted in Brackett collections and theme anthologies.  Today we read three stories by Henry Kuttner that have not been quite so widely reprinted–you might call them “deep cuts.”

RPG (R’lyeh Reviews): 1978: G3 Hall of the Giant King. 1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary.

Sensor Sweep: Hall of the Giant King, Henry Kuttner, William Stout, Alex Nino published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 117: The Legacy: Realm of Terror (1993) – Introduction

By Voltgloss

In 1992, Infogrames released Alone in the Dark, which put the player in the role of an unsuspecting investigator who experiences the horrors of the mansion of an eccentric magnate, after said eccentric magnate committed suicide. The player tries to escape from the mansion, the unspeakable lurking fears that haunt it in the dark and from the raving madness that the secrets of the mansion could deliver. It is exciting, deadly and … why do I suddenly have this overwhelming sense of déjà vu?

All the pictures into the mind/There’s a flashing in my eyes (Image still from here)

Yes, it’s time for a horror double bill here on The Adventure Gamer. The year after Alone in the Dark saw, not only Infogrames’s own Shadow of the Comet, but a competitor’s entry placed even more solidly in the “haunted house” genre. Because in 1993, Microprose released The Legacy: Realm of Terror, which puts the player in the role of an unsuspecting inheritor who experiences the horrors of the mansion of an eccentric Massachusetts family, as said family’s last surviving heir. The player tries to escape from the mansion, the unspeakable lurking fears that haunt it in the dark and from the raving madness that the secrets of the mansion could deliver. It promises to be exciting, deadly, and … why do I suddenly have this overwhelming sense of déjà vu?

We’ve just been in this place before

So the setup for Legacy is decidedly familiar. What about the gameplay? What we’ve got on our hands here, based on the manual and a bit of make-sure-everything-works tinkering, is an Adventure/RPG hybrid: a game where the player controls a single character exploring a “dungeon” (the mansion) in first-person perspective, with tile-based mapping and over fifteen different character statistics, all apparently with gameplay significance down the line. Something in the Elvira and Waxworks vein, then – but leaning even more heavily on the RPG side. Will the game stand on its own as an Adventure? Will it navigate the narrow straits of hybridization successfully, or will both halves combine to make less than a whole? We’re about to find out.

Higher on the street

The Legacy: Realm of Terror (also called simply The Legacy outside the United States) was the last game developed by British adventure game developer Magnetic Scrolls, after their acquisition by MicroProse. Between 1985 and 1990, Magnetic Scrolls had previously developed six graphical parser-based text adventures (and one “mini-adventure” offered to those who joined the short-lived “Official Secrets” adventure gaming club): The Pawn, The Guild of Thieves, Jinxter, Corruption, Fish!, Myth, and Wonderland. We’ve not covered any Magnetic Scrolls games previously on this blog – perhaps some Missed Classics treatment is in order down the line? [Admin note: Well, a reviewer did start Wonderland as our sixth Missed Classic, but he vanished after barely scratching the game. A replay is definitely in order.]  For now though, I’m playing through their first and only foray into mouse-driven, RPG-hybrid adventuring, published in 1993 for PC (and released digitally on GOG in December 2019).

See your body into the moonlight

Loading the game treats us to a cinematic intro where someone (our protagonist? someone else?) drives up to the spooky Winthrop House, accompanied by lightning flashes and tense, fast-paced music. Between the glowers of gargoyles our perspective passes through the front door, into a foyer (that we’ll see “for real” soon enough), up stairs and through a door – and promptly face-plants into the floor in a dimly lit hallway, blood filling our vision. An omen of things to come? The fate of the last visitor before us? We may never know! What we do know – as the game next tells us after showing a newspaper about the “Winthrop House heir” (us) being located – is that it’s time to select (or create) our character.

The fiction is gonna run it again

Character selection/creation lets you pick one of eight different protagonists, each with different backgrounds, character model design, and statistics. You can also manually adjust statistics for any one of the eight characters to tailor their attributes to your liking. The manual also promises that skills can be improved as we progress through the game, although there doesn’t appear to be any dedicated “experience” score or character “level”; rather, the game suggests that repeatedly using a particular skill can increase your proficiency at it, Quest for Glory-style. There are seven primary statistics, three of which have four secondary sub-skills, as detailed in the manual:

1. Knowledge – ability to “perform various operations requiring special training.” Sub-skills:

Electronics – for opening “electronic locks” and dealing with other “electronic objects”

First Aid – for restoring health via first aid kits

Meditation – for restoring magic power via “Power Crystals”

Mechanics – for opening “mechanical locks” and dealing with other mechanical objects

2. Strength – prowess with hand-held weapons, and boosts Health. Sub-skills:

Brawling – bare-handed punching prowess

Club – prowess with club-type weapons

Force – for forcing open doors

Lift – for picking up heavy objects

3. Dexterity – a “value for basic agility.” Sub-skills:

Blade – prowess with bladed weapons

Dodge – ability to avoid ranged weapon attacks

Firearms – prowess with firearms

Throw – ability to throw objects or weapons

4. Stamina – poison resistance and boosts Health

5. Willpower – prowess with magic and resistance to magical attacks

6. Health – our character’s life meter; death at zero “hit points.” Derived from Strength and Stamina.

7. Magic – or “magic points”; expended by casting spells.

And now, let’s meet our eight potential protagonists. Whom shall we pick? That’s up to you! I’ll be accepting votes in the comments to this post as to your first, second, and third choice of protagonist; I’ll then assign 5 points per first-choice pick, 3 points per second-choice pick, and 1 point per third-choice pick, and then using whichever character gets the most points. Ties will be broken by random roll. I’ll accept votes up until 72 hours after this is posted. Here we go!

Brad Norris. Sophomore at NYU, ski team captain and Debating Society member. Planning a “mondo party.” Never claimed to have deep motivations.

Brad is the default choice if you’re just clicking through as fast as possible, and perhaps by design he’s one of the most well-rounded statistically, with equal Knowledge, Strength, and Dexterity scores. Most of his sub-skills have a few bonus points added (the gold line segments extending to the right of the blue, red, or purple line segments below each sub-skill’s name).

Charlotte Kane. CEO of the charmingly-named Golgotha Holdings. Planning to turn Winthrop House into a luxury hotel and conference center.

Charlotte is one of the four options who comes with a spell already learned. No idea why a CEO knows the secrets of the Crimson Mists of Myamoto, but apparently it’s a spell to reduce physical damage taken. Statistically, she’s got very low strength, mediocre dexterity, but high knowledge (and particularly good at patching herself up with first aid kits). Lower health than Brad, but higher willpower.

Charles Weiss. Stage magician and self-described astrologer and occultist. Implicated in the Arlington “sacrifice” scandal. We don’t talk about the Arlington “sacrifice” scandal.

Charles eschews protective magic for a good old-fashioned fireball spell, leveraging the arcane power of not one, not two, but three words ending in “-eth.” Base statistics are generally low across the board (even his Knowledge score is just equal to Brad’s, though he’s specialized in Meditation where Brad isn’t). Where Charles put his bonus points is into his fire magic; see the length of the gold line segment below the “Flames of Desolation” spell name.

Lucy Weston. Sophomore at UCLA. Orphan who worked her way through school. Tennis and volleyball player. Thinks her inheritance is “totally rad” and “almost tubular.” 

Possibly modeled on horror films’ “final girl” trope, Lucy here is just as strong as Brad, has extremely high dexterity and health, and is apparently a crack shot (with the best skill in firearms out of all eight characters). As a tradeoff, her knowledge is at rock bottom.

Henry Jones. Head of the Department of American History at Penn State. Authority on the Salem witch-trials. No word on whether he has a son named Junior.

What horror game is complete without a university professor character? Henry here brings impressive knowledge to the table, with mediocre dexterity (though he’s spry enough to dodge and throw surprisingly well) and lots of points devoted to his “Sight of the Dark Walker” spell. I don’t have any information on what spells do beyond the description you see here; I’m guessing this lets you see in the dark and, maybe, helps with discovering secrets. Of course, all those points need a tradeoff somewhere; Henry has the least strength and health of all eight characters.

Jane Olson. Investigative journalist with the New York Daily Post. Looking to uncover the truth about the Winthrop family’s enigmatic disappearance.

Jane is our second well-rounded choice. She has very similar stats to Brad, with equal knowledge, strength, and dexterity scores and with solid health and willpower. Jane’s a bit better than Brad with at punching, dodging, forcing doors, and tinkering with electronics/mechanics; while Brad has the edge in first aid and throwing skill.

Robert “Boomer” Kowalski. USMC (retired). Purple Heart and Navy Cross holder. Veteran of actions in Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf.

Someone has to have the most strength of the bunch, and that someone is Robert. He’s best situated of the eight to beat down eldritch abominations with his bare fists, and is also ready to swing a mean blade or shoot a mean gun. Average dexterity and mediocre knowledge (though with combat training in the use of first aid kits). His weak point is very low willpower. What’s that going to mean in gameplay? We’ll see, but the manual suggests your protagonist can become terrified or go into shock at the horrors they’ll face. If willpower determines resistance to such effects, our friend Robert here is well-equipped … to go mad.

Isobel Gowdie. Widow and distant Winthrop family relative. There’s always been one Gowdie resident in the area, dating back to the 17th century.

Isobel, like Charles, is a fire-slinging offensive spellcaster. Mediocre stats across the board in exchange for very high willpower and a pumped-up Flames of Desolation spell. Compared to Charles, she has less knowledge (though is a bit better at first aid) and less prowess with weapons; but she actually is better at magic (in both raw magic and in her Flames spell) and has more stamina and health.

So, there’s our cast! Whom shall be our avatar for this spooky adventure? You all tell me. I look forward to your choice!

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it’s an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won’t be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with 50 CAPs in return. It’s also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-117-the-legacy-realm-of-terror-1993-introduction/

[preciousmetals0]

Alibaba Explains It All; Tesla’s $2 Billion Call

Alibaba Explains It All; Tesla’s $2 Billion Call:

Alibaba Explains It All

The market’s got chills. They’re multiplying. And China’s losing control.

Because the Wuhan virus they’re supplying … is electrifying!

Yesterday’s lull in new, reported coronavirus infections was the calm before the storm. Today, China announced 15,152 new cases and 254 new deaths. The totals now stand at more than 60,0000 confirmed cases and 1,369 dead.

So far, China has remained confident that it can contain the outbreak, and Wall Street has followed happily along. But that narrative changed this morning after an earnings conference call from Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: BABA).

Now, Alibaba’s most recent quarter was stellar, with earnings surging 58% and revenue climbing 38% year over year. But the company’s guidance was a wake-up call for Wall Street … and not just for Alibaba shareholders.

“The epidemic has negatively impacted the overall China economy, especially the retail and service sectors,” said Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu. “While demand for goods and services is there, the means of production in the economy has been hampered by the delayed opening of offices, factories and schools after the Lunar New Year’s holiday.”

In short, Chinese workers are either sick and can’t work, or can’t work because of delayed return-to-work dates or quarantines. It’s safe to say that productivity is grinding to a halt in the country.

Alibaba’s quarterly report has, so far, been the most honest take on the situation, and investors across the board should take notice.

The Takeaway: 

So, how’s everybody feeling today? Any sniffles? Fever? Aching outside the norm?

I hope you’re doing well. If you’re outside of China and inside the U.S. (like most of Great Stuff’s readers), you’re probably just wondering when the rain will stop.

Maybe you’ve got your own flu worries to contend with. While the Wuhan virus gets loads of attention, schools are closing due to outbreaks of the regular old flu here in the Greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area.

We went from snow days to flu days here … it’s kind of sad.

You’ve probably heard that the Wuhan virus — officially dubbed COVID-19 — is like a really, really bad flu. That’s not far off the mark.

But that comparison brings with it generalization. Why can’t the Chinese just suck it up and keep working? That’s what we do here, after all.

The Chinese are hard workers, but their health care system (from hospitals all the way down to local drug stores and supermarkets) just isn’t as convenient as ours. We can rag on U.S. health care all we want, but at least we have convenience at our disposal! It’s the price of that convenience that’s a pain…

I think this is the main reason why Wall Street and most regular investors aren’t taking the threat of COVID-19 very seriously. It’s not spreading here, so why worry?

In truth, the virus may never widely spread in a Western country due to improved health care options. But that doesn’t mean that COVID-19’s impact in China won’t affect you or your investments.

Alibaba made that very clear this morning. The company relies on local merchants and businesses to operate and sell goods … and those businesses are struggling under the weight of the outbreak.

This is true for every single company with a significant supply or manufacturing chain running through China — as we’ll see later with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO).

Now, this isn’t the end of any of these companies by any means. For Alibaba and the rest, this latest bout of volatility is just another buying opportunity in disguise.

Great Stuff readers know more drawdowns may follow today’s, and the shrewdest of you may have already taken the chance to scoop up some shares on the cheap. But, if you’re tired of panicking on down days, Banyan Hill expert Jeff Yastine is your guide to buying when the buying’s right.

Over his 15 years of financial news coverage, Jeff’s seen it all — from boom to bust to boom again. No matter what happens in the market’s fickle flights of fright, Jeff Yastine has his eyes out for high-growth stocks trading at bargain prices.

Today, he’s about to reveal a massive investment that he calls “Q Shares.” This may be Wall Street’s best-kept secret — a simple upgrade that could grow your profits up to 27 times faster than holding “normal” shares.

Click here to learn more about “Q Shares.”

The Good: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

Oh boy … we’ve got another winner here! I hope you’ve been reading Great Stuff, because you might’ve missed this recent opportunity.

I’m talking about Applied Materials Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT). Shares of the semiconductor equipment-maker are rallying today, after the company put in a solid fiscal first-quarter performance. Applied beat earnings expectations by $0.07 per share, and revenue rose to $4.16 billion. Wall Street was looking for sales of just $4.09 billion.

What’s more, the company issued second-quarter guidance significantly above the consensus target. Applied sees earnings in a range of $0.98 to $1.10 per share and revenue of $4.14 billion to $4.54 billion. The average analyst targets rest at $0.91 per share and $4.05 billion in revenue.

I’ll just take this opportunity to say: I told you so! Back on December 31, I recommended AMAT as one of Great Stuff’s top picks for 2020 and beyond. In less than two months, AMAT is up more than 12%!

And, as the cycle continues to improve for semiconductor stocks, we can expect bigger and brighter returns from AMAT.

Congratulations, Great Stuff investors. You’re on a roll!

The Bad: An Offer You Should Refuse

You know when a company says it’ll sell more shares, and investors get worried about shareholder dilution? Yeah … that didn’t happen with Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA).

Today’s trading was quite volatile for TSLA, but the stock still moved broadly higher. Why should Tesla stock have fallen? Because the company announced it was selling $2 billion in new common stock. Yes, $2 billion.

Now, I get that the company can put that money to good use. This is not necessarily a bad thing for Tesla … as a company. In fact, with the shares trading stupidly high right now, it’s a brilliant move by Tesla to raise capital.

But $2 billion in new Tesla shares running around should have some negative impact on the stock’s price. It just should.

You divide the current market capitalization by the new higher number of shares outstanding and the price goes down. That’s how math works.

Well, that’s how math is supposed to work. But, when your stock price is propped up artificially high by speculation and over-the-top bullish sentiment, math tends to take a back seat.

Don’t get me wrong: Great Stuff is still bullish on Tesla over the long term.

But this current craziness in TSLA pricing is still out of hand. If you already own Tesla, you don’t need to sell, but some hedging might be in order to protect your portfolio. If you don’t own TSLA … don’t sweat it. There will be better prices to buy in at down the road.

The Ugly: Down With the Sickness

Earlier, we mentioned Cisco Systems in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak. The stock is getting punished today, and I don’t think it’s because of the company’s earnings report.

In fact, the company’s fiscal second quarter was quite good. Earnings beat expectations by a penny. Revenue came in at $12 billion, also edging past Wall Street’s targets. Third-quarter guidance was relatively tame … but nothing unexpected.

All in all, it was a very vanilla quarterly report with no real surprises.

But there was one little tidbit that Wall Street might’ve seized on. Asia-Pacific orders were down 4% last quarter, with China driving that weakness. In fact, Chinese orders plunged 30%.

When you combine that footnote with Cisco’s heavy reliance on Chinese component suppliers and contract manufacturers … things start to get dicey. Add in Alibaba’s stark admission on just how bad things are getting economically in China, and you can see why CSCO fell roughly 6% today.

That said, Cisco is a well-run company with solid growth opportunities. The COVID-19 outbreak won’t last forever, and CSCO will bounce back, meaning now could be a good time to buy the dip.

I would also like to remind you that now’s an excellent time to choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. You don’t have to rush to take Jeff Yastine’s advice, but, if you’re a working man (or woman), sooner is better.

Here’s that information on Jeff’s “Q Shares” again, just in case you missed it earlier.

Welcome back to another edition of Great Stuff’s reader feedback!

In this weekly column, I read your emails and … provide feedback. It’s kind of in the name, huh?

This week we asked for your thoughts on the Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) / T-Mobile US Inc. (Nasdaq: TMUS) merger … and boy, were you guys chatty!

Let’s get started:

They Did the Math

Perhaps the judge is the one who understands the economics of building a network.

All network operators have to build a network that gets you 100% coverage, or you don’t get customers. The most expensive part of all networks is the last mile.  So, the cost is the same for all providers.  Now, take the mobile population and divide by the number of networks:

100%/1= 100% revenue = monopoly, covers costs and huge profit.

100%/2= 50% revenue each = duopoly, covers costs and nice profits for both.

100%/3= 33% revenue each = oligarchy, covers costs and slim profits for all.

100%/4= 25% revenue each = costs not covered, no profits and fight to kill one.

Based on 30 years working on mobile networks, three competitors provide both competition and money to upgrade to each generation of networks. Having four slows progress down and impedes innovation.

Mike H.

Thanks for writing in Mike! I’m not entirely sure about your math there or how it applies to T-Mobile and Sprint — that last mile is often run by companies like Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE: CCI) or American Tower Corp. (NYSE: AMT). But you get an “A” for effort, nonetheless.

As for the judge in the case, it seems his decision was based less on the credibility of the 10 witnesses in the case and more on the fact that Sprint just sucks as a company.

Total Domination

There is an extreme determination in the world to justify one’s existence by how much $$$ you have or control. And that equates to Power and with unabjectable Power comes total domination … so it refurbishes that, in our reality, you are undeniably the Most Superior essence in Existence. My relative that came over here on the MayFlower didn’t come here for me to live under that concept!

Brian R.

I have to be honest with you, Brian. I totally appreciate and get your point, but … maybe … lay off the Red Bull occasionally? (Or maybe I need more Red Bull … caffeine is a heck of a drug.)

Remember, the new T-Mobile still has to compete with AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) … as well as a host of other internet companies providing access. We’re not at “total domination” levels just yet … despite how the financial media portrays this merger.

Thanks for reading and writing in!

Happy Wife = Happy Life

Following up on your wholly unsubtle snarky comment, “Please tell me you don’t still have a phone landline,” in today’s Great Stuff, I have to guess that you have never been married, or if you were, you are since divorced. Why do I say that? Because if you had a wife, she probably disliked her cell phone — I know mine only uses hers in a true emergency!

We also have cable TV, since streaming here is still too fragmented for comfort, so I use a much less expensive (Tracfone) cell service for us and do my heavyweight online stuff from home. I figure my extra net landline cost is maybe $30-$50/month — a very small price to pay to have a happy wife.

Yes, I suppose if my wife were under 40 and grew up with wireless, this conflict would not exist, but there you are. I’ll stick with the one I got…

Dave G.

I feel you Dave. I’ve been married for more than 20 years. My wife is like a technology black hole. Everything she touches randomly and mysteriously stops working for no reason. It took me years to get her to use a smartphone, and she only switched after I laid out a detailed plan on how cutting the landline would save us lots of money down the road. (One of the benefits of being a financial wag on the internet, ha!)

Now, she’s hooked on the thing and uses it more than her laptop. But those mysterious tech issues pop up more and more frequently, and we argue about those instead of dropping the landline.

It’s a never-ending cycle. So, we did manage to drop the landline … but at what cost? At what cost, Dave?!

If you wrote in and I didn’t get to you, it might be because you cursed too $%*?@#! much. I still really appreciate the feedback, even if they won’t let me publish it.

And if you haven’t written in yet … what’s stopping you? Drop me a line at GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com, and let me know how you’re doing out there in this crazy bull market.

That’s a wrap for today. But if you’re still craving more Great Stuff, you can check us out on social media: Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

[goldira01]

Alibaba Explains It All

The market’s got chills. They’re multiplying. And China’s losing control.

Because the Wuhan virus they’re supplying … is electrifying!

Yesterday’s lull in new, reported coronavirus infections was the calm before the storm. Today, China announced 15,152 new cases and 254 new deaths. The totals now stand at more than 60,0000 confirmed cases and 1,369 dead.

So far, China has remained confident that it can contain the outbreak, and Wall Street has followed happily along. But that narrative changed this morning after an earnings conference call from Alibaba Group Holdings Ltd. (NYSE: BABA).

Now, Alibaba’s most recent quarter was stellar, with earnings surging 58% and revenue climbing 38% year over year. But the company’s guidance was a wake-up call for Wall Street … and not just for Alibaba shareholders.

“The epidemic has negatively impacted the overall China economy, especially the retail and service sectors,” said Chief Financial Officer Maggie Wu. “While demand for goods and services is there, the means of production in the economy has been hampered by the delayed opening of offices, factories and schools after the Lunar New Year’s holiday.”

In short, Chinese workers are either sick and can’t work, or can’t work because of delayed return-to-work dates or quarantines. It’s safe to say that productivity is grinding to a halt in the country.

Alibaba’s quarterly report has, so far, been the most honest take on the situation, and investors across the board should take notice.

The Takeaway: 

So, how’s everybody feeling today? Any sniffles? Fever? Aching outside the norm?

I hope you’re doing well. If you’re outside of China and inside the U.S. (like most of Great Stuff’s readers), you’re probably just wondering when the rain will stop.

Maybe you’ve got your own flu worries to contend with. While the Wuhan virus gets loads of attention, schools are closing due to outbreaks of the regular old flu here in the Greater Cincinnati, Ohio, area.

We went from snow days to flu days here … it’s kind of sad.

You’ve probably heard that the Wuhan virus — officially dubbed COVID-19 — is like a really, really bad flu. That’s not far off the mark.

But that comparison brings with it generalization. Why can’t the Chinese just suck it up and keep working? That’s what we do here, after all.

The Chinese are hard workers, but their health care system (from hospitals all the way down to local drug stores and supermarkets) just isn’t as convenient as ours. We can rag on U.S. health care all we want, but at least we have convenience at our disposal! It’s the price of that convenience that’s a pain…

I think this is the main reason why Wall Street and most regular investors aren’t taking the threat of COVID-19 very seriously. It’s not spreading here, so why worry?

In truth, the virus may never widely spread in a Western country due to improved health care options. But that doesn’t mean that COVID-19’s impact in China won’t affect you or your investments.

Alibaba made that very clear this morning. The company relies on local merchants and businesses to operate and sell goods … and those businesses are struggling under the weight of the outbreak.

This is true for every single company with a significant supply or manufacturing chain running through China — as we’ll see later with Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO).

Now, this isn’t the end of any of these companies by any means. For Alibaba and the rest, this latest bout of volatility is just another buying opportunity in disguise.

Great Stuff readers know more drawdowns may follow today’s, and the shrewdest of you may have already taken the chance to scoop up some shares on the cheap. But, if you’re tired of panicking on down days, Banyan Hill expert Jeff Yastine is your guide to buying when the buying’s right.

Over his 15 years of financial news coverage, Jeff’s seen it all — from boom to bust to boom again. No matter what happens in the market’s fickle flights of fright, Jeff Yastine has his eyes out for high-growth stocks trading at bargain prices.

Today, he’s about to reveal a massive investment that he calls “Q Shares.” This may be Wall Street’s best-kept secret — a simple upgrade that could grow your profits up to 27 times faster than holding “normal” shares.

Click here to learn more about “Q Shares.”

The Good: Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner

Oh boy … we’ve got another winner here! I hope you’ve been reading Great Stuff, because you might’ve missed this recent opportunity.

I’m talking about Applied Materials Inc. (Nasdaq: AMAT). Shares of the semiconductor equipment-maker are rallying today, after the company put in a solid fiscal first-quarter performance. Applied beat earnings expectations by $0.07 per share, and revenue rose to $4.16 billion. Wall Street was looking for sales of just $4.09 billion.

What’s more, the company issued second-quarter guidance significantly above the consensus target. Applied sees earnings in a range of $0.98 to $1.10 per share and revenue of $4.14 billion to $4.54 billion. The average analyst targets rest at $0.91 per share and $4.05 billion in revenue.

I’ll just take this opportunity to say: I told you so! Back on December 31, I recommended AMAT as one of Great Stuff’s top picks for 2020 and beyond. In less than two months, AMAT is up more than 12%!

And, as the cycle continues to improve for semiconductor stocks, we can expect bigger and brighter returns from AMAT.

Congratulations, Great Stuff investors. You’re on a roll!

The Bad: An Offer You Should Refuse

You know when a company says it’ll sell more shares, and investors get worried about shareholder dilution? Yeah … that didn’t happen with Tesla Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA).

Today’s trading was quite volatile for TSLA, but the stock still moved broadly higher. Why should Tesla stock have fallen? Because the company announced it was selling $2 billion in new common stock. Yes, $2 billion.

Now, I get that the company can put that money to good use. This is not necessarily a bad thing for Tesla … as a company. In fact, with the shares trading stupidly high right now, it’s a brilliant move by Tesla to raise capital.

But $2 billion in new Tesla shares running around should have some negative impact on the stock’s price. It just should.

You divide the current market capitalization by the new higher number of shares outstanding and the price goes down. That’s how math works.

Well, that’s how math is supposed to work. But, when your stock price is propped up artificially high by speculation and over-the-top bullish sentiment, math tends to take a back seat.

Don’t get me wrong: Great Stuff is still bullish on Tesla over the long term.

But this current craziness in TSLA pricing is still out of hand. If you already own Tesla, you don’t need to sell, but some hedging might be in order to protect your portfolio. If you don’t own TSLA … don’t sweat it. There will be better prices to buy in at down the road.

The Ugly: Down With the Sickness

Earlier, we mentioned Cisco Systems in relation to the COVID-19 outbreak. The stock is getting punished today, and I don’t think it’s because of the company’s earnings report.

In fact, the company’s fiscal second quarter was quite good. Earnings beat expectations by a penny. Revenue came in at $12 billion, also edging past Wall Street’s targets. Third-quarter guidance was relatively tame … but nothing unexpected.

All in all, it was a very vanilla quarterly report with no real surprises.

But there was one little tidbit that Wall Street might’ve seized on. Asia-Pacific orders were down 4% last quarter, with China driving that weakness. In fact, Chinese orders plunged 30%.

When you combine that footnote with Cisco’s heavy reliance on Chinese component suppliers and contract manufacturers … things start to get dicey. Add in Alibaba’s stark admission on just how bad things are getting economically in China, and you can see why CSCO fell roughly 6% today.

That said, Cisco is a well-run company with solid growth opportunities. The COVID-19 outbreak won’t last forever, and CSCO will bounce back, meaning now could be a good time to buy the dip.

I would also like to remind you that now’s an excellent time to choose a ready guide in some celestial voice. You don’t have to rush to take Jeff Yastine’s advice, but, if you’re a working man (or woman), sooner is better.

Here’s that information on Jeff’s “Q Shares” again, just in case you missed it earlier.

Welcome back to another edition of Great Stuff’s reader feedback!

In this weekly column, I read your emails and … provide feedback. It’s kind of in the name, huh?

This week we asked for your thoughts on the Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) / T-Mobile US Inc. (Nasdaq: TMUS) merger … and boy, were you guys chatty!

Let’s get started:

They Did the Math

Perhaps the judge is the one who understands the economics of building a network.

All network operators have to build a network that gets you 100% coverage, or you don’t get customers. The most expensive part of all networks is the last mile.  So, the cost is the same for all providers.  Now, take the mobile population and divide by the number of networks:

100%/1= 100% revenue = monopoly, covers costs and huge profit.

100%/2= 50% revenue each = duopoly, covers costs and nice profits for both.

100%/3= 33% revenue each = oligarchy, covers costs and slim profits for all.

100%/4= 25% revenue each = costs not covered, no profits and fight to kill one.

Based on 30 years working on mobile networks, three competitors provide both competition and money to upgrade to each generation of networks. Having four slows progress down and impedes innovation.

Mike H.

Thanks for writing in Mike! I’m not entirely sure about your math there or how it applies to T-Mobile and Sprint — that last mile is often run by companies like Crown Castle International Corp. (NYSE: CCI) or American Tower Corp. (NYSE: AMT). But you get an “A” for effort, nonetheless.

As for the judge in the case, it seems his decision was based less on the credibility of the 10 witnesses in the case and more on the fact that Sprint just sucks as a company.

Total Domination

There is an extreme determination in the world to justify one’s existence by how much $$$ you have or control. And that equates to Power and with unabjectable Power comes total domination … so it refurbishes that, in our reality, you are undeniably the Most Superior essence in Existence. My relative that came over here on the MayFlower didn’t come here for me to live under that concept!

Brian R.

I have to be honest with you, Brian. I totally appreciate and get your point, but … maybe … lay off the Red Bull occasionally? (Or maybe I need more Red Bull … caffeine is a heck of a drug.)

Remember, the new T-Mobile still has to compete with AT&T Inc. (NYSE: T) and Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) … as well as a host of other internet companies providing access. We’re not at “total domination” levels just yet … despite how the financial media portrays this merger.

Thanks for reading and writing in!

Happy Wife = Happy Life

Following up on your wholly unsubtle snarky comment, “Please tell me you don’t still have a phone landline,” in today’s Great Stuff, I have to guess that you have never been married, or if you were, you are since divorced. Why do I say that? Because if you had a wife, she probably disliked her cell phone — I know mine only uses hers in a true emergency!

We also have cable TV, since streaming here is still too fragmented for comfort, so I use a much less expensive (Tracfone) cell service for us and do my heavyweight online stuff from home. I figure my extra net landline cost is maybe $30-$50/month — a very small price to pay to have a happy wife.

Yes, I suppose if my wife were under 40 and grew up with wireless, this conflict would not exist, but there you are. I’ll stick with the one I got…

Dave G.

I feel you Dave. I’ve been married for more than 20 years. My wife is like a technology black hole. Everything she touches randomly and mysteriously stops working for no reason. It took me years to get her to use a smartphone, and she only switched after I laid out a detailed plan on how cutting the landline would save us lots of money down the road. (One of the benefits of being a financial wag on the internet, ha!)

Now, she’s hooked on the thing and uses it more than her laptop. But those mysterious tech issues pop up more and more frequently, and we argue about those instead of dropping the landline.

It’s a never-ending cycle. So, we did manage to drop the landline … but at what cost? At what cost, Dave?!

If you wrote in and I didn’t get to you, it might be because you cursed too $%*?@#! much. I still really appreciate the feedback, even if they won’t let me publish it.

And if you haven’t written in yet … what’s stopping you? Drop me a line at GreatStuffToday@banyanhill.com, and let me know how you’re doing out there in this crazy bull market.

That’s a wrap for today. But if you’re still craving more Great Stuff, you can check us out on social media: Facebook and Twitter.

Until next time, good trading!

Regards,

Joseph Hargett

Great Stuff Editor, Banyan Hill Publishing

[thesouthendproject]

A brush with death: Why Britain's coolest art and fashion names have rallied around a victim of random knife crime

Monday night in east London members' club Shoreditch House, and a glamorous group of artists and fashion designers has gathered for a charity auction. Tracey Emin is posing for photographers in front of two drawings she has donated for the event. Antony Gormley is there too, busily repositioning his contribution – a stark black-and-white image of a human silhouette. Works by Wolfgang Tillmans, Banksy, Rankin, Ron Arad and Cornelia Parker fill the wall space. As well as the art, there is a cluster of mannequins, each swathed in pieces donated by the hottest names in fashion – Christopher Kane, Richard Nicoll, Marios Schwab and Roksanda Ilincic.

The auction begins, and with telephone bidders hanging on the line from the States, business is brisk. The Harry Potter actor Daniel Radcliffe, who seems to have turned up with his entire family in tow, is determined to get his hands on the Banksy and, after some frenzied bidding, finally wins it for £7,000. A large-scale image by fashion photographer Tim Walker goes to a New York collector for £6,500 and Gormley's piece is surely a snip at £7,000. As the cash rolls in, Will Young surveys the scene quietly from the sidelines and an increasingly vocal Tracey Emin sits perched at the bar. "It's too cheap," she screeches, "too cheap." When the hammer comes down on the final lot, the Australia-born singer Daniel Merriweather steps on stage to entertain the now boisterous party-goers.

It is a celebrity turnout that would have been a coup for any well-established charity, but this is actually the launch of an organisation, called Art Against Knives. What is even more remarkable is that it was set up by three 21-year-old students, none of whom really knew what they were doing, but who were galvanised to act after an incident last year turned their lives upside-down. "The plan was to have a little drinks party and maybe see if we could auction off some of our student friends' work to raise money," says one, "but it escalated."

Last summer Oliver Hemsley, Katy Dawe and Alice Wilson were three ordinary twentysomethings who had moved to London to study. Hemsley and Dawe were both fashion students at St Martins, while Wilson was doing a design degree at the London College of Communication. "We were all just having a brilliant summer before university," says Dawe. "We were out every night just having a laugh."

Then, on the evening of 28 August, all that changed. Hemsley decided to meet Wilson and a couple of other friends for a drink after work. He set off from his home on Arnold Circus, in the heart of London's fashionable Shoreditch, for the George & Dragon pub a couple of minutes walk away. When he turned on to Boundary Street, a group of about six local teenage boys, aged around 15 and 16, pushed aside the girl he was walking with and attacked him from behind, hitting him on the head with a bottle. Then they started stabbing him. The first knife went in through his back and into his lung. Then they went for his neck, his chest and his heart. Once they had finished, as Hemsley lay motionless and bleeding in the street, one of the attackers returned and jumped on his head. The entire assault, which had taken place just off a busy London thoroughfare in broad daylight, lasted for four-and-a-half minutes.

Hemsley, who had never been in a fight in his life, barely made a sound – he never stood a chance. But thanks to the horrified screams of the girl he had been walking with, the police and ambulance service were on the scene within minutes, whisking Hemsley to the Royal London Hospital in nearby Whitechapel. But by the time he got there, his heart had stopped beating, his spinal cord was severed and clinically he was dead.

No one knows why those boys picked on Hemsley that night. It seems that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, the victim perhaps of a gruesome gang initiation. They couldn't have chosen a more gentle, innocuous person. Hemsley was an upbeat, funny, popular fashion student who was a regular on the Shoreditch art scene. He had grown up in a tiny village north of Cambridge and only moved to London two years before, to pursue his dream of studying at St Martins; he was due to take up his degree place just days after the attack.

If there was one bit of luck on Hemsley's side that night, it was the fact that the incident happened just around the corner from one of the country's leading trauma hospitals. ' The Royal London is home to the capital's air ambulance, so the staff there are highly skilled at dealing with severely injured people. When Hemsley was brought in, the doctors resorted to one final technique to try to get his heart beating again – a brutal piece of high-risk surgery called a clam-shell thoracotomy, which has a success rate of less than 20 per cent. To do this, they cut him from one side of his chest to the other, lifted his ribs, parted his lungs, reached in, took his heart from his body and coaxed it back to life. Hemsley had lost bucket-loads of blood, he couldn't move from the neck down, but he was alive.

It is hard to imagine how a parent would feel receiving the call that delivered that news. "It was a bolt out of the blue. I can't describe how it felt as it is too painful to recount," says Hemsley's mother, Jenny, a primary-school teacher. "In the dark days after the attack we were so frightened and so anxious but we had to keep going for Oli's sake." When Dawe received a call about it, she was so shocked that her legs gave way beneath her. "I remember having to walk past the spot where the attack had happened to get back to my house," she says. "I saw police searching through the bins. I just stopped and vomited all over the street."

A lot has been written in the media about victims of knife crime who die, but there is little about those who survive and have to carry on living with the consequences. The month Hemsley was stabbed, there were 444 hospital admissions for "assault by sharp object" (knife attacks) in England alone (there were 4,910 admissions over the year). Most will figure briefly as a story in the local paper then disappear, each victim left to fathom how to come to terms with the physical and psychological fallout. "It's been really tough," Hemsley says with typical understatement, "because there's no manual on what to do when you get stabbed. No one knew what to do. Me, my parents, my friends – we all had to learn."

Hemsley's parents moved from their village of Sutton in the Isle into a caravan in south-east London to be closer to the hospital, and his dad, also a teacher, officially retired the day after the attack. "What made it so hurtful," says Hemsley's mother, "was that it was random, totally random. If it had been for a reason – that he was carrying money, or if he'd been out drunk with a knife himself – it may have been easier to understand. But this was impossible to rationalise."

Mercifully, Hemsley has only vague recollections of the attack. "I think I can kind of remember feeling some sort of blows coming down on to my body," he says. "I'm very glad I can't remember more. Someone told me snippets about it the other day and it was horrible to hear. In the future, when I'm ready, I can ask."

The first few months passed in a blur for Hemsley, but the one thing he did know was that his friends rarely left his bedside. One of them brought a projector to his hospital room, stuck a sheet up on the wall, and his friends would all go around to watch films, read magazines and play music. Dawe went there every day. "We just did what we would always do when we were hanging out," she says. "It was never a sad atmosphere; we just kept it as normal as possible. We realised it really was an amazing thing that Oliver was still with us, so we counted ourselves lucky. It sounds like quite a weird thing to say, but we turned it into something really positive."

Hemsley spent 134 days in intensive care. When he turned 21 in October, his friends filled his room with helium balloons. At Christmas, they got dressed up, brought presents and drank mulled wine. At one point, there were more than 30 people trying to get into intensive care to visit him. The nurses had to start clamping down. "From the beginning Oli had so many visitors, and I didn't dare believe they would stick with him, but a year on and they are still there," says his mum. "They have helped us restore our faith in humanity, which I can assure you goes when your son has been violated in the way Oli was."

When Dawe and Wilson started talking about setting up Art Against Knives to raise awareness as well as funds for Hemsley's care, it was decided they would do it only if he worked on it with them. All emails were copied to Hemsley, which he monitored from his hospital bed. News of the stabbing had sent shockwaves through the halls of St Martins as well as among Shoreditch locals, and both powerful artistic communities threw their support behind it. "More and more people kept hearing about what we were doing and coming forward to ask if they could help," says Dawe. "So many people have been touched by what happened to Oliver. We had a completely overwhelming response."

Tracey Emin, who lives around the corner from where Hemsley was attacked, didn't just donate work and turn up on the night, she also personally gave him a big pile of art books. "It's so sad and appalling what happened," says the artist. "A young designer with his whole life ahead of him stabbed in the spine for what? Absolutely nothing."

When one of the creatives at global marketing company Leagas Delaney heard about Art Against Knives, the agency offered to come up with a poster design for the campaign. Someone else built them a website and someone managed to get Shoreditch House for free. And still the ball carried on rolling. In the run-up to the auction, somehow they managed to get adverts placed in the national press as well as on digital billboards throughout London, all entirely for free. It was turning into a masterful campaign.

As they worked on the project, amazing things started to happen to Hemsley. First, one of his fingers twitched a tiny bit, then his leg. "I remember the first time I moved my leg, just twitched a muscle, my dad and I cried. It was amazing," he says. "From then on," continues Dawe, "we would just sit there for hours and watch your big toe." He was moved out of intensive care and into the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, Middlesex, for rehab. By the time the Art Against Knives auction took place, nine months after the attack, Hemsley had defied all expectation and was moving around in a wheelchair. "I just took it day by day," he says. "I never wanted to hear about my prognosis because they prepare you for the worst. I just wanted to stay optimistic."

Meanwhile, the police were working to try to catch his attackers. "We were aware that various people were being brought in, being charged, not charged, questioned, released, bailed. All this kind of stuff," says Dawe.

Then, in April, one of the suspects finally made it to court: a 15-year-old local boy called Nazrul Islam. The police had found a discarded kitchen knife in the churchyard next to Boundary Street hours after the attack. It had Hemsley's blood and Islam's DNA on it. At the sentencing, Judge Roger Chapple described it as, "An entirely motiveless, mindless attack. Its ferocity makes my blood run cold." He took the unusual step of lifting restrictions on reporting Islam's name (because he was under 16) and releasing it to the press because "he [Islam] speaks with a degree of pride about his reputation with the boys, with the local community". (While Islam was on bail for the attack of Hemsley, as officers waited for forensic tests, he threatened and robbed a 12-year-old girl.)

Neither Jenny Hemsley nor her husband went to court, "I just didn't want to see the person who did that to my son." Islam was sentenced to 10 years, for GBH with intent. It was, the Hemsleys were told, a good result. The likelihood is that he'll be out in three years. I ask Hemsley what he thinks of the sentence. "Unsure," he says slowly. "They were trying not to leave me alive. There's no way in my mind you could put a knife into someone's neck, heart, back and lungs eight times, to bottle them, stamp on them and expect them to be alive... To all intents and purposes the doctors brought me back from the dead, so, yeah, it is a bit strange. But we are pleased because in Britain that [sentence] is the maximum possible."

It is now just over a year since the attack and Hemsley's progress continues. He recently left hospital and moved into a flat in Farringdon, where he lives with a carer. He has now regained enough movement in his hands to start drawing and sewing again. "The hand/eye coordination is still there," he says. "It's all a little bit wobbly but I quite like a scratchy drawing." He's learning how to navigate London by wheelchair and even laughs as he tells me all about the surgeon who took out his heart, "put it on a tray" and made it start again.

Meanwhile, Hemsley, Dawe and Wilson find themselves in the unexpected position of being directors of a successful new charity. The trio have been asked to head the prestigious Fash-Off party on 23 September, which means they will be responsible for the closing party of London Fashion Week – a party at which they will also launch a further, online, auction of 10 more pieces from well-known names from across the art and fashion worlds. Leagas Delaney has donated office space in London's Tottenham Court Road and they currently go there daily to plan the future for Art Against Knives. They are meeting lobbyists, raising questions and deciding what stand their charity should take to help ensure that what happened to their friend doesn't happen to somebody else's. St Martins, meanwhile, has agreed to hold Hemsley's place open until whenever he is ready. "So many good things have come out of this," concludes Dawe. "Oliver is always going to be dealing with it. We're always going to be dealing with it, but there's no point being angry. We've salvaged something positive from it. We don't really even talk about it much any more. We've moved on."

[jodyedgarus]

St. John’s Is On The Most Unlikely Hot Streak In College Basketball History

The 2018 St. John’s Red Storm might go down as the most erratic team in men’s college basketball history. When they were losing, they couldn’t do anything right. But now that they’re winning, they’re taking down some of the most feared programs in the country. No team has ever rattled off a more impressive series of victories from a less likely place than the Johnnies did over the past week and change.

But let’s roll things back a bit. To start things off, coach Chris Mullin’s squad began the season 10-2 — tied for the program’s second-best start to a season in 32 years. Although most of those wins came against relatively weak opponents, the team was competitive late in each of its losses (to Missouri and Arizona State, both of whom rank among the top 40 in Ken Pomeroy’s power ratings). Coming off a season of progress in Mullin’s second year at the helm, things finally appeared to be looking up for the Storm in their quest to return to the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2015.

Then the wheels fell off. Starting with their first Big East game of the year, a loss to Providence three days after Christmas, the Johnnies proceeded to drop 11 straight games. Before the calendar could even flip to February, St. John’s had matched its in-conference loss total for all of last season. An early season-ending injury to sophomore guard Marcus LoVett, who’d finished second on the team in scoring last season, helped tank the offense,1 and the defense collapsed from 13th in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings to 41st over the span of a month.

St. John’s found numerous ways to lose during the streak. For instance, there was the 25-point loss to Butler, in which the Storm almost instantly found themselves in a 19-2 hole and scored just 45 points all game (the school’s second-worst offensive output in a game since 2010-11). Then there was the marathon back-and-forth defeat against Georgetown that it took two overtimes to decide — and that the Johnnies led by 5 with 24 seconds left in the first overtime, only to watch Hoyas forward Marcus Derrickson tie the game with a personal 6-1 run.

After their 11th straight loss, a hard-fought 73-68 defeat against sixth-ranked Xavier, the Johnnies’ future looked even more bleak. Games against Duke, Villanova and Marquette were coming up, so there was little to suggest that the Red Storm would be able to pull their season out of its death spiral.

And that’s when one of the most absurd eight-day turnarounds in college history started: an upset win over the then-No. 4 Blue Devils to snap the losing streak. An even bigger upset at Villanova, which was No. 1 at the time. A relatively — dare I say it? — routine victory over a tough Golden Eagles squad, with the kind of second-half performance that good teams grind out. All the while, sophomore guard Shamorie Ponds has transformed into a superstar, averaging 34 points per game on 55 percent shooting during the shocking three-game winning streak. For a team that might not even make the NIT, they’ve looked like a tournament dark horse in recent days.

How unexpected was this sudden reversal? Our Elo power-rating data goes back to the 1949-50 season, and over that span there have been 1,207 streaks where a team won three games in a row against opponents who each had Elo ratings over 1750 — the mark of a good team.2 Of those 1,207 teams, none had a lower Elo at the start of their streak than St. John’s, who’d dropped to a 1511 rating at its nadir (which was a low point since Dec. 2016, and the program’s fifth-lowest rating in a season since 1964). Statistically speaking, the Johnnies might have been the least likely team in history to rattle off those three particular wins at that particular moment in time.

The Johnnies’ win streak came out of nowhere

Lowest Elo ratings for teams just before starting a three-game win streak against opponents who each had at least a 1750 Elo rating, 1950-2018

Win No. 1 Win No. 2 Win No. 3 Season Team Opponent Elo Opponent Elo Opponent Elo Starting Elo 2018 St. John’s Duke 1977 Villanova 2117 Marquette 1761 1511 2017 Nebraska Indiana 1910 Maryland 1840 Iowa 1767 1577 2007 Auburn Arkansas 1770 Alabama 1761 LSU 1767 1577 1977 Virginia Maryland 1843 W. Forest 1828 Clemson 1890 1583 1985 Miss. St. Alabama 1827 LSU 1831 Georgia 1767 1586 2008 Georgia* Ole Miss 1758 Kentucky 1788 Miss. St. 1893 1599 2008 Okla. St. Baylor 1767 Tex. A&M 1928 Kansas 2051 1607 1997 Missouri Nebraska 1764 Texas 1810 Oklahoma 1868 1619 2000 Marquette Depaul 1768 Louisville 1800 Charlotte 1767 1621 1970 W. Forest UNC 1835 Davidson 1751 UNC 1827 1627

*Georgia had two qualifying streaks in 2007-08, which overlapped. We included only the streak with the lowest starting rating.

Source: ESPN, Sports-Reference.com

The Johnnies’ win streak came out of nowhere

Lowest Elo ratings for teams just before starting a three-game win streak against opponents who each had at least a 1750 Elo rating, 1950-2018

Win Season Team No. 1 No. 2 No. 3 Starting Elo 2018 St. John’s Duke Villanova Marquette 1511 2017 Nebraska Indiana Maryland Iowa 1577 2007 Auburn Arkansas Alabama LSU 1577 1977 Virginia Maryland W. Forest Clemson 1583 1985 Miss. St. Alabama LSU Georgia 1586 2008 Georgia* Ole Miss Kentucky Miss. St. 1599 2008 Okla. St. Baylor Tex. A&M Kansas 1607 1997 Missouri Nebraska Texas Oklahoma 1619 2000 Marquette Depaul Louisville Charlotte 1621 1970 W. Forest UNC Davidson UNC 1627

*Georgia had two qualifying streaks in 2007-08, which overlapped. We included only the streak with the lowest starting rating.

Source: ESPN, Sports-Reference.com

The victories over Duke and Villanova alone were historic. According to Elo, St. John’s was the lowest-rated team ever to knock off two teams with ratings over 1900 in back-to-back games, toppling a record that had previously been held by the 1957-58 Nebraska Cornhuskers (when the Huskers beat No. 4 Kansas and then No. 1 Kansas State). But unlike that Nebraska team, which lost the following game, the Red Storm tacked on another impressive win to bring their streak up to three in a row.

They’ll try to extend it to four straight on Wednesday night, against DePaul in Chicago — and according to Pomeroy’s projections, there’s a 49 percent chance that St. John’s will pull it off. If so, it would only add to one of the most up-and-down seasons the sport has ever seen. Even after three big wins, the Red Storm still aren’t on anybody’s NCAA tourney radar. In fact, with 13 losses already on the books, maybe the only sure way for St. John’s to get to the dance would be for them to win the Big East Tournament — possibly by knocking off Villanova again. But hey, stranger things have already happened.

from News About Sports https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/st-johns-is-on-the-most-unlikely-hot-streak-in-college-basketball-history/

[junker-town]

Lane Kiffin found redemption without changing at all. We’ll see if that lasts.

FAU obliterated Akron in the Boca Raton Bowl last night. That’ll probably increase those applications another couple of percentage points.

The first month of Lane Kiffin's first season in charge at FAU was a little bit rocky. His Owls got trounced by Navy (42-19) and Wisconsin (31-14), then got stuck in Wisconsin for a while because of Hurricane Irma.

They returned home to beat Bethune-Cookman but then headed north again and fell at Buffalo, 34-31. They handed the Bulls four first downs via penalty, lost the turnover and field position battles, and got Little Things'd to death, basically.

This all made sense, considering what Kiffin inherited.

FAU was 115th in S&P+ last season. They beat three horrid teams -- SIU, Rice, UTEP -- and lost their other nine games by an average of 43-22. They had a couple of decent offensive players and one of the worst defenses in FBS. Kiffin was recruiting well and hired a hungry, mostly young staff, but that doesn't assure immediate success.

From the moment the Owls returned from Buffalo, however, everything changed.

The offense that was picking up steam became unstoppable. The defense that sagged so deeply in September began showing some bite. And FAU didn't lose again.

In yards per play, the Owls went from a margin of minus-0.7 in the first three games against FBS opponents to plus-2.0 in the last nine. It was plus-2.9 over the final five games.

The Boca Raton Bowl was destined to be a blowout.

The Owls played host to an Akron that had lived a charmed life, winning close games, benefiting from happy turnovers luck, and saving its best performance for the biggest game of the year, an upset of Ohio that allowed the Zips to steal the MAC East title.

The Zips had lost 52-0 to Penn State and gotten smoked by a combined 44 in two games against Toledo, the only MAC team comparable to FAU. They entered the game ranked 110th in S&P+, nearly 100 spots lower than the Owls. They deserved a little bit of good fortune after dealing with a boatload of injuries in 2016, but they were not going to be capable of sticking with a red hot FAU team for four quarters. For anyone in a bowl confidence pool, this was destined to be a 39-pointer.

Akron stuck with the Owls for about 19 minutes.

After two drives each, the score was 7-3 FAU. Total yardage: Owls 88, Zips 72.

The rest of the way: FAU 43, Akron 0. Total yardage: Owls 494, Zips 74.

The carnage was even worse than we assumed it would be.

The spread was more than three touchdowns, and FAU won by more than six TDs. The Owls even randomly went for two after a late-Q3 touchdown, and the rationale was very Kiffin:

Lane Kiffin said the 2-point conversion was prompted by an Akron athletics official talking trash yesterday. "His bad," Lane said.

— Tim Reynolds (@ByTimReynolds) December 20, 2017

His bad.

Over the last year, Kiffin has managed to craft a redemption story without actually changing.

After serving a stint as Nick Saban’s offensive coordinator/scorned son, he came to Boca intent on winning at all costs. If that meant hiring Art Briles’ son and saying, “My plan is not in place to please the media” (as if the media is why you should be wary of the Briles family at the moment), hiring his brother (who recently received a show-cause penalty from the NCAA), or running the score up on an overmatched opponent because of an “athletics official talking trash yesterday,” so be it.

When you’re winning, that’s all considered personality. And there’s no doubting that Kiffin has plenty of that. He proves it on Twitter almost every single day. His web presence has basically become its own sentient being at this point. He has begun to morph into a combination of Steve Spurrier and, well, a younger Lane Kiffin.

There’s also no doubt that hiring him has benefited FAU immensely.

Kiffin's impact has transcended football. [FAU president John Kelly] told ESPN earlier this month that FAU's out-of-state applications for the 2018 fall semester were up 35 percent.

"And we haven't done anything else differently, so it has to be Lane," Kelly said. "He just gets it, both as a football coach and being able to attract attention to our university. I laugh just about every day at something he puts on Twitter and understand that he's about the good of the institution and is thinking about what appeals to a 17-year-old kid and not a 60-year-old guy."

FAU is a school in an affluent, white city with a huge senior population. It almost named its stadium after a gross for-profit prison. But not only is Kiffin attracting football talent to Boca Raton all the same, he’s attracting out-of-state students who just want to be near the football program.

Kiffin just signed a 10-year contract extension, and while that probably won’t keep him at FAU for an entire decade — if it does, you can make some money off of it — he’ll probably leave FAU better off whenever he does leave, especially if an increased buyout ends up part of the deal.

This is the Flutie Effect magnified. The longer FAU keeps Kiffin, and the longer Kiffin keeps winning (both of those are required), the more of a national presence this university will have, even out of the sports realm.

This doesn’t have to last, of course.

Maybe a given batch of transfers doesn’t pan out. Maybe some assistants leave, and their replacements don’t pack the same wallop. Maybe character issues permeate the two-deep. Maybe the school doesn’t address it properly.

Or maybe not. Those are all part of an undetermined future. In the present tense, no school has benefited from a recent coaching hire like FAU. The Owls just won 11 games for the first time, and they did so with:

A junior starting quarterback (Jason Driskel)

A sophomore star running back (Devin Singletary)

A freshman No. 1 receiver (Willie Wright)

A sophomore tight end (Harrison Bryant)

Sophomore and junior starting offensive tackles (Reggie Bain and Brandon Walton)

One senior among the top 14 tacklers on defense

FAU could be even better next year.

And the Owls were already one of the best teams in the country over the last month or two. I’m not sure where this ride on the #LaneTrain ends up, but right now, FAU is enjoying it immensely.

[ultramediocre-blog1]

Running Is Stupid, So Why Do I Do It?

Running is stupid. That’s probably the last thing you’d expect me to say. But let’s be real for a minute – it really is. So, what makes running stupid? There are almost too many reasons to list!

Running hurts. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or not trying hard enough. When you start running your whole body hurts. If you are doing a hill workout, your legs hurt as you progress through it. Running in the heat? It’ll feel like you’re pulling a corpse behind you (and if it’s hot enough, people will actually tell you that you smell like a corpse!). Speaking of smelling like a corpse – I can’t even begin to describe the laundry situation.

There are several days per week when my fiancée and I are both doing two workouts a day. That’s four sets of workout clothes each day festering in the bottom of the laundry basket. Sometimes, doing laundry, I’ll pull out a tank top that’s still wet, six days later. The smell is indescribable. It’s like getting hit in the face with a shovel. A damp, stinky shovel. How about running in the cold? Your lungs will burn and you’ll get to feel the magic sensation of peeling dried/frozen snot, sweat, and drool from your face.

The physical pain is just the beginning. The mental pain of running is much worse. At maximum effort, your brain will constantly send you messages that you are overexerting yourself and that death is imminent. These signals manifest themselves in many different ways, but the ultimate goal of the brain is to trick you into slowing down. When most runners receive these signals, they obey them and slow down. Sure enough, after slowing down, the brain says, “Oops! I guess we weren’t about to die. Go ahead and run again!” Except by that point, you’ve slowed enough that your goal time is blown, which brings a different type of mental pain: regret. “I missed my goal time by 45 seconds!

Why couldn’t I ignore millions of years of evolution of my brain!?” We’ve all been there, and trust me it hurts far worse to slow down than it does to press through those initial pain signals. Or how about training for a race for months…being meticulous doing everything right. You are in the perfect position to win or set a PR. On race morning, it’s 84 degrees with 91% humidity at 7 a.m. That’s a punch in the gut that hurts?

“Running is a great hobby! All you need is a pair of running shoes and you’re ready to go!” That’s another dirty lie runners use to trick people into thinking running is great. First of all, a pair of running shoes isn’t enough. Most running shoes have a life of 300-400 miles. For people running 80 mile weeks, that’s a new pair every 5 weeks (at most). I’d make a bet that anyone running 80 mile weeks isn’t running in $12 shoes from Target. $100 is the absolute low end of good running shoes unless you find some miracle sale. That’s $1000 on shoes annually, minimum.

In our closet, there are currently 18 pairs of shoes. You need your road shoes, trail shoes, other trail shoes for when the trail is muddy, road shoes that have 400 miles on them so you can’t run in them anymore but they still look brand new because they are only five weeks old so you wear them to the grocery store shoes, and other road shoes that you wear when it’s rainy. Oh, and maybe treadmill shoes. But shoes are just the beginning. Would you like to race and get a sweet medal? That’ll cost you. Race fees can be more than $200, not to mention costs of traveling, other gear you need, etc.

Perhaps the biggest shock to me though was the grocery bill. Runners, on the whole, eat nonstop. I consume 3500-4000 calories/day. That’s a lot of groceries. So when someone tells you that running is cheap, laugh in their face and call them a dirty liar!

I could go on for pages talking about all of the things that make running stupid. How many baseball players do you know that hit the field with toilet paper in their pockets, “just in case”? How many tennis players have fallen asleep standing up while playing? I have a friend who, on two separate occasions, dealt with varying levels of blindness during a race. A combination of distance and altitude led to ocular malfunction.My only 50-mile race, Monument Valley 50, further illustrates the stupidity of running. After climbing above the valley and starting single track back down, I turned a corner at about mile 45, and in front of me was a 1,000-foot-tall sand dune, with flags running right up the center. I loudly said the F word, and began trudging up the dune. I reached the pinnacle, and again said the F word (that word is so cathartic, especially when you realize you’ve narrowly escaped turning into a cartoon-style skeleton on the desert floor). I ran a few minutes and needed to empty my shoes. I saw a rock off the side of the trail. As I sat back on the rock, I placed my hand down to stabilize myself (remember, this about mile 45) directly into a cactus – a tiny little cactus with approximately 24-million needles, all of which ended up stuck in my hand.

Here I am: 14 pounds of sand in each shoe, tired, dirty, and ready for this to be over. Now I’ve got a hand full of cactus needles. As I begin removing them, two people pass me. Well, no one is going to beat me for 29th place at this 50-miler! To hell with the needles, I’ll solve that problem later! At one point, I thought it made sense to spit on my hand as some sort of lubricant to help the needles out of my palm (spoiler alert: it didn’t help). But this is how a runner’s brain functions. This is totally normal, sane behavior. If I was in the hunt for a podium, it makes sense. But I wasn’t. I’m a mid-packer who had every reason in the world to take the extra five minutes and ensure I was ok. Four months later, there is still a needle buried in my palm. I’ve named him Spike, and he reminds me how much fun that day was!

So why do I do it? Why am I out there six days a week, usually before 4 a.m., making myself uncomfortable? Why do I and millions of other people willingly subject ourselves to it? I can say that for all the pain, sadness and frustration I feel, there is nothing that makes me feel better. I look at where I was three years ago, overweight and not able to run a mile, and now I’ve done races of all distances! It allows me to clear my head. It’s a time to think, or to go blank. Listen to your breath, nature or music. Running has taken me many places – down the Las Vegas Strip, to Europe, to running up a mountain in Japan, and everywhere in between. It’s who I am. It hurts like hell, but it’s a pain that I wouldn’t trade for anything on this Earth.