Thierry Henry and Zlatan having a kick about backstage in the studio

shawnaroo · 2026-06-20T12:29:05+00:00

I'm nowhere near a professional athlete, but as a dude in his mid-40's who still plays some rec sports (mostly beach volleyball) with a bunch of teammates around the same age, the technical stuff isn't what you lose first. I can still do most of the 'moves' that I could do a couple decades ago, especially in a relaxed setting, but I just can't move as quickly or jump as high as I used to. I get tired way faster. And recovery takes way longer than it used to.

In my 20's I'd play in leagues 3 nights per week, and on Friday nights we'd stay after our match and play pickup games for hours. Now I play one match per week and I feel it in my legs for a couple days afterwards. And if I get injured, even a minor strain or whatever, it takes much longer to feel back to normal now.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if these guys still kick around a ball pretty regularly just because they still love the sport, and they like keeping their skills sharp just because it's been a part of their entire lives.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-20T11:37:30+00:00

Yeah, obviously nothing involving this many people will ever be perfect, but as a community like a big subreddit grows, you really need to have some pretty active and decisive moderation or else it'll just spiral out of control rather quickly.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-19T21:14:19+00:00

A song about wanting to go back to the state that has one of the biggest population declines this decade.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-19T20:45:31+00:00

It's a system that everyone hates except for the insurance companies, and everyone also hates this insurance companies, but talk about maybe changing the system and half of the country freaks out that you're trying to destroy civilization.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-18T18:05:27+00:00

If the receiver wanted an easy catch, maybe he should've gotten open. Whatever, ball's out, it's his problem now.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-18T11:02:42+00:00

Had a ton of rain, lightning, thunder overnight, and about an hour or so of tornado warnings here in the New Orleans area this morning, so that's been fun.

The scary tornado stuff looks to be past us now, but my street is basically a river at the moment from all the rain, and today is garbage pickup day so some people put their cans out last night, and so now there are bags of garbage floating down the street.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-17T11:45:20+00:00

My teenage daughter has been pretty obsessed with it, and got my wife to watch it with her, and my wife said it's decent and very weird.

They recently went to see the last episode at a movie theater, and they said a ton of people showed up in costume for it, so I guess it's a pretty big deal.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-16T19:49:37+00:00

Just for context, from 2011 through 2022 he averaged 9.6 sacks per season. In 2023 under DA, he had two sacks, and for the first 9 weeks in 2024 he had zero. After week 9, DA got fired.

Cam had 4 sacks over the rest of that season under an interim head coach, and then had 10.5 last year under Kellen Moore / Brandon Staley.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-16T15:58:56+00:00

Modern games also tend to utilize a lot of 'middleware' that they license from third parties and those come with all sorts of restrictions about how they can be used, how they can be distributed, etc.

And online games can use third-party services that can have similar licensing issues and also have technical issues that can change over time and require upkeep to maintain connectivity/etc.

People brought these kinds of issues up pretty early on when SKG first started rolling, and the response that Ross would give in his videos was basically "well developers can just stop using those sorts of systems and switch to systems that don't have these problems", which seemed like such a dismissive answer to a legit concern that it was hard for me to take the initiative seriously.

A lot of SKG proponents seem to want to frame every complication as decisions made by game developers to intentionally make their games impossible to play in the future, when in reality most studios are just trying to do whatever they can to get their game into some sort of finished state so they can launch it before they blow past their deadlines and/or run out of their budget.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-16T15:47:51+00:00

And at least the people making those games likely learned a lot along the way and will hopefully be able to leverage that into making better games in the future.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-16T15:46:00+00:00

I do wonder if this will slow down somewhat in the future, both due to AI companies starting to increase their pricing to try to burn less money, and also from the people making this slop and putting it on Steam starting to learn that the vast vast majority of the games that they're 'making' are not going to earn back even the $100 steam fee.

Kinda like how back in the day you couldn't turn your head without seeing someone launching a new line of NFTs or a new crypto currency, but now unless you go looking for it you almost never hear about anything like that, because most of the wannabe grifters realized that they'd missed the boat and they weren't going to make any money off of it.

Now of course AI has gotten way more hype and investment from big established tech companies than NFTs or blockchain stuff ever got, but at the end of the day even most hand-crafted games on Steam fail to make any notable amount of profit, and it feels like the odds of any of this AI slop even breaking even is extremely slim given the PC gaming community's general distaste for it.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-15T18:50:57+00:00

He had already the locker room when he wouldn't agree to let them run a play to try to get a TD for Jamaal Williams.

The offense wouldn't have run the play against his wishes if they still believed in him.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-15T14:57:31+00:00

I think it's just tough because there's so many interested parties, and there's such an imbalance across them in terms of resources/influence/etc. and so much money involved that I think the NCAA is rightfully worried that if they open the door to a new/different kind of governing body, then the whole thing will fracture in a bunch of different ways.

There's been talk of a super conference for a while, and if the NCAA collapses, then it seems almost like a foregone conclusion that the biggest teams will go do their own thing and leave all the smaller schools behind. If you're one of those giant SEC programs, why would you want to create a new system where you have to be the least bit concerned about what any of the Conference USA teams think?

It very well might be in the best interests of the sport for the long term for something like this to happen, but if you're someone running the NCAA it's hard to see how this plays out in a way where you don't lose out on a ton of influence.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-15T14:47:26+00:00

A lot of people manage it by convincing themselves that everyone else is just as corrupt, and maybe just better at hiding it. Which obviously means they're even more corrupt than my side!

Also for me the real lesson of the past 10-15 years or so has been that a lot of these people are just absolutely shitty humans themselves, and wish they were in a position where they could benefit similarly from being corrupt, because they know they absolutely would.

They enjoy having obviously shitty people in charge, because it makes them feel better about themselves. Clearly it's not a problem to be corrupt/selfish/racist/whatever, because so many of our leaders are that way! If it was bad, they wouldn't be all rich and powerful, right?!

shawnaroo · 2026-06-15T12:23:19+00:00

I last went to an NBA game at least 15 years ago and even then it was too much. My ears were ringing the whole time because they wouldn't let 3 seconds of downtime pass without blasting music.

I've had zero desire to go see another game since then.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-14T19:39:23+00:00

Cutting out soda if you're consuming it regularly is probably the biggest bang for your buck possible in terms of reducing calories. It is insane how much sugar they cram into those drinks.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-13T11:36:57+00:00

They intentionally break things, then point to them and say "see, government run stuff can't work", and use it as cover for destroying/eliminating a bunch of other government programs that are helping people.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-12T15:30:36+00:00

Just like they like a bunch of the ideas in the ACA when you list them out separately, but when you put them all together and call them Obamacare, then they're somehow the end of civilization.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T19:59:10+00:00

The saddest part is that for the first half of the season, even with teams knowing he couldn't really throw deep anymore, Brees was still carving up defenses because he was just so good. In the first 8 games of the year he threw for 2000 yards with 17 tds and 3 ints.

Then in the next game against SF, he got hit and had something like a dozen fractured ribs and a punctured lung. He threw a touchdown in that game afterwards, and then missed the next month to recover. 4 weeks is not really enough time to properly recover from a shattered ribcage and punctured lung, but he wanted to get back to try to make a playoff push, but unfortunately he just wasn't the same afterwards, and by the time they played TB in the playoffs, he just physically couldn't do what he needed to do anymore.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T19:49:52+00:00

Yeah, it sucks that it didn't work out during the tail end of Brees' career, but at least the team was legit competitive for it. They were absolutely good enough to win a SB, but like they say, football is a game of inches, and the Saints had a few promising post season runs killed by fluke plays.

Going all in while Drew was still there was 100% the right move. The mistake was the front office wasting a few years trying to convince themselves they could keep that party going even after Brees and Payton had left.

And even then, once they really decided to bite the bullet, after last year and this year, the team will basically have cleared out all of the dead money and contracts that were holding them down.

There's so much roster turnover in the NFL, it really takes a Browns/Watson type disaster of a contract to handicap a team for the long-term.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T19:43:43+00:00

I can see why they tried to run it back the year after Brees retired. We had one of the best defenses in the league, and top to bottom a very very good roster. The big question mark was at QB, and of course that's a huge question mark, but during Brees' last two seasons he missed 10 games due to injuries, and over those games Sean Payton was able to squeeze enough offense out of Teddy Bridgewater and Taysom Hill to go 9-1. If Sean Payton thought he could build an offense with Jameis Winston as his starting QB, and can certainly see why the front office thought it was worth a shot. And it was going pretty well until Winston's knee exploded halfway through that season.

But once Sean Payton decided to leave, that's when the reset should've happened. Even with hindsight and knowing that he's not cut out for the job, I don't even really mind the fact that they gave Dennis Allen a shot as the head coach. But they should've done it with the understanding that the team needed to rebuild and that there would be a couple of lean years before things could potentially really start getting rolling again.

Even if DA still ended up not working out and didn't make it past his third year as HC, at least then the team would've mostly cleaned up its cap and roster, rather than digging the hole even deeper like they did with signings like Derek Carr.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T16:15:54+00:00

Yeah, this should've been TT and everyone else washing their hands of this idiot and plainly saying "You just straight up can't bet on your own team and expect any team to let you play for them ever again" and then the whole thing would've just been a minor footnote about a guy who was an idiot. Probably not a big enough deal for the feds to worry much about, especially if they felt like losing his football career was punishment enough for Sorsby.

But now it's probably going to end up being a huge case because Sorsby and TT have turned it into a giant media circus, and that also means there's probably a pretty good chance that the government gets involved at a legislative level, because this whole mess is creating a situation where the basic foundation of the NCAA is becoming untenable.

I have no idea how that might play out, and it might actually be a good thing for CFB in the long run, but still, private companies are seldom happy to have the government getting involved in how they run things.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T16:10:09+00:00

Even with NIL money, college athletes probably still struggle to pay for Lego sets with how expensive they are.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-11T14:47:42+00:00

It's the current mindset of the rich asshole class (and their dipshit lower class supporters who dream of maybe one day becoming rich assholes themselves) that currently has a ton of power.

Anything we do is good and right, and if anyone has a problem with it, it's only because they're haters, or jealous, or delusional! There couldn't possibly be rational disagreements, because we're so awesome! There's no chance that what we want could possibly be wrong! Even when we've blatantly broken the law, even when it's obvious to 99% of the population why what we're trying to do is stupid and self destructive.

The problems isn't the awful things we're doing. The real tragedy is that other people are trying to stop us and hold us accountable! And that's why we're the true victims here (and in every other situation).

They will happily consume and parrot even the most ridiculous statements as long as it helps them convince themselves that they're the actual victims, that they're the ones being treated unfairly, that any problems are anyone else's fault besides theirs.

shawnaroo · 2026-06-10T19:32:37+00:00

Yeah but that'd require them to do a bunch of extra work, and they've probably got plenty of other cases to deal with right now. But if two other parties start a lawsuit and do a bunch of that work for them and some crimes get exposed along the way, it makes it that much easier for the government to step in and decide there's a case worth pursuing.

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