Boy oh boy is it time to write some incredible words of wisdom for you all! I have been slacking. A ton. Nothing to do with the people in Seattle, nothing to do with my interest in sim leagues, or the events going on in my life. In fact, I’m thriving. I’m enjoying my hobbies, I’m kicking butt at college, locking in, doing the right things for my mental and physical health. I feel great, I’m looking better, and I’m excited about the future. I have wonderful relationships with the people around me, and really so many things I never thought would be possible a couple years ago are the life I live today. But for some reason, I’ve been slacking in my SHL life. Sure, one could say the greatness of the life outside of the SHL has kept me there instead of here, and sure you could be on to something. But I think it’s bigger than that, and while I work on figuring out how best to put this thought into words, I’ll actually conquer it piece by piece.

As some of you may know I’ve been in sim leagues for about 4 and bit years now. Mostly VHL, but I’ve spent some time in SBA, EFL (rip), GOHLS, and most recently ISFL. Most don’t get anywhere near the attention the VHL does, and never will, but for a good period of time, SHL was getting a good chunk more attention than those other leagues ever have, or maybe will. I’m not really a sports fan. I’ve tried football, the other football, basketball, and baseball. I still think baseball and football are probably the sports best set up for sim leagues. They’re easily broken down into definable sections and have always had a huge analytics community. What is a sim engine other than reverse analytics? But I digress. None of those sports have ever really caught a hold of my like hockey. I hate the EA NHL games, after spending so much of my time wishing they were something more. I’m sure everyone who has reached this point is nodding in agreement, and shedding a singular tear in solidarity. Eastside Hockey Manager kept me going for a while, but the clunky interface and the eventually predictable and philosophically outdated engine couldn’t keep me going through the lack of NHL hockey in 2020. Franchise Manager turned me off immediately because I wasn’t buying another game every year like EA, I simply don’t have the cash on hand to handle that, and I like to do long-form things, and getting set up in a game means I can really invest into it. So obviously sim leagues were an instant hit. I tried Hockey Nation, and I hear it’s changed a ton, but for some reason that was too slow-burn for me, no clue why. VHL caught me through a Reddit post, one of the last of it’s kind, and eventually I caved and joined the big bad rivals SHL. Y’all are so cool by the way, I have no idea what was going on back in the day, but man are y’all cool.

So what does this have to do with me slacking? Well I’m normally really on my game. I usually have my updates lined up Monday, ready to submit, I always have money in the bank for the moment the seasonal purchases come out, but somewhere along the line I got too comfortable, or too busy, and dug into next seasons money. And well, the prospect of writing 6000 words in one go, which is the Jacob way, simply became too much to do that season. I just know I won’t be coming back to write 500 words at a time, or even 2000. And so another season went by, and I survived on Chirping and my Contract, and my poor team keeps sending me so much money, and I really appreciate it, despite my laziness as of late.

Honestly, being in “debt” has kept me from checking the site as much as I hoped to, and I’ve really started losing track of what Agate is up to. Building has been very slow, and honestly quite painful this early in my career. It can take weeks to get an attribute up, and I’m not even all that familiar with what I’m even getting out of them. The contrast between the SMJHL, even when I was banking, is very stark. At least then, I knew I was banking to come out with this amazing rookie build, and sure Seattle’s talent level probably didn’t help, but it really was underwhelming. I hope it’s a good sign I hit on at least some of the Milestones this season, but it feels quite weird to have barely scraped by on 2. I know my concept of TPE scaling is very wonky compared to VHL, where a 1000TPE build is all-star level, and I’m just barely scraping the halfway point to that kind of performance. I also know careers are many more seasons, so I don’t need to be worried about making sure I make my 8 seasons all count, because well, I’ll have many more than that. And SHL doesn’t have quite the scoring inflation that VHL has historically had, and is so deep in our precedent of how to operate and change the league.

But here I am, having gotten about 900 words into the 6000 that I plan to write today, and now I’m feeling much more confident in my ability to dig out of the hole. It really is about setting aside some time, distraction free, to just let your fingers go, and tell the story as it comes to your brain. Sometimes it isn’t worth writing, and sure, those parts can be cut out. But we’re not here to enforce some major kind of writing superiority. It’s a forum based simulation hockey league, not a writing circle. It’s about us sharing our experiences and our imaginations with each other, in some context relating to the one things we all decided would be the center of our hobby. And that’s the fun part, is that it really could have been anything. I think our lives are sorely missing forums, and the centralization of communities. All of our patches of the internet all seem to overlap so much, and it’s so hard these days to keep a central context in our brains. We’re wired to jump ship the moment another thought comes into our minds, and those damn phones (okay grandma) certainly aren’t helping either. So here’s a celebration (yippee) to the thing that brought us all together, and may we share many more seasons together enjoying what we all love. And that thing of course is SHL money. I jest, kind of.

I recently picked up, again, a gig as a GM in the minors of the VHL. I love being a part of the new player experience, and I love seeing all of my little players go off to have fabulous careers and flourish in their own right. Some of them even go off to run their own teams, and then I have to beat them at my own game. I think the SHL really changed me for the better between the last time I held one of those positions and now. The way that the structure of the league is set up really inspired me to advocate in the VHL Board of Governors to increase the TPE Cap and therefore the amount of time that is spent in the minors. This was accomplished in a sort of back route way, but at the end of it all, we got there. Now, for the better earners, this will be two seasons, certainly shorter than the time spent in the SMJHL. There’s no sitting and banking TPE for the major leagues either, and I think honestly that it’s an upgrade over the SMJHL at least in respect to STHS. FHM requires a ton more TPE, and so I think it works perfectly fine here, but in an engine where 500TPE is a great starting point, players move up the season immediately after they hit 400TPE. And so many, like myself with my last player, ended up being 600TPE as a rookie, whereas I was around 1000TPE here. But the importance of longer stretches of time on the same team can’t be overstated. The easiest time to lose a player is during a transition period. A new management group, new people, a reset in where you are on the food chain, and often times a new set of tasks and purchases and expectations can really just turn people off completely. But if you get them set up, get them prepared, and give them the information to make sure they know what to expect in a reasonable enough timeline for them to digest all of the other million things that make up this niche hobby, and the specifics of this particular iteration of this niche hobby, they might stand a fighting chance against all that change.

What else do I bring over from my experiences here? Well I think a team really needs to be run by committee. Finding my favourite people, and those who I think have really good ideas and bringing them into the fold to facilitate whatever they’re most interested in doing, and having that be on behalf of, and in the benefit of my team, has been a huge asset for me. Finding people who love to make graphics, people who love tinkering with roster strategy, line combinations, and player builds to give us the edge. Finding people who love the new players as much as I do to build those relationships around the league, and help make people WANT to play for my club, and reach out to us. Finding people who just love to chat and be a good time, and set them loose in our Locker Room ready to engage and entertain anyone who meanders our way. I don’t have to do it all, and neither does my AGM. On the topic of AGMs, I plan to treat mine much more like an SHL Co-GM. It helps that they have more experience than I do in the league, but I want them to feel confident to just go, and we’ll figure it out together later. This is an us team, not a me team. We’re both going to swing and miss sometimes, and that’s okay, because we’re doing this together. Cooperation, delegation, and general helpfulness is something the VHL is lacking, and something I admire about each of the experiences I have here in the SHL.

I also plan to bring prompts to my Locker Room for people to complete for TPE. Every week I get presented here and in ISFL with prompts to give me something to write about. And they’re not hard, and I’m sure that’s why some people are haters about them, but really, I can write 150 words about just about anything. Or at least close enough to that thing for it to count. VHL is even broader, just make it VHL related and you have free rein. So if I can present some prompts, and I’ve already got 100 moderately okay ones kicking around in a Word file on my computer, why wouldn’t I just throw one or two at my players a week, and if they like them, they write about them, and if they don’t, they might be inspired to write something adjacent, but still league related. It ends up with more of the tasks being done, and that’s my goal here. Make it as easy as possible to earn as much as possible, while bringing excellent vibes every day. I’ve never struggled for ideas, in fact I often end up writing things in the VHL just because I want to, and don’t end up ever claiming them.  The format there leans a bit better towards doing it that way than here, but perhaps I need to adopt some of that mindset and drop a couple hundred words as I feel them appearing. They’re not always super insightful, and I’m sure many people won’t think this is either, and they’d probably be right, but in the end, if I only wrote the insightful, I’d not really be able to participate much. I don’t really have that many profound thoughts to share, I wouldn’t keep them from you folks don’t worry.

We’ve crossed the one thirds mark, and the caffeine, tranquility, and the buzz in my fingers are all crossing over at an incredible wavelength. There’s nothing quite like getting into a groove and seeing what kind of magic will appear. That’s something I like about sim leagues as well, and I have been seeing it quite a bit here in the SHL. Your build is a snapshot into what ranges of outcomes would be likeliest for your player. And most values don’t change all that rapidly, and for some, they’re only going down. So to sit and see where you are now, and to watch the range of outcomes appear based on the years sometimes of work that you put in to get here, is a bit of a surreal experience. There is something about things moving so slowly once you make the big leagues, that really puts into perspective the sheer number of words you’ve written to get there. How much is an attribute worth? And how much of that value have I been finding every season for the last few seasons, and for many, many seasons, to get to where I am. And sure, there’s the context of your teammates, opponents, the luck of the sim, and a whole host of factors which make the continuous and unsolvable nature of hockey interesting. But realistically we’re just plotting the distribution of things we could be, and hoping we end up above the mean. Sometimes I like to think of it as safe gambling. I put in my time and my effort, my creative energy into making this player as good as I can, and waiting to see what the slots decide. If we simmed a season ten thousand times, we’d probably start to see the normalized distributions of results for each game, and certainly across the season. This single run of this single combination of all of our builds, all at this very moment, is the landscape the league is set in. And that is certainly very cool.

I’m back in school, Bachelors never got me anywhere, so college it is! Aritificial Intelligence and Machine Learning is the game this time, and with some better habits and some incredible medication, I am on my academic grind. But learning all of these cutting edge tools that capitalism insists on using in the worst ways possible has really changed the context in which I consume everything. The data that exists everywhere we go, most of it goes unrecorded, and even more goes unanalyzed, but forums are really such an interesting opportunity for us to dive into the unstructured data we pour out every day. There are a million spreadsheets around the league, a wonderfully done portal, and the loads and loads of text data available to us. Learning how the people in this league speak and create, understanding the contexts in which we exist and the reactions that come from it, learning the sentiments we all share, and the outliers who move and shake the league, are all more accessible through the use of computers. Generative AI is garbage, and will probably result in the downfall of capitalism and the internet. I could probably write 6000 words on that alone, but I want to stay on topic just a bit. There was a bit of a joke movement in the VHL about allowing generative AI to be claimed for TPE. None of the sane people there agreed, and I’m sure many here would as well. It won’t make it anywhere and it never should. The argument is always the effort that you put in to get the tool to spit out something good is still worth rewarding. And I’m sure many people end up spending more effort trying to get AI to give them something than it would to just make it themselves. I know many people are optimistic, and I suppose so am I, I think the fundamentals of the science are promising, but I think it’s most important to understand the way that we are fundamentally human, and the way that our creativity is certainly a novel combination of existing elements, not far off of an artificial intelligence, but the experience of being in that creative state is more valuable than the actual produced output. When you give that to AI, you become a scientist, not an artist. And of course science is hard work, and is valuable, and my brain certainly excels more in a scientific context than a creative one, but creativity is always hard. And in the end, it’s always worth the effort put in. Science can be fundamentally wrong, and can often end in a fruitless effort. Science can, and often is, bad. Art may be ugly, it may be distasteful, but it is always valuable. And being able to use science to inspire art is where AI will probably end up being the most useful. And I hope to be able to do some projects here where I can work on some science, and use it to create my own art. The people that do in depth analysis here are fantastic, and deserve every sim dollar they get from it, and often more. It’s so much easier to put out simple art, and while that’s acceptable for the sake of making sim cash, it can be so much more fulfilling to go above and beyond simply for the sake of it.

That about wraps my halfway point about the league, where I’ve been at mentally and physically, and what I think is valuable about the SHL. If you read this much, you’ve gotten the insightful bits, and the rest will likely end up being me catching up on the time I haven’t paid much attention to my player, Olivija Agate.

I’ve slipped a bit in the TPE rankings for my class, people keep doing better in fantasy or something than me, and I’m sure I’ve missed a few random tasks here and there. Oh, and well of course I haven’t purchased my seasonal training yet. But don’t you fear, that’s in short order and is nothing to be worried about. I’ll throw on another attribute or two and roll the dice again. The great 73-75+ classes for Seattle are really starting to come into fruition here and the team being led by the great Rence Sykut is set to become a mover and a shaker in the SHL for a long time coming. We’re looking to be better than even this season, and a lot of that will have to do with getting more shots than our opponents. The offense was slow for us last season, but being able to retrieve more pucks, and get them to the ever improving offensive core will generate more surely. I was second in D scoring for Seattle, but even then, it was only 26 points. The D will most certainly need to step it up and gain some serious confidence if we hope to compete in the playoffs. I’ll be putting everything I can into getting to 1200TPE as soon as possible, starting with this here article, and getting that Seasonal Coaching underway. My weekly tasks are in, including the All-Star Week, and I’ll be making sure to get a good plan underway for what I want to do next. Unfortunately I’m at that point in my career where I simply want to be good at the things, but overcommitting to any one area leaves me still vulnerable in the rest. I’ve made great strides in my skating and vision, hopefully working my way into being an above average distributor, but my shooting and my physical game are lacking. I want to be working hard, but at some point that hard work will need to begin to translate into success for myself and for the team on a better than average scale. Obviously rookie seasons aren’t super indicative of what is to come, but with a PDO of hanging around 100, the output simply wasn’t good enough, and I know it wasn’t bad luck. We were swiss cheese with Agate on the ice, and while she wasn’t the worst of the bunch, she played enough minutes in enough situations there has to be some kind of relationship. We weren’t shooting the puck enough at all, and we were allowing a ton of shots, which is never a recipe for success. I never want to be below team average in both stats, as someone who plays at least a third of the game. That means in my third, we’re doing worse than the team was doing with me off. I’ve been praised for my successes which seemed to have been irregular but high, and while they’re inspiring, I hope to see a time where I am regularly putting in above average performances rather than irregularly putting in stellar performances. And it’s not like those performances came during the playoffs, although not much came in the playoffs for any of us. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a 60 point player or anything, but pushing towards 40 or 50 is the goal for me in the coming seasons. And most of all, we need to be limiting chances against, because chances against means we don’t have the puck to score with! And well, how is one expected to get points without a puck to score with. On Seattle, which of course is not a great indicator of overall league distribution, I really seem to be middle of the pack on all of the attributes I want to be good at. And I’m sure that’s more indicative of the overall TPE level of the team than anything else, but I need to find a way to break out into being something special for my niche, if I want to ever stand out on the SHL stage as being one of the best, if not the best at that thing. I don’t exactly know what it is yet, I’m sure many are rooting for it to end up being assists, but I would also love to be able to be a league leader in shot differential or one of those fancy Corsi or Fenwick scores. There are some great opportunities to be one of the few players to break past 17 or 18 in a score, should I ever be in the position where I have the TPE to do so. Even in the attributes where there is a few 20s, it would be cool to even be a top 5 player in that category. I don’t necessarily expect to ever be a premier player in this league, and I probably won’t. There’s simply too many people who love it far more than me, and I concede in the passion war to them. But it would be cool to be a name that people recognize, and that people pick in Fantasy and remember when they see me on the All-Star ballot, or even the All-Star team. Maybe there will even be prompts written about Olivija Agate. That would be fun. There’s very few names I know whenever I look at the list for Fantasy and I think that’s pretty funny, but I mean when I see Hodor, I know Hodor. Or Hargreeves, or Prpich. The Koivus, Cale Salad, those are names I remember. I couldn’t tell you what team they’re on, or even the users behind them, but it would certainly be cool to be a name that people remember even if they don’t associate  it with the actual person sitting here typing words into my keyboard. And with many many more seasons to go, and a ton of time to work on that legacy, maybe I still have that in me! I’m excited for another chance to get out there and make some progress, win some games and bring this Seattle team one step closer to being a perennial contender, just like we dreamed of those seasons ago when I was being drafted. A lot of legends have moved on since then and there are huge shoes to fill, replacing some of those powerful entities in magnitude of personality and virtue, but also in on-ice performance. I’m sure the more we succeed the more personality we will have, it’s been hard to engage in loss after loss, and I wasn’t even that early in the rebuild. But I’m thrilled to be here, and I’m thrilled to keep doing my part. It’s probably time for me to wrap this thing up, and move on to the next tasks on my hulking to-do list today, and while I never made it to 6000, I’ve made more progress than I have in a few seasons.

Thanks for sticking through this, especially whichever poor grader had to take this one, but I promise to be a bit more regular, and maybe a bit less long next time. I hope to engage more now that I’m back on my feet, and headed towards better things, both in and out of sim leagues. I want to thank my fans, okay actually I want to thank Seattle for sending a big cheque in the mail, the SHL for being so kind and so genuine, and for words for being able to get me a whole chunk of change.