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uhh · 08-10-2019, 07:30 PM

(3706 words - I'm baked 2x bonus if that's a real bonus, else disregard)

www.uhhthoughts.gov.www/uhhthoughts
@uhh, The Athletic

What is this? Well, it's a blog of sorts. Actually, it's a blog, period.

I'm extremely baked right now. More than usual. Yet, I'm also feeling a sense of clarity. This is actually going to be a collection of thoughts, all of which are tangentially related to the league. How tangentially? I make no commitments to an exact value.

I do hope that if you read it, you find it entertaining.

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A Giveaway

When I get paid on this article, I'm going to give 10% to a random person who posts in this thread within the next 24 hours. I have to have the time limit, or else people are going to bump it nonstop. Then it will never actually be graded, and "The Giveaway" will just become a long-running SMJHL meme.

Actually, that might not be a bad idea, but I do actually want to give money to a random person, so 24 hours it is. Godspeed.

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Idea 1: Change the Fighting System

[Image: Colton-Orr-George-Parros-Fight.jpg?itok=NhI81B_h]

[Image: Colton-Orr-George-Parros-Fight.jpg?itok=NhI81B_h]

Fighting has been a hockey staple throughout the sport's history, but does it have a place in the SHL? Can we please finally just answer this question?

There has been some discussion lately around whether or not enforcers have a place in our league. On the one hand, I understand where GMs and players are coming from -- players who do nothing more than fight and take penalties are a liability in the sim. You can't blame a manager for not wanting to punish 19 other players by putting an enforcer in the lineup, just as a chaos agent.

At the same time, I also think that this is, at its core, Dungeons and Dragons for sports nerds. The ultimate beauty in this site is being able to roleplay as whatever you want to be in the hockey world. That's why, if I want Hariken Urawa to be a formerly-unknown Japanese hockey player turned viral superstar, I can will that into existence for him.

Just the same, if someone wants to be Doug Glatt or Bob Probert or One-Punch Man, they should be able to do so. Fighting is a part of the game, and it can be a key story element that gives us all another thread to write about as we are putting our media together. I think eliminating the enforcer archetype entirely would be sad.

That said, Fighting is considered a useless stat in the sim. Most players will never put any TPE into fighting. A player only needs to increase fighting by a few points to be one of the most prolific fighters in the sim, so raising fighting to anything past 45 makes little sense. Fighting pretty much only has use if part of your player's story is the fact that he/she is an enforcer.

The Fighting stat is basically the frequency with which a player will fight in the sim, which is why raising it any further than a few points is a waste of TPE in our league. Suppose we took Fighting off of the standard TPE scale, and instead made it a trait that players could choose one of four values. Those four values would be:

Never (0) - The player will essentially never fight. I only say essentially because I don't know how STHS handles zeroed-out stats, or if it's even possible. The lowest might be 1, which means even Never Fighters can get into the occasional scrap.
Rarely (25) - The player will very rarely get into fights in the sim, and maybe will have a handful of them throughout their career
Sometimes (50) - The player has a 50/50 chance of dropping the gloves when the situation warrants it, and will show up somewhat regularly on the penalty sheet for fighting
Often (75) - The player is basically one of the fiercest fighters in the league, and will drop the gloves very often, especially when on the ice against other Often Fighters

The main advantage of this proposal is that it represents a compromise. Fighting is still an aspect of the game that a player can choose to make a part of their story if they wish. However, it costs no TPE to increase your fighting rating, and fighting is treated as a player trait (like a strength or weakness) as opposed to a directly-trainable attribute.

This means that players won't have to choose between putting TPE into skill attributes and making fighting a part of their game. It allows the freedom to have physicality and aggression be a part of the player's overall identity without needlessly closing the door to their ability to otherwise contribute to their team's success.

Is this a good idea? A bad idea? Not an idea at all? Well, tell me what you think in the comments.

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Idea 2: Loans

This is more of a business idea that I had for myself rather than a league idea, unless the Bank wants to consider it.

I was thinking of starting my own loan business here, offering cash loans to players with reasonable interest rates provided that they are paid off by the end of the loan's term (which would be negotiated). The main reason I thought about doing this is because I pull in a lot of money from writing -- more than I know what to do with -- and I want to find some way to make it passively work for me.

The main drawback to this idea is that I don't know how to collect in the event that someone defaults on a loan. I could see a player from a rival team take a loan and then not pay it back just to try and cripple my own bankroll, and I don't really think negative reputation or the inability to take loans out in the future would be enough of a deterrent to stop people from gaming the system.

That's why I think this idea probably only comes to fruition if the league decides to implement it in a centralized way. There isn't really a way for a player to police their own loans, other than the honor system.

I might revisit this later on in the post, but for now, that's the end of this idea train.

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How are you so high?

(Note: I am an adult of legal age in a country that has legalized marijuana. If this section breaks any site rules, just delete it from my post. Please keep the rest intact)

I usually take edibles, but my stock has dried up, and all I had left is about a gram of bud. Anyone who has made edibles knows that you usually need to make some kind of THC butter or oil, which takes time and effort and also requires a lot more than a single gram of bud.

However, for years, anytime I've been in this sort of pinch I've just made myself a couple of firecrackers. I know what you're thinking. "What are firecrackers?"

Firecrackers are a way for those like me, who like being high but don't really like smoking/vaping, to get the satisfaction of the edible high in a pinch when you don't have enough weed to make true edibles.

To make these, you're going to need the following supplies:

Crackers or hard cookies: If you're in a pinch, you can use bread, but it won't be ideal. I'll explain why.
Peanut butter or Nutella (or both if you're feeling extra dank)
Bud (at least a gram)
Aluminum foil
A grinder
If you don't own a grinder, a shot glass and a pair of scissors

Go gather the supplies, and then come back. Got them? Okay, good.

First thing you're going to do is preheat your oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. If you're anywhere outside of North America, that's about 162 degrees Centigrade.

While the oven is heating up, take your bud, put it in the grinder, and grind it up until it's very fine, almost like a powder (but not quite). If you don't have a grinder, you'll need to drop your bud into the shot glass and then chop it up with the scissors repeatedly until it's the needed texture. This is tedious, but also sort of relaxing if you do it mindlessly while watching Netflix or something.

Alright, now that you've got your weed into a powder-like consistency, it's time to assemble the firecracker.

First, take two crackers or cookies. Think of your firecracker as a sandwich, and these are the slices of bread. You can use actual bread, like I said, but the results won't be ideal. I'm very close to the time where I will explain why not, but we aren't there yet. Stay tuned.

On one side of each cracker/cookie, spread a generous amount of either peanut butter or Nutella. I do mean generous - more than you'd spread on a normal sandwich. It's important that you have enough of it to totally ensconce your powdered bud.

Now that you've got the two crackers/cookies slathered with your fatty, oily medium of choice, take your powdered bud and sprinkle it onto each half, on top of your peanut butter/Nutella. Make sure that you coat as much of the surface area as you can with ground-up bud.

Now I'll explain how this works, and also why using bread increases the odds that you'll screw up. As you heat up the powdered bud in the oven, the oil in your peanut butter/Nutella starts to soak up the THC while the bud decarbs. This turns your normal spread into a pretty awesome mixture that will get you baked if you eat it, assuming you don't mess it up. This is why you need something oily and fatty like peanut butter, Nutella, or something similar.

Cookies or crackers work best because they're hard, and less likely to soak up the oil from your spread. You want the oil to soak up THC instead of getting absorbed by the outer layers of the Firecracker. Because bread is softer and more porous, it's likely going to absorb some of the oil that would have otherwise been infused with THC, leading to an overall weaker experience.

Alright, now that you've thrown away your bread, gone to the store, bought a sleeve of Chips Ahoy, come back, and reassembled your new firecracker-to-be, the next thing you're going to do is sandwich the two halves together, essentially burying the bud in the middle of the spread. You should now have a cracker/cookie sandwich of either peanut butter or Nutella, with copious amounts of bud right in the middle.

This is where the foil comes into play. Foil is your best friend. It's what holds this magical little delight together and enables all of the goodness that is about to ensue. Take a reasonably-sized piece of foil and place your firecracker-to-be in the middle of it, then wrap it up like a fast-food burger. Wrap it tight enough so that everything is held together, but not so tight that you crush it.

Once wrapped, toss your foil-wrapped firecracker-to-be onto the top rack of the oven, and bake it for 20 minutes at the temperature I specified above.

When it's done, you'll probably want to refrigerate it for a few minutes before eating it. I wouldn't recommend eating it straight out of the oven. For starters, it's going to be hot as hell. Imagine the roof of your mouth after eating a hot slice of pizza, and then multiply that by 100.

Now that your tongue is obsessively feeling the roof of your mouth for hanging skin, you've probably waited long enough to go get your firecracker out of the fridge and enjoy it.

If it's your first one, eat half. Wait two hours. If you aren't baked by then, you probably got a dud. That's okay. Try using more spread or grinding your bud more next time. However, if it worked, you probably have a pretty kickass high by now.

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What are you doing tonight?

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The Office!: A Musical Parody is on tour after selling out in New York City. If you're on the Dark Theme, the above image is going to look trippy.

The Mrs. and I are going to see The Office!: A Musical Parody. It's exactly what it sounds like. They took The Office and turned it into a musical. Needless to say, we are very excited.

I'm also a little nervous though. I think that the potential for disappointment is high. If the title of my post didn't give it away, I am a huge fan of The Office. It's one of those shows that I rewatch regularly, and I can either watch it in sequence or fire up a random episode and still be entertained.

Thus, I think it's going to be pretty hard to live up to the extremely high bar that the show has set for comedy and writing in my mind. I hope that the songs are catchy and well-written. I hope that the actors they cast are representative of the characters they're playing. The Office has such iconic and memorable characters that it's hard to replicate, but I'm optimistic.

Speaking of which, this is probably why you don't hear much about the actors from that show anymore. Like, Rainn Wilson is a fantastic actor, no doubt, but he's Dwight. You can look at him in any performance in any show, and he is always going to be Dwight Schrute. It's not his fault. It's not that he's a bad actor. It's actually because he's such a good actor.

This is why John Krasinski's success as an actor post-The Office is so incredible. Jim is arguably the most recognizable character from the show next to Dwight and Michael, but Krasinski has still been able to reinvent himself as the star of more serious productions like A Quiet Place. I mean, he's Jack Ryan now. That's a pretty incredible reinvention.

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Taking a break

I'm going out to the aforementioned musical now. When I'm back, I'll keep writing and also answer some audience questions. Anyone who asks a question will be entered in the giveaway mentioned above.

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And we're back

Well, the show was incredible. I will have more on that in a moment, but first, a few other things.

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Idea 3: The SHL Coffee Table Book

Over the years that this league has existed, how many pages of media do you think have been written by its players? There must literally be thousands of pages of content about this fake hockey world that we fake live in. Honestly speaking, it would make a great coffee table book.

I'm not really saying that it would work as an actual book, but it would make a great coffee table book that people could idly flip through while sitting on the couch. It could have pages of articles interspersed with graphics and other collateral that has come out of this league's collective creative mind over the past 10+ years of its existence.

The book would also be in chronological order, so that if you read it cover to cover (which most wouldn't), you'd have a loose but complete picture of the history of the league, and also know all of the important moments and characters.

Years later, after the book exceeds expectations, you get to a point where our league has enough of a cult following that we use the book proceeds to produce the screenplay for Simulation Hockey League: A Musical Parody. It goes on to win a Tony.

Thoughts on this idea? I think that forming a book/musical exploratory committee would be my first act as SHL Intern.

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Idea 4: Tie Morale to Activity

The theme of this idea is similar to the fighting idea, in that we're trying to take a statistic that exists in the sim and turn it into something useful. Right now, morale is basically a non-factor if I'm understanding the league rules right. I don't think morale is ever modified from its baseline value in this league, but I am only going to say that I am 99.999% confident.

Anyway, I had an idea that players who are active should have a boost in the sim over players who aren't. I know what you're saying right now.

"We already have activity checks, and they give you TPE. That already gives active players an advantage. We don't need an additional layer." -What you're saying right now, probably

Yes, activity checks give you TPE, which goes into attributes, which makes your player better in the sim. However, it is not the case that the player with the highest attributes always does the best in the sim on any given night. What if there was an additional factor in the sim that could be influenced directly by your actions around the league?

The basic idea: the more active you are on the site, the higher your morale is. What impact does morale actually have in the sim? Well, let's quote the words of the great Simon T. Hockey God himself:

"It affect (sic) the performance of the player in the simulator."

How much does it affect performance? Well, it's a mystery, and we would have to a few test sims to really iron out the wrinkles and make sure it doesn't tip the scales too drastically, but I do think it would be nice to have another mechanism to incentivize activity.

Here is a rough idea of how I think the scale would work:

99 morale - You did every activity check in the month, completed every PT in the month, AND submitted at least two pieces of graded media in the month
90 morale - You did every activity chcek in the month, completed every PT in the month, OR submitted at least two pieces of graded media in the month
80 morale (current league baseline) - You did two or more (but not all) activity checks in the month, completed two or more (but not all) PTs in the month, OR submitted a piece of graded media in the month
70 morale - You did not do a single activity check, point task, or graded media submission this month

I really think it would be interesting to see what kind of impact such a change would have on team performance. In the SMJHL, it might allow teams of active but low-level rookies (shout out to my Raptors

homies) to actually compete against the teams laden with inactive but developed veterans. It would add another dimension to the league that would give activity another, more direct impact on the outcome of games.

If you really think about it, this idea makes a ton of sense. Being active around the site is putting in the time to make your player better. That means when you're active, it's like your player is spending extra time on the ice, doing more reps at the gym, eating clean, etc. It makes sense that the players doing the most work would have the highest morale.

At the same time, a player who has been inactive maybe hasn't left his house in months, only shows up to games, shows up to them smelling like booze/weed, doesn't give it all on the ice, etc. It makes sense that these players should have the lowest morale.

If you think this is a terrible idea, go ahead read this whole article again from the top, and then after you read this section again, stop and give me positive reputation. Hopefully I've changed your mind.

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Capturing a Moment from My Youth - The Office!: A Musical Parody

That was a great show. One of the best musicals I've seen. It was incredibly well-cast and captured the essence of each of the characters.

As a parody of an already-hilarious show, TO!:AMP was over-the top ridiculousness in some parts (in a good way, still). Each character had their identifying trait played up to the max. Michael is very inappropriate (more than the show), Dwight is a giant kiss-ass and especially weird, Kevin is especially dumb, Meredith is especially trashy, Oscar is especially flamboyantly gay, and so on. It's a parody, after all.

The show must have been written by fans of the show as a tribute. The amount of fan-service in the writing in undeniable. They referenced all of the major moments from the show, and all throughout, you could hear whispers of "I remember that episode!" throughout the auditorium.

Perhaps more beautifully, the show captured the human element of The Office that made it so relatable and caused all of its fans to fall in love with it in the first place. Interspersed between the hilarious musical numbers are the sweet little moments between Jim and Pam that ultimately lead to them getting married (after dealing with Roy and Karen first).

In all, TO!:AMP is an over-the-top send-up of a show that was already designed to be an over-the-top rendition of the daily lives that most of us in the working world experience day-in and day-out. We relate to annoying but well-meaning bosses, office crushes, suck-ups at work, office politics and drama, corporate shills, and all of the other myriad personalities and plotlines that made up this great show for so many seasons.

I was asked in the questions if I like the show Scrubs. I do. It holds a similar esteem in my mind to The Office, though it isn't quite number one in my heart the way The Office is.

Still, what Scrubs shares with its spiritual television cousin is that brand of humor that pushes the boundaries of believable in a workplace, but interspersed with enough drama, heartbreak, and sadness to remind us all that humor plays an important role in life, which is to allow us to lean on each other and cope with the true hardships that life inevitably throws our way.

That's what makes these kinds of shows so relatable. A Scrubs musical would probably be a cult hit, if it doesn't already exist.

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Sign-off

No more jokes?

Does that include That's What She Said?

It does?

Oh, wow... that is going to be really hard.

Do you really think you're going to be able to handle that?

Well, you always left me smiling and satisfied.

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CleverPin · 08-10-2019, 07:31 PM

Love this honestly, reminds me of an article I did! Love to see the personal approach and your take on implementing ideas!

***BadWolf*** · 08-10-2019, 07:52 PM

Very good article, fun to read.
Have fun seeing The Office!: A Musical Parody, i wanna go.

SlashACM · 08-10-2019, 07:52 PM

Way to flex that you have a wife on us smh my head

*slothfacekilla* · 08-10-2019, 08:05 PM

Great read. The firecracker talk took me back... I haven't done that in so long! Definitely let us know how that musical was.

***luke*** · 08-10-2019, 08:08 PM

@Wasty show this guy the getting high thread

hewasajazzman · 08-10-2019, 08:30 PM

im trying this cracker idea. ill let you know how it works out.

Wasty · 08-10-2019, 08:53 PM

I don’t deal with edibles that much I’m a flower type of guy through and through and I rarely ever run out of weed now. But good info for everyone else! Great article.

#40 Niclas Wastlund - W - VANCOUVER WHALERS Whalers

/ TORONTO NORTH STARS Stars

Thunfish · 08-10-2019, 09:04 PM

I'd be big into having the possibility of choosing how much my player would be able to fight. I mean, you'd think an Irish Ninja would be deep into knocking people out anyway.

Nokazoa · 08-10-2019, 09:37 PM

Quote:I'm extremely baked right now. More than usual. Yet, I'm also feeling a sense of clarity. This is actually going to be a collection of thoughts, all of which are tangentially related to the league. How tangentially? I make no commitments to an exact value.

Sold from the very beginning. So now I'm gonna talk about the various bits of the blog

1. Fight system change. I don't hate the idea of this. I don't know how much it'll take to change the sim like that, but it really isn't a bad idea. Keep the skills that affect wins in place, maybe make them more meaningful to fighting success, and boom its a pretty good compromise. Though just removing it is probably easier.

2. Loans would be a neat idea. You hit the nail on the head with why it would be hard to do without it being regulated by HO though. That and it could lead to the abuse of first gens and it would probably lead to a lot of unforeseen consequences. Because it relies on people being decent to each other

3. Not gonna really comment on you being high. but uhhh have fun

4. I like the office but my rewatch show is Scrubs. Let me know how the musical went. You like Scrubs?