Just a quick note to anyone dropping by: I’m on Twitter, at http://www.twitter.com/icecreamjonsey.

(Please click for full image.)

The webhost I use for Jolt Country is POE Hosting. I can’t say enough good things about them. They are utterly fantastic. If I could, I would use them for everything. 

Ah, but I can’t: the other site I run, Caltrops.com, is oftentimes a drama-filled mess. Caltrops was created when the forum on Old Man Murray was removed. The founder of POE Hosting ran Old Man Murray… you can see where this is going. For Caltrops, and Caltrops alone, I needed a different host for the sake of simplicity and good feelings for everyone involved.

For years I had been using midPhase. Now, I am not going to trash them:  for the longest time, they were okay. I have a few complaints, and rather than make it this huge thing, I’ll just list them. Oh, let’s do it after a jump so I’m not dorking up the place!

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Two of my Internet friends, Jhoh and Jsoh Cable, recently had a spell with a carbon monoxide leak. Luckily, they were able to get the situation corrected, and they’re both gonna be fine.

I contacted a few posters on Caltrops.com (where I “hang out” with the twins) and together, we all signed a get-well card for them. 

Would you like to know more?

Although I definitely had some stuff I have to do around the yard tomorrow, I did mostly take tomorrow off from work to play Fallout 3. I have talked about using a vacation day for a video game for years, but I am not sure if I had actually done so before? I have to get down to under two weeks by the end of the year, so knowing I have to burn some anyway… well, here we are.

Fallout 3 is installing as I write this. Actually, knowing a little something about how long it takes, I can write several thousand words and the fact that it is still installing shall still be true.

I have found, as I have become older, that I am willing to set a game down for anything. It’s like I am just looking for an excuse to do so. Don’t like the save system? Boom! Outta there. Don’t like the default control scheme? Good day! I said good day! It doesn’t work well with my trackball, because the game needs a scrollwheel? I don’t even have to say it. 

It’s sort of sad, because I stopped pirating games years ago, but my ability to instantly drop a game and never return didn’t change. This is all really starting to cost me a lot of money. I dropped the original Half-Life because it was TOO SCARY. This is really stupid of me. But I end up knowing fairly quickly if I am going to finish a game… BioShock and Freedom Force are probably the last two that I just “knew” I’d play until they were done. 

So I am a little worried about the money I just dropped on Fallout 3. I was under the impression that – at some point in the game – we’d all be able to pick what city we want to set a suitcase nuke off in. I have seen about seventeen seconds of promotional video for this game, and I guess I had created a weird fiction off it. It’s fine, it’s okay – nobody is saying “FUCK YOU BETHESDA” here or anything. I really do know nothing about how it plays, what the story is going to be like, whether it’s really destined to be the horror that the guys at No Mutants Allowed seem to think it’ll be… I know nothing. This is how I wanted it. (I knew literally nothing about BioShock before grabbing that last year, aside from the fact that I’d be shooting libertarians at some point.) 

I’m excited. Right now, as Fallout 3 completes its installation procedure (I have to admit, it was rather quick!) it’s the greatest game that has ever existed. I hope the reality just comes close!

I hate doing this, but I was swamped today – the only writing I did today is, man this is going to dork the place up something fierce – my take on why Wrath of Khan is more fondly remembered than Star Trek: Nemesis, even though there was plenty of cheese in Wrath of Khan. 

Enjoy! And let’s not ever discuss this one in person. 

This is a few years old, but comes from me trying to learn how to make photographs look more comicy.

Concept by Jhoh “Creexul” Cable, words by Mischief Maker, I put the panels together. You can click on it to get the whole thing, uncompressed. 

Pinner wrote the article with that very title on Caltrops, which I will link to … here! 

(OK, the link works now.)

I remember reading the Saints’ schedule at the beginning of the year. It’s soft-serve ice cream. This was the weakest schedule I’ve ever seen them with.

I’m not going to blame Ed Hochuli for a miserably-officiated game. The Saints beat themselves. I’m not going to blame all the turnovers or Martin Gramatica. Antoine Winfield was the best player out there tonight, if you subscribe to the theory that the MVP of a game should come from the team that won.

What gets me is just how much of the joy I seem to be missing from sports.

When Reggie Bush took back his first punt, I was screaming at Pinback in Google Chat. He almost broke the next punt, and I flipped my shit when he took the punt after that back for a touchdown. Because, this was going to be a special game for Saints fans. This was going to be the game we describe for years as, “The game where they fumbled four times and were saved by Reggie Bush.”

Of course, it wasn’t that. Bush is an amazing player who doesn’t fit the mold of a normal running back or wide reciever. I guess he’s become my favorite player because, unlike Brees or Deuce, I never had to hear that they were horrible “busts” for years on end, by terrible sportswriters. (An aside – the terrible sportswriter known as Rich Tosches has started having Yahoo delete the mails that Pinback writes that clearly explain how horrible he is. Delete this, Tosches: YOU’RE WORTHLESS.) To me, when you take the fact that the guy is rich, he’s a young kid that had most of the press in this country saying how much he sucked in 2007. That stirs sympathy in me, I suppose.

So when he took the second punt back, to give the Saints the lead, I thought that this was going to be one of those games I’d always remember, fondly. It isn’t, of course. It won’t be. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Saints beat the Vikings. No matter how shitty they are, the Vikes find a way. It’s be admirable if it didn’t make me sick.

A few years ago, the Saints needed one win in their final three games to go to the playoffs. They were playing three of the worst teams in the NFL to finish up - Minnesota, Cincinatti and Carolina. The Vikes were hopeless that season. They scored late and normally, a team would have kicked the extra point to put the game into overtime. Instead, head coach Mike Tice realized he had nothing to lose, so he went for two.

Daunte Culpepper took the snap. He fumbled the ball. He scooped it up. He ran into the end zone. Two points. Game over.

(The Saints would then lose to the Bengals and Panthers, end up 9-7 with a three-game losing streak, and miss the 2002 playoffs.)

That’s the kind of football I’ve tortured myself with.

WHEN DOES IT EVER GET BETTER?

Not tonight, that’s for damn sure. I honestly didn’t feel bad after the Broncos loss. Now I feel like I’ve wasted, what, 16 weeks x 30 years = 480 football weeks, or 9 years? 9 years of my life, worrying about this nonsense?

Okay, maybe it didn’t ruin my life when I was *five*, but still. I need a new hobby. Something.

My pitching has been pretty terrible in my first two seasons. I think my team was letting up like five runs a game. Some of this was due to my park (I played in the 2005 version of the Skydome, which was a rocket launching pad) and some of it was because the pitchers I had were just not that good. I was also trying to “develop” a few pitchers for later. By “develop,” I mean:

Let’s say I am about to play the 2006 season. I know that Shaun Marcum had a lousy 2006, but had a promising 2007. In order to ensure that Marcum is on my team for 2007, I need to play him at a 33% clip for the 2006 season. He needs to face 33% of the batters he faced in the real-life 2006 (keeping in mind we only play 82 games).

This results in me throwing out a hilariously bad pitcher for many innings. But the benefit is that I can, thereafter, enjoy his really good seasons. Of course, he just recently had Tommy John surgery in real life, meaning he will be useless to me when we play the 2009 season. So I am having second thoughts about snapping up pitchers in the hopes that they develop.

Here’s what my rotation and bullpen look like for 2008:

 Scott Kazmir, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays. 12-8, 152 IP, 3.49 ERA, 125 ERA+, 1.267 WHIP

Absolutely dominated left-handed bats. Actually, in terms of just batting average, he was great – righties hit .227 off him, and lefties hit .198. He let up more home runs in 2008 than he did the year before, and that’s with pitching 44 less innings. He missed a bunch of time at the beginning of the year, but with how my rotation went, I am just glad he’s not having a combo Tommy John surgery / torn labrum stay in Alabama. Kazmir was inexplicably terrible for me when we played the 2006 Diamond Mind baseball season, and I never really figured out why. I was skipping his starts at one point. Infuriating.
 

Shaun Marcum, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays, 9-7, 151 IP, 3.39 ERA, 127 ERA+, 1.163 WHIP

I don’t have a lot of insightful things to say – he looked dominating for most of the year. He was sent down to Syracuse when he started getting rocked, and the story has it that the Chiefs pitching coach figured out a problem with his mechanics in a single pitch. He came back up, was dominant again… and then had to shut it down for TJ surgery. He’ll miss the entire 2009 season. I get the trifecta here: he’s gonna be gone from my favorite real-life team (Toronto), he was going to be a keeper on my fantasy baseball team, and he was supposed to anchor my rotation for my DMB team. Also, he was going to help me move a few arcade cabinets downstairs next month, and I guess that’s cancelled, too. (/shakes fist)

 

Felix Hernandez, RHP, Seattle Mariners, 9-11, 200 IP, 3.45 ERA, 121 ERA+, 1.385 WHIP

He walked more batters per inning in 2008, and he also drilled 8 guys, which will be fun to see during the season. “Fun,” as in, at least he can’t hit my own batters.  Left-handed batters hit .275 off him, which won’t be fun, so I should probably make some kind of effort at picking up some in DMB, instead of having them dispersed through the other 7 teams. I have to assume he’ll stick with the Mariners as they rebuild, but he does seem to be the kind of guy whose concentration and ability to not balloon up you worry about. He’s kind of chubby, in that pick, isn’t he?

 

Gil Meche, RHP, Kansas City Royals, 14-11, 210 IP, 3.98 ERA, 114 ERA+, 1.317 WHIP

I have received an EARFUL all season long about Mr. Meche, since I subscribe to Rany Jazayerli’s blog about the Royals. I don’t even like the Royals, but I read that blog because the writing is very insightful. I’ll happily throw Gil out there every five days because it takes a special brand of person to sign a $55 million contract, understand the world is giving you shit about it, take 55 as your uniform number, and then go out and earn the money.

 

Josh Beckett, RHP, Boston Red Sox, 12-10, 174 IP, 4.03, 114 ERA+, 1.187 WHIP

I was just going off ERA here, really, in terms of the makeup of my lineup, but Beckett had a better season than Meche, I believe. He’s also my hammer when I play the 2007 season in a bit. I know that Beckett had some trouble with his oblique muscle(s) this year, and it is amazing to me how hitters will jump on a guy with the slightest amount of weakness. When Roy Halladay had his appendix removed, we could tell there was something wrong as fans – we were RELIEVED that it was just that. Beckett is the sort of guy that’s safe to draft in our AL-only league: he’s not leaving Boston unless he sucks, and if he sucks maybe I didn’t want to play him anyway.

 

Justin Speier, RHP, Anaheim Angels,  2-10, 68 IP, 5.03, 87 ERA+, 1.412

I’ll kill myself before keeping Speier on my 2008 team. He’d need to put up Cliff Lee num… no, fuck that, he’d need to put up Sandy Koufax numbers in 2009 for me to play him at a 33% clip for 2008. He’s gonna be a solid, solid player in 2007, though – what happened to this guy? Did he just get old?

 

Dustin McGowan, Toronto Blue Jays, 6-7, 111 IP, 4.37 ERA, 99 ERA+, 1.374

Well, after my horrendous trade (may I mention that I am never trading away draft picks again?) I absolutely have to keep him and hope that he makes a full recovery in 2009. What he did to right-handed pitchers in 2007 showed a complete lack of respect for hitters, and frankly, I’d say that the MLBPA should have gotten involved and asked him to take it easy, but fuck me, he’s like the 80th injured Blue Jays pitcher that I have.

 

Casey Janssen, Toronto Blue Jays, Did Not Play in 2008

Janssen had surgery to repair a torn labrum in 2008. He was nails in 2007 – I’ll be carrying him over in the hopes that he becomes a “free,” quality starting pitcher in 2009.

 

So, yeah, I think it’s safe to say that when it comes to the bullpen in 2008… I could use some help.