Four Things on a Friday: A Personal Round-Up

I want you guys to appreciate how busy I got this week. It's college football Week 0, both AFF podcasts ran over an hour this week, and I'm looking for a cover artist for The Return of Dr. Necropolis. And let me just note that as much as I love that title, "The Return of Dr. Necropolis" is long and a bit cumbersome for an actual book cover.

Sigh.

If you missed it, we had a truly outstanding AFF Army Football Show this week. Shannon Horne's husband Paul Horne joined us for an in-depth dive into Army's O-Line. I can pretty much guarantee that you've never heard anything like this before. 

It got surprisingly mathematical. Paul went straight for my engineer's heart.

Anyway. I am trying to write here a little more often, so here goes.

Podmatch

I joined Podmatch yesterday, but I gotta be honest. I already think this isn't gonna work out. The service isn't cheap. It's $38/month. That would probably be worth it if it gave me the opportunity to talk about As For Football on a bunch of podcasts, promote my other work, and get a bunch of cool new guests on the College Football Roundtable Show. 

Unfortunately, I don't think that's what's gonna happen.

We're fully into Football Season already...

If you've never seen the As For Football Army Football Show, then here's your chance. Please join us on Monday at 6:30 pm for our first actual football show of the season. We'll be previewing the Black Knights' offense and their first three games.

Tell a friend!

I Had a Nightmare (Sort of)

We shot the new AFF As For Lifestyle show last night. Given that training camp starts in less than a week, this will probably be the last one of these we do before we swing back to actual Army and/or College Football coverage.

We called last night's show Telling Your Story.

AFF Lifestyle #1: Football, R-Day, & Robots

Are there people who follow me here who don't follow AFF? I've wondered for awhile. Granted, I don't necessarily post a lot here anymore.

Anyway, the new show is up. We wound up doing about half of it on off-season Army Football news, schedule analysis, and Mailbag questions. For the rest, we talked about AI!

I'm still wondering if we're eventually gonna get cancelled because of this show, but I was really happy with it, so I'm sharing it.

Who the Hell Do I Think I Am? (2024 Update)

This is a little explainer: Who the Hell do I think I am?

I first published this when I initially joined the Bluesky social network. A lot has happened since then, so I'm re-upping it with an update as of November 2024.

Twitter Threads: Thoughts on Army's Loss to BU

From the Twitter Threads Project:

Well friends, we’ve said it all season but it bear repeating: the toughest thing in sports is consistency, especially when everybody wants to tell you how great you are. That’s simple human nature.

#AsForLax

#AsForDynamite: Why Are We Doing This?

Hello friends. I hope this post finds you well. 

Let's talk about AEW.

A common complaint among WWE fans about AEW is that "AEW doesn't tell stories," or more precisely, that AEW tends to book random matches with no built-in backstory ahead of time. Now, usually WWE fans rank just ahead of Navy fans as far as my Personal Fucks Given Rankings (PFGR) are concerned, and indeed, many of these takes have become substantially less grounded in reality since Elon started his nominal pay-for-engagement scheme over on the former bird app. 

But it still got to me this week. 

I mean, I understand that dudes are shooting out random nonsense to try to stir engagement & get Elon's money, but this week still marked spectacularly bad story comprehension.

Quick Explainer: Who the Hell Do I Think I Am?

Friends, it feels like new social media sites are popping up faster than weeds in my wife's garden. What can you do? No one's quite sure which ones are gonna stick just yet, but we're all steady joining these things for better or worse. The hope, at least for me, is that each new site will offer a way to engage a new or different audience.

But every time we join one of these sites, we have to introduce ourselves all over again. That's a pain in the butt.

So. This is a little explainer: Who the Hell do I think I am?

Top 15 Posts of 2021

The end of the year is a time for reflection and re-commitment, for thinking about what worked and what didn't, and how we can improve in the months ahead. 

My sense is that 2021 was a lot better for most folks than was 2020, but as we head into yet another year amidst yet another surge of the coronavirus, we are again reminded that we are still a long way from normal. Whatever "normal" means in the year 2022. 

Among other things, it seems like the nation's overall psychology has deteriorated. We've spent so much time physically isolated from one another that we've now become emotionally isolated as well. This has not been good for anyone. Somewhere there's an inflection point between physical health and mental health, and as a nation, I feel like we're already teetering.

I know what this means for my family and my career. It's less clear what it means for my writing and/or As For Football.

I've done year-end wrap-ups like this before, but this is the first time that I've ever tried to integrate my writing for AFF with either my social media footprint and/or with my personal blog. It's been a somewhat fraught experience, introducing even more subjectivity into the process than normal. It's never been the case that the "best" posts of the year were necessarily the most widely read, but when we add in the effects of social media influence, we exacerbate the weird, giving potentially widespread voice to some truly random thoughts.

Making this list was therefore something of a balance. Some of it spoke to me. Some of it spoke to you. Some of it was randomly retweeted by the rich and much-more-famous. What can you do? My all-time favorite post on any platform has had just 387 readers since July 2016.  I don't know what that means other than that what speaks to me doesn't always speak to all of you.

Anyway. The Top 15 Posts of 2021 are after the jump.

Blog Shots: Trying to Reach People

 

It's a Barcelona Soccer Stadium, If You Can Believe That.

We've had some staff turnover at As For Football in recent months, and that's fine.  Rob has been stepping away for a while now.  He'll be taking command fairly soon, so we've been working to transition to a place where we can continue to operate the business without him for a good long time now.  It's tough because Rob built a good amount of our infrastructure personally.  But we're -- slowly -- getting there.  I'm finally starting to feel like I understand how all the behind-the-scenes stuff works, to the point where I've lately been putting some of my own touches on a few of our fundamental operations.

Let’s Talk a Little About the BYU Cancellation & Why There Hasn’t Been a Make-Up Scheduled

A couple of guys were arguing about this on my Twitter timeline, and it got maddeningly acrimonious. Typical Twitter slap-fight maybe, but it’s still one of those things were both guys were mashing the PUSH TO TALK button without actually receiving anything. Obviously, both sides have a particular point of view, so that approach accomplished nothing.

Welcome to America.

5 Things on a Friday: Dune!

Hey everyone.  Long time, no see, yeah?  I hope you’re all doing really, really well.

Apologies up front, but the basic purpose of this post is to get you caught up on what’s going on with our family.  Sally has a new gig, and I’ve got a video for As For Football that I wanted to feature, so a lot of this is gonna be self-promotional.  Hopefully you’ll at least find it entertaining.

Happy Friday!  Let’s get it on!!!

XFL Pics: NY Guardians vs. LA Wildcats

I don't know how many folks read my XFL recap yesterday.  Emma and I had a lot of fun despite the cold, but maybe my favorite part of the game was taking a bunch of football pics.  I started working on photography because I wanted to better express what it feels like to watch Army at Michie Stadium, and being at MetLife gave me the chance to practice my new favorite hobby in an athletic context.

I ran some of these as part of my recap.  Others got cut because I flat ran out of space.  Regardless, these were my favorites from the game.  The good thing about running them here is 1) I can talk a little more about them, and 2) I can spend a little more time considering the display in terms of size and aspect ratio.

As always, pics after the jump.

5 Things on a Friday: Panic?!

Hi folks.  Happy Friday.  As you read this, I am skiing Mount Snow.  As I write this, though, it’s Thursday morning, and there’s precipitation in Vermont.

So.  Was it rain or snow?  Am I having a good day or a bad day?

With Josh & Rob at Killington.  I'll be with Josh again today.

These are burning questions.  But by the time you read this, we’ll know the answers.  As I write it, however, I can only worry and wait.  Kind of like the Coronavirus.

Goals for 2020

As I've said before, we don't call them resolutions at Casa Cabeza.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! #2020 💫 pic.twitter.com/D5pC8WMuOF

— Gina Carano (@ginacarano) January 1, 2020

Favorite Photos of 2019

Happy New Year, everyone! 

This has been a year in which Sally and I have mostly kept on keeping on.  Arguably the biggest changes in my life were my decision to commit to skiing more last winter, taking up photography early in the summer, and writing a Hell of a lot for As For Football. 

This post is most obviously about the photography.  However, it's influenced by all three.  First, I wrote so much for AFF that there's really not enough material from the blog to do a best-of retrospective for 2019.  That's been a long-running series here, and I'm sad to skip it, but there's just not much point.  Luckily, I have these pictures to show, so it's not a total wash.  A good number of these come from shots taken for AFF, so before we bemoan the lack of additional writing, it's worth remembering that the As For Football crew sent me to a heck of a lot of really fun football games this year. 

That's not nothing.

The one regret that I have with this is that it's tough to show size and aspect ratios via the blog.  Some of these ought to be shown big and others are just wide or skinny.  None of that comes across in this format.  I'd like to have a little show in our backyard, but that's definitely a project for the spring or early summer.  Paired with beer tasting and a friendly audience, it could be fun.  We'll see.

Let me just say, too, that I don't know that I'm necessarily good at this.  However, I enjoy it, and I've never been shy about showing my work to others.

For all of these, you can click the pics to them at full size.

Twitter is Not IRL

I saw a couple of interesting articles about the Democratic primary election this week, one from the NY Times and one from the Atlantic.  Both papers are struggling to understand the Democratic electorate in the Twitter Age. That’s no easy task.  Bottom line, though, the Young Left of Twitter (YLT) has decided that it hates Mayor Pete Buttigeg of South Bend, Indiana, with an abiding passion.  Apparently, this is because he is either too successful personally or else he’s not far enough left.  Or perhaps both.

My message to those I meet is simple: "este país es tu país."

This country is your country. Everyone who has made the United States their home deserves to participate fully and freely in their communities.https://t.co/sMRkVfwFwF

— Pete Buttigieg (@PeteButtigieg) December 17, 2019

CFB Games of the Week: Week 2

Y’know, I was only partially right about Tennessee last week.  I was right that they would start ugly.  I was wrong, though, about exactly how ugly they’d start.  

They’ve had a bunch of kids enter the transfer portal this week, so it looks like the wheels may be coming off down in Knoxville.  Yikes!

Don't you just love college football?