My final Guild Wars 2 community round-up at GuildMag is now online. After 250 posts at GuildMag, I’m not burned out, but my new job (and the daily commute) won’t allow me enough free time to do the column justice, so I’m trying to go out gracefully. Aside from my “farewell address”, there’s the usual assortment of blog posts, videos, podcasts, and fan fiction from around the GW2 community.
To say last night’s game was ugly is to sugarcoat the truth: last night’s game was a shitshow. For those of us on #TeamTeddy, the news that Bridgewater would be inactive came as a knell of doom for any hopes we had for the eventual outcome. Before halftime, Twitter was starting to see calls for Christian Ponder to be benched in favour of Chandler Harnish, who’d just been elevated from the practice squad (and who’d only just joined the team this week).
All through the preseason, I expected the Vikings to trade Ponder for (at best) a mid- to late-round pick. When that didn’t happen, I thought they were just going to hold on until a team’s starting quarterback got injured and then they could get a better trade … I didn’t think the Vikings would be on their third starting quarterback of the season by game 5! Now that Ponder has shown he really is who we thought he was, I doubt that anyone in the league is likely to call the Vikings and make an offer for Ponder’s services. As Jim Souhan says in his Star Tribune column today, he’s still the same old Ponder:
They could have called.
They could have gone to Hallmark.
They could have Instagrammed or texted or Facebooked or Snapchatted or beamed telepathic messages west.
Instead, the Vikings franchise turned an entire game on “Thursday Night Football” into a get-well card for Teddy Bridgewater, who will ever more be known as Not The Ponder.
Bridgewater has played six full quarters in the NFL. He has proved himself a franchise quarterback with his presence. He proved his value even more with his absence.
His presence made the Saints game competitive, and brought the Vikings an upset victory over Atlanta.
His absence may have destroyed what was left of Christian Ponder’s career, and the horrid tradition of “Thursday Night Football,” otherwise known as “What Time Can We Flip to ‘Scandal’?”
Without Bridgewater to engage Vikings receivers and TV viewers, another edition of TNF turned into a reason to take night classes on fall Thursdays.
In a performance that conjured images of Josh Freeman and Spergon Wynn throwing knuckleballs and sabotaging their careers on Monday night games in 2001 and 2013, Ponder proved that you can believe some of the people some of the time but never football coaches when they’re trying to protect the feelings of a former first-round quarterback or the man who drafted him.
When the Vikings kept saying nice things about Ponder during training camp, you had to figure they were hoping to trade him. When they kept saying nice things about him while keeping him on the roster, you had to wonder whether offensive coordinator Norv Turner had rewired Ponder the way some made scientists can turn a toaster into a short-wave radio.
Thursday’s 42-10 loss was a reminder that in politics, parenting and sports, what people do always counts for much more than what they say.
Published on 2 Oct 2014
Our heroes emerge victorious… for now!
This is rather cool:
HMS Cavalier virtual tour (via Google Maps)
CInsideMedia has done it again with exclusive access to the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Cavalier at the Historic Dockyard, Chatham.
The class C/A destroyer celebrated her 70th anniversary on 5th April 2014, having served during World War II and then subsequently being refitted in 1957 to remove the mid-ship torpedoes and replacing them with anti-submarine squid mortars.
Following on from the massive success of CInsideMedia’s Google Maps Business View tour of HMS Ocelot, The Historic Dockyard Chatham is making it possible for anyone in the world to ‘virtually visit’ this National Destroyer Memorial and last surviving Royal Navy Second World War Destroyer.
Over two days of exclusive access, the CInsideMedia team were guided around the destroyer by the Dockyard’s Scott Belcher (Duty Manager: Visitor Operations, Security and Health and Safety) and Chris Tutt (Marketing).
The team captured over 350 panoramas meticulously capturing almost every deck of the 363 ft, 1.7 ton former Arctic Convoy vessel, including the gear room and engine room which are normally only accessible on special request due to Health & Safety and limited accessibility.
Among those currently imagining our possible futures, one of the most persuasive is the novelist William Gibson, who, having evolved quite a bit past the man who wrote Neuromancer in 1984, can hardly be said to be imagining futures at all, with his most recent novels constituting, in his words, “speculative fiction of the very recent past,” more oriented toward social situations than technological situations. With the possible exception of David Foster Wallace, no novelist of whom I am aware has ever written with such freshness and imagination on the subject of advertising and marketing, which is a big part of what Wallace called “the texture of the world I live in.” Nor has any novelist quite so precisely identified what is sinister in our world of ubiquitous sales pitches: that something whose entire purpose is to be at the center of our attention still manages to be somehow covert. The marketing mentality is an invasive species; earnest young people now speak entirely seriously about their “personal brands” at the same time they complain about the commodification of this or that. Gibson understands the strangeness of our times, and my own mental shorthand for the odd little details one sometimes encounters, particularly in urban life, when one identifies something that is entirely ordinary and yet feels as if it were not in its right time and place, is “Feeling like I’m living in a William Gibson novel.”
Kevin D. Williamson, “Futures Trading: We are no longer thinking about the future because we believe we are there”, National Review, 2014-10-01.
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