Gustav

I started my time in the VHL first by playing for Houston and next by GMing Mississauga. As luck would have it, both of these teams are hiring new GMs--Houston through @AJW stepping down and Mississauga through the recent movement of @Nathan_8 to a VHLE job. We're always sad to see our GMs go, but we're always equally excited to welcome in fresh faces. Give it up for your new Bulls GM: As well as for your new Hounds GM: We're excited to see where these new GMs can take their teams in the seasons to come, and we're looking forward to working with them to make the VHLM the best place there is on this site. As always, we love seeing everyone apply for the job and regret that we don't live in a perfect world where we can hand out teams to everyone who wants one. Stay active and keep applying if you weren't selected--we had some applicants who we're excited to keep an eye on moving forward--and perhaps you'll be in one of these threads in the future! @VHLM Commissioner

Salem has done enough voting for Ricer in the past that he was bound to hit political office eventually. Ricer is in fact the Mayor.

Happy Sunday! Gustav is enjoying his weekend, and he hopes that you are too. One thing that Gustav hopes will brighten everyone's spirit is that no one died last night. Salem is as populated as ever, and the second day begins now. Night phase to start probably on time. List of living players (16) @Adrest245 @Advantage @Alex @Berocka @Dadam30 @Da Trifecta @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @jhatty8 @Lemorse7 @N0HBDY @NSG @omgitshim @Ptyrell @Ricer13 @rory

*Gustav noises* The sun sets in Salem, a little bit early tonight. Could the sky be acting up because something supernatural is afoot? Or because Big Weather has had its strings pulled lately? Who knows. All anyone in town knows, although no one really knows why, is that tonight may end up being something other than ordinary. List of living players (16) @Adrest245 @Advantage @Alex @Berocka @Dadam30 @Da Trifecta @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @jhatty8 @Lemorse7 @N0HBDY @NSG @omgitshim @Ptyrell @Ricer13 @rory

I'll take "things the VHL never thought possible" for 200--Moscow winning a Cup, and me dragging myself into my thirtieth game of Town of Salem. The world lives in fear of how cool I would be if I spent all this time going outside and talking to people. Last game, I ignored Any All winning the poll, as it always does. I think the poll is still valuable because it gives me some perspective on what people are OK with, and if one format does a bit better than usual, I can take it as my reason to swing it that way by executive decision. But this isn't a dictatorship, and Smiling Moscow is the only one who gets to wear the crown today. This game, I give the people what they want, which means that this is your role list: Player list (16): @Adrest245 @Advantage @Alex @Berocka @Dadam30 @Da Trifecta @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @jhatty8 @Lemorse7 @N0HBDY @NSG @omgitshim @Ptyrell @Ricer13 @rory Gustav wishes you a good clean fight, with Night 1 starting at approximately 10 PM Eastern tomorrow (technically today if you're also in Eastern). You may find the usual copy-paste below, and should you choose to object to my use of pasting in rich text rather than making the simple choice on your part to switch to dark mode, then you can use your fingers to count the days you have left until I chop them off. Rules are here The wiki is here -JOIN THE DISCORD SERVER! YOU'RE REQUIRED TO! HERE'S ANOTHER LINK! -I'm going with my usual starting and ending times as a general guideline: WHENEVER THE HELL I WAKE UP marks the start of each day phase, and 10 PM EST marks the start of each night phase. Those will be the times that I'll aim for, but, officially, the start of one phase and the end of another comes whenever I make the announcement. You'll be pinged. I will do my best to give out expected announcement times, but I reserve the right to kick off any phase at any time. -No talking in this thread during night phases. That goes for everybody, regardless of role. I have no power to lock this thread at night, and there's no official penalty for talking in here at night, but if you see one of your fellow citizens doing so, please yell at them for me. I CAN LOCK THE THREAD AT NIGHT, AND THERE'S NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT! If for some reason I forget, or if you have mod powers and can comment in locked threads, please keep the "no talking" rule in mind anyway. -Do not edit posts. I've been relaxed about not yelling at people who have, but editing is a sneaky way to take out potentially incriminating information. If you say something stupid, too bad. Don't change it. -If you are reasonably able to be online at the start of the night phases, please make an effort to do so. The JAILOR (if there is a Jailor) is able to speak with you in their own Discord channel at night, and that is when I will put the Jailor's target in said channel. If it is within your power to do so and doesn't present a huge inconvenience, please be online when the night phase starts and please join the server out of respect for the Jailor and their time. If you know you won't be around at the start of the night phase, it might be helpful to give me a message to forward to the Jailor during the day phase should you be placed in jail that night. -DO NOT PM ANYBODY. All communication must happen in this thread, unless you have already received an invite to a Discord server where you may speak as well. If you haven't, keep everything here. Should you wish to contact someone directly, too bad! Whispers don't exist in this format. -STAY ACTIVE. If you do go two day and night phases in a row without speaking in public, speaking in a private Discord, or sending me a night action (or specifically telling me you do not want to take a night action), I will swing the Mighty Gustav Hammer of Death. You do not want the Mighty Gustav Hammer of Death, and neither does anybody on your side. -NO ROLES ARE OFF THE TABLE. If you play the online game, you may be familiar with a Classic mode being the default, where many of the newer roles are not used. In these games, if the evil faction is the Mafia, ALL roles which are not members of the Coven may be used, and vice versa. This includes Any All and Town Traitor. -Last but not least, friendly reminder that no discussion relevant to this game in particular is allowed in the #general channel of the game server while this game is running. -Just kidding! Actually last but not least--IT IS YOUR RESPONSIBILITY TO CHECK YOUR DISCORD CHANNEL FOR NOTIFICATIONS PRIOR TO EACH DAY PHASE. It might not end well for you if you don't! -And last but not least for the third time, if you choose to change a night action, please, please, send a new message rather than editing your old one. I've missed changes because of this before as an edit doesn't give me any sort of notification if I've already seen and missed the first one...so make sure I've got it right by separating your submissions!

2020 was a time of huge social, political, and mental unrest for just about everyone. Here, in a "20" of its own, I'll talk about how that influenced both myself and the league, and how those things affected each other. You may have noticed a common theme between many of my articles in this series. I like to end these things, if I can, by reflecting on what a given story means to me, how it's shaped me as a person, and what we can learn from each other through the VHL. Even the one I wrote about Kranch has that to some extent. If you've read hard enough, you also know that I believe hard enough for it to matter to me that everyone's humanity should be respected. Now, I don't think that's saying much--it's not like the average person truly believes themselves to be hateful--but it is an idea that I've had nothing holding me back from getting out there over the years. Sometimes, I've gone on and on about it. It's fair to say that the league has had its share of teachable moments around this point over the years. I think things like the toxic Houston-Philly rivalry or the SBA drama wouldn't have unfolded in the ways that we did if we all knew how to take a deep breath and chill out a bit. But nothing up to this point is anything new to this series or even to what I've put out there on this forum prior to it. A big time in presumably everyone's life, and a time when this point was especially true, was the dreaded "COVID times"--a phrase I personally dislike, but the shortest way to get my point across. I remember sitting in my university's student union in early March of 2020 and watching people come and go across the lobby, wondering how much longer I'd be able to do that amid lots of rumors about what was in store for the rest of the semester. Regardless of how anyone may editorialize on what happened thereafter, or which political party we'd like to blame for those events, the objective facts of the situation were that a nebulous "let's all stay at home for two weeks and see what happens" turned very quickly into a "this keeps getting worse and you're going to be at home for the rest of the school year." The day before everything shut down, I went out to Barnes & Noble and made a few impulse purchases, one of them being a CD (yes, a CD) of Herbie Hancock's Head Hunters - one of the greatest jazz fusion albums of all time and something I listened to compulsively all year. It's still one of my favorites and I credit it as the origin of lots of my current musical taste. COVID was horrible. I never had it when it was a big deal, but it did a huge number on my life. At the time, I was halfway through my second year in a program where I had taken some unconventional turns through my general coursework and also wasn't in many classes exclusive to my major until the third year. Having bounced between a few places, I was friends with zero people at school when we all went home, and going to classes knowing that lots of the other little squares on the screen cared about each other by that point--but I might as well not even exist--made me feel bad. On top of that, I watched some members of my family suddenly get intensely political over the situation in ways I'd never seen before, and the whole whirlwind that came with that was something else. My extended family has some who felt quite strongly the other way, causing big divides that aren't fully fixed yet. I'll also say that by not jumping on board with the passion for who-even-knows-what, I had some of the negative feelings for also-who-even-knows-what taken out on me--and all I'd done "wrong" was to try to stay uncontroversial. I hated my job before COVID, and that really never changed, but there were certainly days where I was just happy it was getting me out of the house. "But Gustav," you say, "This isn't VHL-related in the slightest! I am going to deny all of your updates this week and call you an asshole in some restricted channel in the league server that I'm assuming you don't check very often!" To that, I urge you to chill. Not only am I getting there, but if you're still with me at this point, it means that my article has been more "forum content" and generated greater interest than the one you just approved about the contents of someone's player page. Where was I? Yeah, COVID forced me inside for over a year and fundamentally changed lots of the people around me. That was dumb. It also meant that all that time I had to sit in my room in front of my computer was potential VHL time. I wrote articles when classes I couldn't bring myself to care about played in the background and made scouting spreadsheets when it would have been really helpful for me to be using Excel for homework instead. This was also the first few seasons of my time in Davos, and I was going absolutely full-tilt into making my locker room a great place to be and trying to earn the respect of all the other GMs and players in the league as a noob. At the same time, I was using the VHL as my main social outlet and going through some rough stuff. I was up late every night to get some time purely by myself, during which I more often than not ended up lost in a weird jumble of thoughts. I don't think I remember ever dumping out onto the forum that I was sad and lonely and felt picked on and whatnot--I understand that at the end of the day, the people in the VHL are not my therapists and shouldn't have to sort through whatever negativity I have in any case. But that was also a time in my life where I felt those things more than ever--and it did work its way into my posting. I got all that out there not by expressing it directly, but just by getting really weirdly philosophical sometimes. I don't know where I'd find everything I wrote, because I'm pretty sure lots of these threads were VHL.com articles, but I took a dig through the General Discussion forum and found a couple of them. One thread puts forth an interesting question that was the topic of a speech I gave at my high school graduation a couple years earlier--the version of you that exists in the mind of one person is entirely different from the one in the mind of another, and all of those infinite "you"s are not equal to who you are in your own head, so what do you think about that and what are you going to do about it? Another one asks the community to think about something they've done recently that they're proud of and to share it and reflect on it. And, like I said, I put out many .com articles in that time that got into one thing or another--we're all real people with real hopes and dreams, you should take time in life to appreciate the things around you, do something nice for someone, all of that touchy-feely bullshit sort of thing. As a central theme, lots of what I wrote (and what I still believe) was centered on the idea that there's so much out there in our lives that we never notice because we just make ourselves too busy to be bothered. I still think that's important to consider--you ever put on a song you're familiar with and decide to really listen to it and pick up a keyboard part or a bass part that you never thought about before, or just vibe to it a little extra? What about walking around where you work and imagining the building itself being built by real people, thinking about someone putting down the tiles where you're walking or installing the lights over your head? What about driving on the highway and wondering who all these other people are and where they're going? There's so much that you make yourself miss out on, and you can tune right into it by just opening your eyes a little wider. Anyway. Before I write a whole other one of those for the first time in a few years... I'll admit that I clicked into those old threads I linked and cringed a little bit. To me now, it reads a bit like a 20-year-old kid thinking he's figured out the universe (I wonder why). I'm sure many people here went through one thread or another and judged it the same way, and I wouldn't blame them for doing so. Overall, though, I don't regret having done it. I want to say that I wrote these things to make a positive difference in others' lives, and based on some of the replies some of my threads generated, I like to think that worked. But overall, a big part of using the league as my stream-of-consciousness diary in that time was to use it as an outlet for lots of what was in my head then. By the end of one article or another, I always felt less frustrated, and it did feel good to see positive replies and a few people wanting to talk about what I'd just written. I could talk on and on about how "I spent a lot of time online" over COVID, but didn't we all? Recruitment numbers booming as hard as they did then told us everything we needed to know about how many people were trapped in their rooms. What matters to me about spending so much time online was how I used that to help myself deal with the circumstances, and I think this is the first time I've gotten even close to this far in detail about my story. Long story very short, the VHL helped me stay sane over COVID, and I still think you should slow down and be amazed by the simple things again. #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man #19: The Sun Also Rises

List of players: Adrest245 Advantage Alex Berocka Dadam30 Da Trifecta Doomsday eaglesfan036 jhatty8 Lemorse7 N0HBDY NSG omgitshim Ptyrell Ricer13 rory

30 is a wonderful number. I'm wrapping up my 30th season in the VHL! I'm in the middle of my personal 30 in 30 series, where I've been inflating my ego to unforeseen levels. Some of you, you know who you are, are even turning 30 this calendar year--you geriatrics! Most importantly of all, it's time for our thirtieth game of Town of Salem. I still don't know what I'm doing, but I still enjoy watching you try to figure out what you're doing every once in a while. And while life is busy sometimes, I want you to have fun. There might be a day or two in here where my timing isn't exact, but that's nothing we haven't worked around before. As usual, trivia is BACK! I know not many people take the time to enjoy it as much as I'd hope, but I also hope that those who do think it's a nice touch. Enjoy the copy-paste. Rules are here The wiki is here CLICK THIS LINK IF YOU'RE NOT IN THE DISCORD SERVER JOINING THE SERVER IS REQUIRED FOR ALL PLAYERS! Non-players are welcome as well. Remember that ALL game-related notifications will be given on Discord! Make sure you join the server, and check it BEFORE speaking in the game thread each day. Also, do your best to be there at the start of each night phase! If you're new to the game, read up on some roles on the wiki and go through some old game threads in this subforum. TRIVIA TIME: HERE IS THE LINK TO TRIVIA! -If you won the last game, you have an automatic 30% chance to receive a role of your choosing, if you'd like to request one. The winners of last game are listed below: @Alex @woog @Doomsday @eaglesfan036 @Ptyrell @Dadam30 @rory @Berocka @Advantage @jacobaa19 -If you didn't win the last game, you can still request a role! Play trivia, and for each correct answer, you'll earn a cumulative 5% chance toward a role of your choosing, for a maximum chance of 20%. -If you won the last game, you can still play! This possible 20% chance will be added to your 30% chance for a maximum of 50%. -No, you do not need to do this if you don't want to. -If you'd like to play without requesting a role, simply write "Random" in the role request box. Vote for your preferred format up top and sign up down below, as always. Target start date: possibly Friday night if we get enough people quickly and I'm feeling ambitious! Saturday if one of those isn't true.

Every carousel I think I remember, I also think I remember turning counterclockwise. Do you think the same, or am I just making things up? Hello VHL! As some of you may or may not have heard, @AJW will be stepping away from his GM job in Houston at the end of this season. AJ is no stranger to the VHLM. In fact, he's been a GM three different times, two of them with Houston. We've always expected the best from him, and we've always been happy to hire him because we know he'll put in the effort that the league deserves. This past time was no exception--many thanks to AJ for your time once again! That said, we're looking for a new GM in Houston. Let us know down below, and we'll pick who we like most. With the offseason comes lots of new developments, of course, and something we often have to deal with is our GMs being stolen with no notice (and we LOVE dealing with that, so please continue doing so). I mostly joke because I've been looped in on what's happening, or not happening, in at least one place so far, but as a whole it remains entirely possible that we'll still have openings that I currently have no idea about. So, if you don't see yourself hired as the next GM of the Bulls, keep in mind that you might still become the next GM somewhere else! We will keep the community (mostly) as updated as we are. Best of luck! Speak up and help us lead the next generation of sim leaguers. @VHLM Commissioner

A dump of some tabs currently open between my phone and computer: The Italian Unabomber - an unsolved case of someone in Italy who made bombs over a period of many years. Curiously, these were not intended to kill anyone--rather, just to injure. Why this was is unknown. The Oklahoma panhandle - and why it exists. American students probably remember the Compromise of 1850 as the establishment of the state of California and the foundation of American policy with regard to slavery as it expanded westward. What I personally didn't know about this was that Texas, a slave state, had a tiny strip of land in the area that was set to be free territory. This land would be cut out of Texas and is today what makes Oklahoma shaped funny. Sitka, Alaska - the largest city (by area) in the US. Not many people, but almost four times the size of Rhode Island. Casiopea - a very solid jazz fusion band from Japan. I learned from here that they have a very intricate history, with lots of different members and 36 whole studio albums over four different, officially named iterations. Their best-known album, Mint Jams, is an interesting example of a live album because it was recorded with the intent of receiving post-production treatment (including strategic editing in and out of crowd noise). Jochen Hecht - former Sabres forward who I remember from when I was a kid. I was intrigued by his playing history because it features three separate stints with German team Adler Mannheim--where he now coaches. Columbus radiotherapy accident - a reminder to pay attention to the details around you. The wrongful calibration of a radiation treatment instrument led to numerous instances of complication (and death) over many years before it was finally noticed. Randy Bass - an American baseball player who moved to Japan after limited MLB success and ended up doing really well. He still holds the record for highest batting average in a single NPB season, is a member of the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame, and ended up a state senator after baseball.

The first sig I made for Taro. This would have been sometime during the school year in 2020--I remember making it while sitting in the library wearing a mask--and I believe this would have been right at the start of my fall semester in my third year. I was just about exactly halfway through my degree and as VHL-brained as ever. I think the Japanese text is just Taro's name, but I don't remember. If you as a GM think your drafts are painful, then you need to take a second and reflect on the early days of managing super large, 2019-sized draft classes, when guidelines weren't as defined and inexperience combined with ignorance to crank out drafts that regularly exceeded 3 hours in length and often featured GMs with no regard for planning their own time or respecting others' taking multiple tens of minutes to talk out deals while on the clock. And if you think that's bad, you haven't seen anything yet. The 1974 NHL draft was excruciating, so much so that my favorite team chose to draft a player that didn't even exist. I'm going to assume that most people in this league know the deal, so I'll just link you to something in case you're unfamiliar and keep it pretty brief--the draft was conducted entirely over phone, and the Buffalo Sabres were bored. Not finding much value in the eleventh round, GM Punch Imlach and director of communications Paul Wieland created Taro Tsujimoto, a fully fictitious player from Japan, and drafted him. Before the Internet, the hoax lasted a little while before being revealed, and the NHL wasn't amused. Taro, though, would live on to become an immortal part of Sabres history and one of the greatest inside jokes that hockey has ever seen. Flash forward 45 years, and I joined the VHL. I named my first player Jerry Garcia and almost immediately regretted it--within a week, I had thought of what a great idea it would have been to take everyone's favorite fake hockey player and put him in my new favorite fake hockey league. Taro was on my mind from the start, and I spent almost a year and a half waiting until my recreate season hit and hoping that no one would come along and steal my idea before I got the chance. Thankfully, because the VHL only cared about recruiting Canucks fans, not many people joined in the seasons in between who were eager to cash in on the legend of Taro. The name and the concept were still available, and I stopped at nothing to bring everyone's favorite fake hockey player into fake reality. Taro signed in Ottawa for reasons I don't remember. My stated reason in my player creation thread, back before portal waivers, was that I wanted a good combination of team success and playing time, and I got that for all of 3 points in 19 games with the Lynx. The next season, though, took a very interesting turn when I managed to be drafted by Mississauga--the team I'd previously (inaugurally) GMed. This was where Taro's promise as a prospect took its full form--putting up 50 goals and 119 points, he was one of the top scorers in the VHLM and was on top of the TPE leaderboard at the time of the draft. I was GM of Davos at the time, and it was just my luck that at the time, I could just decide that I wanted my player and have him handed to me. The league has gone through a handful of different sets of rules regarding GMs' players, and as hard as it may be to believe for some, many here are completely unfamiliar with them. When I joined, VHL GMs controlled two players that were managed separately. One was treated just like any other player, but the other was tied directly to their team, was never drafted, and was force-retired the second they left. At some point around S70, this was switched up because it was kind of stupid and because rosters were full enough that members taking up double the space wasn't ideal. At that point, a GM got only one player, who was treated exactly the same as anyone else, except that the team could elect to designate one of their first-round picks to have automatically spent on their own player. This was what I did with Taro, and as one could expect, every GM who was picking their player in this way wanted that pick to be as close to the end of the first round as possible. Unfortunately, I never got to trade down for free picks--I had 3rd and 9th overall, using that 3rd on goaler Kunibuni UnGuri and reserving that 9th for myself. No one was interested when I asked around before the draft, and even though Toronto offered during the draft, I was at work. My picks went per my instructions, that offer went unseen, and I was still pretty happy that I'd gotten the draft's presumed #1 player, whose contract I still controlled, at #9. This would be the last season a GM player was chosen in that manner, as the old system was abolished after S75. Anyway, Taro officially started to wear purple, and that happened right from the start as we had no E (the horror! Such an unsustainable system that we used it for almost 15 years). Anyone who's bothered to read my second GM article will know that our roster found itself a bit crowded in the mid-70s. For instance, if I remember correctly, we had 8 forwards in S75. This meant that I'd be buried in the lineup, and deservedly so at rookie TPE levels. A 43-point rookie season (including Taro's only time below 25 goals) was all there was to be seen so far, and Davos missed the playoffs yet again. S76 rolled around, and as anyone who (ahem) reads my articles knows, it was the one where I decided to let our roster implode. Or, rather, we could have been competitive, but nothing worked. We still had lots of forwards on the roster (maybe we were down to 7?) and Taro's ice time was limited, but the deadline saw us selling hard. Then-top forwards Soren Jensen, SS Hornet and Robin Winter were shipped out for big draft capital, and we suddenly had more roster space that suddenly meant that Taro got top ice time. By this point, he was my top forward and I could play him like one. With an improvement over the previous season. Taro finished with 65 points, as well as an amount of hits that was finally showing signs that I'd been working on checking. By the start of S77, Taro had achieved a "good player" TPE level and was the top forward on a bad team--a recipe for some slight number inflation as well as some enjoyment floating my way on my own stat sheet. S77 featured 92 points and 234 hits, cementing Taro as a perennial VHFL favorite and dragging the team to within surprising striking distance of a playoff spot. Taro was still improving going into the offseason, and I was really looking forward to seeing how S78 went if I'd already been doing this well. And I guess S78 went OK. The team took a big step back (again), but 86 points and 284 hits was a solid total (keep in mind that averages were lower at this time) and Taro had at least earned his status as the face of the franchise. There's not much to say about S78, except that some of the players I'd added as fresh faces were about to turn the corner to good TPE totals, and I was ready to make a big splash as a GM in the coming offseason. That's where I ended my most recent GM article, and that's where I'll end this one as well. Lots of exciting memories are about to come, and you'll hear about both Taro and Davos. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2 #18: I've Been Everywhere, Man

I used to WRECK VHFL and I remember being in an article like this. Then the scoring system changed and now I suck.

I'm also way better with spreadsheets and Photoshop than I need to be at my job and it's served me well. I also think there's no way it hasn't made me a better writer--sure, I'm not using exactly the same style I would with something more professional, but I'm still essentially practicing in ways most people don't.

The EFL shut down less than a year ago after a recruitment tailspin, in this message that I dug up from the San Francisco Frenzy locker room. Aside from the VHL, it was the league where I've done the most. I max-earned for almost a full career, made a few all-star games, and was an updater for almost a year. To be a VHLer is one thing, but to be a "sim leaguer" is another. Various members of our league, some in super high standing and some who have been here far longer than I have, did not start in the VHL but were rather brought in through other leagues, whether by word of mouth or by direct recruitment or by affiliation. I distinctly remember affiliate league great @omgitshim telling me at one point that he joined his first sim league in 2005 (when I was in kindergarten, or even preschool, depending on when specifically), while @Beketov and many others started the VHL as migrants from other leagues. It's actually a bit weird that most of us here today were recruited into the VHL specifically. Most leagues can't get past that point of initial formation and into the phase of continuous, stable, independent recruitment, and it's a testament to the hard work put into any league at all that gets to that point and lasts longer than a few seasons. But because of the highly networked origin of most sim leagues, a community exists between them that leads to lots of member crossover. The VHL is the only league I'm in today, and it's always been the one I'm in the most, but I've been active to some extent in lots of places over the years. I don't think talking about my time in the VHL would be quite complete without also talking about my time in the sim league community as a whole, and here's where I'll be doing that. The SBA: I believe the SBA was the first league I ever joined outside of the VHL, and it was almost immediately after the announcement dropped that we'd be getting free TPE out of affiliate checks somewhere around S67 or so. I created a player named Michael Lang (named directly after the organizer of Woodstock), and immediately screwed up player creation in a way that made him 5'0" and 250 pounds. Thankfully, being short hurt me less as a point guard (I'm not sure what being thicc did). I wasn't very effective in my first season for I-forget-who under GM @Benson, but I won the sixth man of the year award in my second season in their development league. Sadly, my (super casual) time in the SBA would be cut short abruptly by our affiliation ending, which meant that my hard work in the VHL was no longer claimable in the SBA. Sure, I could have welfared it, but I had a little bit of bad feelings toward their administration at the time and I'm not someone who can enjoy a league anyway if I don't have the time to contribute to it. I never officially retired my player, so who knows what happened to him--probably not much. Interestingly, the SBA is also the most recent league I've joined. I've gotten to know @GoodLeftUndone over the past year or so through Town of Salem, and I made a promise that if his VHLM player made it up to the VHL, I would create in the SBA. And both of those things happened--I was very proud of the fact that no one had yet named an SBA player Cranjis McBasketball, and I was an auto-12 with lots of earning potential. Unfortunately, Cranjis would fall victim to my own not really having the energy or the motivation to care about another league, and my SBA presence died out pretty quickly. The EFL: I joined the EFL not at all long after I joined the SBA, and for exactly the same reason: affiliate checks. My first EFL player was actually my first attempt at making a Seinfeld reference in a sim league, long before Art Vandelay--Cosmo Kramer was a safety who I retired after he capped out because I misunderstood the uncapping system and thought I'd put myself too far behind. Along with Kramer, though, I'd created Robert Hunter--a fullback named after the Grateful Dead's lyricist who I kept around because I knew there were practically no fullbacks in the EFL and I wouldn't have any issue finding a team. Hunter went to @AW13's San Antonio Wolfpack and stayed there for his entire career. After retiring Kramer, I created linebacker Jabari Spalding--a rare player of mine whose name I just made up without attaching a meaning to it. Spalding would be drafted to the expansion Minnesota Frontier, run by @Renomitsu (who was at the very least GM for a good part of my time there. I think he was the first, and the one who picked me, but I can't say for sure. He's the only one I actually remember in any case). The EFL was the league I cared about the most outside of the VHL. To incentivize people to take jobs, the EFL's system would max out a player's earning at 9 if you didn't have a job and at 12 if you did--so I took a few one-off opportunities for busy work for that extra 3 and eventually became an updater. Between a few things--updating, using the EFL to practice graphics when I got into that, and playing Town of Salem--I spent enough time around the league to follow it. That plus earning well meant that I stayed interested for almost the entire career of my players--Hunter depreciated first, and I took my max earning a couple seasons into that. By the end of both careers, I was in the top 10 all-time in some stat related to their positions. I wasn't quite Hall of Fame, but managed to put together good players who were recognized around the league. I went inactive with both of my players old, and both eventually retired. After about a year out of the EFL, I rejoined with two development league players: receiver Samuel Sellers of the Trenton Generals (whose name I also just made up) and cornerback Jordan Green of the Athens Carnage (who I mostly made up, but using a color as his surname was a slight nod to then-Bills cornerback Tre'Davious White). I earned decently well and kept up...OK...for most of a development league career, but then I went inactive in what I think was my post-draft season. Both of my players went to the San Francisco Frenzy--an expansion team along with Minnesota when Spalding was drafted, but at that point a team that had survived a massive contraction. The EFL eventually fell victim to an unfortunate cycle of death a few seasons after I left it. Recruitment was weak because it was heavily reliant upon other leagues' affiliations. Because of this, few people wanted to take EFL jobs, especially when those jobs were the ones that really mattered. And having a shortage of high-power members led to lower effectiveness in bringing in new members, which weakened the user base, which led to a greater shortage of high-power members, and so on. The end of the league was something that I was sad to see, but lots of us had seen it coming by that point. Nonetheless, I made lots of great memories in my time in the EFL and would absolutely have it back in its former state if I could. The SBL: An ill-fated baseball sim league started up by @AW13 and one that I really liked for the time I spent in it--from beginning to end. Lasting just a couple seasons, I created pitcher Pedro Velasquez and max earned the whole time. I was an updater in the SBL as well and ran some of their fantasy games. It was fun! It was intended to be a sort of VHL/EFL/SBA-style equivalent of the PBE, it all made sense, and I love baseball. The SBL ended super abruptly, but for good reason--it was simply too much to keep up with from the end of administration. I don't remember who I played for (maybe Sherbrooke?) but it was a good time and I'm glad I was part of it. The PBE: I talked about the SBL first because it was my first baseball sim league. That said, there's a lot more history and establishment behind the PBE. My player Armando Velasquez, also a pitcher, was meant to be SBL Pedro's brother. I also created him right around when jazz legend Chick Corea died and gave him Chick's real first name. I remember that I played for Anchorage (who I think are called the Huskies?) in the minor league, run by very solid GM @Guriinwoodo. I earned pretty well, made some graphics that got me some respect among my teammates, and even wrote a massive article over there--the PBE, where one is paid by the word, would be super dangerous outlet for me if I stuck with it. I ended up being drafted by the Buffalo Surge near the end of the first round--also an expansion team. I've been part of lots of inaugural draft classes over the years for some reason. I didn't quite click in Buffalo the way I had in Anchorage, and ended up losing interest in both the PBE and the EFL over the same week after I went on vacation, didn't check either that week, and found that I didn't really care whether I caught up after I got back. I'm actually pretty glad that was the case because at that point I was spending way too much time in sim leagues, but the PBE is a positive space and a very fun league that I'd recommend anyone check out if you're interested in baseball. Howzat: a cricket league, of all things, started by @Berocka and my one foray into trying to run a league (even though others did most of that work). Originally, this was a small group where we all got to create a couple players and he did the rest of the job in creating them in whatever the official cricket video game was. We had sims on video that he streamed on Twitch for us, and that's where I learned the rules of cricket. Eventually, Berocka wanted to make a full-blown league out of it. Our friend (and my former VHLM draft pick) @Cxsquared was a web developer who put tons of work into creating a forum for us, and we already had a better updating system in place than most established leagues. We had a decent handful of people signed up, enough that we could reasonably fill up four teams (you're looking at the GM of the Perth Challengers, named for the first ship to ever sail into what's now that city's port). But we had zero recruitment, everyone was an affiliate, and we had a particularly drama-filled situation where half of our GMs threatened to quit over a VHL rule that we'd transferred (namely, it was a big issue that we weren't tying GMs' players to their teams). Howzat never officially folded as far as I know, but it did stop operating and everyone sort of accepted that. My players, Big Chungus and Robert Fripp (named after the guitarist of King Crimson, one of the most respected prog rock musicians in existence who's up to some interesting stuff lately) disappeared just as quickly as they'd been created. On a personal note, my Howzat experience has transferred very well to real life. Being in a grad program in engineering, lots of my friends are from India, where cricket is huge. I've played cricket (I'm a surprisingly decent bowler!) and kept up with the big international matches, and genuinely done better in my social life because of it. Cricket is fun once you know what you're looking at--give it a chance! The IHL: an invite-only GM league started up by @enigmatic at some point a few seasons into my time in the VHL. I wasn't originally part of this league, but was brought in after a handful of seasons to run the Birmingham Blinders. After not much time, I moved the Blinders up to Greenland and made them the Nuuk Nukes (mind you, this was before the VHL Greenland business was ever a thing). I had lots of fun in the IHL and it was probably the space where I spent the most time after the VHL and EFL. It was a small group that was a mix of VHL and SHL people and all of them were very fun to talk to. I remember making hot prospect Zayden Dawson into my best player, as well as drafting a goaltender who I did all I could to max out for a while. I thought the update system was interesting and it was another league where I cared enough to practice my graphics every week. Some of my best work ever was actually in the IHL, and I wish I was able to crank out that sort of content on a regular basis here. The IHL collapsed very suddenly over one offseason, but I learned later that it was getting to be a lot of work to keep up with anyway. It was just what I needed to have a little non-serious sim league fun, though, with a group that was small enough that I never lost track of who was who as it stayed non-serious. Out of everything I want back, this was the one that I think I'd most realistically be interested in. The QCHL: a different GM-based, invite-only league that's a before-most-of-us-were-in-sim-leagues project of @Rin. It hasn't been active in years, and my old team (the Portland Steelheads) only saw a few sims before things stopped. But the server is still up and running--the two of us, along with @Grape, aim to be the first one to rush in and claim the title of league champion every even-numbered month--and things are slowly on the way to being overhauled and rebooted. New team names and branding are in the works, and I think a good deal of fun is around the corner for those of us lucky enough to experience it. The SFC: a UFC sim built by @Dil that I found mildly entertaining for the short time that it was up and running. I don't remember my fighter's name, but I do remember that it was very Italian and that his nickname (which was a fillable category during creation) was The Florentine Fireball. I also remember that I won my first fight; I don't remember who I was up against but it might have been Beav. All in all, it was cool. I wasn't super surprised when it folded, because most sim leagues do, but I'm glad the attempt was made. GOHLS: I don't remember what this stands for, but it's a casual Discord-based hockey league where @Beaviss is now a big name after moving on from the VHL world. I joined and created a player named Harry Hood (named after a song by Phish), and just wasn't interested. On top of not being interested, I felt like I was being pinged all the time--an unfortunate combination that meant that I left GOHLS a few days after I created (and received a DM wondering why almost the second I left the server from someone I'd never met). That said, I know there are people who are in GOHLS and love it. I can't judge it too hard by being there a few days, and there are times when I wish all I had to do was to open up Discord and enjoy it. I'm probably too much of a writer for that, though. The SHL: Interestingly, I've never been there. Maybe I'll dip my toes in at some point. I think being in more than one league can give a person valuable perspective. There are things other leagues do that I wish we did, and there are things they do that I'm glad we don't. I've proposed things here that were based on systems other leagues have adapted, and I always love seeing someone who's a big name somewhere else join our league and have fun with it. If you've spent time in these other places, especially the lesser-known ones, tell me your stories too! There's so much I'm sure I missed out on by being an affiliate. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers #17: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 2

Being killed by the sim is one thing. Being absolutely obliterated by your own players is another. Another week, another installment of this series that I've been putting off putting together because it's going to be lots and lots of analysis of my own GMing. It's a little bit harder, too, because I won't be talking about any winning and I'll be going over a few seasons I spent trying to shuffle around assets in Davos, keeping some players who were good enough to fairly ask for a winning environment away from one because they were a little too nice to do so. Anyway. It wasn't all that bad, and there are things worth talking about that made life worth living during this time as well. Let's get to it--the mid-S70s in Davos, from my perspective. NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S75: Preseason: S76 DAV 1st and S76 DAV 2nd traded to DC for S75 DCD 1st and S76 DCD 3rd Roque Davis re-signs and is traded to Moscow for S76 MOS 1st and S77 MOS 3rd S75 DAV 3rd, S76 MOS 1st, and S76 DAV 3rd traded to Malmo for Tyler Walker Kunibuni UnGuri drafted 3rd overall Taro Tsujimoto drafted 9th overall Vladimir Mlinski drafted 57th overall Bobby Wyman signs in free agency David OQuinn retires Rayz Funk retires I cut off my last GM article after S74 mostly because I remembered incorrectly--the departure of Davis and the retirement of Funk did not, in fact, signal the immediate death of Davos' competitive chances. Up front, the team was still led by high-TPA-but-underachieving Soren Jensen, while hot prospects SS Hornet and Robin Winter continued to develop well and had reached TPE levels high enough to be significant contributors. Though it wasn't even a question whether Davis was sticking around--my first message to Josh that offseason was along the lines of a "you're going to FA, right?"--he was nice enough to agree to a sign-and-trade so I would end up getting fair value back instead of just losing everything. What I got back was a first-rounder that I flipped to fill our new giant hole on defense with none other than my former GM in @Advantage and his still-young Tyler Walker. Defensive play was a must, and I'd even found our long-term solution in net by shuffling picks around with DC so I'd have two first-rounders--reserving one for my own player while using the other on @Berocka's goaltender (whose name means something I don't exactly remember but is something along the lines of how he's not very good. I should have known). So, I'd answered some roster questions as well as getting the people in the locker room that I wanted, getting two big things out of the way. Even in addition to these two, I brought @Brrbisbrr back to Davos by selecting his player in the draft (who would eventually make it up for a bit), and I signed @Lefty_S in free agency (who many of you may know from one affiliate league or another). I'd envisioned this as more of a retool and aimed to stay marginally competitive for a couple seasons while Hornet and Winter fully fleshed out their builds and Taro caught up as quickly as I could make him. I'd made no mistake that we didn't expect to win the Cup--Funk's retirement stung and we were a bit short on quality depth--but we were finally a young team again and I didn't have to worry about half of us retiring as we moved forward. And we tried. S75 was our second season in a row (and the fourth out of my six as a GM) missing the playoffs. But we went down swinging--our 75 points were the most out of any team who didn't make the playoffs, and it was reasonably well understood on the roster that we weren't going to take any championships. Overall, we were a bit disappointed that our first competitive run hadn't gone exactly as planned, but it certainly wasn't the end of the world and we all hoped that we could just sit back while things mostly fell into place by virtue of homegrown talent. NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S76: Preseason: S77 DAV 2nd traded to Riga for Lewis Dawson Brian Moreau drafted 22nd overall Jurgis Kalvelis Blazevicius drafted 51st overall Owen Nolan retires Joakim Bruden leaves in free agency In-season: Robin Winter traded to Chicago for S78 CHI 1st and Kasey Tamm Soren Jensen traded to Seattle for S77 WAR 2nd, S77 SEA 4th, Daldo, and Eoin Byrne This huge three-way deal in which I traded SS Hornet, a 2nd, and a 4th for a 1st, two 2nds, and two 3rds Lewis Dawson traded to DC for S77 DCD 3rd, S77 DCD 4th, and Joe Kelly I don't even remember what I had to do with this deal but apparently there was another three-way. I think I just took someone's roster dump but why I didn't ask for another 4th or something I couldn't say. So yeah, so much for that one. We had young players who were also pretty solid by this point. Taro had reached solid depth level, Walker was good, Jensen was still high-TPA-but-underachieving, and Hornet was by this point one of the highest-TPA players in the league. Nolan had retired, but I did my best to account for that by renting @Kendrick's Lewis Dawson--a player that ADV once asked me to pick when I filled in for one of Malmo's drafts. I figured that we could remain marginally competitive, challenge for one of the lower playoff spots, and retain our dignity as we stuck with the plan and trusted the process. It was also this season that Berocka took over as our starter--UnGuri had by this point outpaced Bruden, who had come back as the starter in S75 after being rented out by Funk a season earlier. The problem with that was that we sucked. We were coming up on the trade deadline, and we were nowhere near the playoffs. I knew by this point that I was wasting Jensen's (and Dawson's) last season, and that wasn't right. I also had a couple players in Hornet and Winter who still liked me OK but were completely fed up with my GMing and its results. I'd had them sit around and be disappointed in everything for long enough, so...against my best wishes, I took things into full blow-up mode. So, off went Jensen, off went Dawson, and after a good deal more negotiation, off went what was once our future in Hornet and Winter. I remember spending hours bouncing offers off of teams for either one, especially Hornet (fun fact: he almost went to Prague), and it wasn't at all fun because the whole process was a big reminder of what could have been. Among players who earned well enough to make a difference, we were down to Taro and UnGuri who were still very new, @Ahma as usual in Fernando Jokinen, Shawty Nananana, and Tyler Walker--I'd talked to Advantage and offered to move him if he wanted to win, but I wanted to see if keeping him would speed things along and he was fine with that for my sake. In retrospect, I regret this a bit. But anyway, S76 ended up in a familiar place--not only in the basement, but deep in the basement. No one else was even close to as last place as we were, and we headed into S77 ready for a repeat performance. NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S77: Preseason: S77 SEA 4th traded to LA for Olof Samuelsson S79 DAV 4th traded to Seattle for S78 SEA 4th, S79 SEA 4th, and Vin Calia S78 SEA 4th traded to Toronto for S78 TOR 4th and John Callahan Jr Reylynn Reinhart drafted 2nd overall Miles Johnson drafted 13th overall Griff MacKenzie drafted 29th overall TheCHEESE drafted 31st overall Declan Wolf drafted 33rd overall Raihan Heavems drafted 44th overall Lochlan Chisholm drafted 58th overall Fernando Jokinen retires The mid-late S70s were plagued with "mid-late activity" players, so to speak. Normally, a player who doesn't earn at a high rate is still a player valuable to a team and to the league. Around this time, though, so many existed that it became a big problem for management. I was always pretty solid at drafting, actually--that's not at all what made my GM run so horrible--but ironically, it made my accumulation of picks in S77 an issue. Even by the end of the first round, picks didn't mean a whole lot--Miles Johnson was a decent pick considering the circumstances, and he didn't even amount to much. The big news of the draft class was defender Reylynn Reinhart--@Ricer13 had just been appointed GM of Calgary, but had promised me a whole career right up front if I wanted one from him anyway. Aside from a pleasant surprise in TheCHEESE at 31st, though, I'd just managed to find a huge handful of players who were barely active enough to make the VHL at a time when everyone else was, too. This would become relevant later. Complaining aside, S77 went decently well considering how S76 had gone right before that. I had a surprisingly complete blue line--Walker, Nananana, Reinhart, and Samuelsson wouldn't have been out of place on a better team--and with Taro playing well by this point and UnGuri a legitimate starter, we were good enough to leave last place and even challenge for the playoffs. We were so close, in fact, that we missed out on the playoffs in a tiebreaker with Malmo, making things very interesting. At this point, we had questions to answer. How, for example, would we fare in getting more scoring talent on the roster? How would we deal with our massive pool of prospects when that wasn't even a good thing to have? I chose to address one of those and completely ignore the other in S78. NOTABLE TRANSACTIONS OF S78: Offseason: S78 DAV 1st and S78 LDN 2nd traded to London for S78 RIG 1st Luc Tessier drafted 4th overall David Tavau drafted 11th overall Gregory Bates drafted 38th overall In-season: Tyler Walker traded to Calgary for S80 CGY 1st and Darth Kaprizov I got who I wanted in the draft by trading up for a solid forward--@KC15's Luc Tessier in the top 5. Later on in the first round, Ahma was back, and I picked up @Tyler's Gregory Bates a bit further down the board. Needless to say, we were back to drafts I was happy with. S78 would take a turn for the worse, though. After challenging for the playoffs just a season earlier, and with not much changing about the roster, we found ourselves out of a playoff spot again near the deadline. It was at this point that I finally realized that keeping Walker around and hoping everything would work itself out was pretty unfair, and he was even getting a bit older at this point as depreciation set in. He was still worth a bunch--a first-round pick, plus a near-max earner in @Darth Kaprizov, was a solid return and shuffled things around positionally in the ways that I could have used (even though I got ripped on in the trade thread for some reason). I'd made moves I was happy with, but mostly spent S78 putting blocks in place and waiting while we all disappointed ourselves in coming next-to-last. Still, though, the second time through the rebuild cycle was the start of a new, more restrained Gustav, one who didn't try to transform the team overnight and made moves that made reasonable sense. Until I tried to rock the VHL world in S79. But that's a story for another time. In total, I think you could pull out any one of these seasons by itself and reasonably say that it wasn't that bad of a show of management. I did well relative to the draft picks I had in every one. I never got completely ripped off in a trade. I always made sure that my team was full of nice people who the rest of the league wanted to be around. Decisions that didn't work out actually made sense in the moment. Trying to compete in S76 was realistic on paper, and I made sure to pull the trigger when it was clear that it wasn't working. Keeping Winter and Hornet made sense because they were young, and keeping Walker made sense at first because I felt that I could make things happen quickly (and it continued to make sense when S77 made it look like that could have been the case). S77 and S78 featured no stupidly early attempts to end things, and when we eventually get to the part where I try to dig out of the hole in S79, the timing of that made sense as well. I think that Davos was partly on the receiving end of some bad league circumstances. We started going downhill at a time when accumulating draft picks wasn't really a good thing to do, and we partly tried climbing uphill at a time when the league was a bit locked up with roster sizes and whatnot. It was an interesting time to be part of the VHL and an unfortunate time to have to change things about your team. Oh, and it was also a really unfortunate time to have horrible sim luck. Of course, my strategy as a whole could be criticized (and quite fairly), but hindsight is always 20/20 and when I go back and look at all of the moves I've listed here, I remember exactly why I made them and the reasons still make sense to me today. Rebuilding is hard in the VHL. I didn't like the one I did in the VHLM, and that only lasted one season. By the time I was doing it again, I was thankfully being promoted, but it made me want to quit a little. I've just been over four straight seasons of rebuilding here (OK, first "retooling," then catastrophically failing at that, then actually rebuilding). That's the entire length of my VHLM tenure--so it wasn't exactly easy to stick with things. I think it gave me a much better appreciation of how much it took for the players I had to stick with me through all of it, and how much understanding needs to go into trusting the GM as a rebuild goes all the way from start to finish. I wish I could say that all of this worked--obviously, it didn't--but there's another GM article on the way at some point that will go over some more exciting seasons. Until then, I guess I'll just be writing about Kranch or whatever. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo #16: Jolly Kranchers

Awesome—exactly the type of article that Jannula deserves after all this time. I also always appreciate my work being recognized and I’m glad you were the one to write this up. Justice finally served (and really well)!

Welcome to the league! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out. I'm going to tag @N0HBDY as the VHLM simmer and @Beketov as a blue and someone who knows a lot more about what does and doesn't change in the sim files than I do.

No pants + bailing on plans = dominance asserted I wish I had a tribute band; no one wants to hear me play anything sadly.

VHLM WEEK LET’S GO

This is kinda nuts. Sparks is an award-winning goalie—so put some respect on that instead of blowing that off. I will say that I was surprised last season to learn how well Malmo was doing given that I thought other rosters were definitely better on paper. I can see why predictions might have undervalued them, for sure—but good on Malmo for being well built and finding ways to make things work.

A moment greatly anticipated by all, and the only time I have ever shared a physical object with a VHLer. Way more Discord sleuthing than I'd like to admit went into trying to track down the day the transaction was completed, and I'm pretty sure it's been wiped from the memory of the league server. But anyone who was there to see it can verify that it happened. It was early 2019, and I was finishing up my first year of college. I'd learned over the course of that past year that it isn't all too uncommon for people in my line of work to end up in various places in the food industry, and that's an industry that had its hands full as Heinz was getting busy rolling out a new product to the Western world. First introduced in 2018 to the Middle East, Mayochup is exactly what it sounds like when you think about it--mayonnaise and ketchup mixed together into this weird, off-pink gunk that looked pretty weird and sounded a lot weirder. And because we're not going to rest until we've tried the latest shiny new product, a social media push brought the 'chup outside the region the next year. I remember exactly how this went down at the grocery store where I worked--we were sent "distros" of Mayochup (short for "distributions," this means that the company bought a bunch of it and sent it to us without our ordering it individually, making it our problem). These were in the form of "shippers" (large cardboard pop-up displays) that we had to set up all over the place. The sides of each even contained the question of "WHY IS EVERYONE TALKING ABOUT #MAYOCHUP?" which I found a little bit stupid. The Mayochup craze wasn't really much of one, honestly. There are certain items that you would not believe sell as quickly as they do unless you've seen it. When it goes on sale, you'd better do whatever you can to keep up with the flow of canned soup, Gatorade, cereal, Cheez-Its, and (maybe even more than all of those) both mayo and ketchup. It's a constant pain to deal with, especially in the summer, and it's really only beat by sales of water when it's 90 degrees out and the mad rush on the baking aisle around holiday season. Long story short, mayo and ketchup separately did great--mayo and ketchup together did not (even when Hellman's very briefly tried jumping on board by sticking ketchup packets to their mayo jars. If you don't remember this, I think it was a thing on exactly one of our shipments). We had an extra stock of Mayochup in the back room for a while after it stopped being so exciting and new, and though it earned a permanent spot on the shelf, it wasn't something we were dying to promote again. That is, of course, until summer hit. With summer comes grilling, and with grilling come some interesting changes in the layout of your store. You have to spend lots of time filling up charcoal--which gets your hands dirty and spreads coal dust all over everything in the back room because the bags tear open super easily. You have to fill up bottled water multiple times a day, sometimes doing it and then getting yelled at for it being empty half an hour later. And you put up displays of things like...condiments. Also, companies start getting great ideas about what to do over the summer. Heinz had introduced Mayochup at a bit of a weird time, when we weren't trying super hard to push things you'd normally find on a barbecue display (including hot dog and hamburger buns, another thing I forgot to mention that becomes a giant pain in the ass. At my store, this was a store manager responsibility, but more often than not it was pawned off on us). But by the time summer came up, they had a.) clearly been wanting to make a big marketing splash, and b.) just given in to social media pressure to mix some stuff together, and even though that particular instance had just done OK (I guess Mayochup hadn't completely bombed), I'm sure the general concept still seemed appealing. Which led to me opening up our store's first shipment of this stuff and having to set up its display: I'm intrigued by the challenges that had to have been faced by the food stylists over at Heinz. Each of these was a weird, off-white version of its non-white component. None of it looked good, and lots of it sounded awful to me. Sales of the three new flavors that summer almost did completely bomb--our display quickly became a "please take this off our hands" type of deal, and only Mayochup continued to exist at our store past that summer. But I digress. At some point over that summer, the Heinz Saucy Sauce line (as it was seriously known) became a topic of conversation and a running joke in VHL Discord thanks to my bringing up its existence. Most people I talked to agreed that it really didn't sound all that great, although some people found some of them an interesting concept. One of those people was @Beaviss, who took a hard disagreement on my negative impression of one of them in particular: Kranch. Ketchup and ranch didn't seem like a very good combo to me, and Kranch didn't look very good to me either. But me having work stories soon started to go hand in hand in chat with me encountering any given Saucy Sauce, which then was just associated with Kranch in particular. We talked about bathing in Kranch, drinking Kranch, directly injecting Kranch, all sorts of things. A few of us developed mock unhealthy obsessions with it. Sometimes I'd just talk about how much I loved Kranch for about 10 minutes straight with one person or another. It also wasn't sold in Canada at the time. I'm not sure if that's changed, but it's very relevant that this was true in 2019. I'd made a mostly-joking promise to Beav that I'd send him Kranch if he wanted. The trouble was that he actually did--and he wasn't letting me forget it. Kranch had been on the shelves for about a year at that point. My store had long stopped carrying it, and I'd never tried it nor known anyone who had. It would have escaped all of our imaginations if it weren't just so persistent. Which is exactly what led to me going to Target one day, finding it there, and buying it. I reached out to Beav, got a work address, and got to work trying to figure out how to ship something across an international border (something I haven't done since). Eventually, I gave up on that and ended up walking into the post office. I remember weird looks from people in line, and I remember the guy laughing at me when I walked up to the counter, set it down, and said "I know this sounds really weird, but I'd like to know how I can ship this to Canada." I got everything I needed there, filled out the form, and spent about $25 (that's about $7200 Canadian) to cover shipping costs. Off the Kranch went--and a couple weeks later, I had photographic proof that it had made it all the way across the continent. Allegedly, Beav found Kranch pretty solid with fish and chips. Occasionally after the fact, he'd send me an update of something else he'd tried it on. It was fun to keep up with and only made the joke stronger over that dreaded COVID summer where I essentially traveled back and forth between work and the VHL. Flash forward a couple years, and I'd moved out and found myself buying my own groceries. I took it upon myself at one point to get myself some Kranch and give it a try: Kranch is OK. Maybe it could go well with some fish and chips, though I've never tried it. Usually I like to close these things by thinking about what they meant to me, but this was mostly just meant to be a story of something I did and found funny at a particularly bad point of my life. If I had to find some meaning, I'd describe it in a couple different ways. Connecting with someone half-in-person by sending a real object was actually a nice thing, and I think that overall this is a nice reminder to go and find what's interesting and funny in things that aren't necessarily meant to be. As dumb as it sounds, I'm glad that I got to experience Kranch with the VHL, and I hope you find the story as fun as I do. Read my other articles for the full Gustav experience: #1: Lightning Glory Gonna Be My Name #2: Can't We All Just Get Along? #3: Who Needs Cybersecurity Anyway? #4: The House That I Built #5: Can We Fix It? #6: American Beauty #7: The Kids Are Alright #8: Dogs In A Pile #9: I Just Wanna Grill For God's Sake #10: This Old House #11: Go Directly to Jail #12: If You Can Dodge a Color, You Can Dodge a Ball #13: How I Messed Up Davos #14: Ello Gov'nor #15: Weewoo

But yeah, LA was a great time! I’m glad I get to be the franchise everything leader for at least the foreseeable future. Thanks for an amazing career—I wouldn’t have done the whole thing with you guys if I didn’t get back what I put in from management. Hopefully LA gets its first Cup soon; I’ll never forget my time spent trying.