Gustav

I had a cooler media spot thought up, but it's Sunday night and I don't really care to do all that right now. So, I'd like to bring the community's attention to the fact that the year is almost over. 2024 was a cool year, I think--after all, I recreated, we killed the E, and I finally got inducted as a Hall of Fame builder after a little bit of being FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY on the grounds that I haven't disappeared from the league yet. On the surface, that argument is usually brought up as "OK, well, [inactive member] has done everything and can be summarized in a portal article, but [active member]'s induction may end up not recognizing things that haven't happened yet." I, however, prefer to think of that as an unwritten rule that we're supposed to avoid being happy for people that will see it, lest they start ego-stroking (or something of that sort). Anyway, the year is almost over. Assuming that I won't disappear in 2025, what would I like to do around the league? Bridge the gap between recruitment and the VHLM: it's not a secret that Recruitment has had some trouble lately with hiring people. In a league that depends on people to keep itself going, that's pretty shocking! Aside from pushing you to go join the team (which I'm doing here; go do it), I think that there are solutions that don't involve trying to motivate people in that direction when it clearly isn't working. I think that the VHLM, with its greater need for steady inflow inherently motivating some level of interest in maintaining it, could serve some purpose in cases where Recruitment is a bit short-staffed or wants some extra stuff done around the league. I think I'll be recreating again. I think I'll end up finishing Holmes' career in 2025 (though it might take most of the year or even all of it), at which point I want to think I'll be good for another round. The timeline of all that might put me in a really busy spot in real life, but who knows? It doesn't take all that much time to keep up with this place, after all--the bigger question is whether I still want to run the VHLM at that point. But who knows about that, either--time will tell and I'll leave the role whenever I feel like I can't serve it well anymore. Make a better effort on Discord: I feel like I used to know and love everyone who bothered to show their face around the league, but I'm not really at that point anymore. I think it's possible to improve in this regard and get back into meeting people and having conversations without it turning into a giant waste of days of my life like it once was. Make Town of Salem great again: I still love Town of Salem! I've got a couple issues that have come up lately that mostly have to do with limited sign-ups and quieter threads than there used to be. I think that if we can get our player numbers back up to 20-ish instead of 15-ish, we'll naturally have a much more fun game because there will just be more people to talk and more questions to be answered. If you see my threads, join them! It's still a very fun time and I think it's possible to bring it back to its former glory. Leave a new mark on forum content. It's no secret that I pride myself on writing things worth reading. In the past, I've dabbled in mock drafts, I've written articles projecting trades for every team, I've spent 13,000+ words on one media spot about league history, and this past year I put out my most ambitious work ever in the entire (and complete!) Gustav 30 in 30 series. Outdoing Gustav 30 in 30 is something that I am not in any mood to attempt, but I think that the well has certainly not run dry and that I'll continue to be very much worth reading over the next trip around the sun. I just have to come up with ideas for what I'm writing about. That's all for me, and now it's time for me to retreat back into late-night binge-watching. What would you like to see me do in 2025?

F - Spanish Moon Moth D - Lazlo Holmes @Agito

D - Guntis Gavrilovs F - Logan Ninefingers @Agito for 2

12 for 12 for my first time ever

Damn I'm getting pinged hard up in here F - George Richmond @Agito

What’s up

Wat

Give

Love the idea!

8 days a week

Give VHL Hall of Fame Builder Gustav his prize

I’ll stop short of accusing random.org of being wrong—originally, Apple’s “shuffle” feature was entirely random and they had to change it because people assumed that some sequences of songs that it randomly generated were wrong. BUT I use it all the time for Town of Salem and I have to say that if I were to accept everything it gave me, we would have multiple roles with 3+ people playing then just about every time. I have no problem with some duplicates, but I almost always have to do some rerolling if something overloads. I trust their reasoning that it’s based on atmospheric noise and that that’s random, but I do wonder if it’s pulling from some data set where the noise at certain points hangs around a specific level that leads to it picking that level a lot. Obviously, random means that it will repeat by chance too, but personal experience has me wondering how much it should. It’s all just speculation; overall it works fine for me. So maybe you guys are taking me out of the list or something.

One thing I'd point to in particular is LA's ability to stack up four first-round selections in this draft. It isn't a particularly huge draft, which means that things could go either way when you've done that. What LA did to get into their current state (lose all their top players without selling for assets, instead choosing to wait for them to retire) is something that teams like Prague and Malmo should already be watching to find out how they ended up with those draft assets. From this point, their big draft haul this season should be an interesting case study in how that's best managed. Hopefully competing, and also my own starting to get into that "good" TPE range. Last season was expected to be a bit of a retool in Seattle, but those have also historically turned around pretty quickly there. We'll see if the team can turn the corner, and I'll see how much I can play into that. I'm going home for the holidays + for the rest of the year, but I have no specific plans yet. It's the only time of the year that all my friends are in town for as long as this, so we'll try our best to catch up and do some fun stuff. 1. Predict your stats for the coming season! 2. You can add one attribute to STHS that you think it's missing. What is it and how do you think it helps? 3. What's your favorite holiday-related movie?

2024 is the fourth year in a row that the league has done its 12-day donation drive. Having been in the league since before 12 Days of Christmas was a thing, I'm proud to say that I've contributed to the annual charity every year we've run it, and that I really appreciate that the league has (allegedly) put our money to a good use. So why haven't I won anything yet? You see, out of every iteration of five winners, then five winners again, then three winners, then one winner, across four separate tiers of winning, exactly zero of the names drawn have been mine. Heck, the first year even featured ten winners in that first bracket, a fact that I'm sure the league hoped no one would notice when they cut that in half. It's because of this that I started my posting in this year's holiday threads with a complaint that the blue team was purposely avoiding giving me prizes, presumably because they hate me. I decided I'd like to see what I could do to analyze that, so I went back to every previous holiday drive and found out: How many people had replied to each day's thread Whether I myself had entered in that drawing by replying to that thread ...and I did what I do best and put it in a spreadsheet that calculates the probability over time that I would have won at least one of the drawings up to this point, by taking that number for each tier of each drive and factoring in bonus draws from donation and the number of winners in each tier. What I found was: Surprisingly, there was already at least a 10% chance that I would have won in the very first tier ever, based on the fact that there were 10 winners in that tier. There was approximately a 15% chance that I would have won something in 2021 overall. By the end of 2022, that number grew to a 28% chance that across the first two years, I would have won something at some point. By the end of 2023, I had just over a 40% chance of having won anything at all across those three years. So, it still isn't out of the question that I've lost year after year by chance. Should I not win anything this year, though, my cumulative chance will likely break 50%--meaning that it will have become more likely than not that I would have taken a prize. So I'm not being cheated yet, but keep an eye out for all I might have to say next year if history repeats itself.

DJ KHALED