solas

I made this using only pictures of cheese (and Auston Matthews, certified cheese)
 

@16z
 
 

got completely outclassed by oferson soyou made a goalie... insecure

Player Information
Username: Hybrid1486
Player Name: Sting Chameleon
Recruited From: Returning
Age: 18
Position: D
Height: 74 in.
Weight: 220 lbs.
Birthplace: United States of America

Player Page
@VHLM GM

Player Information
Username: CowboyinAmerica
Player Name: Xavier Booberry
Recruited From: Returning
Age: 17
Position: G
Height: 78 in.
Weight: 249 lbs.
Birthplace: United States of America

Player Page
@VHLM GM

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

I've been meaning to do this post for a long time, and what better time to do it than theme week.
 
Now that I'm allegedly part of the elderly gentlemen's gang, I'm more than happy to provide insight to what happens behind closed doors.
 
You've heard it before, and you'll hear it again here: The Board of Governors doesn't do as much as you think. But, in this case, we did a shitload work. The VHLE was, for the most part, designed by the BoG. Any complaints you have regarding the rules, structure, or otherwise, can be forwarded to @GustavMattias.
 

We did some serious work. Also, rip beav.
 
The average member may not know, but there's been a major problem brewing behind the scenes for many seasons. On January 20, in the midst of S76, former commissioner Beaviss brought the "Roster Room Potential Issues" to the Board, admin, and staff.
 
Privately, GMs had been complaining about a flat salary cap and overstuffed rosters for a long time. That led to a massive expansion in S73 with four new teams added. But still, the issue persisted.
 
Calgary GM Jubis publicly lays out the roster issue problem, allowing members insight into the discussions happening at GM meetings.
 
The BoG discussion began in earnest when former Calgary Wranglers GM @Jubis shared his math on roster sizes for S76. Turns out, the rosters are very, very full. The ideal VHL team runs a 6-4-2 roster, with two full lines of forwards, two full pairings of defense, and two goalies. This is the optimal balance between ice time: any more players, and no one plays enough minutes; any less players and teams get accused of manipulating rosters to get their star players more ice time. Only one team in the VHL, even after expansion, had a 6-4-2 roster. That, my friends, is a problem.
 
Of course, this BoG thread started with Beaviss pitching expansion. The dude loves expansion more than egg salad and kranch sandwiches. By S76, Beavis and expansion was a meme, but the numbers presented by Jubis and Beav made the board seriously discuss another round of growth. In preliminary talks, more than a few members were even on board with a smaller, two team expansion. However, our wise old man (and future VHLE commissioner) @Victor dropped this nugget in the fourth post of 748 replies:
 

Victor: the radical
 
This truth bomb set the table for the months of discussion to come. The philosophy of the VHLE has been the same since the beginning: give the players who are too good for the VHLM but getting absolutely trounced in the VHL somewhere meaningful to play.
 
We're fortunate to have a collection of VHL/M GMs on the board. These experts on their respective teams were able to give context and insight into the numbers dropped by Beav and Jubis. Through the first few weeks, and again every month or so, the Governors were not entirely convinced that there was a roster room issue. Much was debated about who should be counted in those numbers, what the development timeline looks like for various types of prospects, and predicting sizes and quality of future draft classes. Before even considering expansion, we needed a clear picture on who was actually here in our league. 
 
The first group that was skewing our numbers were inactive players. There were inactive players taking up valuable and limited roster spots from low-earning active players. Like the VHLM did, the VHL needed to develop a way to cull inactives. That change was fleshed out over the course of months, and culminated in a rule change beginning S78. Now, teams are only allowed to carry ONE inactive player per season. With a finite number of VHL roster spots, we cannot afford our active members to be stuck behind inactive players, no matter how much better the IA player is.
 
See, we value you active members!
 
The other problem with the roster size numbers is that every player was treated equally. This is not true when we are discussing earning. Max earning players will reach the VHL faster and stay there longer. Non-max earners (for example, clickers) are still valued members of our community and cannot be discounted. We knew we had to deal with this roster size problem in a way that works and engages our max earners, mid earners, and clickers.
 
 Our number genius @rjfryman and his ruby programming skills provided us with weekly TPE chart detailing how many people were in each TPE bracket, sorted by age. This data allowed us to discuss whether there actually was a problem (there was) and assist in setting the VHLM/E TPE caps.
 
Less than 100 TPE Update: 17 100 to 199 TPE Update: 67 200 to 250 TPE Update: 32 250 to 299 TPE Update: 11 300 to 399 TPE Update: 46 400 to 499 TPE Update: 34 500 to 599 TPE Update: 30 600 to 699 TPE Update: 28 700 to 799 TPE Update: 20 800 to 899 TPE Update: 13 900 to 999 TPE Update: 9 Over 1000 TPE Update: 21 Lost in my math: 0 SEASON BREAK DOWN: {70=>3, 71=>15, 72=>26, 73=>30, 74=>43, 75=>62, 76=>48, 77=>57, 78=>44} Not sure when this is from, but this is what RJ's updates look like.
 
Once we definitively identified a real problem, took measures to ease pressure by culling IAs, and collected updating data on player demographics, we could realistically start talking about creating a new league.
 
In order to create a third league, we had to discuss the philosophy of our two existing leagues. The VHL remains largely untouched, but the VHLE drastically alters the purpose and structure of the VHLM. We were cognizant of recreates wanting to get back to the VHL as soon as possible, and didn't want an extra league to slow those max-earning, experienced members down. The VHLM was reimagined as a 'landing pad' for first-gens, or a 'junior hockey' for recreates. Like the VHLM today, the new focus continues to be on development and retention. Success in the VHLM is graduating players to the VHLE. There were many pages of heated discussion about nuking the VHLM draft and moving to an all-waivers roster building mechanism. It was argued that this would reduce the ability for GMs to go for scorched-earth rebuilds like we see today, but we worried about VHLM GMs having little to no actual managing duties. Ultimately it was decided to keep all VHL/E/M drafts. 
 
If the VHLM is meant to be a training grounds, the VHLE was the first real battleground in a VHL career. The E League, as we lovingly referred to it before it was officially named, would be a competitive league with the goal of winning chips. We envisioned a KHL-style rival league, where pros would come over to the VHL when they were properly developed. There were some voices that wanted older, regressed players to be able to go play Season 7 or 8 in the VHLE, Jagr-style, but that didn't come to fruition.
 
It was important that the VHLE was independent from all other leagues. We settled on 6 teams, based on the demographic data from RJ, and that effectively ruled out AHL-style affiliation. Six teams with prospects of 16 VHL clubs was not going to work. We thought about prospect-sharing teams, like the Chicago Wolves, but the cons outweighed the pros of that system. Like the VHLM, considering the GM experience was important. We want VHLE GMs to have agency over their own team - we wouldn't want a contender to lose half their team to call-ups in the midst of a playoff push. The VHLE is fully independent from other leagues, with the only caveat that all players are also VHL-drafted.
 
Once concern that we absolutely wanted to avoid was the EFCA-style manipulation of the uncapping system. Under no circumstances did we ever want anyone to actively stop earning TPE. I know I got to the 199 cap in the EFL and then completely disengaged because it was disadvantageous for me and the team to earn a single point more. The soft/hard cap was discussed at length, and really, what we have in the VHLM is a pretty sweet system. Like the M, earners in the E will stop applying TPE at 399, but will continue to earn and bank for the rest of the season. Once you earn TPE # 400, you are automatically going up to the big leagues next season. A player could choose to stop at 399 and start earning in the offseason again, but we plugged that loophole. Like now, your career clock starts when you are VHL drafted. If you choose to manipulate the system to get an extra E season (why?!?!?), you will be penalized in the grand scheme of things by having a shorter career in the VHL. 
 
Speaking of career length, it was a pretty big change to add in a ninth season. For 99.99% of players, the VHL career will still be 8 seasons. If, by some absolute miracle, some player eclipses 399 TPE before their VHL draft (or the offseason cut off date, whatever), then they would skip the VHLE entirely and have a 9 season VHL career. We do not want that to be the expectation or the goal: if we let everyone skip the VHLE, why would we even bother with the hassle of creating it? Extending the career clock meant that everyone would have a fun, competitive season in the minors AND a regular ol' 8 season career. To further encourage participation in the VHLE, we made regression in Season 9 really, really mean. You can use a Jagr to protect one stat, but the 5% (?) overall regression can't be stopped. A 9-season career likely involves a weak rookie season (being a lower TPE than your peers who marinated in the VHLE for a season) and likely a weak ninth season, crippled by regression. It's possible to skip the VHLE, but you shouldn't do it and you shouldn't want to. Finally on this note: literally one person from the recent draft class was eligible for this. There are recent seasons where zero people would have met the criteria.
 
Recap: we know there's a problem, and we know how to fix it. We've thought of most loopholes, and came up with some neat creative solutions to plug them. Now, we need to package this idea together and turn it into something real.
 
We had been calling it the "E League" (it always made me think of the NBA's G-League) and that worked for the time, but wasn't going to be an official name. Branding is always a highly subjective exercise, and there was heated debate about what the league should be called. One unnamed board member was so incredibly deadset on calling it the Europe Victory League (EVL) that he created a poll to decide the name, lost, and created another poll to make sure no one wanted to change their vote and call it EVL. It would just be too hilariously fitting to have the Victator running the EVL. It'd make for excellent canon, with the rival league across the pond playing heel to the good guys VHL, but in practice it wasn't very realistic. We ended up keeping the branding consistent with the other leagues, and choosing VHLE over VEHL and EVL.
 

In the Best people here but socially distanced, we always have to consider the rainbow flavoured unicorns.
 
To continue the branding train: I don't think I ever noticed all the VHLM teams were in North America? With all our M teams on one side of the pond, it made perfect sense to put the new league on the other. As a bonus, the names and logos of all of the European VHLM teams that used to exist were available. Recycling names would be a fun exercise in nostalgia, while also reducing costs of commissioning new logos.
 
So, that's some insight into the going-ons of the Board of Governors. This was probably one of the biggest projects the BoG has worked on ever, and I'm really proud of what we've come up with. I joined the process in mid-March: it had been going on long before I got there, and continued long after. Six months, 30 pages, 748 posts later, the BoG actually did something!
 
holy heck that's 2000+ words, noice
 
 

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

huge cock fan here

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

There are already some good submissions for both Berlin and Paris logos, so I thought I'd try something a little more outside of the box. The logo features a rooster, which has been used a symbol of France since the Renaissance. The name, Club Galois de Paris, uses a more European naming structure (hence "outside the box"), while "Galois" refers to the historic region of Gaul that contained most of what is now France. I felt "Paris Roosters" didn't really have the right ring to it, plus "Les Coqs de Paris" was rife for jokes and misunderstandings. I considered trying a full-body rooster for the logo, and still may do so on my own time for fun, but I thought I'd prefer to just get this in as a PT rather than hem and haw over adjustments until the week is over, lol.

If you don't stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it.
 
TLDR:
 
Well, if 2020 has taught us anything (and we are still in 2020), it's that time is precious, finite, and we can't ever get it back. We lost a year of two of our lives to this covid shit. I was never 26 or 27. I'm sure some people had it worse than others, and some didn't mind the whole 'forced to stay inside' thing, but our old way of life is gone. Even as vaccines roll out and the world begins to open up, the world we live in is and will be fundamentally different.
 
And I should know, my life is very, very different than when I joined in March 2020.
 
I know a few close friends on here are in the loop, but I wanted to share my story with everyone just to be open, share my life with the people who mean a lot to me, and not have to repeat it over and over again in discord.
 
I joined here at the start of the Forever March Break. Schools shut down after the break and didn't come back until September (or even later, I've been teaching online for 16 months now). At the time, I was living in southern Ontario with my partner of six or seven years. We'd lived together forever, and we had accepted (and ugh, covid, cancelled) jobs to teach in Cambodia for 2020-21. We'd planned (and ugh, covid, cancelled) a wedding in Iceland too. We had a whole forever planned out together.
 
However, my philosophy about planning is "Have a five-year plan, and be comfortable changing it every six months."
 
Southern Ontario, our home for the last ten years, was getting pretty scary pandemic wise. We both caught covid in February after a sold-out OHL game on a long weekend, but before covid was a thing in Ontario. It fucking sucked. I cannot describe to you how awful it was. I had never, ever been so sick. We took turns being fevered and delirious for two weeks. I'm a fit, athletic guy who likes to run, and I was winded moving from the couch to the bathroom. There was a boulder sitting on my chest that made it near impossible to take a deep breath. And, we were pretty alone. All our friends had graduated and moved on, while I stayed in uni for an eternity and stayed put. Her family was three hours away, mine was seven. Bless their hearts, my Chinese bosses meant well, but the care package they brought us was two bags of clementines and a Costco box of Oreos. We had a friend drop off groceries, but that was kind of it. I was genuinely worried about one of us dying in the house and the other not being able to get help or do anything because we were so sick. That was a bit of an eye opener, to say the least.
 
In the summer, we took a trip up to my folk's place for a month. They live in a little town a few hours north of Ottawa on the Ontario/Quebec border. Classic small town Canada: rural, conservative, a bit rough around the edges, no one ever leaves, and they all follow "the script". The script is the life path that everyone who stays at home forever follows: high school sweetheart, a bit of college or uni in the big city next door, buy a truck, get a puppy, buy a house, get married, have kids, get a job you don't really care about so you can fund your fishing and hunting and ATVing on the weekends. There is nothing wrong with that life, and lots of people I know on that path are incredibly happy and satisfied with their life. Following the script is just not for me. I swim upstream, zig when the crowd zags, and just generally live a life they don't always understand. I was one of the very few from my high school class to go truly 'away' for school. A mentor used to say that we lived in a "lefty liberal CBC bubble", and my experiences in rural Ontario confirmed that life in the Arts & Culture scene in Niagara Falls was not the same as life outside of the city.
 
So when we decided to move back home to be closer to family, to walk into guaranteed fulltime jobs, to buy a house, it was a really tough choice. My partner was super naive to life outside of the bubble, and had a hard time adjusting to some of the, uhhhh, not PC she'd hear her coworkers say (and fair enough: her educational assistant, who works with kids with special needs all day, refers to them outside of work as r-d's, as just one example). People didn't take covid too seriously here: that's a Toronto problem, we don't have that here (funny, some here say the same thing about "the gays" and "diversity"). Owning a house is fucking hard, especially when we were landlords to the family who rented out our basement apartment. Winter is longer, colder, darker than we were used to in tropical Niagara. Teaching is an extremely demanding job, and we were both doing it fulltime for the first time in a long time (or ever, for her). It was a very tough transition for both of us.
 
While these stresses starting piling up, I was putting some serious work into my wellbeing. Everyone had a pandemic project, and mine was me. I got a new therapist and worked a whole lot of shit out. I learned all about self-compassion, what the hippy dippy "learn to love yourself" bs actually mean (turns out it's not bs), and started to identify and prioritize my own needs and wants ahead of others. Turns out I had an undiagnosed mental illness that had been causing some issues in my life for a while, and I worked with a doc to get medicated and stable for the first time ever. I had my shit figured out, and was happy and proud of myself. For the most part.
 
Those two opposing forces - an incalculable amount of change and stress, and me figuring out my mental and emotional wellbeing - came to a head around Easter. A pipe broke in our basement and flooded it. I handled the situation extremely well, but she didn't agree. I was proud of being cool, calm, collected, sourcing a shopvac and getting the water out of there immediately. She was livid I didn't communicate a plan to her (uh, I was winging it and making it up on the fly...) I was learning to trust myself, believe in myself, and to not let others determine my value and self-worth. She was so mad (and so wrong) that I left and didn't come back. I spent three days at my parents, journalling, sorting through what had happened now and over the last many years, and overall applying the lessons learned to a real life case study. I didn't like what I learned. But because I had always put others needs ahead of my own, I hadn't ever let myself examine my relationship with a critical lens, or to even consider breaking up. It wasn't an option. Now, it was. It was a hard choice because she is a great person, kind and caring, we had a lot of wonderful history together, but somewhere along the line we changed to the point that we just weren't compatible anymore. Our needs and wants didn't align, and we couldn't give each other what we needed. I was pretty proud of myself for making such a difficult decision and putting myself first, but it doesn't make it less sad. Boom, that whole life we had planned was gone. Oh well, shit happens... 
 
Suddenly freed from all responsibilities to others (except dealing with the house we bought together six months ago, ugh), I had time and space to really reevaluate my life. I realized that yeah, small town Ontario wasn't the place for me, and started looking elsewhere. I was so close to going abroad before the pandemic that I wanted to revisit that. I have my ESL certification and had spent a summer teaching in China. Covid is nearing the end, I'll be double vaccinated soon, and the only thing tying me to Canada is a few hundred dollars of monthly student debt bills. My mom was very adamant that I shouldn't go abroad if I was "running away from my problems", but I'm so happy and proud of who I am now that I'm running towards opportunities to be the best me somewhere else.
 
I spent an afternoon cold-calling every international school I could find in every country I thought was kinda neat. I imagined living in South America, and South East Asia, and Eastern Europe. I threw out probably a hundred emails with my cover letter and resume, and sat back and waited to see who came calling. Turns out, lots and lots and lots of schools want native English speakers with a real teaching degree. In the first week, I got calls from Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, and Hungary. I interviewed and started to move forward with them. Two weeks later, I was flooded with responses from Prague, Warsaw, Trinidad, Vietnam, Equador, Bangkok. I'm a big fan of the developing, second world, clearly. 
 
Today, I accepted a job offer from a school in:
 
I am fucking pumped. Most international teaching jobs are at international schools: essentially, little American or British bubbles inside a foreign country more or less removed from the local culture. That kind of colonial, 'check your culture at the door and come become American' mindset doesn't quite jive with my lefty liberal CBC bubble values. I'll be working for a program that sends English speaking teachers into actual Hungarian public schools. I've never heard of the "family model" of bilingualism: there'll be two "parents" (teachers) in the classroom at the same time, one speaking Hungarian and one speaking English, flipping back and forth throughout the class. I'll be teaching some sort of history/social studies stuff in English, which is totally my jam. I had to haggle a raise because the salary would let me live like a king in Hungary, but wouldn't cover my debts back in the homeland. In exchange for extra pay, they gave me extra chores: I have to create field trip guides for students to visit museums on field trips. As a past museum curator, I am fucking pumped. Best additional duties ever. 
 
It wasn't the highest paying job. Costa Rica wanted to give me an obscene amount of USD to be a vice principal and teach classes about socio-emotional learning, which, given my own learning over the last year, was right up my alley. It was very hard to turn that job down. But, I've never been to Europe. I'm too adventurous to live that 'chill by the beach' Caribbean lifestyle. I'm so excited to explore a thousands year old city. I can't wait to hop on a train and be anywhere in Europe in hours. Hungary is such a fascinating place, straddling so many different worlds. It's in the European Union, but doesn't use the Euro. It was in the Soviet Warsaw Pact, but was the first one to try (and almost succeed) to oust the commies. The language is near impossible to learn, and it can be fun to try to navigate a language barrier (my Hungarian is as good as my Chinese, and I survived there).
 
I'm not leaving the VHL. You can't get rid of me that easily. I fully expect to still be a max earner and an active part of the community. I'm so happy to be here, love all the cool people I've met, and am really proud of the neat things we've done in the last year and a half. I've got Boulets to win. I've got carryover TPE to spend. I've got the WJC and the BOG and the DCD and so many acronyms. I've got a title to defend in the Degenerate Dynasty League. I'll finally get to partake in degen hours (rip degen hours). I'll lobby hard for that VHLE Budapest team. And, clearly, you can still be a leader in the community all the way from Budapest. For a fee, I'll even deliver a pie to the face of Juice for you!
 
So, this could be oversharing. TMI. Shut up and play spreadsheet hockey. Everyone irl is jealous, and I don't want to come off as braggy. I'm just going through some changes that affect both irlAL and bigAL. I think it's important to know who, really who, you're talking to online, and this is who I am and who I'm gonna be for a few years.
 
Hi 👋
 
 

Da fuck is going on lmao

1. This week is theme week! What kind of content are you hoping to see this week about the VHLE? If you haven't done your PT yet, do you have ideas? If you have, is there anything, in retrospect, that you wish you would have done differently?
I don't quite know yet, but I think I might take a stab at doing another VHLE team logo. Maybe one for Paris? Although I still have the Vasteras one in the bank, so I might just submit that as my PT for the theme week.
 
2. We are about halfway through the season, and as of today, Chicago is third overall and second in the NA. Any thoughts? Do you think we're performing as projected? Over or underperforming?
I'd say we're performing fairly accurate to how I would've expected. We've got a good team so we should be a contender, but I don't know if I'd say we should be any higher than we are right now. 
 
3. What's one of your pet peeves about the VHL? If you had enough power to (reasonably) change anything in the league for a day, what would you do?
I don't know if I have one off the top of my head. I'm not really good at identifying problems (or coming up with solutions, for that matter) in sim leagues like this one.  I'd be on board with either a separate awards committee, or at least more transparency about the award discussions in the BoG (i.e. an explanation of why people voted the way they did). Of course there's also a problem with the boringness of building a player here but that could also just be because I've been around for a while.
 
4. What's your favorite time of day? Mornings? Mid day? Evenings? Meal time?
Mid day for me (like 1-2 PM). I don't like waking up early, but I prefer when it's light out because then it feels like there's more of the day left. Although I will say I enjoy the nighttime, it can be pretty relaxing sometimes when it's dark out and just a little bit chilly. Not when it's too late, but maybe around 8-10 o'clock. I remember taking a few walks out at that time of night when I was in college - I get that could seem a little weird but it was actually kinda relaxing.
 
5. If you could be anything - animate or inanimate, what would you be? A star? A leaf on a tree? A screwdriver? Why?
I kinda like being human, honestly. For all the problems and anxieties it may cause, having human intelligence is really fucking cool when you think about it. Nothing else on Earth can experience stuff like art, culture, language, etc. in the same way that we do. There are a couple animals that would be cool to be as a second choice though. It'd be fun to be able to fly so being some kind of bird would be sick. Also there are a couple animals that have more capabilities in their eyes to see different wavelengths of color, and I'd like to know what that looks like
 
6. What was the last thing you did for yourself because you wanted to or because you knew you'd be better for it? If you haven't had water recently, this is your sign to go get some!!
I've been trying to be more careful with my money and save up a decent amount, which should hopefully benefit me in the long run. I still buy things for myself, but I'm trying to be less impulsive. Also thanks for the reminder, my water glass is empty right now so I'll go refill it.

1. Describe your ideal sandwich
I'll go with a good chicken sandwich, with jalapenos and/or green peppers, on a brioche bun. I could go either way on condiments, don't know if I'd have a favorite (maybe mustard). To be honest I'm not a huge sandwich guy though.
 
2. We've been in the league for a while time now and I think it's time we do this. Which team would be the rivals of the Chicago Phoenix? 
Berocka wrote an article recently where he suggested LA would be our rivals, which I think is fairly fitting since we came in as North American expansion teams at the same time. I'd also say that Seattle would be a good rival because of our upset win in the S75 playoffs. Warsaw is a cool suggestion but I feel like I'd want our rival to be in the same conference.
 
3. Should the team host a game night or a movie night? What game/movie would you choose?
Movie night is tough because I feel like it's hard to pick a movie that everyone would be interested in. Personally I'd go with a game night but with something like Mario Party or Jackbox since those are fairly simple games that I think pretty much everyone can enjoy.
 
4. If you were put in charge of something for a day, what would you like that to be and what would you change or do?
I'll echo Sonnet and say I don't want to be in charge. Plus I don't think I have solutions that would fix things in a day. I guess for less important things that I'd be far less likely to mess up, I'd probably make myself in charge of some kind of branding/graphic design thing because there are a lot of small things that bother me about that stuff.
 
5. What are your thoughts on the league right now? Are there enough people joining or do we need more? Are there any improvements that could be made?
I don't really have a good pulse on recruitment. I will agree that we could use more variety in recruitment channels, as well as a change where everyone isn't stuck doing the same build. But I don't have the answers so who knows.
 
6. We're gonna talk about some emotions here. How are you doing right now? 
Eh. I'm doing okay now, I wouldn't say I'm feeling great overall but today is a decent enough day. I don't want to spill all my guts but I wasn't exactly happy with things before the pandemic so I don't think COVID has helped. I guess at least I've kinda had the chance to sit back and think things over but then the rest of the world hasn't exactly been great either which doesn't make me feel any better.

Update. Thought I'd give some tries at a wordmark:
                   
 
Also here are some slightly different variations of the original logo just for some more options:
          

my next recreate will be from the disputed territory of western sahara

my next recreate will be from the disputed territory of western sahara

@Sonnet finally decided to follow through on testing out the podcast game, and I was honored enough to have been his first podcast pal! We stray down a lot of tangents, but we had to keep it spicy.
 
Sorry about the random points where my mic got super quiet. I don't know how to fix that shit, so you just have to deal with it. I also am too lazy to add music. Our voices are good enough audio.
 
https://anchor.fm/fishy3/episodes/fishy-and-sonnet-e126ofl
 
I actually included checkpoints for this episode:
5:15 - pbe v vhl & earth
17:53 - max earning, questions about the meta, and point task grading
23:06 - (mostly GM) job pay
30:21 - VHLE
~46 - down with UPS but especially fuck fedex
59:42 - abrupt topic change to PALINDROMES
1:03:47 - VHL logo review
 
run time: 93 minutes, both of us are eligible for 3 weeks of claims

@Telkster

Curious if there's been any movement on this one? Because if someone were to hypothetically recreate with expressed purpose of maximizing VHLE time, brute forcing their way into that first draft, then it would hypothetically make sense to recreate S79 trade deadline rather than S78 to play S80/81 in the E. Hypothetically.