November 9 I celebrated my three years anniversary of being smoke free. Not a single drop of nicotine, cigarette, vape, nicotine help or anything. Cold Turkey! It’s crazy to look back, think and just have the realization sink in that it’s been three entire years. I still have tough days. I still have days when I want a cigarette and while I really hope that goes away, it might stay for quite some time still.
These stats are also crazy. Based off what I was smoking at the end of when I quit, about 15 a day, because I was trying to wean myself off, I would’ve smoked 16,449 cigarettes from my quit moment until now. Based off show long it takes to smoke a cigarette, taking about five minutes per, I would’ve sat there for 57 entire days had I smoked them all consecutively… that’s NUTS! Also saved a rough estimate of $11,000, however, the price of cigarettes has also gone up since I last smoked.
I don't really know much about hockey at all but I have a player and (near) max earn here because of the community. Without interactive events like TOS, I probably would be less inclined to contribute PTs or even have a player to begin with
But either way thanks for writing this enjoy your articles as always
I don't really know much about hockey at all but I have a player and (near) max earn here because of the community. Without interactive events like TOS, I probably would be less inclined to contribute PTs or even have a player to begin with
But either way thanks for writing this enjoy your articles as always
Hello. I am somebody who is known by quite a few titles in the VHL circle. I am muffins, I am sniffum, I am a former pretty bad Vasteras GM, I am a former pretty good Warsaw GM, I have been FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY out of consideration for GM of the year, I am a VHL Hall of Fame Builder, I am a GFX maker, I am pretty irrelevant to the modern scope of the VHL considering I was gone for quite a while. But one distinction I have that not a lot of people might know about is that I played a pretty big hand in the FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY meme becoming a thing in the league, some ten years before the term meme ever came to be used as it is today.
But before I get into that, here’s a little bit of context and prior backstory that honestly mostly serves to pad the word count. If you don’t really care about this part (and you really probably shouldn’t), feel free to skip ahead a couple paragraphs where there will be a nice convenient tl;dr. Anyways, we begin our story some time in 2008 or so; I was 13 years old, and had been active in OOTP 6.5 players leagues that I had found on a complete coincidence for close to a year at that point. Somebody joined one of the leagues I was in and made graphics that far blew away what everybody else there was making, and they said they had honed their skills in the VHL. That interested me enough to check the league out even though I didn’t (and still don’t) really care at all about hockey. I created a new player with my name, did one point task, and promptly went inactive, going into my draft with a whopping 6 TPE. Calgary’s General Manager at the time was looking for somebody to draft in the 3rd round (a wasteland of inactives at the time) and saw that I put my screenname on a popular instant messaging service on my VHL profile, so he reached out to ask if I’d be active if he picked me. I said sure, so he drafted me. He boasted a few times around the league that he got himself a massive steal late in the draft, but I never even logged in to sign my contract, let alone earn any TPE. A few weeks later I was released and that was it for Damien Walec.
A few months later I recreated in the league as Optimus Prime. I stayed active enough to earn some TPE, including writing a biography that was essentially me transcribing the Transformers Wikipedia page and then adding on 100ish words at the end about Optimus Prime deciding to become a hockey player. I earned enough TPE to be selected in the 2nd round by Helsinki, but by that point I had once again run out of steam and ended up falling off as an inactive. From there, because I was still young and dumb, I figured nobody would want to touch any of my future players with a 10 foot pole because of my history of going inactive, so when I wanted to give the VHL a third shot I decided to come back with a new alias rather than using my old username.
Tl;dr my first couple VHL players didn’t go well and I worried I wouldn’t be taken seriously as a user and a potential player unless I re-joined the league with an alias. My third attempt at a player, Joey Clarence, was part of the S18 Superdraft that probably played a massive part in helping the VHL last past some of the doom and gloom that comes along with being a league driven by about 30 active members or so. Still, despite the fact that I was actually earning TPE at a strong rate, because I was in the eyes of others a new member in a draft full of good recreates, and because of the fact that I was a goalie in such a strong goalie draft, I wasn’t seeing a lot of attention being paid to my own player. I also decided that it’d be good to try to switch things up and have some fun with stuff considering playing things more as myself the first couple times around resulted in me getting bored pretty quickly.
So, I ended up going around to threads, generally media spots but at times just any thread at all, that didn’t mention Joey Clarence somewhere within them, and just commenting “šnubbed”. I did it quite a few times, just fucking around, and eventually people took notice. It was kind of hard not to when being the best team meant you had 6 active members on your team; when that’s your league setup, one person commenting the same thing in tens of threads a week is going to get peoples’ attention. Eventually the commissioner of the league, Slobo, who himself was apparently running quite a few multis to make the VHL’s rough active user numbers look a little less rough, decided to make a podcast talking about some things going on in the league. In the podcast he mentioned how annoying he found the whole “šnubbed” thing to be, and somewhere within that he mentioned FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY. From there, the word filter was put onto the forum and longtime members rejoiced every time a new member would use the word FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY somewhere in a media spot or a post only to be flabbergasted by what it changed to.
So yeah, that’s really it. I annoyed some people by trying to be a troll and putting FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY in threads all over the league and eventually the filter to make it FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY was implemented and subsequently carried over to every new iteration of the VHL forum that came along after. My attempts to continue trolling ended with me outing myself pretty stupidly (@JardyB10 was the one to figure it out), Joey Clarence ended up being one of the last active players selected in S18 but I stayed active and had a strong career, then went on to make my first and only VHL Hall of Famer on my next player with Tukka Reikkinen.
Gonna assume that faith hope love is the name and not a slogan. I like what you've done with the sig as a whole - its unique but still looks pretty good. I really love the lighting coming from the left. I think to make this a perfect 10 you could improve the lighting elsewhere as it feels oddly dark and light on some areas. But great job other than that, always love a creative v2 sig.
Oh yeah its a muff sig, gonna try a different format for this
Likes:
- The text is hella clean, love the groovy cursive main font and the secondary text fits well right underneath
- Abstract background is pure flames and the way you incorporated some of the color splashing with the render is peak
- Lighting over the head is pretty solid
Dislike:
- Your sigs tend to be washed out and I think its a stylistic choice but I feel that every muff sig would become 10x more fire by making a curves layer
Player name: Erik Finck II
Render name: Matt Grzelcyk
Preferred colours: Team colours for the Mississauga Hounds
Extra details: Preferrably wearing #19 if you can do that