Rin

Houston resident checking in Tf is the Honda Center?

not on my fuckin watch

Forgot to update here-- Put in my 2 weeks for current job last Friday, was accepted for a position with a locally based software company as a DevOps Engineer! Little bit of a career shift, but the team seems so much more fun and the benefits are so much better than my current situation. Moving on from a dead end into something that I might actually be able to put time into and grow with.

Ghosted after an hour tour and an in-person interview? That's a new low as far as I've heard, JFC. Supposedly there's a bit of a trend going on where younger candidates will apply for jobs, get interviews set up, and then just no-show. Any e-mails or calls they get after, they just ignore. Maybe one day they'll finally get the message.

Taking some inspiration from @kirbithan's thread about goalie players, I felt a little inspired to look back and reminisce a little bit about the career of my first (and favorite, to this point) player, former Titans goalie Alexander Pepper. While I've expressed the love before of being the guy in net, I also have a really fun time doing something I haven't really committed to since then; being a franchise player, and being synonymous with a team's logo in a way. When Pepper was drafted to the Titans under @Quik's regime, I had a feeling I wouldn't be going anywhere for the entirety of my career. Not that I would have had a choice, mind you; the goalie market was just as crowded and stagnant as it is today. I might have been able to find a trade to go elsewhere later in my career, and it might have even been the best choice for the aging Titans to move on from me, but I stuck it out to claim two career milestones that still mean a lot to my VHL tenure-- 300 career wins (all with Helsinki), and the franchise lead for wins as a goaltender. Immediately, I made my goal with the Titans clear. Taking a peek at some of the handy spreadsheets, history posts, and Portal statistics, I noticed that the Titans had not had a winner of the Aidan Shaw trophy since season 23, when Jakob Kjeldsen took home the award. Something about breaking that kind of a curse really spoke to me, especially since a franchise-oriented goal seemed a lot more achievable at the time to my first-gen mind. If I couldn't make an impact on the history of the VHL as a whole (most wins, most awards, etc), I most certainly wanted to make an impact on my franchise. I wanted a Shaw win, I wanted a cup win, and eventually, I wanted a cup win where my player was recognized as a playoff MVP. The third of those goals, I thought, would take ages to accomplish. To my surprise, however... ...In season 66, I accomplished all three of those goals at once. Pepper split the Shaw trophy with future hall-of-famer and perennial thorn in his side, Kallis Kriketers. In the moment, I wondered if he truly deserved to split the award, but in hindsight I do think that the stat lines are close enough that a shared award makes enough sense. Back then, the award committee was a rotating group of users chosen to keep views fresh and decisions supposedly unbiased and unique, but that concept was eventually abandoned pretty quickly; likely a direct result of some of these award wins. I remember being on the committee at this time, and explicitly requesting to abstain from the vote because I couldn't remove myself from it enough to make a call. That lack of a vote resulted in the Pepper/Kallis tie, so I like to think that I made the right decision; I was too close to the situation, and truly couldn't pick one goalie over the other for that year. Of course, that was one of only three trophies Pepper would see that year. With the season 66 cup win came the necessity of crowning a playoff MVP, which Pepper ended up taking home in a narrow vote over teammate Matt Thompson. This one, I think, is the vote that got the committee disbanded. The Titans, that year, were honestly just a good team. When putting all of their stats next to each other, it was admittedly difficult to find a true stand-out player to grant the award to. Since the group couldn't bring themselves to choose one player over the other, we were all tasked with ranking the players in order of how deserving we thought they were, from highest to lowest. A winner would be determined by adding up the sum total of the rankings. Satisfied with this system for voting, I ranked Thompson as the number 1 choice and Pepper as number 2, which is what I truly thought after looking at the entirety of the playoff run. Thompson would have won MVP under this voting system, had one user not inexplicably ranked him as last among their selections, taking his overall total and granting the award to Pepper, who ended up with the highest tally. While I was happy with achieving my goal so early in my overall VHL career, it didn't feel great to win it that way, and I've gone on record since stating that Thompson should absolutely have won that award. The monkey's paw would curl as a result of the season 66 success, as Pepper would continue on exactly as he'd been playing throughout his entire career-- good, but not great. Still, as a career member of the Helsinki Titans, a team that had been racking up wins with him in the crease, Pepper began to approach a record I started regarding as my ultimate goal; the franchise leader for wins as a goaltender. While he certainly isn't the most revered goaltender in Titans history, I can proudly say that he ended up passing the actual best Titans goaltender Astrid Moon and other notable Tuomas Tukio for wins under the centurion's banner. In his eighth and final season in the VHL, he was just able to eclipse the 300 win mark, ending with a career total of 302. This was also an astounding milestone to hit since, at this point, no goaltender had eclipsed the 300 win mark and failed to reach the Hall of Fame. That was, of course, until Alexander Pepper hit 300 wins. Being the answer to this trivia question still bothers me, and is emblematic of the kind of "success" I felt with Pepper- existent, but undeserved and unremarkable. I achieved every goal I set out to complete with my first player, but all of them came with an asterisk. All of them, of course, aside from the franchise record. Today, Pepper's number rests in the rafters of Helsinki's home ice; a reminder that his play and commitment were respected and revered by followers of the historic franchise. I cherish this moreso than any of the individual awards granted to Pepper, because it feels like the only thing he actually earned. I grew really close to the Titans franchise during his career, and they admittedly still hold an irreplaceable spot in my VHL heart. I wish Helsinki was in need of a goaltender right now, because I would genuinely love the chance to get between the pipes for the Titans again. Hell, after this career, maybe I'll pull an @Ahma and devote my future players to the Titans going forward. I love their logo, and I love being a little part of something far bigger than just me. I love that my legacy, however little, lives within this niche hockey world. With Yor Bjorven now beginning his VHL tale, I hope to finally right some of the wrongs that were imposed on Pepper; I want to win a Shaw on my own this time, and I want to enter the Hall of Fame with a goalie. But with goalie being as bloated a position as ever, I also want to repeat the one thing I did right with number 37. I want to make a lasting impact on whatever franchise drafts me. I want to be able to say that, while I was out there lacing up the skates, that little patch of blue ice in front of the net belonged to me. I want to love my team again. 1,200-ish words, claiming for 2 weeks

For the first time in a hot minute, I'm getting drafted once again into the VHLM. Seems like a number of teams need a reliable high-earning goalie, so it's a small toss-up to see where he'll end up. Last time I was here, Rin was being drafted into the VHLM for what was absolutely only going to be one season. On that day, the VHLM draft felt more like a formality; I was hopefully going to play for a contending lineup that would make use of the short time I would spend on the first rung of the VHL ladder. I wasn't particularly excited or engaged in that draft, to be perfectly honest, because I knew it was more of a formality now that I've been through the process a few times. What didn't help, of course, was the idea that I would be drafted again the next year for another minor league team, the VHLE, where I would spend an additional season in a different minor league that had zero interest in... well, anything, it felt like. I've voiced my displeasure with the VHLE time and time again, so I don't need to re-hash things here, but needless to say it was another draft and transition that I didn't care about at all. Another quick, temporary stop on the long and arduous path to playing games that meant something, I thought. This time, though, the VHLM structure has changed for the better. I'll get drafted once before knowing my VHL team, and then I'll likely spend some considerable time with that minor league squad while I work up enough TPE to be competitive at the majors level. While that does make it a little harder to be competitive or effective in the M right off the bat, I actually feel like getting drafted will mean something before my VHL time begins. I'm actually really excited this time to see where I'll end up, and where I'll play for as few seasons before my career officially kicks off.

1. I genuinely can't remember; I don't watch anything these days that isn't on... honestly, Youtube. 2. I doubt I'd just shave the head, seems like a waste at this point. I feel like growing out your hair and picking out a few nice hats would go a long way. 3. Coffee! Love the mix of something bitter with something sweet. Can't go without a little cream, though. ----- 1. What's the best goalie gear setup you've ever seen? 2. Is hockey your favorite sport? If not, what is? 3. What's your favorite color combination, and why do you like it so much?

Wouldn't mind playing for Houston at all. Live here, love the logo, love the colors.

Didn't want to hold out for S100?

Honestly, though, I LOVE being the team's goalie and, at this point, might just continually recreate goalies until I stop having fun with it. Something about the position has always spoken to me.

I'm going to kms

Squires is a crazy good sim player name

I'd throw mine into the ring here but it seems like there are a number of requests already-- deservedly so

As far back as my tenure with my very first player in the league, my biggest problem with the VHL has been some of the hyper-competitive nature that exists at just about every level of member. Don't get me wrong, it's fun to be competitive, and having our fake hockey players compete against one another is exactly the point, but sometimes I feel like discussions surrounding competition warrant some inward reflection about what the VHL provides for us. It's discouraging to see a lack of sim results for not only our players, but our teams at large. It's discouraging to put forth so much time and effort for it not to pan out when it "counts." Time and time again, however, I'll see heated discussion spark over results that don't feel fair enough to those on the losing end. Calls for rule changes, format alterations, accusations of unfair or even completely rigged sims. Crises of confidence as higher earners aren't getting the level of production they expect out of their players. Is this discussion bad? Absolutely not. But at the end of the day, I see so much emotion over text-based simulations that we have such limited control over, and I can't help but feel like maybe we need to step back and think about what we, personally, take away from the VHL. I like some of the wording I used in a response to a different post, which referred to the VHL not as a hyper-competitive, skill-based simulation where time and effort are guaranteed to yield results, but as a collaborative writing and world building project that everyone contributes to, piece by piece. This league is something greater than the sum of its parts, evident by the countless forum posts and extensive portal documenting its history. Write-ups and logs of various players, builders, interpretations of results and retrospectives over the different "eras" of the league at large. It's fucking cool, no matter how you look at it. I know it's frustrating when sim results don't reflect what we expect, but isn't that where the fun is supposed to lie? Are we here to create content and find community over a shared interest in nerd shit, or are we just here to get the Discord ping that says sims are up for a daily ego boost, knowing or player and/or team (deservedly) rolled better at the sim casino today? Why is team and player performance so important to us, and why do we feel so entitled to success over something that, at the end of the day, is entirely arbitrary? Are we supposed to be having fun contributing to something bigger than ourselves? Is it so important to let everyone know how much more Simon loves me as opposed to someone else? This whole thing is cool, I just like stepping back to appreciate that.

Wait, wasn't the original point of trivia that you HAD to use the forums in order to find most of the information? 99% of older trivia questions used to be answerable by knowing which spreadsheet to go find within one of the many different history sections of the forum. The portal is wonderful, but it can't be the be-all end-all. Instant gratification generation's gotta learn how their ancestors used to get things done around here