A Gustav 30 in 30, #30: Touch of Grey

[Gustav 6,406]

 

With the conclusion of this series, I once again give the people of the VHL what they want.

 

 

After a season or so longer than I'd originally hoped, which shouldn't surprise you, and a lot more words than I thought, which shouldn't surprise either of us, it's time to close out Gustav 30 in 30. This series at times saw multiple articles per week, and at other times saw multiple weeks per article, but what's most important to me is that it's super comprehensive and a successful completion of my most ambitious individual project ever. I'm not entirely sure there's even any more to talk about than what I've given you--checking out my other articles really should give you the full Gustav experience. Spending lots of time wondering if I've forgotten anything, from the time I first made my list of article ideas up until now months later, has given me nothing of any importance. So, here you have it: the very last bits of thought about my time in the VHL that I've left unwritten.

 

I'd like to delay the weird personal recap a bit by first talking about my current player, Lazlo Holmes. In keeping with my run of naming players after something I find fun, Lazlo is named after the reporter in this SNL sketch. I pay practically no attention to SNL in general, but it was a video I'd seen years ago and liked. Plus, I can identify a little bit with Lazlo Holmes--I really like hockey and I do my best to watch my teams play when they're on, but it just isn't my favorite sport and sometimes I feel a little out of place talking about the NHL with people here who know how to evaluate a player beyond "does he score" and can tell me more about my team than I know myself. So, perhaps because I hadn't played the position for the longest time, and perhaps because I wanted to make up for the abject failure of my first player to do it, I created Lazlo as a defenseman.

 

I came into this career with a lot of publicity, retiring Art Vandelay in an "Art Vandelay"-filled thread and bringing in Lazlo by offering VHLM GMs the opportunity to offer to my player old-style. I ended up going with Halifax, who wasn't going to make the playoffs but gave me lots of opportunity to see what was possible. It turned out this was a lot, as I went point-per-game with very respectable defensive numbers in the rest of S92. 

 

S93 was very interesting and very fun. I was drafted 3rd overall to Saskatoon by GM @Dadam30, who ran a fun locker room with lots of active players. It was my first time ever playing for the Wild, and we were really good. Lazlo wasn't top of the top on the board from an individual standpoint, but I was still excited for his future and I was having a fun time. That fun only increased when I did something I've never done on any level of the VHL and won a championship--some might say it's "only" the VHLM, but that doesn't stop it from being something I'm proud of.

 

My draft season came up next, and I was ready to make a difference. The two players I'd managed who I'd seen drafted by someone other than myself went 1st and 7th overall, and I'd earned well enough with everyone I've managed to back up that draft position, so I thought I had a shot at cracking the top 5 in a stacked class. As it turned out, I went 10th in a stacked class and came after a few people who played the same position and were a bit better at earning that extra uncapped TPE than I was. Prague and @Tetricide had themselves a pretty good deal.

 

I played S94 in the E because there was really no point in wasting a season of depreciation to join Prague's roster that season (as much as I have to say about that). My GM was @Doomsday, who did a genuinely great job of managing the team and shifted my perception of the E a tiny little bit. It's not that I ever stopped hating the E or that my opinion ever changed about it being something the league should get rid of at its earliest convenience, but it is that I was glad to have a positive experience there and wasn't as worried for the sake of anyone who found themselves playing for Stockholm. Lazlo responded to his promotion to the E by putting up just about identical numbers to his last season in the M (including exactly equal goals and assists and hits/SB both within 10 of the season prior). 

 

After this, Lazlo graduated the E and moved up to the bottom-feeding Phantoms. It was here that I led the league in a category (SB) for the first time ever, blocking even more shots than I took myself in an effort to make Prague look semi-respectable. Granted, this failed most of the time, but it really wasn't anyone's fault given the state of the team's rebuild. That rebuild, unfortunately, proved to be a little bit of a roadblock. Going into the draft, and in all of my discussions with every team, I promised that I'd be pretty easy to convince to stick around if I had a clear picture of why the team could remain competitive enough to support that. And this was true going into this offseason, but still--and I will repeat, this is no one's fault--Prague had a plan but not too many pieces in place to be a competitive team. So, I chose to do something that I've very rarely ever done, which was to ask a GM to wait on the question of me re-signing and get back to me later once things had worked out. Now, it's in all likelihood that I would have re-signed eventually. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that building a team up and getting players to buy into something unproven is very difficult, and I was sure that there was a real honest effort to get better, which is usually really all I ask for. But it wasn't too long after I had that talk that I was informed I was on the block and could be moved depending on interest. 

 

Not too long after that, I was traded to Seattle after spending just one season up in the VHL. I left Prague on what I like to think are pretty good terms, and things all worked out anyway--they essentially turned a mid-1st into a probably-earlier 1st, plus a 2nd and 3rd, plus future-1D-and-someone-who-will-definitely-outearn-me Pan Daffleck was their #1 pick this season. The rest of Lazlo's story remains to be seen. He's a bit underwhelming this season, but with me finally adding to Scoring with a defenseman, is a Valiq in my future? I've been recently adding to Checking--could I win the Wylde after missing it by one vote in S68? Could I even win a Labatte? Or a Kanou, or even my first-ever Continental Cup? I have no idea and maybe at some point down the road, I'll be able to read through this and smile as I read this and remember when I thought about it.

 

That's something that I really think will be important to do at some point in time. When I came into the VHL, I was a quiet first-year college student with decent grades and no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I'd never lived anywhere outside of the house where I grew up, and the VHL was really one of my first-ever forays into meeting people on purpose. Now, I earn my own living in my third year of grad school in a different state, I'm president of my department's student organization, I have ideas of what I like but still not much idea of what I want to do with the rest of my life, and I'm up to lots of things that would have surprised me five years ago. Gustav 30 in 30 is actually wrapping up tonight because I have a flight at a weird time for a conference across the country tomorrow, and I decided I'd rather just suck it up and try to sleep on the way. I've learned so much about my field, my hobbies, and even just the world in general over the time I've been here, and I think I'm a very different person than I was back in the day.

 

That being said, I love that I still love the VHL. I could have very easily lost interest, like I've done with some things. I think it's helped that lots of hobbies I have come with the idea of working up to a reward. For example, I like to write music in my free time and recently finished something I've been working at for a long time, which is nowhere near as good as a pro would put out but is something I'm proud of. Luckily, doing things like long media spots combine something I'm good at with something that I can work at for a long time if I want to, that is rewarding when I do it simply because I have just decided it to be that way. Just as much as for the sake of getting you to talk to me about things that I wrote that I find interesting, which is something that in and of itself is fairly satisfying, I put hours of my time into trying to make high-quality media on the forum for the enjoyment that I get out of simply doing it. Often, this is a piece of work that I don't really have to do, and I think that freedom and the fact that I do it when I decide I want to makes it what it is.

 

I think that goes for lots of things in the VHL, and it goes for lots of things I've done that aren't specific to PTs. From the start, I broke my computer trying to figure out STHS, and then eventually got into GMing, and then got really good at building team servers, because I wanted to do all of those things. I started things like Town of Salem because I like being a part of them. I advocated for things like the end of the lottery, portal waivers, and the end of the E, and became M commissioner and helped overhaul the way it works, because I saw those things as things that would work differently if I had anything to say about them--and I did have something to say about them, and now they are different. I even started Discord gags like those related to Kranch and the Horny Police because they were things I wanted to see people having fun with, and I spent some time over COVID putting up those introspective reflection threads partly because I needed an outlet but also partly because I wanted the people around me to get what I had gotten out of thinking about those things. What I'm saying is that I've logged on to the forum with intention for years on end now, and I think the spirit of the league itself is just a little bit more "like me" than it would have been otherwise, because I willed it so. It's not that no one else has ever done this, and obviously lots of people have done that quite a bit more than myself, but I think I can say pretty confidently that I'm one of the people who has.

 

But anyway, I don't think I need to hang about that point for too long, especially since @Victor referred to this series months ago as "an act of ego-stroking" and that's stuck with me enough that I've tried to make sure that most of what I put into it doesn't go too far that way. Up until this sentence, Gustav 30 in 30 contains 51,544 words over exactly 1,900 sentences (yes, I checked), with an estimated reading time of 3 hours and 7 minutes. It also contains 169 instances of the word "VHL," and somehow 308 of "time," which I guess is fitting for the amount of time that it took. I have to say that I think that time was worth it. I've written about lots of things I completely forgot until I went back to write about them, and I think I've learned a lot about what my work here has meant in the broader context of what eventually evolved from it. 

 

I'm not going to tag everyone who's ever meant anything to me here, because I'm not sure we have space on this forum for another 51,544 words. But if I matter to you in some way, then chances are that you matter to me just as much. The VHL has been a huge part of my life, and I'm glad if I could have given you any amount of enjoyment along the way. You may have noticed that most of this series was written about things I did a long time ago, but I'm not at all done yet--and I think there's lots of room left for me to discover quite a bit that I never thought I'd come across on this site. As for Gustav 30 in 30--it's over! Go home! And finally, for the first time in months, I can write other media spots.

 

 

 

 

 

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

#19: The Sun Also Rises

#20: Ripple In Still Water

#21: How I Messed Up Davos, Part 3

#22: I Hate the Meta

#23: I Hate the Mods

#24: I Hate Bureaucracy

#25: I Hate the VHLE

#26: Mint Jams

#27: It Ain't Easy Being Green

#28: Art Vandelay

#29: Oh My God! They Killed Kenn-E!

[Victor 10,940]

5 hours ago, Gustav said:

@Victor referred to this series months ago as "an act of ego-stroking" and that's stuck with me

Truly I say the meanest things

[jacobcarson877 2,529]

Art Vandelay

[Gustav 6,406]

20 hours ago, jacobcarson877 said:

Art Vandelay

Art Vandelay

[Spartan 4,402]

He's finally gonna stop stroking