A Stroll Down Muffmory Lane, Part I

[.sniffuM 1,741]

As of late, I've been struggling a bit to get all my sim league stuff done. The easiest solution to that would be to write a nice, long VHL media spot so I'm covered for the next month. And since I'm lazy and don't want to write something super research intensive, I figured I'd just write about my VHL history. I'll give you insights into the mind of Muff during these times, and if all goes well, I might even be able to get more than four media spots out of this. Anyways, without further ado, let's get into it.

Chapter One: The Very Beginning

Although this article is about my time in the VHL, my joining this league coincides so closely with the general start to my being in sim leagues that I figured I'd start from the very beginning. I've told this story a few times before, but it still blows my mind to this day how randomly I found this community.

In the dark yesteryear of 2007, a 12-year-old Muff had just grown tired enough of anime from Naruto fillers that he was looking angling for another hobby to follow along with. His natural nerdiness and affinity for numbers led him to baseball, and seeing a young player in Ryan Braun dominate the MLB as one of the best players despite being a new guy really appealed to Muff.

Jeez I'm a tool for writing that whole paragraph in third person. But yeah, Ryan Braun, depressingly enough, is the whole reason I got into sports. Baseball is, of course, light on action, and I preferred following it for the end result numbers rather than for the gameplay. That's when I took to football, my favorite sport to this day. Although games like MLB The Show and Madden were fun and a good platform to learn the sports, they weren't the most accurate simulators of their sports.

So one day, I went ahead and googled 'Football MMO'. This led to me finding a site called Goalline Blitz in its second season. It's a browser-based football simulator where you create players and can run teams as well. I was hooked on it for a couple years, chipping into my birthday money to boost my players every season and the like. One day I went into their forum for the first time, and noticed the off-topic section moved fast. Within two minutes a thread with no posts would fall to the third page, so I decided for whatever reason that I wanted to find the oldest thread in the section without a post.

That post was a recruitment link to the EPL, a long-since defunct baseball sim league using OOTP. I joined and officially started my sim league career, annoying a nice community of baseball and role-playing enthusiasts with my 12-ness. Eventually a new member named Cowboy joined, and brought with him graphics that were much better than the GIMP garbage I was making, and incredible compared to the usual league standard. I asked him for graphics tips, and he referred me to the VHL, saying I could learn a lot more just going there.

Chapter Two: Damien Walec and Optimus Prime

I had popped in to the VHL to see how much I could learn, but didn't really engage with it. A few months later, I grew tired of the EPL's system for point earning, where you could earn up to 30 points a season for doing tasks at a max of +3, at any time in the season. Because of my procrastinating nature, that meant I always put off my PTs until the end of the year. I preferred the weekly structure of the VHL and eventually joined up despite having no interest in hockey, with a player bearing my true identity. I did a media spot, updated once, and then disappeared.

Because I put my AIM screen name on my profile, I was still findable. When it came time for my player's draft, Matt Bentz of the Calgary Wranglers hit me up on AIM just to see if he could steal a prospect. I responded in earnest, and he picked me in the third round. He also supposedly went around the league bragging that he had the biggest steal of all time because a third round pick told him he'd be active. I never even logged on to accept my contract, and was released a couple weeks after the draft. I then came back a month or so later, apologized to Matt, and re-signed with Calgary (which was against the rules, but no one noticed). I earned some TPE, not much, then went inactive again and that was that for Walec.

 

Here's a dog doing yoga.

One day like a year later, I randomly got the spark to do this VHL thing again. I retired Walec and went for Optimus Prime as my second player. My best memory of Prime was researching Transformers lore to implement into his biography. Because I didn't know shit about hockey, the bio ended up being 90% Transformers history, but the league let me have it. Otherwise I remained steady enough to have almost 100 TPE when Quik drafted me to Helsinki in the second round. My interest was already waning again at that point though, and I went inactive shortly after being drafted. Prime would go on to play a role as a second line forward for some of the league's worst teams.

Chapter Three: Joey Clarence

I re-joined the VHL, but didn't want to have my reputation of going inactive follow me so I went under a different username, Thisismybthname. In between my Optimus Prime stint and this stint, the EPL had gone under and continued in a different form as BTH, so that's where that came from. Slobo, the commissioner at the time, thought it was a spam account based on the name so he denied my account creation at first, but I talked to him and cleared that all up. I created a goalie this time, Joey Clarence. Clarence worked for me because his story was that he didn't know shit about hockey, so I could relate to the character.

Along with being back under an alias, I wanted to spice things up to keep my own interest. So I went out and acted like a little scrub, talking smack and annoying people. My biggest claim to fame was going around to every article that didn't mention me and posting snubbbed. Slobo grew so annoyed with this he uttered in a now infamous podcast that snubbbed should be changed to FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY, and so it went.

My antics didn't last long, as shortly after the whole FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY debacle I made an account on this other site where you can animate characters and use text to speech. I made a stupid video talking shit about people but I messed up in my account name, so it was discovered who I really was. From there I went back to my usual demeanor and probably saved myself from going undrafted.

That Season 18 draft would, of course, go down on history as the best draft in league history to that time. 100 TPE players that would have been first round locks were falling into the third round because there were so many good players. Tfong's magnum opus Daisuke Kanou smashed the draftee TPE record, resulting in a cap being implemented on carryover TPE, and went first overall to become Davos's franchise goalie. Aidan Shaw, the namesake of the VHL's best goalie award now, was one of many players selected by Toronto, who picked the best possible draft to put all their eggs into the basket of. Helsinki got themselves a franchise goalie in GM player Jakub Kjeldsen, and then Seattle went ahead and picked Clarence in the third round. These four goalies would go on to dominate the era.

After spending his first season down in the VHLM, Clarence came up and became Seattle's franchise goalie. That run culminated in him co-winning the first Most Improved Award in Season 21 with Kevyn Hesje, checking gawd. However, going against the Toronto juggernaut, Seattle just couldn't get it done and had an older core, so the team elected to rebuild. Greg Harbinson, the Bears’ GM at the time, gave me an option to either go to a better situation in New York or net the Bears a better return in a deal with Calgary, which I ended up opting for.

Clarence played for three seasons in Calgary under Jardy, helping the team win the Season 23 Continental Cup. I had told Jardy I would play eight seasons with Clarence, but I was young, stupid, and bored with the goalie position. This resulted in someone in the Season 25 draft (I think Zach Voss) telling me to join the draft, me saying okay, retiring Clarence early and screwing Calgary. I feel bad for that, but it did lead to my best player, Tukka Reikkinen.

 

 

 

 

And with that, we’re more or less at 1,500 words. Considering I’m sure Tukka’s section would be well over 500 words considering how this has gone so far, I guess I’ll just stop this one here and get to that portion next time on Dragon Ball Z.

Quote

1,546 words

 

Claims

 

11/11-11/17

11/18-11/24

11/25-11/30

 

Edited December 2, 2019 by .sniffuM

[Gustav 6,093]

I'm fairly certain I read something somewhere where someone higher-up said that the origins of the FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY thing are a mystery.

 

I guess we've just solved it, assuming this is true.

[.sniffuM 1,741]

Just now, GustavMattias said:

I'm fairly certain I read something somewhere where someone higher-up said that the origins of the FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY thing are a mystery.

 

I guess we've just solved it, assuming this is true.

 

It is in fact true.

[zepheter 584]

Very cool when will you post the next bit of this

[.sniffuM 1,741]

4 minutes ago, zepheter said:

Very cool when will you post the next bit of this

 

I can't claim part 2 for another few weeks but I might write it soon. I'll post it somewhere if I do.

[Jayrad28 369]

The fact you refer to yourself as muff makes me uncomfortable 

[.sniffuM 1,741]

4 minutes ago, Jayrad28 said:

The fact you refer to yourself as muff makes me uncomfortable 

 

Call me .sniffuM then.

[Jayrad28 369]

3 minutes ago, .sniffuM said:

 

Call me .sniffuM then.

sure thing muff

[Victor 10,533]

5 hours ago, GustavMattias said:

I'm fairly certain I read something somewhere where someone higher-up said that the origins of the FISTED ANALLY BY A CIRCUS MONKEY thing are a mystery.

 

I guess we've just solved it, assuming this is true.

Clearly you're talking to the wrong higher ups.

[diamond_ace 3,106]

On 11/12/2019 at 9:58 PM, .sniffuM said:

 

Call me .sniffuM then.

<--- Omelet

[.sniffuM 1,741]

Week 2/3.

[.sniffuM 1,741]

Week 3/3.