I absolutely detest the practice of saying the “the proper nouns of the world,” i.e the Tom Brady’s of the world. Or the Empire State buildings of the world. First off, it’s a proper noun. The implication of a proper noun is there is only one specific instance. Second, that’s diminishing to the proper noun used by lowering that status to the mean. Last, it’s usually used in a sports context to unnecessarily group up a bunch of players even though we already know the context of why they’re being grouped up for comparison. It’s just fucking dumb. It really grinds my gears.

I was on broadcast crews for sports events. I started out doing camera then worked my way up to graphics. As cool and fun as that job was there’s major caveats to it. You need multiple jobs in this field to make any money. You can’t just coast at one place and expect to make bank. You have to hustle back and forth between gig after gig. This was just for college. Pros are even worse. I knew people getting gigs with my favorite pro teams and they’d say stuff like " we only got 2 dates this month" and that’s with avails given upto 6 months in advance. I was told for one arena that the group there is very clicky and the only way to get into it is to wait for someone to die. I know guys who would spend a weekend in Philly just to book it up to New York for a few days then fly down to Florida for the next weekend. It’s a real hustle, with potentially no down time, and crap pay. It’s an amazing gig of you’re fresh out of college and have the energy for it. Unfortunately life put a couple road blocks in my way and I had to give it up for my own sanity.

I agree that it still needs a cooking, but what’s there is already so good. Salmon is great raw or cooked.

For video games, Ostranauts. It’s the perfect space survival sim IMO. You wake up on an industrial salvage station and get a ship. Then you fly to derelict ships and scrap them for money and parts. Build up your own ship and travel farther and farther out. It’s jank as fuck to learn but once you get it down it’s the type of game where you put on music then just go for hours and hours. It’s early access and a lot is changing but the core gameplay loop is so addicting already.

For tabletop games, Infinity. It’s the best miniatures skirmish game I’ve ever played. The rules are deep but tight. The number of minis you put on the table is just right to me. List building is the best of any game I ever played. The rules are free. The app is free. The miniatures are the best out of any wargame I’ve ever played. It’s just a shame that people are so locked into Games Workshop that they don’t see other games as an option. Like I had a couple friends get hardcore into it but never more than that. And at the height of it’s popularity at our store we had one of the best players on the East coast play in a tournament. That was a sight to behold. Like I’m not a tourney player at all for any game. Watching the number 1 east coast player do his thing was the most inspired I ever was to become a tournament player.

Try it. It’s a fantastic game. I think the newest version that came out on Steam is the way to go but a lot of people still recommend the PSP Version if you wanna emulate it. Or you can go all the way back to the SNES version. I don’t think there’s a bad version of the game but there are definitely better versions of the game.

Tactics Ogre. I see people drop Final Fantasy Tactics as the greatest tactics game of all time. Then you always see Fire Emblem, Advance Wars, and Disgaea after. People sleep on Tactics Ogre. It’s a mechanically superior game to all of the mentioned. It’s story is equally as good as FFT. I think the graphics are better. It’s a challenging game from the start. FFT was created with the Tactics Ogre director and lead artist to be a more accessible version of TO. People see 90s golden era Final Fantasy and automatically put FFT on a pedestal. TO is like Undertaker stalking AJ Styles ready to obliterate whatever is in its way.

My brother got Loser down one of his sideburns. Everybody uses it against him every once in a while.