The Meta-game Dialogue That Inevitably Accompanies a League of Legends Session

"Hey, I was wondering if anyone wants to give me tips on playing this hero."

"Pick another one. That hero is under-powered."

"No, I mean, I really enjoy play-"

"Pick another one. That hero Is not nearly as good as these alternates."

"Come on, I just want some advice. Look, I could easily go to one of hundreds of forums and find out exactly how to play any of these heroes, including sites that would tell me exactly what you're saying about hero selection. I know I could win 51.5% instead of 51% of games if I played the metagame and picked the most OP heroes at any given time, searching for a marginal advantage, but that's fucking retarded as advice. I don't enjoy playing with those heroes as much, so yes, changing up my hero selection might mean winning a sliver more, but it's also completely limiting my enjoyment of the game which decreases my enthusiasm to make it through the early game. And besides, even if I lose slightly more often, that will eventually be accounted for in the matchmaking system. God fucking damn it. I just want to enjoy myself for the five fucking hours a week you guys insist that I play."

The Confluence of Albums and Basketball Teams: Criteria, Justification, and "Pet Sounds"

My friend (and editor at the Gothic Ginobili) Aaron contractually obligated me to write this piece after another 3000-word unpublishable rant about stats. He says that all my pieces are basically just Lovecraftian ramblings about Richard Jefferson and the "untold nature of numbers" (my words, not his). Guilty. This is... actually a good point, Aaron. You're right. I need to loosen up. Heh. So, *sigh*, here's a possibly-viral, reader-friendly post for all the music lovers out there! I was thinking about how musical albums (like LPs) would translate to basketball teams. There are several modes of analysis we can use to base a sane comparison on. After all, consider the following:

• Depth- how many songs are good? How many songs are playoff good?
  • Numerically this works seamlessly. Most teams have about 10-15 players and most albums have about 10-15 tracks (and in both cases a typical listener's playing time for each song will be proportional to that song's quality, with the last few often being skipped entirely in both cases). What is the distribution of the album's quality?
  • Playoff depth? How many players would you honestly trust to start or finish the Western Conference Finals? Not so fast, Ramon Sessions, even though we all love you. How many songs would you honestly listen to on their own for pleasure? Not so fast, "That's Not Me" from Pet Sounds (okay, situationally, sure, sue me, I'm nostalgic). Not so fast, 2nd-best George Harrison song on a Beatles album (except Here Comes the Sun)! How many songs would you trust with your life?
• Good Fit/Chemistry/Variety between the players (especially when it comes to the role players) is essential when talking about the greatness of teams.
  • This can mean fit caused by track ordering/lineup tandems (see side B of Abbey Road).
  • But it can also be fit caused by inherent chemistry (for example, between a offensively-limited stopper and a ball-dominant volume-shooter). To keep with the Beatles' example, "Revolution #9" and "Good Night" from the White Album are both very good songs, in my humble opinion  But they work especially well in that specific order: the transition from one to the other is epic and shows a deep understanding of how to use those two songs in the lineup.
  • "Fit" means that players can be put in lineups that play better than the sum of their parts, but it also means that the team has a diverse skillset of pieces for matching up against any opponent (or any adjustments that opponent might make). The players can "fit" into any basketball puzzle needed of them. The musical equivalent to this is to have a range of styles, aesthetics, moods, lyrical modes, chords, etc. Basically the questions boil down to "Is this a versatile album to listen to in a variety of situations?" Like: Would you put a stretch of this album on in your friend's car (sorry, Pet Sounds/2003 Spurs/2011 Mavericks)? Would you listen to this album alone if you were feeling depressed (sorry, Rush, but come on, you are a silly band. You are a silly band to like [I'll call you back when I'm better I will meet you and we will get ice cream together you are so funny, Rush, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings]. Sorry, Ringo [except for the devastatingly sad "Don't Pass Me By". Dead serious])?
• Star quality:
  • What do the stars do? Do they have a simple game or are they multifaceted? Are they just very good players or are they transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime, impossible-to-replicate players? Are they conducive to building a great team or are their talents actually a limiting factor in the team's ability to attain greatness?
  • What do the best songs do? Are they simple or musically complex? Are they simply very good or are they transcendent masterpieces? Is the song conducive to building a great album around or do they call undue attention to themselves and fit poorly with the other songs on the album?
• Offense vs. Defense - Offense is musical creativity, defense is musicality. Sue me, the metaphor falls apart here. I'm not going to rely on this except as a sort of semantic tie-breaker. Bob Dylan's mid-60s output is a balanced two-way team, not too great in either.
• Pace - pace is pace. Err... I mean tempo is tempo. Possessions per minute is beats per minute. But possessions aren't beats. There you go.
• Historical Success. What did this team/album do? Did it never win any championships but everyone that watched them won championships of their own? Sup, SSOL Suns (thanks, Bill Simmons, for that prenatal article premise, by the way).

This is gonna be a series, usually covering albums I've listened to dozens (if not hundreds) of times: Today I'm gonna review The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, later I'll probably do such masterpieces as Songs In The Key of Life by Stevie Wonder, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart, That One Pretty Good Kanye Album That Everyone Pontificated About, Especially Kanye, by Kanye West (or My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, as it's more commonly known), Moment of Truth by Gang Starr, and, finally, the greatest album of all time, which is, of course, Om by John Coltrane.

Let Earthquakes Be Earthquakes

"Welp. Still haven't posted at The Gothic Ginobili yet. Writer's block."

It's the strained, pathetic cry of futility, meaning nothing and aggravating me with its meaninglessness. I've long known there's something to this block beyond some nebulous "things have to change": it's just that I haven't known or been able to articulate just what.

I love basketball, and I love writing about basketball. As the spooky, CIA-monitored, RJ-enshrining, prevolutionary version of my contributions to that blog, Pearls of Mystery gives the lie to the writer's block. I have no trouble writing these sentences and approving them for publication when I'm safe in the knowledge that no one will read this crap. And so it goes that here I can write whatever I want, and I feel not just respite from the "block" but the non-existence of this block entirely. It's not performance anxiety, either: If you could witness the number of things I manage to say about sports in a given day to friends and acquaintances, you'd think that I'd thought about little else. I love the public discourse, too: That's not the friggin' problem. Nor is time commitment: I've been spending a lot of time learning sort of the theoretical and empirical basis for competition. I've really been exploring my most basic impulses, competitively, and been learning to articulate them. That's not the problem.

There is no damn writer's block, and there's nothing wrong with the Gothic Ginobili. So what the hell gives? Why am I suddenly so d*mn profane? LOL.

Well, the truth is, I think it starts with my relationship to my family (especially my extended family on my father's side). See, I love my family dearly and I'm certain they love me back. But while the love is unquestionably genuine at every turn on both sides, the relationships, communications, and expressions are ingenuous and infinitely questionable. Which is only to say that the love is human.

"Only at Nightfall": A Return of the Mystery and a Manifesto at Dawn

Hi, everyone. Oh, I see you've tripped over your own feet and spit out your coffee at having seen a new Pearls of Mystery post. Yes. Well, nice trip. See you next... it's almost fall, and it's been several months since I have posted here. This is good because I've been posting and editing at The Gothic Ginobili, which is in the process of becoming a Truehoop affiliate.

Now, The Gothic Ginobili has been wonderfully successful by any measure, thanks mostly to Aaron McGuire, but I've had a lot of great pieces go up and I've done a lot of fine editing. We've even had a few new writers and a few more guest writers, which is wonderful. I had a lot of pride when my link to "The Consummation of Dirk" turned out to connect its fine DFW-influenced author Jonathan Callahan to a literary magazine for the analogical "Beyond Good and Evil" to the "Thus Spake Zarathustra" of "Dirk".

Overall, the only regret I've had with GG is that the consistent feature I could theoretically bank on for a couple posts a week has thus far eluded me. So I go through alternating periods of intense posting activity and barren writer's block. So - in the utter midst of such a block - I want to spend my way out of the recession, so to speak, by putting  some ideas to virtual pen.

Spurs Grizzlies Update

So far I've gotten through one rotation of Game 2, after promising a full play-by-play, a full possession-by-possession of the entire gosh-darned game of 48 minutes.  Yes, it's coming sometime, but I've found it hard to continue.  Why?  Because many of my organizing assumptions and working concepts for the piece turned out to be false.

Problems I'm having extending the first rotation to the rest of the game:

• Too many images; not enough visual cues: A picture is worth a thousand words, but if the picture is of ten basketball players (as most of the pictures were) I've already diluted that maxim down to one hundred words per player.  Okay, seriously, though, it's hard to tell from a grainy still which short Grizzly is Sam Young and which one is Mike Conley. I need to explain visually (using cues like arrows/screen arrows/shading/words on the image) what is going on, then use those cues (and only those cues) in order to explain what is going on in the picture.  In other words, I need to treat stills as if they are of 10 wire-frames, assuming the reader doesn't know the difference between Duncan and Parker, but also assuming they can find the "left elbow" or the "mid-post" if I mark Tim Duncan there with a yellow circle and refer to the area in the text.    I don't think this is at all condescending; rather, I think describing these plays is telling me how little I actually understand of basketball strategy. It's what NBAPlaybook does and as far as I'm concerned, Pruiti's site is the absolute gold standard.  
• Not every possession is atomic: This wasn't obvious when I did the first rotation but when I started to do the second one it was clear: The structure of half-court sets really broke down for the Spurs and their opponent when Tim Duncan and Manu checked out.  I'm probably going to be using "flows" or natural sequences of possessions when chippy, scrappy scrums of turnovers begin.  
• Learn the difference between the different types of screens: A self-explanatory dictum that will allow me to avoid misuse of the word "flare" when describing a brilliant non-flare screen play.

I think that about covers the problems I've been having, and their obvious solutions.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant, as we see once again.  Anyway, I have to go back to my cave for a few weeks and finish this entire play-by-play.  Pearls...Away!  :hops into gigantic flying pearl laden with question marks:

Redundancy of Roles and the 1960s Celtics: An Academic-Sounding Blog Post Title

Over at A Substitute For War (a neat NBA blog if ever one existed), there's a great little piece about what the author believes to be the best starting five of all time.  Instead of going with the "All-Time All-NBA 1st team, so to speak," they simply describe an ideal team, taking into account that many of the best players in history (almost because of their greatness) would be redundant in their roles, and that having 5 incredible scorers but no one to hit an open 3 or get putbacks would not actually be ideal.  It's a fascinating concept: that players like Shane Battier might be better on an all-time team than LeBron, despite every statistic on Earth favoring LeBron as an individual performer (for all of Battier's particular areas of greatness).  Given (as ASFW notes) that the Heat were a solid contender this season whose limiting factor seemed to be the offensive redundancy of Wade and LeBron, I really agree with this concept, and I'd like to put to words a new take on a very old concept, a take that immediately jumped out at me after reading this piece (coming from someone fascinated by the relative strength of eras and conferences).

Okay, for some context for what I'll say next: I'm the first person to say (basically) that we are living in the best of possible NBA worlds.  There is an embarrassment of talent on at least 15 teams (I'm looking at you, entire Western Conference besides T'Wolves and Warriors) and the fact that #1 and #2 seeds keep getting bounced in the West - I sincerely believe - has as much to do with diminishing returns on such incredibly loaded (and well-coached) rosters as it does with sheer random chance, matchups, and injuries.  Every team in the Western playoffs belongs, and then some.  The 2011 Grizz and 2007 Warriors (and 2010 Spurs at the 7 seed) were fantastic, near-contending teams*.  And the East - while incredibly top-heavy - is actually quite heavy at the top and its top teams rival the West's top teams.  In short, we are looking at an incredibly loaded era which will surprise me if it can get any better, but given the intelligence at work in (most) of these great teams' front offices, I won't be too surprised.  What I'm saying is I have never bought the concept that the talent pool today is at all diluted relative to any other era - fewer teams or not.  If it seems like there is a diluted talent pool, I think it is mostly because there are the same proportion of bad/disinterested owners with a larger sample size (i.e. there are literally more examples), and that proportion's actions are more firmly in public view thanks to first ESPN and then the Internet.

*Granted, all eventually lost in the second round, but still, all three won the first in 6 convincing games and injuries hardly totally account for the difference in any of the three.

On the other hand, though the talent pool might be more barren than today, if we can accept that historically great players today and yesterday are comparable, then maybe the very best teams of yesterday are not as far behind our best teams then we think.  After all, historically great teams might not feature a whole lot of historically great players...but they certainly might feature a few historically great players and many historically great role players that complemented them (and be better off than the former situation, even ignoring egos and salaries).  And that got me thinking: What about teams like the 1960s Celtics?  Even with a drier talent pool, didn't they have historically great players and fill in the gaps with remarkable craft and intelligence?

"Solving For Pattern" and the NBA Lockout

Thanks to Larry Coon (via Pounding the Rock) we learn that the lockout is extraordinarily more expensive than the marginal percentages at stake in lockout negotiations. Now, as someone applying for jobs in computer science, and someone that has recently been obsessed with proper solutions to problems on small and large scales, maybe I can weigh in here with my (probably idiotic and reductive) two cents.

Wendell Barry's great essay "Solving For Pattern" (warning: PDF) is a fantastic burst of sense that tells us lucidly about "holistic" and "organic" solutions to problems without falling into ideological or mystical claptrap. Barry tries to differentiate between good solutions and bad solutions and uses as an example some case studies in agriculture. In his view, good solutions don't create problems outside the scope of the solution or the original problem. As Barry attempts to show, good farms mimick nature in her elegance, rather than in her bare-stripping brutality. Good farms don't pollute the surrounding area with manure. Good farms don't demand too much in resources of the world outside the farm, don't deconstruct their own long-term goals with short-term cash grabs (for example, by destroying the farm's topsoil with a monoculture). Good farms turn (as much as is possible by the Great Eroder) cattle waste into fertilizer for plants and plants into feed for cattle. Good farms are really good (if highly artificial) ecosystems with a sustainable yield. Good farms are not so large in scope or size that they cannot economically sustain the humans needed to tend to them. Good farms are good interrelated processes with the overall goal of social health and well-being.

Now, Barry is not just talking about some pie-in-the-sky utopia rooted in Ecclesiastes' meditations or some sort of Platonic or Randian ideal where a farmer is some sort of virtuous, compassionate genius or anything. No, Barry just calls for the existing attention and intelligence and vision of farmers to be directed to appropriate solutions, rather than directing that mental power to ameliorating work and liabilities with directionless amalgams of short-sighted band-aids (that in the end tally, says Barry, are unsustainable on every level). Barry recognizes that any solution not rooted in a whole understanding of problems, any solution that is not recognized as a process with its own qualitative demands and yields (he uses the analogy of an organ in the body) is doomed to fail at resolving the solution's goals in some ultimate sense.* Transparently, Barry's argument applies to just about any organization and its problems.