F1 in Sauda Arabia

 Am I just one of millions of fans writing what they think about this race? Yes.

Am I even sure what I think about what I saw? HELL NO.

...

Just a couple bullet-points, then:

• I had pretty well made my peace with the idea that Lewis will win his 8th WDC, and I believe I told my dad and best friend (another F1 fan) the same thing. But this weekend did nothing to stop that feeling of inevitability.
• The lengths Max has gone to to try to stop Hamilton are positively Schumacher-esque (and the Red Bull team therefore very Brawn, Todt and co.-esque). 
• The dude is a menace, absolutely. Not that I have a huge problem with the idea of someone being a menace in ruthless pursuit of winning.
• Could Mercedes have been playing along quickly enough during the pass/repass/rerepass that they weren't shaken at all by RB's/Max's tactics? Seems a bit of a stretch until you remember that Mercedes is always a step ahead in tactics/strategy over everyone else, even when their car isn't.
• On the other hand, Mercedes sure did hose themselves by pitting both drivers during the first safety car, making Max's choice to stay out and hoping to persuade Masi to throw a red the only option...by which point Merc were on the back foot.
• That whole cat-and-mouse experience was just nuts, and I suspect it will get lost in the shuffle of what came afterwards. But Bottas either deserved a penalty for what happened there, or the rules need to be changed where that sort of shit becomes a penalty. That the red flag turned it on its head does not excuse what happened before it. It would not be the biggest shock if it turned out the FIA was working their magic to neutralize everything as best they could, and if so, shame on them (even though this was one of the most memorable races of the past decade).

What an incredible race and experience.

Upcoming Carpentry Projects

I've been in my current digs (avec girlfriend and her cat) for about four years now. In the same town for that plus about six months. When you're in an apartment or townhouse that has no garage, no shed, no covered parking spots, and only a paltry patio, it's difficult to rationalize purchasing too many tools or having too many projects. Every time I think of buying something that is larger than a T-shirt or a book or a DVD, I have the same questions for myself:

• How are you going to pay for it?

I'm not poor by any means, but I'm not well off enough to buy my own house or a place that has the aforementioned garage/shed/covered parking

• How much will you use it?

I have that tendency that some others share where I start a lot of projects or think I'll get excited about a various hobby, only to fizzle out soon afterwards. That didn't stop me from buying an electric guitar and amp, nor did it stop me from buying a few paint supplies and building my own easel to try out some Bob Ross-style painting, but the results of those make the next time around a little less likely to result in a purchase.

• Where will you store it?

This is the biggie. At this point, all our closets are pretty much busting at the seams. Two bicycles stored in the master bedroom closet? Check. Or, well, until I took one out, rode it a few times, and have now left it in the kitchen because it's filthy and I don't want to clean it or put it back in the closet. New tool chest loaded with tools in the other bedroom (office) closet? Check. And a damn good thing it is, too, because I kept buying tools and was just piling them on each other...as a result, this was a great purchase, but that doesn't make the closet feel any more full. Bowling ball bag, car wash bucket, old birdhouse, box of paints/adhesives/aerosols, and two coolers in the downstairs coat closet? Check.

You get the idea. It's a damn mess. Girlfriend doesn't complaint much, but if I bring it up she will share my anxiety about it. The cat doesn't complain at all--what a trouper. But that doesn't mean there aren't still ideas running through my head. Occasionally one of them is even decent!

F1 2021, Co-Op, Preparation: Runnin' Down A Dream

Author's Note: I was going to publish our results from Round 1, originally, but thought I needed to give some setup and housekeeping first, so started going and before I knew it I was typing about a dozen different things. So this will just be a preparatory post, allowing for the possibility that we re-start our Co-Op Career.--DID.

Brett and I decided to run a shortened schedule for our Co-Op career mode; 23 races (the full season within the game, I believe) is an awful lot and we'd like to be able to feel like we made some progress in this over the next year or two, however long we play it. Also, I'm not positive that a 23-race schedule would allow you to make any changes from season to season. So a 16-race season it would be, allowing us the option to change a half-dozen items of any schedule from year to year. 

Even in real life the schedule has been a mess. The last several months, dating to before the release of the game, has seen a never-ending shuffle of the real-life season. Most recently, Qatar is rumored to be added in to replace...Japan, I think...but this hasn't been confirmed yet. For those non-F1 fans or those who are baffled and overwhelmed by the fluid status of the schedule this year, I present the following:

Current Schedule:

• 1 Bahrain
• 2 Emilia Romagna (Imola)
• 3 Portugal (Algarve)
• 4 Spain
• 5 Monaco
• 6 Azerbaijan
• 7 France
• 8 Styrian (Red Bull Ring)
• 9 Austria
• 10 Great Britain
• 11 Hungary
• 12 Belgium
• 13 Netherlands
• 14 Italy
• 15 Russia
• 16 Turkey (Istanbul)
• 17 USA
• 18 Mexico
• 19 Brazil
• 20 TBA (Qatar the leading rumor)
• 21 Saudi Arabia (Jeddah)
• 22 Abu Dhabi

Cancelled from one part of the 2021 schedule or another:

• China
• Canada
• Singapore
• Japan
• Australia

Of course, the video game doesn't even have all the tracks that have been advertised to be a part of game: Qatar will not be added in, but Algarve (Portugal), Imola (formerly San Marino, now Emilia Romagna) and Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) were also not included at the time of release. Since beginning to draft this post, Algarve was added in 1.10 and Imola was added (in 1.12, I believe), but Jeddah is still not done.

All this ignores that Imola and Portimao were both raced last season and never made it into last year's game either. The subject of a steady stream of frustration and inquiry from fans of the game series, it is reported that the amount of work required to design a single track takes months. Which makes sense. But then, we're over a year past the second F1 race to take place at two of those tracks. Jeddah is a more reasonable situation, as (last I checked) the track hadn't even been finished yet...so how would Codemasters create that one?

Realization of a Dream: The Creation of F1 Multiplayer Career

The announcement came this past Spring. My dream. 10-20 years in the making. Something I've been wanting so long that now I may be too old to get much enjoyment out of it.

This year's F1 video game by Codemasters introduced a new game mode: a multi-player career mode. I know that might not sound like a big deal to many people out there, but it really is. Contract negotiations; driver movement; competing R&D. Two human players. Working their way (hopefully) up the grid. Maybe teammates at times. Maybe not. Two. Humans.

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The whole thing reminds me of the coffee table book I acquired at a Hasting's many years ago, Realization of a Dream: The Creation of British American Racing. Unsurprisingly loaded with pictures that varied in quality and subject from good to charming to seamy, the pictures were also a hint that the team and those they employed were not nearly as ready for the elitist environment of F1 as they thought they were. The book travels through the few years leading up to BAR's debut, talking a lot about Pollock, his successful efforts to snag Villeneuve, the hiring of Adrian Reynard, development and testing of the car, the ill-fated attempt to get two differently-liveried cars onto the grid and the bizarre compromise the team settled on, and their debut at the 1999 Australian Grand Prix, where Villeneuve qualified 11th, briefly ran as high as 7th and ultimately lost his rear wing.

The parallels are innumerable: a lofty idea beautifully visualized in the mind, the number of half-steps taken toward the goal, the challenges involved, and the ultimately half-baked result that we are left with. If you grab your binoculars and squint into the future, you can even predict the next decade: the dream becoming more and more realized following a series of buyouts, to the point that the end result is no longer recognizable. Not that you're complaining about the improvements.

Hang on. Let me start over.

Spurspective - Game # 2, Vs. Toronto, 26DEC2020

I know, I know. It's been almost two weeks. Six games have been played since opening night by this team. 

Did I realize just how much time was involved in watching every game and then writing about it (even if it's just a few scattered thoughts)? No. No I did not.

If you don't mind, I'm going to write about this as if I haven't been following the team in the five games since this one. And don't worry, I haven't even watched all of those yet (as I've learned over the past few years of aging and moving to the EST, East Coast Bias is a real thing).

___________________________________________________________________________________

The home opener came against Toronto, surely a leftover from some scheduler who forgot Kawhi doesn't play for the Raptors anymore. If Kawhi didn't just absolutely HAVE to go play near his home,

Spurspective - Game # 1, @ Memphis, 23DEC2020

I decided I might like to write about the team on a game-by-game basis as I wet my feet anew. And, well, hell, I just don't care as much about the other teams or their players. So it sounded like a potential idea to write about the other teams through the prism of the Spurs. Of course, getting to grips with the team I'm more attached to seems like Priority 1. ___________________________________________________________________________________

The Spurs' season opener took place in Memphis, as all the teams are (for the moment) playing back in their own arenas, albeit still empty of fans (again, for the moment). I'd spent the previous week or so briefing myself on the players and the storylines of this year's squad, and thus had come to many of the same conclusions as other Spurs fans:

A New Spurspective

A semiprofessional sports journalist friend of mine recently told me he was taking his talents to another website, and it was discussed that perhaps I would also be interested in throwing my pen in the ring. Although I did have my own sports column in a monthly newspaper at a tiny Christian college in Idaho 15 years ago, and although I do have interest in doing more writing than I've done for years (as any faithful reader of my half dozen prior posts knows), I'm not sure I have enough enthusiasm to throw my pen into the ring just yet. Desires aside, I don't know that I really have the talent or the determination to keep making contributions, particularly if it's not my living.

Of course, it does provide a potential avenue to keep me using this blog. And so I think I'll try to get something down here.

As a fan of the NBA's San Antonio Spurs, I am not proud of the fact that I pretty well tuned out the sport during "last season" (they only wrapped it the first bubbleball season up a couple months ago and have already started another abbreviated season to try to maintain the semblance of normalcy). Between the China/Daryl Morey story, and the disastrous responses by LeBron, Adam Silver, and many others in the NBA, and the league's decision to have a season in the face of a pandemic experience this country has never experienced, I was pretty well turned off. The truth was and always will be that the league will do whatever it can not to lose money...if they can spin their greed as providing a public service for the morale of the average American, they will.

Of course, at this point, they're going to have another season (gotta have that money!). And though their reasons for having a season in the face of danger and setting a shitty example for the public were dirty as sin, the bubble has been noted publicly as more successful than the attempts of any other contact sports league. And as I am getting bored with the same old stay-inside routine, as many Americans--and I think I've held out longer than the average person, as I'm more of a home-body than the average person--I'm bending to my baser desires of catching a basketball game.

Lost in the shuffle of the past year and change of China and COVID were my formerly beloved Spurs. 

Although I will never care as much as I did when Tim and Manu and Tony were suiting up, I still consider myself a fan and surely know more of their bench players than I do from any other team. All that in spite of the fact that they missed the playoffs, had a losing season, and won fewer than 37 games for the first time in 20 years or more. Of course, over the past few years, things have gone about as poorly in the luck/probability/randomness department as they could go for a franchise who is still doing an adequate and self-aware job (as opposed to, say, the Suns organization). Tim, Manu and Tony retired or spent a year in Charlotte before retiring, Aldridge got old, Murray got injured, the team was still picking low in the draft every year, and then the Kawhi situation, wherein the Spurs also lost Danny Green and got probably as much back as they could in DeRozan, who is of course a very good player but also makes it harder to see the writing on the wall.

So now I'm left with the the spectre of former glories behind me and the unknown silhouette of the present and future in front of me. If I'm going to continue calling myself a real fan of the sport, I have to make an effort to be watching it somewhere and somehow. If I'm going to remain a self-proclaimed Spurs fan, I really need to know not just the names but the direction of these players and this team. In short, I need to take a look for the first time since Kawhi left town. I'm excited and a little bit scared of what I'll find.