Long story short: people protested in front of Smyrna city hall over the decision to promote a police officer, who had shot and killed a man who attempted to evade a warrant arrest by stealing a Maserati and driving at police.
Seriously, why are protesters so stupid? They’re clamoring for “justice” for a guy that stole a car and tried to run over some cops. In the cops’ case it was kill, or be killed.
The funny thing is that the people protesting all seem to have this idea that the cop was promoted solely as a reward for killing a black guy; it’s like they have no understanding of promotion schedules, tenure, and a record of commendations that could lead to a promotion. Not really a “hey, good job shooting that colored fella, have a promotion!”
When I first saw the final score to the 2016 NBA All-Star Game, I thought that I was looking at a screen capture for like a video game or something. Like when sports pundits are having a slow news day, so they do fluffy shit like video game simulations of upcoming real-life sporting events, just so they can have something to talk about. I didn’t realize that the 196 points that the Western Conference All-Stars put up in their 196-173 win over the East, was actually reality.
Name an NBA video game of the 90s; NBA Jam, Tecmo NBA, EA’s NBA Live 94-98. I was pretty good at all of those games.
But scoring 196 points in any of them required some pretty exceptional circumstances in order to pull off, and most certainly not as likely against human opponents. Like NBA Jam would require the perma-fire code and use of Detlef Schrempf to rain three pointers to run up the score. And in Tecmo or Live, I’d most certainly have to set the games to play actual 12 minute quarters, and probably turn fouls off, so I could clobber the AI opponents, steal the ball and score at will. Even with these kinds of conditions, scoring nearly 200 points was never that easy of a feat. In a video game.
Slapping a Confederate stars & bars sticker on your Japanese Acura CL family sedan.
bahahaha.
I saw this while I was coming home from work. I was expecting to have a fairly unpleasant slog through a route of traffic that I knew that I would be facing regularly from now on, but I have to admit that seeing this amusing unity of conflicting automotive elements made the drive a little more tolerable, as I found myself laughing over this several times over throughout the crawl.
TL;DR – NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, wishes to explore the idea of creating rules to discourage the use of the strategy known as “Hack-A-Shaq.” Kobe Bryant disagrees, stating that it would set a bad example for the NBA and aspiring basketball players.
I’m with Kobe on this one. In short, Hack-A-Shaq is a basketball strategy in which teams deliberately foul the worst free throw shooter(s) on the opposing team, repeatedly, to send them to the free throw line where they ostensibly will miss both or make just one out of two free throws resulting in 0 or 1 points on the possession, instead of 2, 3 or 4. It was named after Shaquille O’Neal, a notoriously poor free throw shooter, who endured countless intentional fouls, to send him to the line, to hinder his team’s offensive output. And the strategy has only grown and continued since the reveal of the name and tactic, as free throw shooting has continued to devolve into a dying art, and percentages are plummeting throughout the entire league.
Sometimes, it’s used when a team is ahead, and they want to preserve their lead, so they deliberately start Hacking-a-Shaq so that the opponents’ ability to chip away at the lead is suppressed, and they are unable to build any substantial momentum. More often, it’s used when a team is behind, and they use Hack-a-Shaq to stop the clock, minimize the opponent’s ability to stretch the lead, and to try and maximize the number of possessions they can get.
Meet Cupid Twitch. Cupid Twitch is a skin concept for League of Legends character Twitch, the Plague Rat. The impetus behind this design is that Twitch is the last bow-and-arrow wielding character on the roster, and with Valentine’s Day approaching, adding him to the Heartseeker family of skins. The idea works two-fold, as it provides an opportunity to present a character known for filth and pungent odor in an ironic manner to be suddenly a romance-spreading Cupid, firing his arrows upon champions on Summoner’s Rift, as well as holding true to Heartseeker trends of utilizing bows and arrows.
The basis for the idea was taking a hairless rat, which are already all pink and cherub-like colored, and giving it Twitch’s weapon, modified to at least have a Heartseeker theme. Add wings, and superfluous hearts, and voila, it’s Cupid Twitch, ready to spread love in surprise double and triple kills.
I should be in a pretty good mood right now. I’m not saying that I’m in a foul mood by any stretch of the imagination, it’s just the fact that instead of being happy and in a pleasant mood, I feel kind of in the middle somewhere lately. In fact, earlier this week, I had some pretty great news that broke, that I will eventually start sharing with my six readers and maybe over social media if I feel like it. Unfortunately, earlier this week there was also some terribly bad news, that anyone willing to scroll back a few posts would realize, and it certainly has held a lot of weight to why I feel like how I do lately. If anything at all, it’s the conflicting ends of the spectrums on the two events that have me somewhere in the middle, albeit leaning towards the wrong direction, that is preventing me from feeling absolutely depressed and somber.
The thing is, even without the tragic news from earlier this week, I think I’d still be emotionally weighed down, because aside from the super bad news from earlier this week, there are still things going on with various other people close to me and out there, that I’m aware of, and are aware that they’re bringing them down. This makes me feel less happy, because I know there are people I care about feeling down.
Such is the nature of those with empathy, but I’m beginning to think that I might just be overly empathetic, if such is even possible.
To those who follow professional wrestling, already have heard about the retirement of Daniel Bryan, the darling of the fake sport for the better part of the last three years. As far as professional wrestling is concerned, this is a massively huge blow to the industry, losing one of its more capable and popular performers over the span of the decade, but when it comes to caring for the well-being of your fellow human beings, it’s still the right call.
Honestly, when the initial news and tweets broke out, I was skeptical that it wasn’t a work (fake, for storyline purposes), since in the ever-changing and adapting world of pro-wrestling, this wouldn’t have been the first time a storyline was set up, utilizing social media and preying on the emotions of others to lay the groundwork for a swerve.
And there’s still a part of me that thinks that the door is not 100% shut, because if doors actually managed to shut permanently in wrestling, then we would have never seen things like Sting coming to the WWE, Bret Hart coming back after Montreal, and the countless times Hulk Hogan has come and gone.
