Agreed! Should improve retention a lot. nostr retention is quite low nostr:note148fhu4yqpghm6szxwkdevjfkklnm3tq0q47haj3cuy3v7y9aw6gqyglee3

It’s funny because I thought this was a get-well game for Dallas and that they’d cover the 6.5, but I picked the Giants in my low-stakes pool because it’s not worth it for me to go against them, and they covered. But only thanks to Brandon Aubrey finally missing a 50-yard FG.

- Malik Nabers suffered a concussion late, but I’d have a hard time arguing against someone taking him a 1.1 even in a re-draft league once he’s healthy. He’s a target and catch machine.

- Wan’Dale Robinson is the clear No. 2 and made some nice plays after the catch. He’s small and won’t make chunk plays, but useful.

- Darius Slayton showed up finally, and he’s a useful field-stretching No. 3, the role for which they drafted Jalin Hyatt who hasn’t shown up.

- Greg Joseph was 5-for-5 on FGs, including a 52-yarder. Even the waiver-wire guys are better than the GOATs of yesteryear. (Kicking is the one area you can compare players across eras because it’s independent of the competition level.)

- Daniel Jones played well — his INT was a last-second desperation heave. He was accurate and had some zip on his passes. The negative is when he’s pressured he still doesn’t have great feel. He only took one sack, but he rarely turns those plays into a positive. Still, this was progress.

- The Giants offensive line played well against the Dallas pass rush. Devin Singletary made a great move to turn a loss into a first down, but there’s no juice in the run game, no speed element.

- Dak Prescott was solid, took what the defense gave him, didn’t make mistakes. He also made a nice shovel pass to Jake Ferguson when under duress, the kind of thing Jones hasn’t been able to do.

- Rico Dowdle is the Cowboys starting back. He was bottled up early, but got free late. He also caught a TD. He seems like a stopgap, not the solution, but was adequate at least.

- CeeDee Lamb saw targets and production early, did little in the second half. He also had three rushes, as the Cowboys are desperate to get the ground game going.

- Jake Ferguson is healthy again and seems like the clear No. 2

- Aubrey is such a monster, drilling a 60-yarder down the middle with plenty of distance to spare. Seriously should have gone in the eighth round in the NFFC.

I can’t imagine what it would be like for someone to get a divorce now and enter this era of dating. They’d have to relearn everything.

The modern state of dating is really something.

This girl matched me with on a dating app and sent the first message. It was a hand waving emoji basically saying hey. I replied and said “hey what are some things you like to do?” She unmatched. I must’ve come off too strong.

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honestly feel a lot better losing in Week 1 because had I pivoted off Cincy I probably would have lost Week 2 or Week 3

I’ve been putting some more thought into why villains tend to be more interesting and memorable than heroes.

Joker. Thanos. Vader. Hans Landa. Hans Gruber. Hannibal Lecter. And so forth.

I think part of it is intentional and part is unintentional.

An intentional reason is that a less dynamic hero gives the viewer or reader a simpler template in which to insert themselves, which is useful for certain types of stories, especially adventure-oriented ones. Like when we follow Luke Skywalker through the original Star Wars trilogy, in addition to following his development as his own character, the viewer is also kind of seeing the world through his eyes and thinking how cool it would be to be a jedi. Other characters with stronger personalities and screen presence are viewed more purely in external terms.

An unintentional reason is perhaps that more thought goes into villains. Creators put more conscious thought these days into making sure their villain is not tropey or one-dimensional. Like, you sprinkle a touch of good in with the bad. Or you give them good intentions for bad things they do. Something like that. People also did the same to heroes, by sprinkling in some bad with the good, and those tended to be more interesting and so anti-heroes became so common as to become overdone. But if you just want a hero, not an anti-hero, it can take more work to make them interesting and it often doesn’t get done.

Perhaps another -and super basic- reason could simply be average age. Heroes are often younger than villains. There’s less time and thus often less complexity for why they are the way they are. Like, Vader has just seen and done so much more than Luke. There are reasons for why Vader turned bad, but there aren’t really reasons for why Luke turned good. He just was a good kid raised by good adopted parents. Over time, he develops reasons to *stay* good, though, which is his character arc developing. By the third movie he’s older and thus a bit more complex of a character.

And perhaps yet another reason is instinct. Our brains are wired to respond faster and with more magnitude to threats than to good things. And so a character that embodies a threat of some type is more noticeable. And then often the character is doing things that stand out, or wearing things that stand out, or saying things that stand out, etc.

Often, it only takes one thing to make a villain interesting: just knowing why they’re the way they are. Evil is already interesting in a bad way, and so understanding why someone does evil things tends to interest us.

For example, we could pick some simplistic dark lords, which is a template that is known not to be very interesting. Sauron doesn’t really stand out to me other than visually. I don’t know anything about him, don’t know why he’s so mean, etc. It never really comes up in the trilogy, although he’s explored a bit more in Tolkien’s posthumously published worldbuilding lore.

How do we make that more interesting?

Well for example I think Brandon Sanderson does dark lords well. In his shared literary world that a lot of his books take place in, there was a god-like entity that was killed long ago, and shattered into 16 different shards, each representing a facet of its personality and power which people can obtain and become demigods. One of the shards is called Odium, which means hatred. He is described basically as God’s anger, separated from the context that would otherwise make that anger righteous. So it’s the hatred and anger of God, separated from the rest of God’s qualities. And he goes around killing the other shards to be the only one left. So with that basic setup or “why” answered, I’m like, “okay, I see what happened here,” and it pulls me in better even though the character itself is just… furiously evil with no redeeming qualities.

Anyway, part of why I’m thinking about this is because I’m thinking of more ways that creators could use to make heroes more interesting and memorable, without necessarily making them anti-heroes.

Trying a new client, but this one kinda sucks too. Slow, hard to follow people, not easy to like or view what you’ve liked.

When is someone going to build something that works here? Or is it just impossible to build shit on Nostr?

Pacific seems like the best Time Zone and it doesn't seem close.

A whole of hard truths, in one little image. Not sure people on this platform will like that this implies.

Gold has this option too