im shocked shocked that i've baited tumblr's best pacers fan @radelulu
so okay the long version of what this is is my frustrations with how sports media talks about humility, which i think is routinely conflated with modesty or self-deprecation by talking heads for lazy reasons. i think what humility can be (or should be if it's worth anything to people who want to achieve greatness) isn't "looking down on yourself" but "looking at yourself from a distance" (and "looking at the shape of your story from a distance", which is probably more important). to the extent that i think ego ever interferes with an athlete, i'm thinking about it in terms of "i think they have zoomed in on themselves to the extent that nothing else appears in the frame, i think they have lost the ability to turn the chessboard around." the landscape frames a problem with someone's mindset as "too much self-love" when i think more often and more precisely it's "not enough curiosity".
so among the modern Garden Villains we obviously have to mention trae young, who has always had a very clear idea of himself as love-to-hate—he might have been too good at seeing himself from the garden's point of view and not good enough at seeing himself from atlanta's point of view, lmao, considering how things are working out for him
contrast hali, who is by all measures immodest, showy, dramatic, has an instinct for the effective theatrical gesture, and the instinct is perspective—is able to echo the choke gesture because his sense of historical perspective is so fine! what raises him above trae young as a performer is i think hali's ability to maintain double vision and work in double vision—i.e. from both pacers fans' pov and the opponent's pov, simultaneously, in the same gestures. he's able to maintain hali (face) hali (heel) tyrese haliburton (non-kayfabe) separately, because those do have to be separate, and operate them as a single entity.
and i feel confident taking this angle on him as an entertainer because it has a clear x's and o's statistically measurable translation in his court vision, his assist rate, his playmaking, his shot creation for his teammates. his ability to see the stage as a director sees it, in a scene in which he is a moving piece, is fantastic. & another situation where it's accurate, but frustrating in certain meta ways, that the name for the playstyle is "unselfish", when what's great about it is not the absence of self-interest (like... the ostensibly unselfish player gets something pretty good out of it...) but the presence of vision.
on wemby. kfs's jeff johnson says of both this year's pistons and this year's spurs, i think very incisively, "the problem is: what are you going to do when you run up against someone you don't hate?" i don't think wemby—or, on some level, spurs fans—quite knew how to define their identity once their enemy was no longer a team that everyone in the league agreed was the Big Bad.
the pistons never got revenge against us because they couldn't answer that question against the cavs. last year, after we won against boston, we found we couldn't answer it against the pacers. the spurs slew the dragon in the form of the thunder, but then couldn't answer it against us. either you find a way to hate all 29 teams—this is basically what mj did, as far as i understand the situation, so i'm not gonna say it doesn't work—or you stop trying to get yourself hype about what you're playing against, and you find something to play for.
this is what hali gets that wemby is too young, too hyped, and too locked into his own protagonist status to understand right now: you gotta find someone lovable to be and someone hatable to be, because "i'm lovable, but some people hate me, probably because they're evil, and i hate them" is too heavy and too corrosive and it's going to kill you. the villainous shit you do cannot be "it's fun villain behavior if you look at it from the perspective of people who think i'm a hero", that's not the type of villainy you can live with, you're gonna wake up one day at 40 and not be able to escape the knowledge that you could have been more interesting.
you're gonna find a lot of people saying that wemby had a very sudden villain arc because he ran into a big media market; but the fact is that the garden, in its own way, loves trae young. the fact is that the garden, in its own way, loves hali. (as far as i can tell it does not surprise anyone in new york at all that they are both reportedly good dudes in real life.) reggie miller got a fucking 30 for 30 for becoming a garden villain. all chants of "fuck _____" don't mean the same thing. wemby had an abrupt villain arc because he had no idea what to do when he was up against someone he didn't hate, and he kept acting the way he had acted against monsters, because the thing about monsters is you don't want them defeated, you want them dead and gone. but when you're playing human beings you have to want them defeated. i want them defeated makes you a physical player. i want them dead and gone makes you a dirty one.
it really did drive me up the wall that he was asked if he was a garden villain now and replied "not as big of one as trae young". i just don't understand why he would think that rolling the dice on our logo would be a bigger deal to us than throwing two of our point guards to the ground, except that he was answering as victor wembanyama (non-kayfabe, fairly online) because he can't answer as wemby (heel) or wemby (face) yet, wemby (heel) was not the guy who did that, because wembanyama (22 years old) was just trying to dispatch a threat, and wembanyama (22 years old) does not yet have that ability to compartmentalize, to do things for (sorry) dramaturgical reasons, or to understand that other people see something when they're looking at him.
similarly, i don't think he didn't shake hands because he was trying to be rude or snub the knicks in an unsportsmanlike way. (i mean, if that was it, that would have been hilarious. that would have been a good villain act.) i think he just wasn't thinking about anything except how bad it felt that he'd lost a game that he had been clearly, obviously winning and that he had then somehow thrown away all on his own. the game as seen through a zoomed-in camera, without any other players in it. i think, at that moment as during the rest of the series, he was just mentally incapable of turning the chessboard around. that's why he's throwing the ball in the wrong place. that's why he's picking stupid shots at the moment when it matters most. when he's under pressure, he loses perspective.
he said he badly wants to learn a lesson from this but doesn't know what the lesson is yet. some people have said this is a villain origin story for him. i hope it can be! he's got to get something going for him, and soon.
the thing is that the least attractive quality in someone is desperation. It's something that people are very good at smelling on someone and instinctively recoil from. I, however, can't make myself less desperate. The only way to get people to like you is to earnestly not be desperate. No amount of false confidence works. so idk how to make friends. I have to let it happen but also show interest and not seem desperate despite being desperate and on the verge of collapse, and I'm so fucking sensitive to everything right now I just can't.
A Palestinian sight-disabled girl reads Qur’an written with Braille alphabet at the Dar Al Kitab Wa Al Sunna Association in Gaza City, Gaza, 2015.
@Ashraf Amra
Roman glass unguentarium in the form of a dove, containing the remains of a balsam
Sealed since its manufacture, containing the remains of balsam and the liquid in which it was once suspended. The vessel would be blown and filled through either the open tail or beak, which would then be reheated to seal it. Accessing the contents would require snapping off the beak or tail, which in this case was never done.
I am several years past being a person who actively keeps up with naddpod but today my boyfriend said “but this is ridiculous” and I had to suppress the urge to go butthisisridiculousbutthisisridiculous
izzy806
yousharknotpass
snowghoul
gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
