The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

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Turning point

Here’s a wrong thing Yahoo sports said about game 7:

lol wut

Why is this wrong? Because the Fatinals were up 3-2 coming in to that inning. They proceeded to win the game 6-2. The two runs they scored in that awful mess of an inning were ultimately irrelevant; Allen Craig’s solo shot in the third won the game. So, no, ball four wasn’t a "game changer," it was just a run-of-the-mill blown call that forced in a pile-on run.

That inning was still fawful, though. How did these people get to the World Series at all?


October 29th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

World Series game 7 drinking game

Okay, here are the rules. Hope you’re all ready!

Take a drink whenever:

  • Someone is intentionally walked. Take a second drink if the pitcher who threw the IBB doesn’t do anything else.
  • Someone attempts a sacrifice bunt, successful or not. Take a second drink if the bunter had a 2011 OPS+ greater than 100. Third drink if it’s better than 130.
  • Someone commits an error. Take a second drink if the error allows the go-ahead run to score. Take a third drink if it’s in extra innings.
  • There’s a pitching change. Take a second drink if this isn’t the first pitching change this half-inning. Finish the bottle if the wrong pitcher comes in.
  • A pinch hitter comes in who has a 2011 OPS+ worse than the hitter he’s replacing.
  • Someone is caught stealing. Take a second drink if the steal wouldn’t have helped anyway.
  • The batter calls for the hit-and-run and then doesn’t swing.

Good luck surviving the night, everybody! Oh, one one final rule:

  • If the Cardinals win, drink until your heart stops.

October 28th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

World Series thoughts

I’ve been quiet lately. I know it. But that doesn’t mean I’m dead! Though if I am dead, I’m clearly in Hell, since somehow the Cardinals are one win away from a goddamn world championship, which I do not appreciate thank you very much.

On that subject. You seen that game six? Wow. I’m not sure which was more impressive: the bad management, or the bad defense. Get this: Rangers had the bases loaded in the sixth inning, and their pitcher coming up. So R. puts a dude in the on-deck circle to pretend like he’s pinch-hitting, but nobody’s fooled, because it’s his backup catcher. We all know he’s just hiding his real pinch hitter so drunken master T. La Russa wouldn’t be able to overmanage for it. And then, as expected, Torrealba goes back to the dugout, and out comes… Colby Lewis. The pitcher.

R. Washington you mad idiot genius, how on earth could you fuck this one up? This is the easiest decision any manager ever has. Bases loaded, sixth inning, pitcher coming up. By which I mean American League pitcher coming up. Here are Colby Lewis’ career batting stats:

.188 / .188 / .250 / .438, 14 OPS+. That’s in a whopping 17 PA. Sure, Mitch Moreland ain’t great, but you’d take him over that with the bases loaded, yeah?

Now watch this. Do you see that right there? Do you see Nelson Cruz just being Manny on that play? He loafs after the ball for a while then tries to make a dramatic leaping grab and just misses it. It looks to me like he was showboating; it he’d just, like, run over there he’d have caught it easy, but for whatever reason he stopped short and then tried a leap.

That was with two outs. In the bottom ninth. If he makes that catch, the Rangers win the World Series.

Would you believe the Rangers blew two more leads after that? Unreal. I’m with Cameron on this one.


October 28th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

In my mailbox today

"Last chance for kinky sex!"

I’d like to suggest to spammers that perhaps they’re ten years too late. But I appreciate the thought.


October 25th, 2011 Posted by | Uncategorized | no comments

I promise this is true

So I’m watching the Tigers piss away the ALCS, right? And I’m playing this goofy Puzzler World game, doing a word-unscrambling puzzle. And what do you suppose it shat out?

clurtch

I hate you, life.


October 16th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

Not to nitpick

But the title of this article is "Tigers bury their season by allowing 9-run inning." But the Tigers lost that game 15-5.

You see where this is going, right? If Bud waves his magic pope sceptre and negates all the runs the Rangers got in that inning — every single one! — the Tigers still lose. So the nine-run inning was, in a sense, irrelevant.

Funny, though.


October 16th, 2011 Posted by | Baseball | no comments

Video games are dead to me

So I’m playing Space Marine, right? And I’m thinking, hey, these parts where I’m mowing down orks with a meltagun are pretty slick, but why the fuck are they so far apart? There is a huge amount of just like walking around, and way shitloads of cutscenes. Hey game developers: cutscenes suck. Especially when you can’t skip them. Why can’t you learn this? I paid you fifty United States dollars so I could mulch greenskins with a chainsword, not so I could listen to polygons argue boneheadedly about the meaning of bravery and duty.

This is how I am these days when it comes to AAA games. Does anybody actually play these anymore? It doesn’t show from the reviews; all anybody talks about is cutscenes and who’s in the voice cast and triangle fill rates and stupid shit like that. Who cares? Take Gears of War 3, for example. Have you heard anything about it that isn’t cutscenes, cutscenes, Ice-T, Old Spice Guy? Because I haven’t. Because nobody’s said anything else. For all I know there’s no game involved at all, and it’s just a really long Old Spice commercial with aliens in it.

I mean, Metro 2033 is on sale on Steam today, so I went to check it out. No demo, but there’s a trailer. But does the trailer show any gameplay footage at all? No it fucking doesn’t. It’s like three minutes of samples from the goddamn cutscenes. This will convince me not to buy your game, THQ.

And when I do play a AAA game? I’m frustrated by the cutscenes, sure, but also by the mechanics. Who decided it was a good idea to put save points in the goddamn boss fights? Because every game does that now, and it sucks. It turns the boss fights into grindfests, since you can’t really lose anymore; if you die, you restart partway through the fight will full health and ammo. So you just keep shooting and dying, and eventually you win. That’s horrible. It also encourages developers to put assbrained gimmicks in the boss fights, like in Metroid: Other M, since you just keep doing the same part over and over until you finally figure it out.

Also, why does nobody understand how to make a video game look good? Hey, I’m glad Rage’s miraculous new engine can shart polygons all over the screen, but if all the polygons look exactly the same, who gives a shit?

Remember when video games were fun? Yeah, I don’t either.


October 10th, 2011 Posted by | Games | no comments