Contentious C

Thanks for having as many brain cells as eyebrows, Anthony.

Yeesh, at least 4th quarters in the 90s had the excuse of gritty defense. This is some of the shittiest offense ever to close a game. Edwards has been DOG SHIT.

And Minnesota is coming out FEISTY. This is some fun shit.

Also, if it's true that Atlanta wants to trade Trae, why not flip him for Luka again? Embrace chaos indeed.

Billion-Dollar Chuck! Thanks for that jinx, Barkley. Now just beat whoever the 9/10 scrub is and then upset Milwaukee, thanks Heat.

I wonder if Chuck did that FanDuel commercial for free because they were willing to do that awful CGI looking that slimmed down (which Chuck certainly never looked).

Since there's no reseeding - which is the dumbest shit ever, but no less dumb than the climate-change-inducing 2-2-1-1-1 "let's pollute as much as we can with our charter jets" series format - I'd love to see 1) the Lakers make the 7, 2) have them and Memphis just beat the everloving fuck out of each other for 7 games, 3) whoever advances is limping into the second round, and 4) either Sacramento or Golden State blows them off the floor to make the Conference Finals. Would kinda be funny if the Nets stick it to the Sixers in the first round, too, but I don't think it will happen. It'd be like the NBA equivalent of a Zerg Rush.

Well, they weren't wrong when everyone said the Memphis/Minnesota playoff matchup last year was going to yield something interesting this year. Also, we willed Sacto/GS in the first round into existence by talking about it earlier in the thread. Hooray!

As a kid who used to look at Cal Ripken Jr's baseball card and wonder why he had a consecutive-games streak, when I knew the seasons were 162 games long but he only played 161 sometimes, I am 1 million percent here for Bridges doing this.

Bobcats!

Well, tonight was...hairy. As a preamble to the worst of the t-storm bullshit we caught here in the DMV, there was a power surge at my building that zonked out my computer. It's had some POST (that's Power-On Self-Test, which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like) issues for a while, where it would hang and annoy me for as much as 30 minutes before finally coming back to life. Usually two or three power recycles of turning off the PSU, unplugging the cord, letting it sit for 30 seconds or so, and then trying again would wake it up. Not tonight. Must have unplugged it about 10 times and it didn't do a thing. Popped out the CMOS battery (which will reset the motherboard) and that did nothing, at least with a short, 30-second wait. Replaced the CMOS battery with a new one, nothing. And the worst part was that it has 4 little "dummy" lights on it, the two big ones being memory and CPU. And, yeah, CPU was solid red. So finally I got desperate and found only one seemingly workable suggestion: take out the CMOS battery for a period longer than 20 minutes so that the system BIOS properly resets. So, I did that, went to work to check on an experiment at 10 PM (it's fine, btw), and came back to replace the battery. Everything plugged back in...still nothing. Then I got REALLY desperate, opened my work laptop, and resigned myself to spending about $400 replacing the motherboard and the CPU. The CPU is just old enough that you can't get new Ryzen 7 2700s anymore, and if I had to punch up to a different release of the Ryzen, I was probably going to need a new motherboard anyway, not that I knew what was wrong with either (or both). 5 minutes after placing the order, the computer POSTed and booted up. Little fucker.

So Dave Grohl decided to open a new venue in DC that's supposed to be a reconstruction of the original 9:30 Club. In doing so, he decided to keep the first few months of its shows in a lottery, but the lineup is pretty ridiculous. https://theatlantis.com/ You should probably check it out for yourself if you're interested. But the tickets are by request only and for the most part can't be resold, except to just get your money back, more or less, thereby cutting out the third-party fuckfaces who try to scalp these tickets for tons more than face value (BTW, when did scalping become legal?). So you put in your requests by the end of the week and take your chances to see what you may or may not get. I signed up for Foo & Pixies (obvi), X, Living Colour, Jenny Lewis, Drive-By Truckers, and Joan Jett. Guess I'll see if any of them hit.

I had just watched a YT Short from him on this exact topic. But I always feel like a bit of a dunce doing anything remotely similar to a warm-up, I don't know why that is. I think it's kind of a time thing; my workouts take longer than I like, and adding stuff like this just aggravates the problem. I typically do farmer carries on Pull day and usually feel a bit better after doing them. Same with face pulls, for that matter. I probably need to be doing all of these every workout.

I tried something that I can't quite tell yet if it's good or not, or if it's genuinely sustainable once I figure out whatever is going on with my lower back and ribs. Leg days kick everyone's ass, but I usually lead with regular squats and that seemed like a mistake. I'm only doing 105 right now because I don't want to overload my back with whatever it is I have going on, but the movement is still so taxing that I felt like I pay for it for the rest of the workout. So, I decided it should go last. Did my order last time of belt squats -- sumo deads (maybe not the best choice if I was trying to feel less wiped for the whole workout) -- calves -- Nordics -- and then squats at the end. Same weight, nearly the same reps (7 instead of 8), and everything prior to them felt less like I hated my life (well, because of the workout anyway). If I was doing 225 (about where I topped out prior to slacking off and then getting sick), I don't know whether I could pull off this setup, though. I think the primary reason I can do an order of operations like this is only because the primary issue with my squats is CNS fatigue and not a legitimate need for muscle recruitment. Of course, my core also feels embarrassingly weak, as that felt like what got the most work for all 3 sets. So, I don't know what I'm saying with this, except I guess I'm fishing for suggestions.

Bob Knight apparently got released from the hospital recently. Given what I thought was the case, I immediately assumed he crawled out of the morgue and became a lich.

Just too much depth and skill for SDSU to overcome, especially when you go 11 minutes without a bucket and get no points from your bench in the first half. And UConn is really good.

Tonight is Nantz's last Final Four. THANK FUCK.

Making the 'classy' even more ironic.

I'm giving it enough rope to hang itself, but I'm guessing Mayfair Witches will end up on the opposite end of that spectrum. I read all of the Witching Hour books because my mom had borrowed a couple from a friend and left them around the house. And 14-year-old me hadn't seen a book series with so much sex in it, so naturally, I stuck with it past it being any good. Rice is like King for me in that respect: lots of ideas that had merit but I never thought the execution was up to par from a writing perspective, but hey, they made their fortunes, I guess. And I don't know if this will be adapted well, or well enough. Some scenes are fittingly modern and punched up in dialogue quality...but then the opener ends on one of the hokiest fucking shots I've ever seen since Prestige TV became a thing. And why is this a "universe" already? This and Interview have done ONE season each. Get an ego when you get a fanbase, guys. Two interesting things about the casting, though. One is Harry Hamlin, who, generously, has been a bad casting decision in basically everything. This might, uh, be the first role of his life where that's not the case. Massive, massive creepjob right out of the gate: even his odious plastic surgeries fit the character. The other is Jack Huston, who played one of the all-time great supporting roles in Boardwalk Empire and I've been waiting for him to do something else that fucking great ever since. But since he's one of the mains and the character is one of the least interesting in the series, I'm guessing it's going to be another 'no' on that front. Le sigh.

Well, Iowa's magic might be running out thanks to a combination of foul trouble and LSU shooting the goddamn lights out; can't do much about a bench player coming out and hanging 21 on 7-for-7 shooting when LSU's stars go to the bench with 2 fouls each. Still, it's fun to see a game that's closer to a modern NBA or men's college game than the sort of mismatches that Iowa/SC seemed like it was predicated upon. EDIT: That is, until you realize that, in the history of all sportsball, only one team is undefeated, and that's the officiating. Huge chunk of these whistles need to get swallowed, and they miss calls on both ends.

I bought a new Kindle, since the old Fire I had was from 2015 and was frankly always a massive turd of a gadget. It did lots of things and almost none of them worth a shit. Got a Paperwhite and then realized I hadn't done my due diligence. I knew about no SD card/storage, but I should have known about 'no apps'. One of the biggest uses I got out of the Fire was borrowing from the library. Turns out I had to put Libby on my phone, link the accounts and devices, borrow books from my phone, go to the book and tell it to send to my Kindle, THEN go to the Amazon page for the rental and hit another button to actually send it. But, at least it works and I no longer feel like I ripped myself off buying this thing. So I started reading Firestarter because it was the first book that came to mind to check out. It's...not half bad. The recent movie remake, while generally terrible, is at least far truer to the story than the Drew Barrymore version.

There's a difference between Wrestlemania and a birthing suite? Well, I guess all the blood is hardway in the birthing suite.

I did tonight what I may never do again: actually signed up for streaming service (that is, signing up today instead of later next week) so I can watch Iowa/SC. It hasn't disappointed so far. But it's kinda strange watching women's CBB; it's just so different to hear announcers talk about someone being important offensively and their shooting % is in the low 40s. Whereas Iowa seems to be a team that's built with the understanding that shooting from deep breaks all the rules.

I take it all back, I want Stephen A Smith to talk about Lamar instead of you guys, because while he's still just as fucking boring as this, he's not DRY, too.

The Thin Nuclear Orange You Can See From Space Line?