Kyle Number One Fan Club Let's Go Kyle

Kyle may not be a nice person, but he is certainly a star.

I pick it up and hand it to him, making sure our fingers touch for just a second too long.

This is some Arnold Schwarzenegger level mind-games stuff.

Anyway Back to the Game

Nicky picks femmestrats, which makes sense because she's a woman, and ought to lower the degree of difficulty a bit. I've been thinking about whether or not this is cheating or not, and I kind of think it's on the level of the banging scheme.

Daniel, meanwhile, may not have the aptitude for this kind of high level tactical play. You see it every now and again in runners. It's kind of normal to graduate into longer (read: slower) distances as you age up and get slow and old. But tactical racing is way more of a thing in long distance than in sprints, so sometimes runners just, under perform at their longer distances.

Things get acrimonious as a bout of online breaks out in real life.

Kyle doesn't quite pick up on the double-blind-un/reality of the situation either, though. High level play should probably see fewer errors in the long term, but I suppose a newly established sport is going to have hiccups and weirdness before the analytics really get going.

The Verdict

Taking off my broadcaster's Underarmor polo and Oakley's for a moment, I have to say, I got a legitimate sense of anticipation seeing VERDICT ON THE TRIBUNAL.

Wait, this has been a string of tribunals. All by Isaac. Honestly, that's a banging scheme right there. Kind of dishonorable, bro, go join the debate team.

The upshot is, Isaac gets a 6-month tribunal timeout. Normally I'd argue that they should make that kind of rule-change between cohorts, but in a continuous sport like RCBG I guess that's less feasible. Still.

The Implications

One supposes, the 4-1 vote is quite telling here. Trickster's has a vested interest in Izzy and Laura being able to destroy one another; that's the coward's way for him to win, but the prize is substantial. One must imagine him to be conflicted, on the one hand there is the sport but on the other there is the competition.

For the others in the Tribunal electorate, though, what's their reasoning?

I'm still getting my head around the rules of the sport, but one thing is very obvious: the Tribunal is the sport, this breast growth stuff is incidental, clearly.

So why put a cardboard separator between all of the crabs in the bucket and one elegant lobster?

Spectator Sports

Something I genuinely like quite a lot about this book is the way that it has us one step removed from these sort of neo-mythic individuals, Izzy and Laura, at least for now.

"What's their deal?" one must wonder, fruitlessly.

The Mystery

the nuclear option

Great cliffhanger.

Waver Wire

Out

• Nicky

In

• Nichole
• League Commissioner Trickster's Tatas, I guess?

Rivalry

One thing is, I'm pleasantly shocked at how much I like the various "hopeless basket-cases" populating this text. One could imagine this book being, perhaps, angsty? And the degree of madcap pratt-falling going on is a good time. RCBG feels genuinely warmhearted, I am surprised to find.

I keep suggesting sports paraphernalia, so here's this, a mediocre-at-best book with outmoded social attitudes that I like infinitely more than it deserves, Once a Runner.

I don't "recommend" it, or its weird self-consciously neurotic new-South-isms? But I do love it, despite it, again, having aged like milk.

It is a story of administrativa, onerous bullshit, unearned epistemic cockiness, tribunals, and the pursuit of athletic excellence. So basically RCBG for Floridians. So, I dunno, food for thought: are the Tribunals actually subtracting from the potential excellence in the field of RCBG? Absurd to think, I know; they're the entire point of the sport.