Shrimp! Heaven!! Now!!! -- Daniel

We can't keep doing this, Daniel! -- Daniel's Mother

A Mercifully Brief Moment of Kayfabe Dropping

I'm finally getting around to reading Beth's and Talia's book. I like sports. The smell of the bat, the crack of the grass, you know. So I'm guessing that I'll like this book, too, since it's a sports story.

Shut Up and Play the Hits

But enough about me, let's get on to RCBG coverage!

What is RCBG?

Initially I was under the impression that RCBG stood for "Really Competitive Board Games." Think speed chess, but with more speculative financialized gambling and brand opportunities. I have since been informed that this is not, in fact, the case.

This publication was of the belief that this was basically a popular new book about Balatro when we got our bridge loan funding, so I may be somewhat out of my depth. Nevertheless, the work and language of a sport may be provincial, but Sport itself is universal and universalizing. So we shall push on, and this season of Esportz! coverage will be primarily devoted to RCBG.

Endless Grind

This week, I am just dipping my toes into the meta by reading the prologue. I'm vaguely aware that there is a deep schism in the sport's recent history, between Webists and Junkyites. And, while I intend to read both versions, I am beginning with Estro Junkies. This is because I am a Boring Old, and it comes in a form trivially digestible by my Kobo reader, not because of any latent or overt anti-Webist tendency on my, or this publication's, part.

spicy crips packets

That's not performance food, Nicky, you'll never make the hall of fame if you're eating crisp packets. In the prologue we see a talented prospect, Nicky, have his skills wasted on higher education and a sort of low-tier gremlin-wallowing as an indirect result.

Time Out!

I am, at this moment, using he-series pronouns for Nicky. "Nicky" is ambiguous as a nickname, but it's pretty clear that Nicky will be a cis man for the duration of the story (I'm pretty sure Beth said that this was a story about 4 cis men and I don't believe in any of that "death of the author" bullshit.) I will update my verbiage as the inevitable occurs.

Kyle and Nicky have some roommate trouble. A bad clubhouse presence can really derail a season, so this is serious business, even if they both keep their cool about the matter. I once lived with a guy who would eat old rice other people threw out from the Chinese restaurant down the alleyway. He'd dig it out of the trash because he spent all of his money on weed. Anyhow, in retrospect, that was a pretty risky health hazard. We here at Esportz! take food safety very seriously.

I haven't been able to cry in years

Well that's familiar from another book.

Nicky's being out-short-ed by some acquaintances, but that's just crows pecking at eagles. Nicky is spiritually a short queen. It is written. It is known. Of more immediate concern are his incapacity to cry, and the profound executive dysfunction. The two issues are sketched in a pretty breezy shorthand, but the numb alienation is made immediately clear.

Which is good, Nicky's not crying because boys don't cry. The system works.

No, but for real I think the way that Nicky takes additional second-order psychic DOT is pretty interesting? It's not just the gender dysphoria that he's dealing with, it's the way that that dysphoria extracts additional social costs that would at first appear unrelated.

Obvious example being, the entire plot of the prologue vignette:

  • Nicky hasn't done laundry because Nicky has been run down.
  • Nicky gets some bad news.
  • Nicky, as a result, misses class and fails to do any of:
    • doing laundry.
    • eating real food.
    • socializing with other students.
    • going outside.

The additional clothes-grossness of a 3rd day wear, and skin-re-secreted chip-grease do not bode well for future peak performance.

Tidily shown, all of this. The prologue hits a solid double.

Ad Corner

Et in Arcadia Ego

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Back to the Game

Hugboxing.

There's something genuinely awful in the existence of an online term like this, not as any implication to the inventor(s) or user(s) (of the namesake or even necessarily the online term) but just, as a kind of a symptom of compound cruelty?

One of my programming classes has an assignment due tomorrow. It’s on identifying the conditions needed to break out of infinite loops.

Some kind of metaphor, or something. Who knows for what. We here at Esportz! endorse a love of all learning, especially TLA+, in any case.

Make Your Bed (TM)

Briefly, I entertain the idea of getting it all done: grabbing a decent meal, like maybe an actual club sandwich from that student café where everyone does homework, taking all my dirty clothes to a launderette, and even buying a tube of toothpaste from the supermarket on the way home. But I can feel myself deflate from the effort required to even organise the necessary sequence of events in my head.

This resonated for me surprisingly. Talia's written some about the ways that being an immigrant mirrors being trans (or visa versa? who can remember, different book, different year, different continent [also I think it was just a handy metaphor, but hey who knows]), and as a recent immigrant myself, yeah, going places is genuinely fucking exhausting. You have to make your little scripts and prime yourself for what people might say, and figure out how like, "the bank" works all over again but now you're a middle-aged man learning how the bank works instead of a floppy-haired youth.

Jeff

This Jeff fellow totally mogged Nicky.

Brutal.

Now, running (that's "athletics" for the Brits) has of late taken on a fair degree of lycraesthetic creep, it's true, but that's just the kind of high performance material that some runners need to feel their best. Performance fabrics can be clingy but aerodynamics are important when you're pursuing a PR.

Gaming

Finally some gaming content! Nicky's "guild" is, of course, something like a team, but is he a star player? A diamond in the rough? Unclear at this date.

[R]etire to bed and listen to streams of speedrun attempts until I pass out again

See now, this sort of thing may seem incredibly bleak and weird to the casual fan, but the importance of visualization is well-supported by the literature. Not the literature you're thinking of, the sports psychology literature.

He’s wearing his pink hoodie that he insists is “salmon”, as if acknowledging its pinkness would undermine his manhood more than the cat ears on the hood.

Every sport has its subculture. "Pinkness" is such a strange conceit in the contemporary world. There is, of course, a color pink. I've seen it even. It was pink. So there's an anodyne platonic pink. And then there is some supposed historical ambiguity of the color (pink as a relation of red vs pink as Pink. When did Pink become?) The building across from me is pink. And buildings is basically clothes, you know? Think about how Daniel's neglect of the domestic sphere mirrors Nicky's neglect of the personal sphere. It is a difference of meters not miles.

Do these things radiate outward? When we meet Nicky, his scholarly life is eroding, his personal wardrobe is a shambles, his room is covered in a layer of clothing-rubble. Maybe Nicky is already on-tilt and just nose-blind to the effects.

There's also a nice extra layer of irony in here with the well-populated field of study of gendered color perception and labeling.

Fellas, is it trans to be able to tell that something is or isn't salmon-colored?

Nothing could have prepared me for what Daniel says next.

Cliffhanger!

Rats.

Roster Update

  • Nicky: Visible stink lines. Tall. Stoic in that most manly of ways (not crying, duh.)
  • Kyle: Nondescript. Cooks eggs proficiently. Good roommate.
  • Jeff: Lycra, short little wisp of a thing.
  • Daniel: Cat-ears hoodie. Leggings. Can distinguish salmon from pink (suspect behavio(u)r.) Bad roommate who leaves old-milk-smells around.

Grasstouchers

I know that this is an e-sports publication, but one of our editorial values is the continual nature and universal humanity of Sport, broadly construed. So each week I'll be bringing in at least one legacy sports article that resonated with me. This week's is The Minor League Grind, which reflects Endless Grind for plausibly obvious reasons.

The way that Nicky's potential S-tier talent as an athlete goes neglected by the society's talent-discovery apparatus is acutely hurting Nicky, but diffusely hurting the world.

Let's see some hustle out there.