I just had to share this bizarre AI generation. Prompt was something like “Medieval Venetian style football stadium, in the style of Thomas Kinkade.”
Tag: Sports
Wither The Running Back
With NFL season approaching, a hot topic for (some) football fans is-the salary of running backs?
The short answer is that running backs have recently gotten a significantly smaller portion of the pie compared to other players (especially wide receivers). This is due to a decades-long trend towards more passing and also due to a more recent trend where a rookie wage scale was implemented-and almost all running backs burning out in that period before they could theoretically enjoy free agency riches. Because of this and because running backs thrive in the different college game, a team can draft a running back, use him, then draft another one.
It’s hard not to sympathize with someone whose career is short even by athlete standards and who has to be slammed by giants over twenty times a day. But it’s also important to note that the other 45 or so players on an NFL team are also facing physical pressure. There’s no realistic way that the owners and other players are going to give their share to appease players who can be reasonably considered more replaceable. And a certain subset of fan and reporter will always talk about the poor struggling running back and not the players who are earning much more (and not just in absolute terms) than they did in the past.
I do feel like the old “walking tank” running back may be more in vogue. People who otherwise would have trained as Barry Sanders-type “agility running backs” are likely to want to aim for a wealthier, safer receiver position instead. But since you can’t teach size….
A Thousand Words: The Natural
The Natural (Movie)
There are several things that are all true about the Robert Redford movie The Natural, the baseball story that “adapts” Bernard Malamud’s novel of the same name to the screen.
- It is a shallow and sugary but well-shot and well-made movie.
- It is about as faithful to the original novel as a Minnesota politician is to her husband.
- It’s perhaps the most prominent sports alternate history ever made.
The first part needs the least explanation, except to highlight how amazing Randy Newman’s score is. The second part is the more interesting to explain. See, the novel is in many ways just as shallow as the movie, while being far more mean spirited and, frankly, dull. One great inherent part about filmmaking is that via the trick of “the ball hits something which goes boom”, you can see what awesome thing Roy Hobbs did instead of just having someone say “he lead the league in homers and triples and hit lots of home runs until his character brought him down.”
The final point needs some attention. See, Roy Hobbs and the New York Knights obviously did not actually exist, much less win the 1939 National League pennant. But a more important thing is that instead of taking place in a vague “sometime in the past” the way the book did, this has a specific date (1939), and said date is several decades before the filming and release of the movie. If that’s not alternate history, than what is?
A Thousand Words: Action PC Football
Action PC Football
From the same company as Action PC Baseball comes [American] Football. It’s a season simulator that can offer both historical and (my favorite) draft seasons. It has a similar minimal visual interface (that can be enhanced by the player if they add more stuff into the folders) and a similar statistical crunchiness. This later part makes it more interesting than Baseball.
See, in baseball, each plate appearance is basically its own thing. It’s a high variance sport where even having a great shortstop and centerfielder on the other team just makes getting hits a little less likely. But in football, if you have two excellent safeties, a good pass is a lot less likely. Both Action PC games simulate this well.
So Action PC Baseball is more a relaxing “see what happens” game. Action PC Football is a more cerebral and demanding game. They’re apples and oranges, but both are tasty.
World War III Sports
With the actual war done, the WW31987 blog turns its attention to the really important things: Sports! My personal hunches, since this is in July/August.
- MLB stops the season and probably either voids it (sure beats the real life World Series cancelations of the 94 strike and the 1904 boycott), or goes straight to the playoffs after the war ends.
- The NFL hasn’t started yet and won’t start the first game until the second week of September, and the war ends in late August. (Ironically, there was a disruptive strike that year, dunno how the war would affect that). Given its lucrative nature, I can see a wait and see approach followed by starting the season after the war.
- The NBA and NHL start in the late fall and are thus largely unaffected.
- For European soccer leagues, I’d say it depends on the country. The historical Bundesliga started several days before the war would have begun, though a crisis could have averted it. My hunch is that the countries not directly hit (ie, France, etc…, would just launch a delayed and possibly shortened season after the war’s end), while Germany, the nuke victims, and the Scandanavian countries that were invaded would wait and possibly cancel the seasons.
One footnote: 2020 was the historical season that Mike Trout qualified for the Hall of Fame (played in at least 10 seasons). With obvious fears of the season not being able to be completed due to COVID, there was talk as if it would count as official. The Hall responded by saying that 1994 counted for the sake of eligibility, and thus even a World Series less 2020 would as well. Or a World Series-less 1987.
Stable Diffusion Team Logos Part 1
The Logo Project
So Action PC sports games let you insert custom logos. When making a draft league in the newest edition of Action PC Football, I felt “why not fire up the Evil Abominable Intelligence Art Machine”? And I loved the results. Logos were made for all teams in this American Football league. Some were tongue in cheek references to existing teams, some were original, some were multiple iterations that I’ll gladly show here, and so on.
Division A-East
New York
Yep, the pseudo-“Jets” have a knight standing in front of a fighter jet. This is the first “Roundel Logo”, which I ended up with a lot of. Maybe it was the prompts, maybe it was the model, but oh well.
Boston
This was the logo I had the most fun making. I wanted something with the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden snake style, a tricorn hat, and something weird. The prompt was done in the style of eccentric artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I’m glad with how it turned out.
Miami
Not very surprising. Don’t really have much to say about this.
Canton
A maroon bulldog. This looks the most like an actual team logo. Probably the most fun “realistic” logo I had.
Jacksonville
Based on the USFL team and an ancient execution technique, the “Brazen Bulls” have, well, a brass bull and a shield on their logo.
RIP Jim Brown
Jim Brown, former Cleveland Browns football player, activist, actor, and mixed martial arts commentator, has just passed away. RIP to a football legend. Calling him the greatest running back of all time is not particularly controversial, unlike other such claims. He rushed for more yards per game than anyone else at his position and did so in a low-offense era.
Betting on Obscure Sports
I’ve said multiple times that the depths to which sportsbooks scraped the bottom of the barrel in the spring of 2020 was darkly amusing and inspiring at the same time. The thing is, they were doing this before the crunch. And after. Maybe not to the extent of splashing Taiwanese women’s basketball on their front pages, but you still could and can find really weird sports. And the use of obscure sports is a glaring weak point for integrity.
So who actually bets on the Laotian 2nd Floorball League?
Well, from what I’ve gathered, there’s three main categories of bettors. Only one of these is beneficial to the sportsbook, and is probably the reason they keep doing it. None are what would be considered beneficial to society or even the sports betting ecosystem as a whole.
Degenerates
The most innocent group of people to bet on obscure markets consistently (as opposed to the occasional novelty bet that no one expects anything out of) are “degenerates”, the same gambling addicts who will just bet on whatever’s in front of their faces. If it’s the middle of the night and some soccer league halfway around the world is what’s on the screen, they’ll bet it. Everything from table tennis to bizarre half-rink hockey to totally legitimate Indian cricket. This was in fact the reason for those Eastern European ping pong leagues running around the clock and existing at all-it was to ensure that there was something on screen at all times, purely for the purposes of gambling.
Something that greases the skids for a huge and inevitable problem with gambling doesn’t seem like the best thing. But it’s sweet and virtuous compared to the other two.
Line Munchkins
Many of the sharp/plus EV [Expected value] bettors are these, pouncing on whatever mismatch they get. They have little to no handicapping or serious modeling ability (the stereotype is that they’re green lumberjacks who don’t even know the players). After all, obscure sports are the most vulnerable to bad/slow lines. Which of course leads to the cycle of them getting restricted/banned after the book finds out.
I find neither the sportsbooks themselves who blast ads about the road to riches yet restrict successful bettors nor the line munchkins (coming from a tabletop RPG term for players who crudely optimize for maximum power) who act like martyrs to genius instead of people who gamed the system to be very sympathetic. So something that amplifies this sludgy mess does not seem desirable.
Crooks
The smallest, weakest, and most obscure sports are the most vulnerable to manipulation and fixes. So naturally either fixers or people aware of the fix will flock to bet on these crooked games. I don’t think I need to really explain why this is a bad thing.
What Next?
On one hand, the sportsbooks can simply not list the Guinea-Bissau Ferret Legging Third Division, the regulators can forbid it, and the data providers (the biggest, most important, and least visible part of the whole ecosystem), can not provide information about them. On the other, it only takes one offshore data provider and an offshore book wanting to fill that niche to break the restrictions.
So yes, like a lot of sports betting issues, this is not completely solvable. I do think that forbidding bets on the lowest hanging fruit-minor league baseball and tennis or low-division college basketball to use an American example, would still be a wise and prudent thing to do.
AI Art and Wargaming
So I’ve fallen to the dark side and have begun making prompt-generated pieces of AI art. This is a very controversial subject with a lot of undeniably talented artists who I respect being furious about it, and understandably so. If I had to sum up my opinion on the controversy (beyond specific technical issues like how to treat stuff like training images for the sake of copyright and licensing), it’d be condensed to this:
- AI art is here and isn’t going away. It also has undeniable advantages as well as issues. The economic concerns of traditional artists are real.
- Many AI artists have done their medium no favors by just spamming out low-effort prompts and/or deliberately copying obscure internet artist styles, either by model-making or just plain image-to-image.
- The backlash, while understandable, is a Canute-ian endeavor (sorry, had to be a little pretentious). The same thing was said about Photoshop and similar tools. And online self-publishing. And recorded music. And photography. And pipe organs (seriously-the 17th century equivalent of “tech-bros” was applied to the stereotype of organ players back then). Like when free agency became a thing in sports, you have to learn to understand it and see if you can use it to your advantage.
- There’s more to good AI art than just typing in “anime girl trending on artstation”, even if a lot of people only see that (see point 2 above)
But as a hobby, since I can write much better than I can draw, AI prompt tools have let me explore visual media in a delightful way. Yet what struck me when I really started getting into was how natural it seemed to me. And then it occurred to me: I’d done something similar before. Many, many times before. In wargames and simulators like Command, Nuclear War Simulator, Title Bout Boxing, and WMMA, I’d enjoyed simply creating a situation, allowing the RNG to add the needed element of chance to it, and then witnessing the result. And yes, frequently getting inspired by the result.
AI prompt tools allow me to do something similar with art and pictures. Yes, it can be an end. But a casualty list after a wargame scenario or results screen after a sports simulation can also be the beginning of a very human story.
As for AI writing, which is a thing, I’m strangely unfazed by it. I’m an artisanal sculptor, so seeing the metal casting factory rev up means little to my specific work. If that makes sense. Also, I’ve had the warped perspective of reading so many bad and mediocre books that I’m sincerely convinced that a computer can’t really do much worse.
A Thousand Words: Power Slap
Power Slap
A show devoted to a “sport” that is as bizarre as it is dangerous, Power Slap is the brainchild of Ultimate Fighting Championship head Dana White. While White is no ones idea of an ethical person, but this is a low even for him. You might think that slapfighting is some silly, wimpy gimmick. That would be wrong. Expect maybe the silly part. You might also think that slapfighting is some kind of boxing but with open hands. That would be extra-wrong.
Slapfighting goes like this: The combatants stand on either side of a short table. Starting with the winner of a coin flip, they take turns being the attacker and victim. The attacker does an open-hand powerful slap. The victim…. holds their hands behind their back, and it’s a foul if they so much as flinch slightly.
Yes, this is a sport that literally forbids any kind of defense. There’s a reason why even people active in boxing and mixed martial arts have been scorching this for its danger. More than one commentator has argued, and I agree, that it feels like a way to prove the detractors of early MMA right. It’s nothing but hitting until one person falls down (or the round ends).
I love mixed martial arts. But this is an offshoot I do not. It feels like trying to skip straight to the highlight reel knockouts without grasping that the reason why those knockouts are so impressive is that they’re earned in a way that hitting a literally defenseless opponent is not. Or maybe it’s just Dana White being weird. Wouldn’t be the first time him or another promoter acted that way.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 