Fantastic. Thank you!

Dance and Feast should get a fan edit that combines them into a single abridged version. They're bloated and should never have gotten so out of hand. His editor really needs to crack down. I'm praying that the series can refocus for the close.

I'm reading Empires and Barbarians, which is a book about the culture and movement of barbarian tribes around the time of the fall of the Roman Empire. It's such a nebulous chaotic transitional period in history. The book is great so far, but should be read in short chunks. It gets heavy pretty quickly. Literally.…

Ok, that's it. It's been sitting in my bookshelf for more than a year. I start volume 1 tomorrow.

Credit cards. Hidden debt. Insane mortgages. Failed marriages. That's how the high rollers I know afford it.

@avclub-011d0b4fe6835bb3d37ef4e0ea713de6:disqus 
I did the same without the tonic water and felt a lot better as well.

Ignore the tutorials, watch a Let's Play with Ireland. The play as Ireland, which is basically unofficial tutorial island. Good luck!

Dude, these are fucking awesome recaps.

Thanks for the advice. I was leaning toward that stuff as well. I'm not going to apply for unemployment. Between my savings and my wife's salary, we have enough to get by for now.

I was looking for this thread. Furloughed NPS worker.

That's fucking adorable.

Plus, players can maybe get a tiny piece of the millions that college programs bring in.

Sorry about that. My comment was pointlessly derisive. I know there are tons of fans seriously conflicted about how much they love the game vs. the realization of what it is doing to players in the long run.

The fighting crap in hockey seems like such an unnecessary legacy from the older game. I think it's inevitable that it'll be banned. I'm hoping too, because it's just so damn silly when the game has to stop so two fools can hold each other's jerseys and hit each other for 12 seconds.

The cynical side of me sees this as being a boon to soccer in the US. When this stuff starts to trickle down to the youth level, I have to imagine parents not giving up on soccer after 2nd grade. The infrastructure is partly there in the form of existing fields, where separate facilities are necessary for baseball or…

"Football will only lose popularity once its fans actually give a rat's ass about what happens to a player once they leave a game. "

I wonder how it would change if we shifted to a soccer style, development academy system.

"There was a story about this on NPR and more than one person in the Facebook comments called football, 'a modern gladiator game,' "

I would counter that the structure of an NFL game, with play stopping after every down, and two lines of men smashing into each other as hard as possible once play resumes would prevent rugby style helmets from being very effective.

Gaaaaa, I was thinking about the stunner too.