I've got a series of screen shots here that hopefully will help out with doing pre-draft picks and the mock draft practice. Please note that you don't have to do your own pre-draft picks, but I strongly recommend doing a few of the mock drafts to get used to the format and the screen.

Also, you can click on any image to get a very large version.

First up, let's start from the League Screen. It should look basically just like this:


Move your mouse over the "Draft Central" menu option but don't click, and you should get this:


Note that you can click on "Mock Drafts" here to go straight to the Mock Draft screen. But for now, click on "Pre-Draft Rankings". You will get the following screen:


You can see that I've already made some minor changes here, shown under the heading "Your Rankings". Click on "Edit My Rankings", you will see the following screen:


Again, changes I've already made are on the right side of the screen. If you haven't done anything yet, the Yahoo Ranking will be in the middle and the right and left sides will be empty. The goal here is to create a list of players that are important to *you*. For instance, what if I sincerely believe that Mike Trout isn't worth trying to draft because whoever goes first will probably take him; or you have a complicated algorithm which shows that the opportunity cost of drafting Mike Trout causes you to lose value at a harder-to-find position and therefore you don't want to draft the talented outfielder. So, you can click on "1. Trout, Mike (LAA - OF)", and then click on the Left-Pointing Arrow button on the Left Side of the List of Players. This will move Mike Trout to the "Excluded Players" list, and you won't see him in the draft. Other people will still see him and draft him, but he won't be on your list. Now looking at another player, let's suppose I agree with all right-thinking people that Yu Darvish is going to have an incredible year, and I want to try to draft him. In the middle list, the "List of Players", click once on "18. Darvish, Yu (Tex - SP)". Then click on the Right-Pointing Arrow button on the Right Side of the List of Players. Yu Darvish has now been added to the bottom of the "My Players" list. If he is the first person you have added, he will be the only player in the list. So let's add another one. Repeat the process for "17. Fielder, Prince (Tex - 1B)". Fielder will now be listed under Yu Darvish in the "My Players" List. Now, suppose we want to prioritize Fielder over everyone else. Click on Fielder's name in the "My Players" list, then click on the Up-Pointing Arrow with a Line on top of the Arrow button on the Right Side of the My Players list. This will move Fielder's name to the top of the list. You can move the players One Slot at a Time if you click the Up-Pointing Arrow without a Line on top of the Arrow button. You can use the Down-Pointing Arrow buttons to do the same in the other direction. Everything we have done here can be reversed by selecting a player's name and clicking the Arrow button that points in the direction you want to move the player. However, note that you can only move a player one list box at a time. You can not jump from the "Excluded Players" list to the "My Players" list, or vice versa. Also, note that you can also "Drag" the names with your mouse by holding down the left mouse button. However, you cannot see the name you are dragging so I don't recommend it unless you are comfortable with the process.

Before getting to involved, please look at the bottom of the lists at the "SAVE" and "DONE" buttons. I have had this screen load without the buttons appearing. If they aren't there, you can't save your work. So make sure the buttons are present, and click on "SAVE". The page should reload, and should be in the same place you left it. Save often. When you are finished, you can click "DONE" to return to the Pre-Draft Rankings screen, or you can click on the "Mock Drafts" menu option. The "Mock Drafts" screen looks like this:


Make sure "Standard Mock Drafts" is brighter and larger than "Auction Mock Drafts". Moving down the screen, you should see "Upcoming Standard Drafts". I scrolled down until I got to drafts that were still at least five minutes away, and found one that was "Rotisserie" rules, which is how the league is run and scored as opposed to "Head-to-head". You can see this option underneath the time listing for the draft. I also found one that had eight draft slots, the smallest Yahoo does for mock drafts and the closest to our league size. The screen looked like this:


Click on the "JOIN" text to get the following screen:


You can change your order in the draft by clicking on any of the blue "Move to this draft position" buttons. You can return to the previous screen by clicking the "Withdraw from this Mock Draft" button. If you click on the "Run System Test" button, a new window will open and Yahoo will check to see if your browser is configured to be able to load the draft screen. This will probably work, even you will eventually have problems. You should get a "Test Was Successful" message, and can then close the window. If you get any other message, take note of the message and let me know. But I don't think you will. Now, moving on. Under the "Run System Test" button are the Mock Draft Settings. If you click the drop-down box under Pre-Draft Player Rankings (it should say 'Yahoo Recommended' right now) you should be able to select an option for YOUR team. These are the picks you made. Click them, and the box should return to normal but with YOUR team listed. You can also check or uncheck to box to email the draft results to you. Under that you can use another drop-down box to select the email address you want the results sent to. When these settings are all correct, make sure you click the "Save Changes" button.

There will be a clock counting down until the draft starts in the upper-left-hand-ish corner. When it reaches zero the screen will change to this:


After that, I usually get the following error:


I click the "OK" button, and get the following screen:


I click the "Launch the Draft Window" button, and get the following screen:


When it's done, I actually get the Draft Window!


You see the clock in the top left. To the right of the clock is all of the FB players in the draft (or in our league, when we do the real draft). Under that is a large grey-ish area that will display the stats of any player that you click on in the list below. At the far right of this area is the ">> DRAFT >>" button, which, when it is your turn, will allow you to draft a player that you click on onto your team. So it's important to remember where that is. Under that button is a bit of text that tells you what your current "next" pick is. At the far right is a box that shows what positions need to be drafted and what statistical categories are used to score the league, in case you need to check. The tall, empty screen under that box is the chat log. It will show every draft selection, plus you can type messages in the little box at the bottom and click "SEND" to talk to everyone in the draft. ANYTHING you type and click SEND on will show up there. ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. No take-backs.

Moving back to the big grey-ish area that displays stats (Mike Trout, in the picture). Directly under this area is a green bar that has a drop-down menu currently labeled "ALL PLAYERS". If you click this menu, you can select other sortings like "ALL PITCHERS", "ALL BATTERS", "ALL 2B", "ALL CATCHERS", etc. If you are looking to fill a specific position, you can use this list to filter out positions you don't want to look at. You can also select "ALL PLAYERS" again to return to the default list. To the right of this menu is another drop-down menu currently labeled "Yahoo! Rank". If you click this menu, you should see "Yahoo! Rank" and "My Rank" listed as options in the menu. If you have pre-draft picks that you selected in the Draft Lobby screen, click the "My Rank" option.


The list of players should change to reflect your own picks.


The players you put on the "My Players" list will appear at the top, in the order you created. Players that you put on the "Excluded Players" list will not be here. Players that you did not put on either list will appear at the bottom in their default draft ranking order. You can also, regardless of which ranking you are using, click on a player, then click on the little Right-Pointing Arrow in a Circle button to the RIGHT of the player's name to ADD the player to the "MY QUEUE" list that is located between the player list and the chat window. (It says to drag, but again, I don't recommend it.) However, this queue list is only useful for a few specific things that involve draft strategy and level of involvement. And I'm not covering that right now.

IF ANYTHING HERE DOESN'T WORK FOR YOU, DOESN'T LOOK RIGHT OR THE SAME ON YOUR COMPUTER, CONFUSES YOU OR MAKES YOU WANT TO SCREAM IN FRUSTRATION, please contact me via email (midnitetease at hotmail dot com, change the "at" to the @ and the "dot" to a period). Or comment here. Or use the messages feature from the League menu option or from the League screen on the Yahoo FB website.

I hope this helped!

I doubt anyone who needs to see this will, but the ignorance I just witnessed in an online conversation was driving me mad.

Ukraine is an fully independent nation, not a Russian satellite state. 20% of the population is Russian. The other 80% recently deposed a pro-Russian government that took Russian kickbacks to move away from joining the European Union and back toward Russia. The Crimean peninsula, a part of Ukraine, which is the primary population center for the ethnic Russian group, has been occupied by the Russian military. Russian leader Vladimir Putin is threatening to invade the rest of the country on the grounds of protecting ethnic Russians from the native majority, and taking over the government in order to return it to pro-Russian hands. Remember, 80% of the country is opposed to Russian control. Those of you who keep spouting to let the will of the people speak and seek a closer relationship with Russia need to get your numbers straight.

"To be absolutely clear, I don’t believe that modern Leftists have subliminal Nazi leanings, or that their loathing of Hitler is in any way feigned. That’s not my argument. What I want to do, by holding up the mirror, is to take on the equally false idea that there is an ideological continuum between free-marketers and fascists.

The idea that Nazism is a more extreme form of conservatism has insinuated its way into popular culture. You hear it, not only when spotty students yell “fascist” at Tories, but when pundits talk of revolutionary anti-capitalist parties, such as the BNP and Golden Dawn, as “far Right”.

What is it based on, this connection? Little beyond a jejune sense that Left-wing means compassionate and Right-wing means nasty and fascists are nasty. When written down like that, the notion sounds idiotic, but think of the groups around the world that the BBC, for example, calls “Right-wing”: the Taliban, who want communal ownership of goods; the Iranian revolutionaries, who abolished the monarchy, seized industries and destroyed the middle class; Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who pined for Stalinism. The “Nazis-were-far-Right” shtick is a symptom of the wider notion that “Right-wing” is a synonym for “baddie”.

One of my constituents once complained to the Beeb about a report on the repression of Mexico's indigenous peoples, in which the government was labelled Right-wing. The governing party, he pointed out, was a member of the Socialist International and, again, the give-away was in its name: Institutional Revolutionary Party. The BBC’s response was priceless. Yes, it accepted that the party was socialist, “but what our correspondent was trying to get across was that it is authoritarian”.

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers."

http://minx.cc/?post=347496

Original quote and comments at Ace of Spades HQ

"Now, I believe climate change is real. Not with the certitude I believe gravity is real or the moon exists, or even in the way I believe the ideas of evolution are pretty sound. What I am certain of, though, is that like me, Kerry has a preposterously insufficient grasp of the intricacies of climate modeling and no idea how much of the variations we see can be chalked up to anthropomorphic causes and how much of it is organic. From what I can gather, the complexity and depth of the scientific debate over climate change is far from being as cut and dry as those who politicize it — this administration being the one of the worst offenders — would like it to appear.

But even if it were not, advocating that meteorologists at MIT or world renowned physicists or pioneers of Atmospheric Science, whose theories diverge from the consensus, should be shut out of debate is in serious conflict with the ideals of an open society. But it gets worse. Call it libertarian paranoia, but seeing a high-ranking American government official preaching to the world that “we” shouldn’t allow debate on policy because one party happens to believe it’s “the right thing” (perhaps the least scientific phrase ever concocted) is particularly loathsome. And that’s exactly where Kerry goes in his very next thought:

“…Nor should we allow any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right thing outweigh the benefits.”

For starters, you’d think that hearing a cabinet member calling for the end of discourse would be something a reporter with access to Kerry might want to follow up on. What exactly does he mean by “should not allow”? Perhaps we can imagine this going down in alternative historical form — Donald Rumsfeld said “we” should not allow “any room for those who think that the costs associated with doing the right in Iraq outweigh the benefits” — and move forward from there."

http://thefederalist.com/2014/02/18/john-kerry-vs-dissent/

"Indeed, Versailles was mild compared with what Germany had subjected France to in 1871 at the end of the Franco-Prussian war — and yet a vengeful France did not preempt Germany in pursuit of payback over the ensuing half-century. The humiliating terms that Germany forced upon Russia at Brest-Litosvk in 1918 were far harsher than anything that Germany suffered at Versailles, and yet did it not lead to Russian insurgencies against Germany, much less lasting enmity between the two states. Just 21 years later, Stalin and Hitler signed a non-aggression pact.

Perhaps the most draconian envisioned treaty in the history of Europe was what Germany might well have intended to inflict on a defeated France and Belgium, had the former won the war in 1914 — the infamous Septemberprogramm proposal, which, if adopted, would have redrawn the entire map of Western Europe. And what the Allies in 1945 demanded of a defeated Germany would have been considered unthinkable in 1919; and yet we have not had a World War III in the ensuing 70 years.

In truth, by the Germans’ own standards of Diktat, Versailles was not harsh. The problem was not so much its terms per se, but its timing, its language, and the methods of its enforcement. By the time the treaty was accepted by the major parties — over seven months after the cessation of fighting (an armistice rather than an unconditional surrender) in the West — many of the Allied forces in the field had stood down. There was certainly less chance of seriously occupying Germany to ensure enforcement. And while the Allied leaders often talked loudly and harshly about German culpability, they failed to grasp that such tough rhetoric without commensurate consequences would only incite a wounded adversary in ways that a combination of quiet and coercion would not. One of the lessons of the aftermath of World War I is that danger mounts when threats go unenforced, and sermons prove both annoying and empty."

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/371300/lessons-world-war-i-victor-davis-hanson

"In a nutshell, what happened was this: two radio hosts in Long Island decided to spike their ratings by forging a fake RSVP to a child’s birthday party. According to the fictitious account, the mother of one of the guests wrote a homophobic screed on the back of the invitation, addressed to the birthday girl’s two homosexual parents. The story quickly went viral and was picked up by Huffington Post, Jezebel, and all the usual suspects.

It blazed its merry way across the Internet until the two hosts came clean and said, “Whoops, actually we just made that up. Our bad.”

"Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring is riddled with faulty math and shady logic. It doesn’t matter, because they served the pre-arrived conclusions and goals of the burgeoning environmentalist left. The same holds true for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). It hardly matters to the left if the Earth is actually warming or cooling — or if humans are indeed having an adverse effect on the environment."

"First formulated by the socialist thinker Georges Sorel, the “noble lie” was devised to address the problem of Karl Marx’s projections about economics and societal trends not coming to fruition. For Sorel, such details were unimportant. As long as people believed what Marx wrote to be true, they could be rallied to revolutionary action. Pillars of left-wing ideology were to be transformed from statements of objective fact into tenets of a new socialist faith."

http://www.pocketfullofliberty.com/new-fake-but-accurate/

I was so looking forward to finally finishing Hellsing Ultimate. I had seen through volume seven, and now I'm trying to watch eight through ten.

It's stupid.

This series gets soooooooooooooo stupid in the final chapter. It makes no sense. I mean, I don't expect much out of a story with vampire nazi villains, but this is just ridiculous. The dialogue is terrible. The entire final three volumes are, literally, "let's have everyone kill everyone else while being disgusted with something about their current opponent. Deus ex machina is flying around with a neon sign.

For something that started out so good to end in a steaming pile of shit like this is just...sad.

UPDATE: It looks like we'll try to lock the league at the end of next week, approximately 02/28. Let me know pretty quick if you're interested in joining!

UPDATE: Wonderduck has more info, and a better sales pitch, on his blog.

I, along with and thanks to the support of a friend and fellow baseball enthusiast, am starting a fantasy baseball league strongly geared toward people new to fantasy baseball and even people new to baseball fandom. We have 3 or 4 players lined up, only one of which is both a long-time baseball fan and an experienced fantasy baseball player. We would really like to get at least eight players, and as I said, no previous experience will be necessary. No one will be thrown into the deep end and support, help and practice will be available to everyone. The league will be run through a free website that has all of the management features needed to maintain and run the league.

If you have any questions or are interested in joining, just email me (midnitetease at hotmail dot com) or comment below.

Ben

I don't know if it's true, but I've heard that the Ghibli version of Kiki varied quite a bit from the book it was based on, to the point that the author threatened to withdraw rights from Studio Ghibli. (This is apparently more common in Japan than it is in America, as most American productions won't actually allow this kind of power to the licensee or author. I don't know if this actually a legal difference or a function of Japanese culture, however.) Anyway, if you're familiar with the Ghibli version, you probably recognize many of the characters present in the trailer but also probably picked up a handful of differences as well. I'm guessing the live-action version steers closer to the book, but I suppose it also be further deviated.