The Yeast Infection Drill

Okay, first off, I have NO idea why it's called that. Seriously.

Now that that's out of the way, this is one of the funner drills we've done lately. It's pretty easy to understand: basically, you have two groups on the track of equal number. One group are blockers, and the other group are jammers. Yes, so you can have like 4-5+ jammers on the track at the same time. The aim for the jamming group is to get all their members out through the pack, and obviously the blocking group is to prevent that from happening. If you did a major, you had to reenter from the back of the pack and try getting through it again. Then after all the jammers were through, you swapped.

We had about 5 people in each group. We tried two variations of this drill: first, if you were jamming and made it out of the pack, that was all well and good and you were done, or you could go back into the pack and help other jammers through (but you didn't have to get through the pack again). The other version required ALL the jammers to get through the pack together, such that if you ate the baby (i.e. got reabsorbed by the pack) you had to try to get out again, and the drill wasn't over until all the jammers were clearly out together. That one was crazy hard because the blockers just kept speeding up to make sure the jammers couldn't pass and we ended up with the crazy 70-foot rule thing happening. I'd never seen it before but when everyone was so spread out it was seriously like WTF. But I think the non-eating-the-baby-version worked much better, in terms of organisation and pack structure.

We did this as a scrimmaging drill, but obviously if you're not cleared for hitting you can do this drill with positional blocking or something.Keeping the pack together was tricky. But this is a fast-paced drill, and lets you focus on offensive or defensive blocking. Helping out team members was also really important. But yeah! Mega fun drill, and one I'd like to do again.

When I grow up, I want to be a rollerbull

So, New Orleans does an annual Running of the Bulls which is supposed to be similar to the one they have in Pamploma, Spain. But instead of having bulls, the NOLA version has local roller derby league skaters (and selected other skaters from over the US) as bulls, complete with horns on their helmets and wiffle bats. From what I can understand, basically you run from skaters and if they hit you with the bat or check you, then you've been gored by the bull and are down or something. And people take their children to it. And there is sangria at the end.

I wonder how you get beads when you're a bull, since bulls don't have udders?

Check this out from a bystander's perspective:

(It's kind of low quality, and not very interesting until the skaters come in about 2 minutes into the video. But holy crap, watching those people flee for their lives from a bunch of women on skates is AMAZING. Also, the Elvises (Elvii??) on scooters at the end of the video makes it that much awesomer.)

And check out this one from someone who runs with the bulls:

THIS IS THE MOST AMAZING THING I HAVE SEEN TODAY. I have to go to New Orleans now. It's not too far away from where I'll be in the US, right??

Should I change my name?

There’s been some talk among people in the league for changing their names. People grow and change, and sometimes your derby persona has to do that as well. I’d been kind of idly considering it, although Mouse is definitely something I like. I mean, for the last twelve years or so it’s been my nickname in whatever sport I happen to be playing (actually, when I played hockey, it was Mighty Mouse, but that was already taken on TwoEvils, so bleh. MadMouse will have to do. Plus I get to be named after a roller coaster that I swore so much on that the little girl in the seat in front of me actually turned to her dad after the ride and was like “Daddy, what’s ‘fuck’?”)

Anyway, I’d be thinking about switching to Chairman Pow, since 1) I’m Chinese and 2) I think the jokes about stature can only go so far. As far as I’m aware, there’s no Chairman Pow on TwoEvils. However, randomly googling “Chairman Pow” gives me a bunch of random DJ stuff and a link to a merby league in British Columbia, Canada. From what I can infer, there’s a dude called Chairman Pow there. Awesome name, I don't blame him for taking it. Heh. Anyway, for all I know he’s registered on TwoEvils and waiting for his name to be approved. So that doesn’t work. Maybe I should split the difference and be Chairman Mao-se. Heh. I don’t know. I really do like my derby number though. Chairman Mouse wouldn’t be so bad.

All my marketing would be taken care of already!

But I don't know. Is it worth the effort of changing one's name? Or should I just not bother? I guess either way it gets shortened to Mouse anyway, but still...

The Greater of Two Evils

In our league we have people who have been skating on their derby names for a year or so, and have recently found out their names have been rejected from the TwoEvils site. But they've bouted under those names, had uniforms and helmets done up with those names, and are just finding out that that was all worth shit.

I talked about TwoEvils here in this entry, but I think there’s increasing frustration with how the site is run. While I certainly appreciate that someone out there has gone to the effort of keeping a site like 2E, derby has grown exponentially, and the system that 2E uses is clunky and can’t really keep up with the volume of names that one can only imagine they get registered. At the time of writing this, there are something like 36,144 names on 2E. That's THIRTY SIX THOUSAND names that you can't copy.

Honestly, I think the time will come very soon when one of the following will happen:

1. Nobody cares about 2E anymore and will actually seek to register their name formally as intellectual property or on regional associations (like RDAU) instead, 
2. Nobody will care about having unique names in the derby world (come on, there’s really only SO many combinations of words you can do that aren’t above some degree of similarity) or
3.  2E will have to evolve its registration system to make it easier for people to actually get onto their site. 

Waiting for 9-10 months is kind of ridiculous. Half the names of the people we registered with VDL are obsolete or don’t even skate with VDL anymore, so that was a waste of time for the 2E people to have to process them. I can’t imagine that a considerable proportion of names on the 2E list are actually currently being used. 

Vague concepts = opportunity to trundle in
Sorites paradox! (Yes, I'm a nerd.)

Also, at the time, if your name is rejected you have no idea if it is or isn’t, except for the fact that your teammates all have their names up and you don’t. TBut today, we received an email from 2E listing the names that were rejected, but with no explanation why they were. I can imagine how frustrating this would be to some people, especially if their names were only remotely smiilar to other names there.

The best indicator of a name rejection is when you type a name in and it tells you the likelihood of a match (from very high to low). But terms like “very high” and “low” are vague, and it’s not clear exactly what that means for rejection. Since the system is automated, changing a letter sometimes does the trick, even if phonetically the names would still be the same. What’s the point of that?

Presumably 2E works something like this (although, of course, I am open to correction): There’s this online spreadsheet (in effect) with everyone’s names on it, and when you submit names they are checked off against the spreadsheet for similarity. Those that don’t match anything are admitted, and those that match things are rejected, and then there’s some additional checking that goes on for the in-between ones. I don’t know if the additional checking is manual, but I’d assume that it is, given how long it takes.

Ironically, THERE IS NOBODY CALLED JOHN DOE ON 2E.

Many people are already moving away from 2E. In Australia, RDAU has its own list for roller derby names for Australian leagues. It's not like I'm ever going to have to bout against someone called MadMouse from some random place like Bumblefuck USA or anything, so why the hell would I need something that is internationally original? (Of course, yes, my name IS on 2E, but the principle still stands.)

Okay, tons of people have already ranted about 2E. (See here for probably the most scathing and hilarious attack, but also here, where a Canadian skater had the same name as a mascot and it was rejected--a MASCOT*! WTF! and also here, for another Australian story.) But suppose now that we DO need to have 2E for whatever the hell reason. How do we fix the machine that is broken, instead of just abandoning it?

Obviously, we need to make sure that people aren't waiting 9-12 months for their names to clear. How do we fix that? Well, how about this: there’s already an automated checking thingy that exists on the 2E website. Why not use that to let people add names to the list themselves? Like, suppose I have a list of names. Maybe I can just copy/paste them into the name submitter thing, and it runs through the names and automatically adds the ones that are unique to the site. The in-between ones can be confirmed by looking at what the search throws up as being the most similar, and then maybe there can be a section for people to provide evidence if they’ve got permission from a skater to use their name. That would considerably reduce the workload that the 2E admins have to do, since there’s less manual labor involved, and let people get instant gratification almost right away.

This is who I'd want to be checking my name
on the website. Of course, that just means less
manual checking, not no manual checking
whatsoever.

Now I’m not a mega computer nerd, but I’m sure there’s a pretty basic program you could write that would let that happen. But that said, I’m not sure how much longer unique names will be sustainable in the derby world. Of course, there are already trends for people to skate under their actual names (which you’d think would be necessary if roller derby becomes an Olympic sport or something) and hey, if someone just happens to have the same (actual) name as you, then what are you going to do?

But so far as having a program for registering names on 2E goes, I’m not sure why this hasn’t happened yet. So consider this a plea to the 2E peeps: Nice work so far, but you don't need to have this burden all by yourself. Please consider updating your system to be able to deal with the number of submissions you're getting for this sport that we have all come to love. We want our names, because the derby side of us is, well, a real part of us, and it is really shit when you are denying that we can have that.

(Postscript: my MS Word spellcheck is dumb and doesn’t recognise the word “Pow”, or the word “spellcheck” for that matter.)

*Speaking of mascots and skates, I imagine that this post will have possibly enraged some. Here, lighten it up with some mascot skating fail. (This is also why I don't support the Raptors, heh.)

Freshie Seshie

Ahhh, freshies. One of the things that I love about Freshie Seshie is the fact that we get all these bright, shining, eager faces of people who want to learn how to do derby because they think it rocks. It’s like when you have a pack of puppies and they’re all so excited about everything because everything is new and awesome and let’s all do everything all the time!

Herding new skaters is like herding puppies,
which is slightly easier than herding cats.

 Heh. VDL does a thing where we do a “Freshie Seshie” where we have a session specifically for newbies, who can come and learn the basics of skating for free and borrow gear from league members. Then we have four fresh meat intake sessions after that, where they can try out actual league training before deciding whether or not to commit. We used to do rolling intakes, but that got WAY too hard to manage, so now we have a quarterly intake. It makes administration way easier, because there’s only four times in a year when we have to do batches of insurance and registration stuff. Yep. Streamlining admin is important.

Oh, adorable entry-level skates. Eeeee.

 Anyway, we had our first of the four fresh meat intakes on Tuesday. We had about 20 newbies, which was really exciting. Some had obviously skated before, and some were doing that shuffly thing on wheels that everyone starts out doing. There were enough of us at training such that we could each coach one of the newbies one on one, which was really cool. I got a uni student called E (well, I won’t put her real name here for obvious lack-of-consent and whatever reasons) and she was pretty cool. She went to the Freshie Seshie on Sunday and had been looking at doing derby for over a year, so she was definitely enthusiastic. I took her through basic derby stance, and also falls and stops. We chatted a bit as well, so she knows I’m doing a Ph.D. and I learnt that she really likes Japanese and is going to Japan for a year or something. Also Sarge got me to be his demonstrator for the falls, ha ha ha. Too bad I fucked up the four-pointer because I forgot to keep my head up. Whoops. But otherwise it was good I think. We did basic drills and slaloms, and then there was a free skate at the end.

This is sometimes how I feel around
new skaters. I'm an old fogey.

Admittedly, since I’ve been back at VDL the standard for what freshies have is kind of stupidly impressive. There are whities who can do backwards crossovers (both directions) and people who can do like 30/5 and stuff. It’s crazy. In a kind of self-absorbed way, I’m glad I grew with the league when I did, because I’ve sometimes got a tendency to ragequit when I don’t think that I’m improving enough, or when shitloads of people are better than me at something. :P I think overall it’ll be great for the league to have all these skilled people in it of course, but maybe this is just me being intimidated by newbies or something…

Of course, I didn't really learn much from the training session overall, but there was enough room so I could practice sideways skating, and I need to work more on power slides and tomahawks (I'm still overturning for them). But yeah, it was really cool to see all these new faces rolling around on the track while the more senior skaters all zoomed around them and whatnot. I really like their enthusiasm and the fact that they're so crazy about derby. Yeah, so now I kind of feel like a jaded old fogey (at a whole, what, one year into my skating career) but I like that it reminds me of how I used to be, and the fact that their enthusiasm is kind of infectious.

I found a fantastic "how to" for nooblets here. This is pretty much the stuff we covered at the Freshie Intake. I hope they come back on Sunday. Yay.