December Days 26 - Home Plate (The Nine of Bases)

[This is part of a series exploring the Baseball Tarot. If you would like to prompt for a part of the game or a card from the deck, there's very little space left. Leave a comment with a prompt if you want in. All other comments are still welcome, of course.]

Home plate is a most unique base among all the bases on any given baseball field. The other bases are raised above the ground level, to provide something to slide into or run over for the offense, and something that can be found without having to look for the defense. Home plate is even with ground level, which makes it possible to slide with the intent of sliding through the plate as one might with other bases, but also one can perform a form of tag-avoiding hook slide where a runner slides their body deliberately past the plate, only using one of their hands to reach out and touch the plate as they slide by. (Less excitingly, home plate is likely flat because if it were raised, there's a high likelihood that right handed batters would trip on it coming out of the batter's box, potentially injuring themselves. It's why many leagues employ breakaway bases these days, so that the energy of a slide doesn't get directed back into the player's body in ways that would hurt them.) The plate is also differently-shaped than all the other bases, being in the shape of a pentagon that looks like a triangle placed on top of a square, giving it a distinct house shape. (At least, in cultures where that representation means a house).

Home plate is the beginning and the end of every offensive player's plan for scoring runs. To start the offense, someone has to be able to leave home on a hit or a walk, which is tough enough. Then there's the gauntlet of running the bases, which is dependent on your teammates to provide hits and walks to help advance you. Some people get to go in easy, others have to run hard and get dirty to achieve success. However you get there, though, once you're safe at home, there's very little that can be done to undo that (appeals can wipe runs off the board, as does the last out of the inning being anything other than a tag play). The more runs and hits, the merrier, and the higher likelihood it is that you'll be able to win your game. Playing as a team sometimes means someone else gets to cross the plate, but you'll be acknowledged for your efforts with an RBI. Keeping the rally going is more important than trying for a home run.

If you like, it can become a life metaphor at this point - to succeed, you must leave home and go or into places where it's not certain to be safe, where you will be relying on others to help with your success. I'd tweak the ending, though, such that you don't have to return to the home you left to have it all count in the grand scheme of things, although I suppose that's one function of a class reunion. There are more than enough people who have no intent at all of returning to the home they left from, even in emergency situations, for very good and valid reasons. So, instead, you just have to return to your home, however you choose to define it, to score runs. In baseball, it's a little easier, as home is objectively defined. In life, not so much. And, in life, the acknowledgements that come from being a team player aren't always automatic, ether. So that can be discouraging.

Home plate also has significance to the defense, as it establishes the lateral dimensions of the strike zone for the pitcher, is one of the endpoints of establishing the lines that divide fair and foul territory, usually is a reference point in determining whether a batter had committed themselves to a swing at a pitch, and is the domain of the catcher, who is going to receive a little extra in the way of takeout attempts by virtue of being armored.

Home plate is also the place where the biggest plays of a baseball game are likely to happen. I saw on a television game many years ago a spectacular play at home plate where the attempt to take out the catcher with a slide succeeded, bowling over the catcher and leaving the ball and both players involved all on the ground past the plate. Since the ball had been jarred loose, any tags the catcher had applied didn't result in an out (keeping control of the ball while applying the tag is necessary), but the player making the slide had also not touched home plate, so they could still be put out with an appropriate tag. The spectacle, such that it was, was in watching the clearly dazed runner crawl back toward home plate and put their hand on it, earning themselves the run and making it possible for someone to call time and check on the health of all the players involved.

I also had an encounter of that nature myself at the plate. From what I remember of it, I came in and slid for the plate, not with any bad intent, bit apparently, the incoming throw was high, and the catcher went up for it, and came down on me - my head, or something else. I can't really say I know what happened, because the only thing I remembered after going in for the slide was that time had passed. I had to ask whether I was safe or not. I was, but the full extent of everything wasn't made completely clear to me until a minute or two later, when I noticed that my nose was bleeding. Which was promptly stopped in time for me to go out and pitch the next inning. It's still a blank in my memory as to what actually happened, but accidents and all that. Good for us and our rally, I suppose, that I had enough time to get it all in order. The pair of shoes that I was wearing for that game wouldn't ever lose the blood stain, even after the blood itself was long since cleaned up. As one might guess, things that happen at home are always memorable.

If this card appears in a reading, it's a sign of success brought on by the application of knowledge and experience. It may be shepherded and guided by others to make it better as they apply their knowledge to help you get home, but you're the one who gets there. Because you had to do the leg work, as well as get things started with the hit that got you on base. So there's a lot to be proud of.

Of course, there's also that tiny problem where some people can't actually make it out of the batter's box. It could be a slump, or it could be that they're not really learning from past experiences. The coaches can only do so much when it comes to advice - eventually, a player has to be able to execute, or at least demonstrate the learning, for progress to be made on their issues. Players that don't show progress get sent down to the minor leagues. You may have to make that decision, or make a decision about how much someone gets to participate on your team. Or you may have to own up to the fact that you're not learning from your past efforts, either. Pitchers exploit whatever they can to get you out, and if you're not aware of what you need to counter that, or you haven't done your scouting homework, it's not going to go well.

And back to the regular news - 28 November - 26 December 02014

Let's start with 3D printed phalluses synchronized to music or reporting on stock prices. And graffiti that appears to produce a three-dimensional image. And then manwha reimaginations of Disney princesses.

Then we shift to Bloomberg, talking about Anita Sarkeesian and the narrative amounts of harassment she receives on a daily basis, whose slug is "Anita Sarkeesian battles sexism in games [and] gamergate harassment", which is the article, but whose title is "The Game Industry's Greatest Adversary Is Just Getting Started", which is both clickbait and inaccurate. The game industry's greatest adversary is itself - Anita Sarkeesian is just pointing it out in a way that's hard to ignore or sweep under the rug, but the legions that want games to never evolve would rather get rid of the messenger than allow games to change.

And it's not just games - even if they never actually see a teacher, male-sounding names get rated higher in online courses rather than female-sounding ones.

research suggests that, all other things being equal, it's harder to be happy when in the middle of your life. I think it has something to do with the lack of milestones in life at those points, too - between 25 and 65, there aren't really any new privileges accorded to anyone, while the debts,, obligations, and issues mount. It makes it easy to be unhappy about things. If that's your current state, perhaps the Advent Calendar For Depressed People can help?

Time management may be better thought of as trying to do things that will make more time for you later, rather than making more work for yourself later.

The brains of people engaging in simultaneous translation of languages are doing fascinating things, but when put under the imaging machines, there's not a lot of explosive brain activity. Which is interesting by itself.

There are some people whose internal compasses work quite well, so much so that they can navigate without needing much of a map, or no map at all.

The practice of hosting celebrities and giving them humanitarian awards seems quite contrary to the idea of rewarding people who do lots of humanitarian work. But, like any charity or political campaign knows, to collect dollars, you must court those that have them, regardless of what their track record on the issues actually is.

Reparations are a necessity if any progress is to be made on equality between white people and black people - there have been too many centuries of exploitation for any hope of otherwise.

Unsurprisingly, the hostility women face as bosses and high-level managers contributes to mental health issues, as the masculine-coded traits they display to become managers produce negative reactions from their peers and subordinates ("frigid bitch"), and the feminine-coded traits men expect them to have and use are ridiculed ("too soft"). There's also the way that some men in a workplace will exploit impostor syndrome to ensure that the women in their workplace are not supported.

Perhaps not different at all, women's football was a thriving thing while men were fighting wars. Once they came back, though, suddenly it was forbidden for women to play.

Like all art styles, anime and manga style have shifted over the last twenty years or so, while remaining recognizably part of the same style family.

Some large corporations, outside of telecoms, are advocating for Net Neutrality. Which, understandably, gives people shivers, because large corporations generally don't support things that aren't beneficial to their bottom line. Or that the side of net neutrality is so obviously correct that even big corporations join in.

Every now and then, a company lets the people in charge of their social media out to play, with great results.

The United Kingdom has an issue with video on demand services showing very specific kings of sex acts. Not all pornographers, not all sex acts, but a very specific set and only against VoD. To protect THE CHILDREN, of course, is one of the official excuses. In reality, though, it looks like some dudes decided to ban anything they felt squicked by, because there's no rhyme or reason to it otherwise.

Being sex-positive means more than just accepting all messages about sexuality - it means analysis and decisions about which messages to promote.

The more we change, the more we stay the same...so we continue to talk about the issues surrounding whether women should change their name on marriage.

Thank Stephen Colbert for the reasons why you can still make fun of conservative politicians without getting dirty looks, and why you laugh when pundits talk about patriotism as solely a conservative value.

"One size fits all" does not even fit most, especially for women who have anything other than a model-size body with very little in the way of chest or hips. I'm also going to make a frowny-face at the Buzzfeed decision to show the thinner ladies' bare legs in some of these sections to the exclusion of others. Mind you, for those things, the other women would have been showing off their underwear collection, but it does reinforce the idea that some women are to be afforded bare skin and others not, even if the picture selected shows the woman's distaste for the item. It would be fairly easy to use a contrasting color of tights to show off the shortness of the shorts. Much better is dapperQ showing how all body types can achieve an androgynous look and the mic highlighting a pin-up project showing off sexy Asian men.

The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom is doing its level best to make the UK a hard place to migrate to, sufficiently so that even a beloved children's character would end up not being able to get refugee status in the UK. That is, if course, when not participating in the shared fantasy that austerity in spending can produce economic growth.

Chicago Public Schools auctioned bonds to raise money, but then let the banks handle the investments, which lost the public school system a tenth of the money raised and more. I'm quite sure the banks themselves are quite happy being flush with cash they collected from the deal, and they don't care how much they have screwed the schools.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has filed a lawsuit against the practice of employers threatening their employees with health insurance premium spikes if they don't participate in "voluntary" screenings and questionnaires. It's yet another if those ways that people who don't fit a societal norm get hammered on. Like the expectation that bigger people can just make their own stuff as needed.

A couple married in New York is suing the state of Florida to recognize their marriage and allow them driver licenses in their married name. As one might guess, this is only a problem because the couple both present as men.

Gender and sexuality, they are complicated things, which is why it is best to let people define themselves instead of trying to get them to fit your definitions. Additionally, know what you are listening about for all the letters, including asexuality. Because gender identities are a part of self-image these days, and costuming follows identity.

Cultural appropriation sticks in the craw for people whose culture is being appropriated. And if the complaints coming through about that are all about how it's totally not appropriation, or how it would mean that no culture could do things that were part of another culture, don't be surprised if the rejoinder is impolite, as the point and the complainers are on opposite ends of Terra. Instead, design things, all things, with all the cultures that you can think of and all the others that everyone else can.

An experiment involving paying an unconditional basic income to poorer people in India resulted in higher economic activity and greater freedom for those receiving the income.

THC in cannabis may be useful in combating the degenerative disease of Alzheimer's.

Because there's no OSHA requirements (or your national equivalent), home is the place where accidents happen most often. This isn't a surprise, just that being at home means nobody to make sure you're being safe, or your kids being safe, but you. On the chance that you happen to hurt yourself, there may be a few things you can do to help yourself stretch or exercise muscles.

Anxiety disorders, like other mental health issues, so not always behave as expected - have since toys to keep in mind when trying to help someone, which crucially appear to revolve around understanding that the person having the anxiety knows what is going on, but can't necessarily stop it.

A doctor praises the idea of a site that is clearly run by humans to talk about their psychiatric medications, while understanding that they could not recommend it to any patient because of the possibility that one might take offense, because it would only take one.

Applications like Uber represent a possible threat to the London black cab, but those that drive the cabs believe that the app cannot displace them so thoroughly as to make them disappear. Elsewhere, one of the new low-wage underclass is those people who work for jobs that only appear when other people desire things.

A repository of cleaning stains of all sorts on all kinds of fabrics. Nice work, Illinois.

Google is leveraging their massive trove of data to produce a CAPTCHA that consists of checking a checkbox - but it's how you do it that matters. Google is also making progress on automatically analyzing and captioning an image.

Gangnam Style is so popular, its view count on YouTube exceeded the maximum value for a 32-bit hexadecimal address. So now the counter is a 64-bit hexadecimal address.

In the department of when, not if, bebe stores and Sony Pictures suffered intrusion attacks, the stores once making off with credit and debit cards, the Sony one collecting employee data, including very sensitive material about taxes and health care for employees, as well as racist jokes and gossip. The hack exposed the weakness of security at Sony, a weakness that most likely is replicated across several industries.

Turtles are a bit more understood in terms of their relationships to other reptiles, their genetic ancestors, and so forth. Filling in more gaps in the sciences.

The geopolitical implications of having a young mermaid princess want to catch a land-dwelling prince, as told by the witch who tried to make sure everyone stayed safe.

Many things between the English of the States and the English of the Empire don't have local equivalents. Which makes them prime candidates for importation.

Those familiar with the work of Isaac Asimov will understand the solid sporking of Asimov done in "How I saved the Internet from the ghost of Isaac Asimov".

Last for tonight, the core of mindfulness and spiritual centering exercises is in noticing things as they arise. Not necessarily the stuff that you want to notice, but everything, as if comes. As one might guess, this is both the simplest and most difficult part of the whole thing. Until, that is, you get to the point where you have to start forgiving and letting go. In all cases, though, remembering to take care of the body is important.

As is planning for the possibility of your non-existence. Because you may be the person who has to say what you want...or be the person who helps someone else with their directives.

Cats in holiday trees. Or cats trying to steal food. And foxes in nature, which are wonderful photographs of natural creatures.