u/PhoenixPringles01

E7: 5m Sprint

i am sick of this time

i am not continuing this shit

fuck this

it's over

E6 - Funnels

It's Kobover. We fucking suck, back to the irrelevancy and mockery we go.

That's it. That's the article for today. My mood is so fucking tanked and I'm so upset at how we're doing that I can't even be bothered to give actual commentary. Thunderbolts still suffer from gold-drought I guess.

It's Kobover. Goodbye. Sorry if you expected something today. But I'm fucking sick of this.

See you next event.

E5: Hurdles

Looks cool- wait ARE THOSE MORE RETIRED TEAMS?

Seems like JMR has somehow improved their PR if they're literally asking teams that have retired or been out of mention years ago to come back as demonstrating teams. Then again, it's the 10th Marble League, I totally get that this league would be extra special.

now the depressing part

god we cannot escape our horrible hurdle performances can't we, 15th overall and we drop to 16th. fuck this is actually depressing, didn't help that this was an absolute damper of a day plagued by a horrible sleep schedule and barely any productivity.

keeping this short because frankly i'm feeling shit about this and wish to do nothing with it for now and get it over with, see you in event 6.

E4 - Bowling

Overall, not a bad showing from the Kobalts, 6th is pretty good considering most of the teams ended up doing the typical "score-first-zero-second" thing. I did like what Gnome was doing with that bounce shot, even if it took down one of the red dominoes, since it's not much.

Indigo Stars blow us away again with another phenomenal finish AND Marble League record!!! Some part of me hopes that they will do either an Oceanics or Kobalts ML25 and make it next around, it would be cool to see another blue team do successfully. Unfortunately, the Savage Speeders kind of shit the bed with this one and are sitting in last place, which is a bit of an interesting thing to even say. Who knows, maybe they'll come back and this will come back to also bite me in the ass.

Many people also didn't really like the event formatting, so here's an idea of mine:

Rather than having the marble come off the track at the end, instead, raise the track and put it on a 3D printed ramp similar to a half cone. This sloping part still allows the marble to roll forward, but because the sloping is in all directions, it allows the marble to "choose" its path, which increases the possibility of newer shots, rather than both marbles taking the same path.

Hastily drawn sketch of the idea.

Anyways, here's to hoping the Kobalts can hopefully do better in upcoming events. We're going slow but at least not doing badly so far.

See you in Event 4!

I've been thinking about this more and more as I've started paying more attention in church ironically, to the things that the pastors are saying in order to see if what they're preaching really holds up. And one thing that bothers me now is when people try to make analogies to show how people are not happy with God failing them or being not-present.

The talking point for that preaching was something like "Are we doubting God?", and the comparison made was something like "Imagine if you were meeting your friend and they were 10 minutes late, and you started making assumptions about them and thinking that they're really a horrible person because they didn't bother to meet you up in time."

And now that I think of it, it's a horrible analogy. The reason why people are upset at God is mainly because He is said to be everywhere and can do anything, but when people spend years and years talking to Him, they get nothing but radio silence. Meanwhile, you and your friend are finite beings with finite abilities, and can only comprehend finite stuff perhaps. Plus, your 10-20 minutes lost are imcomparable to the years lost by Christians who have spent their time praying just to get nothing.

And in all honestly, all analogies trying to defend God fail because it tries to analogise God's behaviour to a human, which he is clearly not. I've seen people say "God is like a Father, he has to punish us if we're misbehaving", and I'm like, no, being sent to PainIsForeverVille because you were born isn't the same as being scolded because you were misbehaving in a store.

The analogies to try and rationalise an infinite being's actions to that of a finite being is completely inaccurate and just serves to push the blame onto people who are trying to understand why.

There's also the criticism of praying to God for something that you want...even though God is supposedly good and can do that. I mean, this goes many ways, people say "prayer without action is useless", which I guess is true, but then why criticise people for praying to their God for a good thing just because they think that "good thing" isn't Godly, like a new internship, job, and instead say "you should be praying for an open heart!" instead?

It never made sense to me. I mean, now that I have basically opened the door to deconstruction, nothing much about this religion makes sense to me anymore. It just feels like a mish-mash of pandering to an idealised image of a person who has existed in the past [referring to the idea that Jesus was probably a real person but an apocalyptic preacher instead], "no-fun-allowed" in basically anything, and criticising anyone and anything who tries to raise any questions. Basically sifting through a fallen Jenga tower and seeing what I can salvage, honestly.

E3: 5m Relay

Don't mind the title. Inside joke.

Anyways, looks like we're back to the usual format of SD + Main League events for this year's league. Not that I'm complaining, it seems fun. I don't have much to say other than the Jawbreakers may be cooking actually.

As for the main league, Kobalts got another 11th place finish, not really hopeful considering the first leg of their relay was really slow, and though they caught it, it wasn't far enough. Hopefully they can overcome this qualification nightmare and get to more than 8th eventually.

The Hazers cooked pretty well in this event and got a Gold. I'm pretty excited for them and hope that they can win this year's league; they deserve something after all the years of pain, yknow?

Anyways, I don't have much to say as it's E3. There's still a lot to happen.

See you in Event 4!

E2: Short Track

Yeah, this was written days after E2. Am I going to still write it anyways? Yes. Because I got side-tracked by finals preparations. Now that I'm actually free for the summer though, I can hopefully gain the motivation to put these out after every event.

Anyways, E2 wasn't much with the Short Track event. The Kobalts get 11th with their new member Lapis, who actually got the fastest time out of all marbles with 7 laps. Though I had to really suppress some bad memories because seeing them go out of sorts [which I feel is pretty normal, considering their first time as a member] gave me bad flashbacks to Azure absolutely collapsing in the same event and losing the Kobalts qualification to ML24.

But that aside, I can't really make any other predictions, other than sort of expected, the Kobalts have never been exactly the best at these heat events, until recently, so hopefully Lapis can get more used to their team as the events go on. The Indigo Stars blow everyone away again with a Gold, which puts them on top, and frankly I'd like to see them succeed really. It's been a while since a blue team has big success, so they should absolutely have that opportunity next.

Funny enough, 4 teams share the same point total of 13, which includes the Kobalts, Chocolatiers, Crazy Cats Eyes and Oceanics. 13's a magic number I guess.

Anyways, see you in Event 3!

[Yes, I know E2 has long passed since me typing this message, I will still spoiler it anyways because I feel it's only right to fit the other columns I'll be writing.]

[Also, E3 is not in 30 minutes. I am not the brightest Indigo Star.]

E1: Opening Ceremony and E1 - Balancing

It's been a while but the long awaited Marble League is finally back after much preparations. After all, much is to be expected from the 10th anniversary Marble League.

So, what do we have in store? The Indigo Stars have qualified much to the delight of the fans, after 5 years of not being in the league. This is much to be joyful about, especially after their M1S6 appearance and what with what I think is one of the most lovely designed tracks. Safe to say, we're seeing a bit more blue in this league so far. Lets hope it's the team colours, and not the feeling.

As with the first event, I can't say much, so I'll just say that the PROCKETS ARE BACK??? Well that wasn't what I was expecting, honestly. But hey, glad that they're not absolutely dead yet. And of course, their demonstration run is the best of all the teams. In fact, there isn't much to say, considering all the teams underperformed somewhat, with barely any getting above the 300 mark. This is even more atypical for the Black Jacks, who killed it in the qualifiers...and then got killed in the main event. Ouch.

The Indigo Stars get a silver which is a great start, and the Solar Flares win a gold. I hope that perhaps this is the sign the two teams will start going for greatness. But it's only E1, we can only hope so much. The Kobalts get 8th, which is typical of their start - midpack.

And my god, can I just talk about how good the opening ceremony was? The theming was great, we had Nora's amazing voice when she was singing, and nostalgic throwbacks on the TV screen from the past Marble Leagues. And just, the overall atmosphere of the Pinkies home stadium is really making this a great start. I really hope this will carry over the next few events.

I will be looking forward to watching this over the summer break.

See you in Event 2!

TW: Self-hatred? I'm not sure if this applies, but I feel like the topic I am discussing about does relate to self-hatred in some way, due to dealing with misanthropy.

"Misanthropy is the general hatred, dislike, or distrust of the human species, human behavior, or human nature.", according to Wikipedia. In general, any sort of sentiment that talks down on humanity can be said to be in some way, misanthropic.

Ever since my deconstruction journey started a couple months ago, I can't help but think that Christianity, or at least, to be more fair, the preachings that my church has given, have felt more and more misanthropic.

I mean, even if we disregard church preachings and all, the base idea that humans inherent flawness is something that we deserve to be punished eternally for is already something I consider misanthropic. I mean, how is it fair that because we are born with flaws we can't control, we deserve to go to hell?

It doesn't help at all that we're constantly told that nothing in this world we do matters. They're all things of the world, they don't last, so trust in God [that we can't see, but trust me bro, He lives forever]. Nothing we do in the world is enough to fix our fatal flaws so bad that we apparently deserved punishment for it. Until Jesus died for us that is.

In return, we must worship him all the time. Trying to do your work? My pastors all say those are idols, those are distractions. Nevermind that we live in a fucking society and we have things to tend to, like our jobs and schoolwork, and that we have hobbies to relax from those, because apparently, we can't do all of those. Why? Because we're stinking earthly fucking losers who try to understand the folly of the gospel, but Jesus is so good that we, puny dumb fucks try to understand it, but fail. Obviously, because we're sinful fucks so prone to sinning that we DESERVE TO FUCKING DIE FOR IT!!! UNTIL HE ARRIVED OF COURSE!!!

Every single preaching I've attended online feels like this. Humans are never good enough, humans are sinful, humans are idiots pandering to their culture that gives them worth and purpose!!! how stupid!!! how foolish that they don't understand that we're all sinners who DESERVED TO DIE!!!

It just hurts me. To be playing this losing game. I don't want to play a game where there is nothing worth playing. I can't ignore the toxicity, the back-handedness of "we're all sinners, Jesus loves us so much that he took the punishment that we deserved", because that implied that I was responsible for dying an eternal death I never deserved.

Sorry that it kind of went off the rails at the end. I've been looking at the past preachings, noticing how much humans are criticised seemngly by the bible, or by preachings. How much we're jabbed for not praying to Jesus, and how much we are jabbed for praying to Jesus for things that we might want. How much we're jabbed for not being spiritually rich enough, but then how much we're jabbed for doing all this and experiencing a spiritual high. Because how dare humans try and hit a goal. How dare we.

It's never going to be enough in this hellhole.