Monday 1 December 2008

The All Stars Week

Ah yes...The All Stars week....
SLHA has an All Stars game every season and of course Season 6 was no exception. With these kinds of things months of planning can all boil down to one week of hell and this was the week that was...
Are you sitting comfortably?
Good I shall begin, The All Stars roster was posted on the Forum by the luscious Honoria Paine (hereby probably referred to as Hon, Honeybee, SexKitten...etc) after a league wide internet vote...and ofcourse the usual names were up there...Beavis Beckham, Marjan Tomba, Billybob Street, Liesa Ember, August Lusch...wait-a-goddamn-minute August Lusch isn't an All Star!
After confirming with Honeybee and conflabbing with Merrik Caproni (who usually makes the All Star kits) I found out that a) I was an All Star and b) Merrik was ill/sick/bedridden and wouldn't be making kits for this years All Star games.
Lets rewind here a little...SLHA has a couple of clothing designers...through it's history these have changed as seasons have progressed and of course have changed and grown better looking as peoples technical skills have improved. Back in the olden times Weis Hickman created the jerseys...they were fairly simple designs but very well done...this lasted S1, 2, 3 ... then Weis wasn't really around much for Season 4 and Jack Belvedere made the Cobras jerseys his own...then Merrik Caproni decided to join in and Season 5 saw a distinct change into classier hockey jersey designs. Season 5 also saw me enter the uniform fray with my Euro League Ravens and Foxes designs these were simple, some would place them somewhere between Weis's uniforms and Merrik's.
Season 6 Merrik perfected his style and did most of the NA uniforms (apart from the Icelords who used the Season 5 uniform originally made by Harley Wachman) and I honed my Foxes and Ravens jerseys to be much more professional looking.
So...people who can make jerseys in SLHA...Weis Hickman (Absent) Merrik Caproni (Ill) Jack Belvedere (Working on Charity Jerseys) Harley Wachman (Absent) August Lusch (dammit!)
So here's what I did first...
I worked on a logo..a kick ass logo a logo that would sum up the differences between light and dark..between power and chaos, between blue and red.
That logo took 30 minutes...and I still love it...!
Ok so logo down...what else did I need?
Ahh yes teams...now having talked with Jack he was thinking along the lines of Slapshot and I was thinking along the lines of Copyright infringement. So I took his idea and said...heck...lets give this things some good old fashioned SLHA league history. The first two teams in the league were the Whales (blue) and the Wolves (red)and the place where the games are held is Jericho Hill so I took those colours and that name and created two teams...using my powers of english and stating the obvious I created the Jericho Reds...

and the Hill Blues
Jericho Reds Hill Blues (see what I did there?)
With that out of the way I worked and worked and worked on the red jersey...
Tuesday arrived and so did my enery levels...I went in world to show Jack the rough version of the red jersey and to talk about how best to split the names of All Stars into two fairly even teams. I was given the go ahead to use a spreadsheet and my imagination.
Finalising the two teams...both looking fairly balanced and my imagination intacked I worked on the Blue jersey to get that to rough form before going out with Honeybee for a well earned non hockey related night to celebrate our anniversary.
PWP cruises...what a night! Seven month anniversary (though anniversary means year but lets not get technical) we dined on a boat with a live artiste (who played sax...and er 'sang' songs) a waitress who hovered around our table and called me Mr August all night but Honeybee and I had tonnes of fun, laughing and a joking in private voice IM...(the sim was set to no voice which I can understand in roleplaying areas like Toxia but at a dinner seemed to be a little more flummaxing!) it was a good night...honestly it was good to get away from the SLHA for a night (though I was being IM'd by members of the league on all sorts of issues).
As the night drew to a close and we were disembarking...we paid our compliments to the hostess and she implored us to look around the sim, the shops, the ice rink...where we could skate or play hockey..."Hockey?" both Honeybee and I asked and our hostess nodded and handed us 2 SLHA Whales sticks...
No matter where you go...there you are...
This raised questions for us...and I turned into Columbo "just one more thing, where did you get these from lady?"...getting nowhere and finding out that the rest of the setup wasn't as decently scripted as ours was (our scoreboard/stats/goal system really is something) we left and returned home giggling at how we just couldn't shake the league.

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