Questions:

Where are you going for the weekend? Family? Friends? Travel?

What are your favorite Thanksgiving foods?

OK to stuff yourself for no apparent reason on Thanksgiving even when trying to be healthy?

Are you shopping this weekend? If so, are you going to do the whole Black Friday line-up Thanksgiving night thing?

Great Thanksgiving travel and food stories

What's your favorite holiday?

Most importantly, what are you thankful for this year?

Hilariously, this FanPost was 74 words long when I tried to publish it the first time. Never been so close yet so far.

Might as well post this now, since I heard there's a big game coming out next week.

A bunch of LL-ers are on Xbox Live and play games with each other - who else out there has an Xbox and wants to join up? As of Tuesday, Nov 10, we will be playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 pretty much fulltime, so feel free to join the party and get a few games in.

A forewarning - do not put your earpiece too close to your ear when playing with me.

LL SN - XBL tag

seattlebruin - seattlebruin

Scruffy Lefty - Scruffy Lefty

tootthekazoo - TootMyKazoo

Robert - WeaselRed

BrianL - BDL88

JamMaster Jesus - imeatinbutter

Phildopip - Phildopip

BrettJMiller - Bretticus

Ralphie81 - Ralphie81

royalcurve - Royalcurve

Coach Owens - Coach Owens 00

Nate Dogg - herr414

Ckel - Ckel44

seattlesundevil - Hessbian

hcoguy - hcoguy

bmxnw - Distant Echo

seattlecougar - Heeb McMazeltov

joof - Joofie

Jason X USN - Jason X USN

bluemax - BlueMax MB

qrsouther - PapaBear94 (seriously?? 1994??)

Add your names in the comments and discuss, will update the FanPost with everyone's names as we go.

One vote per person in each category unless you're Jeff and you get Fogel's votes too

BEST FRONT-PAGE POSTER

Jeff - Matthew - Graham - "Robert"

Best Commenter

Fogel - Robert - abender20 - Eyebrows - Kermit. - acblue

Rookie of the Year

abender20 - royalcurve - Decatur - Attractive Nuisance - JamMaster Jesus

Comment of the Year, Non-Image

Foot Fetish by Fogel - Line Breaks by Matthew - The Lore of Coach Owens by OlSalty - I CAN HAZ FRANKLIN'S PENIS by Jeff - BBQ by abender20 - Silva Kiss by acblue

Comment of the Year, Small Subthread (comments < 10)

ASCII 9/11 by Eyebrows - Matthew Can Suck Fogel's Dick by Fogel & Matthew

Comment of the Year, Images Permitted

This is My Belief by Fett42

Comment of the Year, Images Permitted, Non-Fett Division

Stephen Strasburg Dead Due to Masturbation by Vatinius - Griffey Scooter by Wilder. - MSPaint Guti by Gihyou

Best FanPost

The Poem by Attractive Nuisance - Felix by Robert - Why Graham is Right by Graham

Best Front Page Post

Mariners Win the World Series - First Half Review, M's Go Driving - LL QC - Is This SPARTA?

Best Thread or Subthread

Scruffy .gif-bombs LL, Franklin Wins Game - Aumont to the Minors - Corcotopia - How to Get Lost in San Diego

Best Random Thread

Pike Street Stench - IS THE KID ON HIS WAY HOME -

Best LL Meltdown

LoLCat Night Announcement by Lookout Landing - THE NCAA FUCKED THE HUSKIES by Robert

It's that time of year again for the Lookout Landing Awards ceremony, affectionately known as the LLemmies!

This thread will serve as the nomination thread - please feel free to nominate additional categories as well. Please do not nominate more than two entries per category, to keep this thing at a reasonable length.

Voting will occur in a new FanPost a few days after nominations are in

CATEGORIES

Best Moderator

Best Commenter (non-mods only)

Comment of the Year (non-image)

Comment of the Year (images permitted)

Comment of the Year (images permitted, non-Fett division)

Rookie of the Year

Best FanPost (FanPost content only)

Best Front Page Post (Post content only)

Best Thread (overall thread after post)

Best Beer Subthread

Best Baseball Subthread

Best Other Subthread

Best Off-the-Wall Subthread (such as the duckyou thread)

Meme of the Year

Please provide links to nominations!

We have not discussed excellent beer in a while. Let us commence discussing beer that is good so Dave Cameron will have reason to refer to us as "that blog that drinks a lot" next year as well.

What have you had recently that's been good? All-time favorites? Favorites in each style? Preferred breweries?

City you would most like to live in for no reason other than beer? (really only two acceptable answers here, far as I can tell)

It's occurred to me that a lot of the terms we use around LL can be confusing even to established regulars, much less new posters. We throw around terms like "expect to regress," "tRA," and "J/M/G."

Many of these things are general baseball or statistics ideas, and some are LL-specific, but all contribute to making LL both an incredibly informative, if at time confusing place to read and post.

I propose that we start a FanPost collection of all the phrases we use, a Lookout Landing Dictionary. I know we tried it before with the Lookout Landing wiki, LLikipedia, but that didn't work as expected. What I propose is that we use this one FanPost as a giant dictionary and continue to add to it as we find new things that should be here, or stumble across old ones that need to be included.

The dictionary would include both baseball and LL specific jargon, and would be intended mainly to help new posters figure out what the hell we're talking about, and as a handy reference for older posters who might have been confused by something and never asked.

I think we should use a format in which we'd provide a brief definition, as well as a link to a relevant subthread or FanPost which might explain the idea in more detail.

EXAMPLE

Regression - Regression is a statistical concept that relates to non-conforming results. It essentially states that given an expected normal distribution, an outlier will, over a large sample size, move towards or "regress" to the mean value.

A good example of this is provided by Kermit. in this subthread.

Let me know what you guys think. Option B is to just re-create LLikipedia, but with less insanity (and probably a restriction on who can edit pages)

September of last year, our intrepid hero made the following bet - if the Mariners are within five games of .500 at the conclusion of play, August 31, 2009, he becomes a mod for the month of September. If the Mariners fall outside this nine-game window, each mod gets to cockpunch him at a time and location of their choosing.

Just today, new user Poochie asked for an update on the status of the bet.

I've created a simple WE chart for the bet, based on a simple binomial distribution, and assuming the Mariner's current Pythagorean Expectation to be their odds of winning the next game. After that, it was a simple matter (well with a lot of numbers) to determine the approximate odds of the Mariners winning between 64 and 69 games before September 1

robert2 (via seattlebruin)

After tonight's game against the Orioles, the M's have a Pythagorean expectation of .442 from here on out, and they've won 25 games already. Thus, I simply needed to find the probability of them winning between 38 and 43 of the next 80 games. As you can see, the odds aren't bad - about 40%.

I repeated this process retroactively for the beginning of the season - as you can see, the team was much too good to hover around .500 at the start of the year. Ironically, the high point of the graph came on Silva's last start - it's been all downhill from there.

EDIT: Updated through tonight's 3-2 victory over Baltimore - Robert checking in at a robust 26.4% chance to avoid three junkpunches

So, welcome to the first discussion forum for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies! You should have read through chapter 24, so if you haven't read that far, either don't read the thread (yet) or don't complain about spoilers.

Discussion questions/topics

1. First impressions (and second impressions, since we read a third of the novel)

2. Comparisons between Pride and Prejudice vs. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

3. Characters so far - strengths, weaknesses, who is likable/dislikable, and why?

4. How has the view of marriage changed both relative to time, distance from England and the number of zombies roaming the American countryside?

5. Please pose other discussion questions!

EDIT: Need to discuss what book we should read next so people can get started acquiring it. The leading suggestion right now is The Avenger of Blood by Miguel Batista, but please make suggestions.

The Avenger of Blood - Miguel Batista

EDIT(11:20AM): For anyone new to LL or advanced analysis, this is the perfect time to ask any question, no matter how basic. I can't stress this strongly enough.

We've discussed some more advanced nuts&bolts-type stuff in the comments, but even if you have a question like "what are tRA and wOBA and why do you use them instead of OPS and FIP," ask ask ask!

We had one of these last year, and it seemed to work out pretty well to get people's questions, however basic answered.

I think it would be a good idea to do this again this year, esepcially with the influx of new posters to Lookout Landing, it would be nice to have a place where you can ask any advanced analysis question and have it answered by someone with great knowledge of this area.

Jeff, Matthew, and Graham have been great at answering questions, and another thing I'm hoping will happen here is that other knowledgeable non-mod posters will be able to contribute and help out as well. I know that at least for me personally, I've learned a ton just in the last year, to the point where I'd be comfortable fielding at least basic questions regarding advanced analysis and metrics.

So feel free to ask any question and we'll do our best to answer them. I'd ask that the regulars really take it easy on everyone in this thread and just do your best to help the asker understand, no matter how basic the query.

Of course this doesn't mean that I don't have my own questions that I'd like to have answered, and honestly, part of this thread was me being selfish enough to make a FanPost hoping to get a few answers out of everyone.

- How does pitching tRA convert to runs above/below average? Is it just a simple [(tRAplayer-tRAleague)*xO]/27?

- What's the definition of replacement-level for a pitcher? For a hitter, we know it's ~20 runs per 600 PA or like .033 runs/PA. Is there a similar sliding scale for pitchers? Is it different for relievers/starters? And what would be that number, if there is one.

- It's my understanding that positional adjustments are defined so that an average hitter at a position in relation to his peers who is exactly an average fielder will always be worth 2 WAR. Why do we value positions like C and SS over corner OF and 1B? Shouldn't a 2 WAR player be a 2 WAR player, regardless of position? I understand scarcity, but due to positional adjustment, shouldn't a 2 WAR catcher be just as available as a 2 WAR LF?

- How does positional adjustment work if a guy plays a lot of positions? Does he just get each positional adjustment multiplied by percentage of playing time at a given spot?

- Are positional adjustments based on ~600 PA? Do you get a bigger adjustment if you play, say CF, and get 700 PAs in a season?

Also, when this is all said and done, I'll try to compile the answers and post them in a new FanPost so we'll have a lot of good information stuck in one spot.

I have no purpose in posting this OFFTOP. I have no particular subjects I want to discuss (except beer!), no particular links to share or images to chortle over. I just need a dose of LL off-topicness, especially given that the last two are both well over 1,000 comments and no one seems to be posting in them.

So please, come, enjoy, talk about stuff related to the Mariners or not (we should rename Scrappy's to the Rally Puppy!) and don't think about how little effort I put into this FanPost.

I can't believe I strung that out for more than 75 words.

EDIT: One of my life goals is to be able to view the rec leaderboard on my own. What are your random life goals?