McGoverning: A Very Special Subplot, or, An Egg in The Hand is Worth Two Terrible Towels...
But wait!! There's more...
As I promised last week, there is one more special feature of the Sweeps Week Bonanza. And that's even before we get on to The Brit Chapters and what follows.
No one here will roll over and die of surprise when I say that I like to paint on a broad canvas. I build worlds big - or rather I've built this world big, such that there are many worlds within worlds in which to play, opportunities to indulge favorite topics and personal interests along with the discoveries and joys of assimilating and synthesizing material from many subjects into the main narrative, an exercise in life-long learning as well as compendious AH. A number of those favorite sidebar-subjects have become what I like to refer to as the Many Side Projects of this specific TLverse. Narratives that may bear greatly or only slightly in relation to the main narrative itself, but that belong very deeply to this specific TL, and enrich it in a variety of directions.
The Many Side Projects take on different forms but let's just say my Google Apps account (well, Docs and Sheets anyway) stays busy, to say nothing of the Appendices section of my primary Scrivener project folder. Sometimes, over the course of the larger project, the main thrust, there may be times when one of the Side Projects pokes its head in and says hi. (Spoiler: this is one of those times.)
As we have noted, some pages back now here in the thread, I am a lifelong fan (though somewhat removed during much of the 21st century IOTL until recent reacquaintance) of The HANDEGG, which is to say Murka Rules Football (although by that definition the AFL and both rugby codes likely qualify also, which bookends what I've actually played myself, namely Murka HANDEGG - tight end, middle school and JV, I lacked the speed for varsity at a major 4A program in my home state, which only went up to 4A in those days - and Union - second-row, tight head forward actually, for my hall at uni in Bristol because I was a Yank who'd been a receiver in the American game which they presumed would be good for line-outs. This presumption yielded mixed, though certainly not purely negative, results. Plus I'd finally hit the level of physical development and personal temperament where I could use my long arms and decent size to poleaxe a bastard given a chance, specifically impertinent fly-halfs who thought they could get free with the ball in the narrows just past a scrum. It was fun to spend a little time in a sport where clotheslining was a feature, not a bug. I digress.)
In my efforts to create a vast and plausibly-inhabited TLverse of CRUNCHY VERISIMILITUDE on as many subjects as the brain can support, sports have always played a role. In my effort to make that count, make that hum, about eighteen months ago I stumbled across what I like to call the Magic Butterfly Engine. This would be the really elegantly programmed statistical what-iffery machinery resident at www.whatifsports.com. It covers a variety of sports and I've dipped into most of them in minor or major (or, let's be honest, really quite terrifying... ) ways. My only regret is they don't have one for the universal game, e.g. o jugo bonito or Association Football, so in a more limited way I've done my best there in a more petite, bare-bones Side Project (one bit of which gets a brief three-sentence mention in the upcoming chapter!)
Thankfully www.whatifsports.com does not have an NCAA football or basketball database that reaches back before the late Nineties or I'd be somewhere in a lightless room with moisture dripping from the ceiling huddled over a flickering screen with a five-foot long beard surrounded by jars of my own urine like Howard fucking Hughes. Small mercies.
But. It is a genuinely remarkable bit of programming that outclasses nearly every other counterfactual-programming system I've come across in many walks of fact patterns, among them stuff programmed by academic econometricians - really I'd say only NUKEMAP is that good or better, and as user-friendly, and I really really don't want to break that sucker out ITTL. What you can affect and influence with the Magical Butterfly Engine (including statistical analogues for players who don't have available the kind of data you might like to have for AH purposes) is really very broad and elegantly detailed without being overwhelming. It's become clear to me through... some measure *coughs nervously* of use that it also crunches other, specific statistical details the general user can't get at but that play a valuable role generating outcomes. And it does a range of them at lightning speed including, if you want to read it (spoiler: I do), a play-by-play for each type of sport that I assume is done by Elves who live at the quantum level. I made a little use of it, as I say, on these more constrained quests for crunchy data and a small, diverting side project during a family vacation back in summer of 2019, and came away from all of that quite friendly disposed to the system.
So I decided to take this rather delightful tool I'd found, then used in a much more niche capacity, and see now what it might look like to play through a bit of seasonal action, just for a look at the sorts of variances might show up in selected ways, compared to what we know from OTL. After all when someone hands you a Magical Butterfly Engine, you engine the damn butterflies. I promised myself from the start that I'd abide by what I generated - I might then take a few more bashes, a few tweaks, at a given outcome just to get a broader statistical picture, how the teams matched up broadly for the game and the relative likelihood of a given outcome, but for narrative purposes I'd stick with whatever came first out the gate.
Then right off the bat a wildly, delightfully unlikely thing happened. (Spoiler: it shows up just a few pages into the Google Doc, when people start playing games.)
As for where things went from there, well...
From there the seasons of this McGovernized decade took form (and make no mistake, whatever George's personal fortunes in '76, the presidencies of TTL's Seventies have all been significantly remade by McGoverning's POD, so I took them here as a thematic whole, from the season during TTL!Nixon's last year of his only term up through Super Bowl XV that coincides with tidy closeness to the end of that last Seventies presidential term, and yes it is the end of the Seventies because there is no Year 0 *eye twitches*...) Here you can find what I mostly did over last Christmas's break - Nixon's Last Season and the bulk of George's very-definitely-for-sure term - plus the bits I added on as bonus for now (finishing up the '76 season and adding '77 as a main-narrative-spoiler-free taster for the rest of the decade) early in quarantine. I have, ahem, what I need to fill out the decade* in due time. After work on this and some of the other Side Projects at that point I want to keep hard at the main narrative for a good while yet. They're settled enough to rest ... for a time.
*(No of course I didn't stop there. Not even remotely, any more than I have with the Ever-Evolving Tapestry of the TLverse. I did for the purposes of this specific Google Doc because it's good for the reputation of this enterprise and its author if people act on the assumption that he's, well, sane. There's a reason I call my McGoverningverse HANDEGG materials the Scary Nightmare Hoarder Shit files, there are some things once seen from which the human soul can never fully recover...)
Of course, when it's a subject dear to one's own interests, sports is one of those matters where there's plenty of opportunity for wonderfully granular AH, so many moving parts, combinations of complex aggregate Trends and pure wild chance, endless filigrees and fractalizations of detail that then ebb and flow and affect one another and re-aggregate in new ways. That tends to be true of the other Many Side Projects also; I do tend to go for granularity.
Once you pass fully through the looking-glass and become a reputable stathead there are all manner of things you can do working complex combinations of players, lineups, and seasonal capabilities (you can, for example, integrate a specific season of a given player's career as your rough statistical base with a couple or three different combinations of teams, related players, O-line and D-line, etc., and get quite different results both at the team level and in the statistical outcomes for that player and others, or the team aggregate.) So once you appreciate the tools you can work with and get a sense of the other aggregate statistics that the engine uses that you can't get in the code and tweak, there's a really rich landscape of AH possibilities (you can even run the same "game" over again, even in the same conditions, and see what the likelihood of certain kinds of outcomes are by running it enough times. Also I have a suspicion that when you play a succession of games in a row with your same base-combination team against a succession other teams especially those who share their division and/or conference, the engine begins to aggregate "seasonal" effects, like winning and losing streaks, improvements or declines over time in individual player performance, games where it apparently choses to rotate players in ways you hadn't selected for to indicate they're out hurt or suchlike, and so on.)
So - some people deal with sleep-interruption issues by becoming gamers, I suppose this is a dedicated AHstorian's functional equivalent. The blend of narrative background choices (strategic level stuff that I can affect with my own narrative decisions) and actual randomization based on complex statistical programming inputs has a satisfying tactile liveliness to it.
A word on style: this Side Project takes on a specific form, indeed one that's kind of/sort of hallowed among the tropes and styles one sees around the forum here, namely the encyclopedia entry. So don't expect a lot of snazzy McGovernese prose, I've read enough reference texts in relation to this kind of subject matter to absorb through the fingertips what I'd call "low-key encyclopedic" form. But perhaps the SHEER FRIGGIN' GRANULAR CRUNCHINESS available, for those who are in to this very subject matter (it's fine if you're not) will compensate for a lower level of verve than the usual. And there's plenty here to enjoy, goodness knows. Again I do not place myself in any category there related, but merely comment on what might be shared habits of mind, when I say it's a bit like what happens when George RR Martin says to himself, "you know, I may need to ease up and stretch and come at all this from another angle ... by writing a 400-page history of the Targaryen Dynasty because that frickin' smacks dude."
As this project goes on down the line some other entrants from the Side Projects may show up also, in the various forms those have taken. For now here's one calibrated to the time of year and our plague world's rather curious present relationship with the diversions we hold dear from more "normal" times. Have at it folks.
(Also if all this degenerates for a couple pages from a lucid, well-read, and high-minded discussion of complex political, economic, and cultural issues to the forum equivalent of chatter at a sports bar, I might be less troubled by that than some 😎 )
docs.google.com
TL;DR when it comes to, well, any of the Many Side Projects - or things that aren't even "side" like the Puttin' On the Brits chapters cued up next, or other intrusions of pet subjects/projects into the main narrative - when a Careful Reader asks, "Does that mean that all this is really an excuse to write a(n) [INSERT PET PROJECT HERE] timeline nested inside a larger timeline where George McGovern won the 1972 election?" the answer is always yes. I mean, it'd be off brand if the answer wasn't Yes...
As I promised last week, there is one more special feature of the Sweeps Week Bonanza. And that's even before we get on to The Brit Chapters and what follows.
No one here will roll over and die of surprise when I say that I like to paint on a broad canvas. I build worlds big - or rather I've built this world big, such that there are many worlds within worlds in which to play, opportunities to indulge favorite topics and personal interests along with the discoveries and joys of assimilating and synthesizing material from many subjects into the main narrative, an exercise in life-long learning as well as compendious AH. A number of those favorite sidebar-subjects have become what I like to refer to as the Many Side Projects of this specific TLverse. Narratives that may bear greatly or only slightly in relation to the main narrative itself, but that belong very deeply to this specific TL, and enrich it in a variety of directions.
The Many Side Projects take on different forms but let's just say my Google Apps account (well, Docs and Sheets anyway) stays busy, to say nothing of the Appendices section of my primary Scrivener project folder. Sometimes, over the course of the larger project, the main thrust, there may be times when one of the Side Projects pokes its head in and says hi. (Spoiler: this is one of those times.)
As we have noted, some pages back now here in the thread, I am a lifelong fan (though somewhat removed during much of the 21st century IOTL until recent reacquaintance) of The HANDEGG, which is to say Murka Rules Football (although by that definition the AFL and both rugby codes likely qualify also, which bookends what I've actually played myself, namely Murka HANDEGG - tight end, middle school and JV, I lacked the speed for varsity at a major 4A program in my home state, which only went up to 4A in those days - and Union - second-row, tight head forward actually, for my hall at uni in Bristol because I was a Yank who'd been a receiver in the American game which they presumed would be good for line-outs. This presumption yielded mixed, though certainly not purely negative, results. Plus I'd finally hit the level of physical development and personal temperament where I could use my long arms and decent size to poleaxe a bastard given a chance, specifically impertinent fly-halfs who thought they could get free with the ball in the narrows just past a scrum. It was fun to spend a little time in a sport where clotheslining was a feature, not a bug. I digress.)
In my efforts to create a vast and plausibly-inhabited TLverse of CRUNCHY VERISIMILITUDE on as many subjects as the brain can support, sports have always played a role. In my effort to make that count, make that hum, about eighteen months ago I stumbled across what I like to call the Magic Butterfly Engine. This would be the really elegantly programmed statistical what-iffery machinery resident at www.whatifsports.com. It covers a variety of sports and I've dipped into most of them in minor or major (or, let's be honest, really quite terrifying... ) ways. My only regret is they don't have one for the universal game, e.g. o jugo bonito or Association Football, so in a more limited way I've done my best there in a more petite, bare-bones Side Project (one bit of which gets a brief three-sentence mention in the upcoming chapter!)
Thankfully www.whatifsports.com does not have an NCAA football or basketball database that reaches back before the late Nineties or I'd be somewhere in a lightless room with moisture dripping from the ceiling huddled over a flickering screen with a five-foot long beard surrounded by jars of my own urine like Howard fucking Hughes. Small mercies.
But. It is a genuinely remarkable bit of programming that outclasses nearly every other counterfactual-programming system I've come across in many walks of fact patterns, among them stuff programmed by academic econometricians - really I'd say only NUKEMAP is that good or better, and as user-friendly, and I really really don't want to break that sucker out ITTL. What you can affect and influence with the Magical Butterfly Engine (including statistical analogues for players who don't have available the kind of data you might like to have for AH purposes) is really very broad and elegantly detailed without being overwhelming. It's become clear to me through... some measure *coughs nervously* of use that it also crunches other, specific statistical details the general user can't get at but that play a valuable role generating outcomes. And it does a range of them at lightning speed including, if you want to read it (spoiler: I do), a play-by-play for each type of sport that I assume is done by Elves who live at the quantum level. I made a little use of it, as I say, on these more constrained quests for crunchy data and a small, diverting side project during a family vacation back in summer of 2019, and came away from all of that quite friendly disposed to the system.
So I decided to take this rather delightful tool I'd found, then used in a much more niche capacity, and see now what it might look like to play through a bit of seasonal action, just for a look at the sorts of variances might show up in selected ways, compared to what we know from OTL. After all when someone hands you a Magical Butterfly Engine, you engine the damn butterflies. I promised myself from the start that I'd abide by what I generated - I might then take a few more bashes, a few tweaks, at a given outcome just to get a broader statistical picture, how the teams matched up broadly for the game and the relative likelihood of a given outcome, but for narrative purposes I'd stick with whatever came first out the gate.
Then right off the bat a wildly, delightfully unlikely thing happened. (Spoiler: it shows up just a few pages into the Google Doc, when people start playing games.)
As for where things went from there, well...
From there the seasons of this McGovernized decade took form (and make no mistake, whatever George's personal fortunes in '76, the presidencies of TTL's Seventies have all been significantly remade by McGoverning's POD, so I took them here as a thematic whole, from the season during TTL!Nixon's last year of his only term up through Super Bowl XV that coincides with tidy closeness to the end of that last Seventies presidential term, and yes it is the end of the Seventies because there is no Year 0 *eye twitches*...) Here you can find what I mostly did over last Christmas's break - Nixon's Last Season and the bulk of George's very-definitely-for-sure term - plus the bits I added on as bonus for now (finishing up the '76 season and adding '77 as a main-narrative-spoiler-free taster for the rest of the decade) early in quarantine. I have, ahem, what I need to fill out the decade* in due time. After work on this and some of the other Side Projects at that point I want to keep hard at the main narrative for a good while yet. They're settled enough to rest ... for a time.
*(No of course I didn't stop there. Not even remotely, any more than I have with the Ever-Evolving Tapestry of the TLverse. I did for the purposes of this specific Google Doc because it's good for the reputation of this enterprise and its author if people act on the assumption that he's, well, sane. There's a reason I call my McGoverningverse HANDEGG materials the Scary Nightmare Hoarder Shit files, there are some things once seen from which the human soul can never fully recover...)
Of course, when it's a subject dear to one's own interests, sports is one of those matters where there's plenty of opportunity for wonderfully granular AH, so many moving parts, combinations of complex aggregate Trends and pure wild chance, endless filigrees and fractalizations of detail that then ebb and flow and affect one another and re-aggregate in new ways. That tends to be true of the other Many Side Projects also; I do tend to go for granularity.
Once you pass fully through the looking-glass and become a reputable stathead there are all manner of things you can do working complex combinations of players, lineups, and seasonal capabilities (you can, for example, integrate a specific season of a given player's career as your rough statistical base with a couple or three different combinations of teams, related players, O-line and D-line, etc., and get quite different results both at the team level and in the statistical outcomes for that player and others, or the team aggregate.) So once you appreciate the tools you can work with and get a sense of the other aggregate statistics that the engine uses that you can't get in the code and tweak, there's a really rich landscape of AH possibilities (you can even run the same "game" over again, even in the same conditions, and see what the likelihood of certain kinds of outcomes are by running it enough times. Also I have a suspicion that when you play a succession of games in a row with your same base-combination team against a succession other teams especially those who share their division and/or conference, the engine begins to aggregate "seasonal" effects, like winning and losing streaks, improvements or declines over time in individual player performance, games where it apparently choses to rotate players in ways you hadn't selected for to indicate they're out hurt or suchlike, and so on.)
So - some people deal with sleep-interruption issues by becoming gamers, I suppose this is a dedicated AHstorian's functional equivalent. The blend of narrative background choices (strategic level stuff that I can affect with my own narrative decisions) and actual randomization based on complex statistical programming inputs has a satisfying tactile liveliness to it.
A word on style: this Side Project takes on a specific form, indeed one that's kind of/sort of hallowed among the tropes and styles one sees around the forum here, namely the encyclopedia entry. So don't expect a lot of snazzy McGovernese prose, I've read enough reference texts in relation to this kind of subject matter to absorb through the fingertips what I'd call "low-key encyclopedic" form. But perhaps the SHEER FRIGGIN' GRANULAR CRUNCHINESS available, for those who are in to this very subject matter (it's fine if you're not) will compensate for a lower level of verve than the usual. And there's plenty here to enjoy, goodness knows. Again I do not place myself in any category there related, but merely comment on what might be shared habits of mind, when I say it's a bit like what happens when George RR Martin says to himself, "you know, I may need to ease up and stretch and come at all this from another angle ... by writing a 400-page history of the Targaryen Dynasty because that frickin' smacks dude."
As this project goes on down the line some other entrants from the Side Projects may show up also, in the various forms those have taken. For now here's one calibrated to the time of year and our plague world's rather curious present relationship with the diversions we hold dear from more "normal" times. Have at it folks.
(Also if all this degenerates for a couple pages from a lucid, well-read, and high-minded discussion of complex political, economic, and cultural issues to the forum equivalent of chatter at a sports bar, I might be less troubled by that than some 😎 )
HANDEGG McGoverning Style
docs.google.com
TL;DR when it comes to, well, any of the Many Side Projects - or things that aren't even "side" like the Puttin' On the Brits chapters cued up next, or other intrusions of pet subjects/projects into the main narrative - when a Careful Reader asks, "Does that mean that all this is really an excuse to write a(n) [INSERT PET PROJECT HERE] timeline nested inside a larger timeline where George McGovern won the 1972 election?" the answer is always yes. I mean, it'd be off brand if the answer wasn't Yes...
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