Lost in Time and Space

Where am I? When am I?

What is this place? Who am I even talking to?

Last thing I remember was running a query on pulled goalie statistics and then… darkness, as far as the eye can see. A darkness so deep that it warped my sense of direction, my sense of self. Spinning endlessly through the pure black void, I lost all hope. I let go of purpose. I stopped asking why…

And in that moment, I was completely free from the confines of our third dimension. I saw life in the fourth color. A tetrachromatic game of hockey unfolded before my eyes and I experienced the infinite loserverse in all its gimmicky glory. I heard the microscopic vibes that govern space-time sing in chorus with puck and post. I felt gravity as it body-checked me beyond the buzzer, into an overtime rift that left me lightyears from my launch point.

But… the silence. The silence is deafening. Space is a vacuum of sound after all, and I am a writer with no audience. I have a site with approximately no organic visitors. A ship with no crew.

But I have data, and I have hockey. Combining those two elements alone has been enough to create nuclear fusion in the past. So I’ll transmit my findings back to Earth regardless of how few people even know or care.

This is a fool’s mission, for sure. But I am Ryan Gosling and this site is my rock buddy. I am Jodie Foster’s father at the end of a wormhole. I am Matthew McConaughey trapped in an infinite bookshelf.

I am The Loser Point. And I make up silly stats to contextualize late-game behavior across the NHL.

The site itself is largely complete. Now we just need hockey to make it rich with context. It’s wild to look back and see how much the vision evolved from xLP and LPE, but there’s obvious risk in just constantly adding more content and math.

Every metric expansion was born from watching hockey through the lens of understanding how close games get decided. Analyzing how well a team performs in overtime actually does require you to zoom in on decisions influenced by penalties. And bringing team-wide scoring differentials into a study on shootout prowess is undoubtedly a smart way to look at a dumb part of the game.

So I’m going to take my SAD(pp) and STD Count seriously whether anyone else notices or not. I’m going to study the league’s USSR% and calculate their ETD and rank them all by ASS%. That’s my right, and no one can stop me. You don’t have to get it. I get it. My Devils friend Rob who lives out in California and isn’t able to watch a lot of games gets it. That’s enough for me.

So onward I skate, into the void…

I’ve literally added so many things since I last wrote that I don’t know where to begin. We have the empty net metrics, the OT and Shootout-specific page, the V.I.B.E.S. readings, schedule gravity, a 3-D map of every NHL game played since 2021-2022, not to mention the handful of time-waster games I’ve developed as well. Each one will get a post so I can explain them all with depth and detail.

This became as much a professional exercise as it was a creative one. I’ve used this site as a relatively harmless way to test my data visualization and storytelling skills. As someone whose job is literally to consult large brands on that exact thing, it became clear over time that I was honing very relevant skills through this passion project.

But that leaves one major thing to address. A mAssIve elephant in the room…

Obviously I used AI to code the site.

Do I think AI is largely built on the theft of other people’s IP and trained on the shoulders of giants? Yes, yes I do. Do I think data centers are a stain on the environment and represent a near parasitic rush to make profit at the physical expense of nearby communities? Also yes.

But AI is a tool. And while it’s now a large part of my job as someone who talks to marketers specifically about innovation, it is primarily just a tool that can help accomplish a task.

The more I’ve thought about this - and I believe it’s something worth thinking about - the more I come back to Pink Floyd…

Watch on YouTube ↗

“I don’t think the equipment could take over. We do rely on it a lot. I mean, we couldn’t do what we do, as we do it, without it. But always things are down to how you control them. And whether you are controlling them - and not the other way around.”

“It’s just a question of using the tools that are available when they’re available. And more and more now, there’s all kinds of electronic goodies which are available for people like us to use, if we can be bothered. And we can be bothered… It’s like saying, give a man a Les Paul guitar and he becomes Eric Clapton. You know, that’s not true. And give a man an amplifier and a synthesizer and he doesn’t become whoever, you know. He doesn’t become us.”

That’s how I see it. Generative AI is a synthesizer and I am a musician. Technically speaking, I play the drums. But I have a synth, and I know how to plug it into GarageBand and mess around with arpeggiator sounds. Not much difference here, but instead of remaking songs from bands I was in long ago, we’re messing around with hockey data and space movie jokes.

I’m not going to sit here and say that “AI art is art!” and AI artists deserve respect or whatever. That’s not really the debate.

Fact is, we live in a competing age of constant content creation and rising AI-sameness. When posting my site on Reddit gets instant downvotes because people are “so tired of ClaudeSlop webapps”, I’m caught flat-footed. The open internet is already dead, man. I’m just trying to have fun here.

Is my site part of the slop wave or does it look unique enough? Do I have real data, a real POV, a storytelling angle that brings the site to life? Or am I just using my spare time to build part of the problem?

I believe in what I’ve made here. I relied entirely on my own creativity to make a dumb idea into a somewhat interesting reality. Not entirely my coding skills, but my vision carried the code throughout and my words are the copy. I know enough about the tool to guide and correct it, enough about the music to tune things accordingly.

I’ve written children’s books that couldn’t be further from this type of project. I cut out tiny pieces of paper to physically lay everything out, writing and illustrating everything by hand. I know what my brain is capable of without the help of any other LLM.

But this time, it was a website idea that spoke to me. This was the thing I needed to make. So I did it. Don’t get it? That’s OK.

But there’s no way you’ve read this far without sort of getting it, right? So I’m going to assume you're part of the mission and want to know more. Well, there’s lots still left to learn about.

Next up, we’ll dive into the empty net stats to understand the data behind pulling your goalie.

Then we’ve got overtime and shootout-specific stats to unravel before we dive into V.I.B.E.S. and the Exoseason.

But I’ve found myself pushing these posts off for over a month now. I’ve been focused on the site itself without much desire to explain myself (probably because I know that no one is actually reading this…) but I’ll remedy that soon.

It just takes a while to receive any message from deep space…

Pulling the goalie in T-minus 3…2…1…