#I wrote something at the beginning of august but that got deleted. Had a breakdown and thought huh. what a great way to start the month - | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

ariaste · 6 years

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Do you ever get really, really frustrated with writing? I know it's normal to get writer's block, but I've written barely a page within the last three months because I can't! Make! The story! Go! For a while, I would get a page in, hate the way I was telling it, then delete it all and start over. Do have any... suggestions? Tips, tricks? Things to scream at myself until I can Brain again?

omgggggggggggg nonny let me tell you what this year has been like

Last year I wrote like 350,000 words. My end-of-year average, across the Writing Days I counted, was 1305 words-per-day (I didn’t count Saturdays, because I work a 12 hour shift on Saturdays; I also took sick days and travel days and didn’t count those either. Any words I wrote on one of those three “non counted” days were FREE BONUS WORDS). Here’s my spreadsheet if you wanna look at it.And then this year. Let’s look at my spreadsheet for this year, SHALL WE. It is... rather more grim. Also RATHER MORE MESSY. Gone are the meticulously dated entries. By October 22 of last year, I had written 232,000 words. This year, I’ve only just broken 103k.

I feel like those numbers are important to tell you about so that we have a scientific baseline.This is about to get real long so......

Last August, I finished editing A CONSPIRACY OF TRUTHS and happily turned it in. It was the best thing I’d ever written and I was so genuinely proud of it. In November, I slammed out 100k for NaNoWriMo, then spent December and January editing it and got it on my editor’s desk at the beginning of February. In April, she returned her feedback and I sat down to revise it again.

And I froze. I had a major anxiety breakdown--the book was not as good as CONSPIRACY. Why? How had this happened? Why do bad things happen to good people? I will quote you the hysterical (both in terms of emotions and in terms of funny) email I sent my poor sweet editor: “I'm feeling like this one isn't reaching as far as Conspiracy did, isn't screaming as loudly, isn't doing as much, and I'm starting to feel nervous and insecure about it?? And on one hand, maybe it doesn't have to do those things? It IS a quieter book, and there's a lot of "Man vs Self" conflict (which Conspiracy had none of, because Conspiracy was "Man vs Others" and "Man vs System"). I think on some level I'm expecting it to be Conspiracy, which... it is a terrible thing to expect one's second child to live up to the example and standard of one's eldest child rather than letting them be their own person, but at the same time I DO keep looking at this one and wondering, "Why can't you be more like your big brother? When it was your age, it was being timely social commentary already. What are YOU planning on doing with your life???" And then I argue for it, "Okay, I guess you're doing something small and quiet -- which does not necessarily mean unimportant -- about grief and taking personal agency and rebuilding your life in the wake of trauma and loss, and also a cheeky bit about social responsibility." And then I argue back, "But is that ENOUGH? Can you get into college with extracurriculars like those????"

Yeah, I was not really in a great place. But i am hilarious even in the midst of anxiety, and my editor did a dramatic reading of this email in front of a table full of people (with my permission), so at least there’s that.

I started taking GOOD GOOD DRUGS for my anxiety towards the end of April, and that helped LOADS.

So, that is a very long answer to your first question: Yes, I absolutely do get frustrated. I try to treat writing like Any Other Job, but sometimes you do the working-from-home equivalent of working from home, and you do everything except put on pants and show up at the page/office.

Now, about the rest of your concerns: First of all, I want you to stop deleting everything. Start over as many times as you want, but make a new folder and label it “Past Drafts” or, if you prefer, “The Shame Corner” or “Time-Out” and just put everything in there when it’s making you mad. Trust me on this. In the book I just finished last week, I wrote one scene THREE SEPARATE TIMES. Kept all of them, cause all words is good words.

Secondly: So the story JUST! WON’T! GO! This is a mood, this is the mood of moods. What have you tried? What have you changed or tweaked? Does your main character have something they Super Fucking Want, or something that they are Aggressively Avoiding? That helps! Make ‘em run for it, that’s plot. Give them a friend. If they already have friends, give them someone they can have Petty Arguments with. Does the group have a collective Goal? What’s the long-term goal, the mid-term goal, the short-term goal? What are the obstacles, and how is your character coping with them? Maybe you have given them too many obstacles and you need to throw them a lifeline? If the story isn’t going, it’s because your brain has realized that the pattern is crooked and it’s trying to make you correct it, so take a step back and a deep breath and try looking at the story from a bird’s-eye perspective. You gotta sorta learn to run your hands over it to feel the weird bumps, and you have to be flexible enough to CHANGE YOUR ORIGINAL VISION.This is the part that trips up soooooooooo many writers. They think their first idea is their best idea, and as anyone knows who has tried to buy a car, you don’t look at only one car and drive it off the lot, no questions asked. You look at the engine, you kick the tires, you mumble to the car man about getting some fuzzy dice and new floormats. You sit in the driver’s seat and fiddle with the seat positions and make thoughtful noises so the car man will think you know what those big words mean. Do that but with your idea. Poke at it. Kick its tires. Ask how much mileage it has on it. If the idea doesn’t go, it might be missing something like a spark plug, whatever the fuck that is. You know, some small but crucial thing. And here’s the good news: You already know how stories work. Your brain is SPECIFICALLY EVOLVED to be absolutely bonkers good at pattern recognition, and that’s all that stories are. It’s just patterns. That’s why your brain throws a fit when the pattern is crooked. Think of how every fiber of your existence goes “BAD AND WRONG!!!!!! WE HATE THIS” when you hear someone singing a song you love, but they mess up a few of the words, or they’re just a little bit off-key. Literally exactly the same thing.So you have all the tools you need. You have a brain that knows patterns, and you’ve heard millions of stories and you can hum a million songs. So listen to your gut, but listen CRITICALLY. When your gut says, “This is bad,” don’t just throw it out and run away scared. Breathe, and ask, “Why is it bad? What am I missing? What am I not seeing?” Pat around in the dark until you figure out the shape of the thing that’s getting in your way. Once you do that, it gets surprisingly easy to just... walk around it. Ask many questions, and then ask questions about the answers you get. Be willing to adapt and change based on new information.Your instincts are good. You know stories. You got this.

#writing #writing advice #Anonymous

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glitchedwitch · 6 years

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reddo no daily life sparknotes

I’ve been wanting to talk about the past year on here for a long time, seeing as how I just kinda left and returned with no explanation. I haven’t really known how to do this - I’ve taken pains to remove myself from my old habit of chronicling everything publicly because it made me suuuuper miserable, but I’ve also really wanted to update all my mutuals/followers who had to deal with me last spring, and give some narrative basis to why I’ve been online much less.

I’ve got impulsive exhaustion tonight so I clumsily wrote a timeline out for everyone who’s been curious. I’ll probably reblog this a couple times and then delete it.

last year, from january to august, is what ive been calling the great slowburn mental breakdown of 2017. i was on here and posting until june so i won’t rehash it. the tl;dr is that i had a lot of backed-up crazy which became expressed crazy and made me totally non-functioning for a while

(last) spring: started therapy, got my driver’s license, made friends at the local unemployment office, changed my meds to something that actually worked. already blogged about most of this.

summer: finally had the balls to realize that the internet was making me fucking miserable. cold turkey cut off my entire online support system and a person i was unhealthily depended on. i have a lot of guilt about this, still, but i think out of all the steps that saved my life last year, this was the absolute biggest one. rest of the summer kicked ass aside from the crippling depression. the weekend i went offline i visited my friend in dc and saw symphony of the goddesses. few weekends later i went to south carolina and saw the solar eclipse in the middle of a lake on my rich friend’s boat, which was this single dopest thing that’s ever happened to me. at the beginning of september i went on a weeklong trip to the outer banks with five of my best friends from college which really was kinda my big turning point cause after i got back home everything unexpectedly started to kinda fall into place.

autumn: my uncle started a nonprofit at his church and i got a gig as his web designer (still ongoing). also FINALLY got a temp job thru the unemployment office at a ‘creative reuse center", which is like... basically a hybrid between goodwill and an art supply store. i worked 15hr a week and got paid almost nothing but it fucking owned. i drove to and from work for the first time in my life and there was a cat there. someone dumped a whole bunch of buddhist philosophy books at a book donation thing near my house and i am FULLY into that shit now (don’t really like calling myself “”converted”” cause that’s not really a thing the way it is in most other religions... looking into joining the sangha in my city tho). besides the “cutting out the internet” thing thats probably the biggest reason im functional rn. finally had the balls to return to my friends on discord and returned to hellsite a few days later because of fuckin star wars.

winter: had a pretty good xmas considering my atrocious track record with xmases. went on a huge organizational kick, started a pen and paper journal which also made me a middle-aged craft store bitch. here is when i really started reaping the benefits of therapy/mindfulness/general functionality - i just generally really became organized and put-together, managed my winter depression the best i have pretty much ever, improved my relationship with my mother a whole lot. currently working with her to clean the house, which has been hoarders-the-hit-show-on-hgtv tier fucked up for about 10 years now.

spring (now): i got an internship doing trail maintenance and habitat restoration on the blue ridge for three months and i leave april 12th so that’s a real actual thing that’s fucking happening i am so scared. like literally, backpacking thru the mountains, camping for up to 9 days at a time, actual physical labor, what-the-fuck-did-i-sign-up-for kinda shit. i finally got off my ass and started working out for basically the first time in my life. i'm maintaining a humorously detached tone throughout this post, but i truly feel like this is the culmination of a hard and intensely rewarding year-and-a-half of dedicated recovery. i’ve been juggling a thousand possible futures in my mind this past year - but if this goes well, that means ive begun to worm my way into nonprofit environmental work which like... might be it folks. guess i’ll find out what i’m made of.

I’ll probably continue to only be on tumblr sparsely, but my inbox is still always open. Sometimes i won’t see messages or activity for a couple days, but I’ve gotten somewhat better at responding to ppl now that i’m generally less overstimulated. I deeply love all of you and treasure all the support I’ve gotten during all my years here.

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flauntpage · 5 years

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Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments

The Markelle Fultz saga was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever experienced in 10 years of covering sports. You probably feel the same, for however long you’ve been watching.

He’s no longer a Sixer, but the former #1 draft pick leaves the team having logged these numbers over a little more than a year and a half in Philadelphia:

33 games

15 starts

7.7 points per game

3.4 assists

3.4 rebounds

41% from the floor

26.7% from three

53.4% from the line

That’s the legacy of a kid who never really had it and may or may not have been dealing with a significant nerve and/or shoulder injury, depending on what side of the debate you fall on.

What I do know is that Markelle certainly had a ton of support here. You can’t say he was run out of town or never given a chance or anything even close to that. You had fans cheering him for simply taking a jump shot. It was like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I picked out 11 of the more bizarre moments of the Markelle saga and laid them out in no specific order, for a trip down memory lane:

Changing the shot

Almost immediately upon his training camp arrival, Markelle’s shot looked completely different than what we saw in college.

This was one of the first clips to result in a bit of confusion:

Interesting how dramatically different Markelle Fultz's FT stroke looks here compared to @ UW (65%). Has lowered release point considerably. pic.twitter.com/6REIFX0qtR

— Mike Schmitz (@Mike_Schmitz) September 28, 2017

Said Markelle back on September 28th, during his rookie year:

“It was just something going on where I wanted to try something new. But my free throw is going to look the same as college. I’m just trying to look at different ways to see how the ball can go in the hoop.”

It seemed like nothing at the time, didn’t it?

The yips?

Were Markelle’s issues physical or mental? The running theory was that he had a case of the yips, but that word was never used publicly by anyone until trainer Drew Hanlen talked about it on a podcast this past summer:

“With Markelle, obviously he has one of the most documented cases of kind of the YIPS of basketball in recent years, where he completely forgot how to shoot and had multiple hitches in his shot. So for me it was, hey listen, how can I get this kid that was No. 1 in last year’s draft back rolling and get him to the point where he was before, if not better?”

Markelle disputed that claim at media day:

Yeah, you know, I think it was a mis-term in words. But me and Drew have talked, and what happened last year was an injury. Let me get that straight. It was an injury that happened that didn’t allow me to go through a certain path that I needed to to shoot the ball. Just like any normal person, when you’re used to doing something the same way each and every day, and something happens, of course you’re going to start thinking about it. It’s just normal. So, of course I had that injury happen, and then people took certain things, of changing shots, and ran with it. But that didn’t affect me. That’s the reason I didn’t just come out last year and try to go against the media or whatever. I just was worried about getting healthy and getting back to what I do. That’s what I did this summer, so I’m happy.

In retrospect, that might have been the beginning of the end.

The deleted Hanlen tweet

Fultz struggled through the early part of this season, resulting in the following Twitter exchange between trainers Clint Parks and Hanlen:

“He’s still not healthy,” said Hanlen.

We were able to ask Markelle about that tweet on November 2nd of 2018, which resulted in this exchange:

Fultz: “I haven’t seen that tweet. I stay off social media during the season. I’ve heard about it but my mindset is the same – come to work every day, play as hard as I can, help my team get better.

Did you have a conversation with (Drew Hanlen), to ask what his intention was?

Fultz: “I’m not going to speak too much on it. Like I said, my mindset has just been to come to practice and be the best teammate and player I can be.”

Are you 100% healthy or close to it?

Fultz: “For sure. I mean, nobody is ever 100% healthy in this game. You play five games in seven days and you get bumps and bruises. That’s life in the NBA. It’s the stuff you signed up for when you get here. But I’m working every day to get better.”

That ended up being the last time we spoke with Markelle.

Total silence

When Fultz returned to the Sixers last spring, he played pretty well in a home win against the Nuggets.

After the game, I asked him about his shoulder injury, to which he responded by staring straight forward and saying nothing at all:

youtube

He also responded to a follow-up from Sarah Todd with total silence. The post-game availability became national news and was all over ESPN the next day.

Shooting from his back

Remember this one?

Markelle Fultz shooting from the floor (April 2017) pic.twitter.com/g2V2ZTlhEd

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) June 8, 2018

The video is from April 3rd, 2017, so it predates the NBA draft and summer league. Apparently it was just sitting there on Andrew Sharp’s Instagram before it found its way into the news cycle.

The common thought was that Fultz started tweaking his shot sometime after summer league in 2017, not before it, because the mechanics looked perfectly fine during his short time on the court out west. Keith Williams, Fultz’s trainer, says he never changed the shot at all. Bryan Colangelo said that he felt like the changes took place sometime in August.

Double clutching

If the Hanlen tweet was the beginning of the end, this brought us much closer to the end, the free throw heard around the world:

This is worse than we have ever seen Fultz's free throw form look. pic.twitter.com/FhCYpNpd5b

— Kyle Neubeck (@KyleNeubeck) November 13, 2018

Fultz said the ball slipped out of his hand.

Brand said this:

I saw the free throw, for sure. I’ve been seeing him work this summer, and all of this season, and he has times where something like that happens. But following that, he shot it very well and it looked very fluid. He’s going to have some ups and downs. He’s going to have more ups than downs. You saw the talent level in flashes, how talented he is.

The NCAA probe

Back in February of last year, Markelle was named in the sweeping NCAA corruption case:

Wrote BWanks at the time:

The report focuses on the dealings of former NBA agent Andy Miller, his ex-associate Christian Dawkins, and the ASM Sports Agency. The documents reveal what could be a major headache for up to 20 NCAA programs and up to 25 current and former players, which allege that ASM worked with programs and players to get them to sign with the agency. Among the players reported to have taken money? That’s right—you guessed it. Markelle Fultz. The top pick of the 2017 NBA Draft reportedly received $10,000 from ASM, but didn’t go on to sign with the agency. Boss move.

It ended up being no much of a thing, not that I recall, but it was another one of those, “holy shit, what’s next?” kind of moments at the time.

Security cameras?

Strange report from earlier this season.

A story in the Washington Post alleged that Markelle’s mother, Ebony, installed security cameras inside his house.

Wrote Candace Buckner:

Fultz is now a professional on a four-year contract worth $33 million, but close associates said Ebony still goes to great lengths to shield him. During Fultz’s first season in Philadelphia, Ebony had cameras installed inside his New Jersey home, according to several people familiar with the setup who described the indoor surveillance as unusual. The cameras have since been removed. Multiple people said Ebony has asked some who have dealt with Fultz to sign nondisclosure agreements for reasons that are unclear to them.

“There’s definitely crazy [expletive] going on with the mom and how involved she is and how overprotective she is,” said a person with a close connection to Fultz. “The best possible situation is if the mom just backs off for a period of time and gives him a chance to breathe.”

….

Scapular imbalance… or dyskinesis?

Markelle was originally diagnosed with something the Sixers referred to as “scapular muscle imbalance” last season.

Said Bryan Colangelo, on March 27th, 2018:

“It was diagnosed as a scapular imbalance by a well-known expert in Kentucky and the cause is unknown at this stage. We don’t know where it started, when it started, but it was sometime from the time we saw him in summer league – when everyone saw that he did not have a shoulder problem and there was no indication there was a problem with his shot – to something that very quickly rose to awareness in late September and early October as we started the season. Once it was determined that he really was not able to function, we dove deeper to determine whether or not there was something going on. Even though an MRI showed that there was no structural concerns, there was a scapular imbalance, as determined by the doctor in Kentucky. It literally was just a breakdown of muscle function. We don’t know enough about the injury. It’s very uncommon in basketball. It’s very complicated and complex, and that’s why there’s been so much unknown here.

But when Fultz did a TNT interview during a national broadcast, the injury was referred to as scapular dyskinesis:

youtube

A Liberty Ballers story looked into this weird disconnect in terminology.

Not having his back

Among the first (and few) to publicly suggest that Markelle Fultz was being let down by the people around him, Joel Embiid first dropped the hint in February of last season:

ICYMI: @JoelEmbiid joined the #FastBreak Postgame Show to talk @sixers win over the Knicks, Markelle Fultz and burner accounts!#TTP pic.twitter.com/8iyw2bJmGR

— NBA TV (@NBATV) February 13, 2018

Said Embiid:

“I feel like we’ve been really close since he got to Philly, and I feel like I’m the guy who can help him the most because I went through it. I missed two years, you know, going through all of those injuries, and that’s what he’s going through right now. All I’ve been trying to tell him is to take his time. Everybody’s going to criticize you, especially when you’re the number one pick. Everyone’s going to criticize you, call you a bust, I was called all of that during my first two years. But I don’t exactly know what the origin of the problems are. I’m still trying to figure that out. But I don’t feel like a lot of people around him have had his back. He’s only 19 years old and that can be hard. The people around you that are supposed to support you, that aren’t supporting you, it’s hard. I was in that situational especially after my first year when I needed a second surgery and I lost my brother. I just wanted to quit, wanted to get away and go home and literally leave everything behind but I’m glad I stuck with it and kept pushing and worked really hard. That’s a tough situation, but the main thing I always thing I tell him is just to stay patient and keep working hard.”

“I don’t feel like a lot of people around him have had his back.”

Fluid drained.. or injected?

Remember the agent, Raymond Brothers, telling ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Markelle had fluid drained from his shoulder to help alleviate the problem of raising his arms over his head?

Brothers had it backward, and revised the comment:

“He had a cortisone shot on Oct. 5, which means fluid was put into his shoulder — not taken out,” agent Raymond Brothers told ESPN on Tuesday night. “My intention earlier was to let people know that he’s been experiencing discomfort. We will continue to work with (Sixers general manager) Bryan Colangelo and the medical staff.”

Strange stuff all around, but it’s Orlando’s problem now.

The post Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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flauntpage · 5 years

Text

Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments

The Markelle Fultz saga was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever experienced in 10 years of covering sports. You probably feel the same, for however long you’ve been watching.

He’s no longer a Sixer, but the former #1 draft pick leaves the team having logged these numbers over a little more than a year and a half in Philadelphia:

33 games

15 starts

7.7 points per game

3.4 assists

3.4 rebounds

41% from the floor

26.7% from three

53.4% from the line

That’s the legacy of a kid who never really had it and may or may not have been dealing with a significant nerve and/or shoulder injury, depending on what side of the debate you fall on.

I picked out 11 of the more bizarre moments of the Markelle saga and laid them out in no specific order, for a trip down memory lane:

Changing the shot

Almost immediately upon his training camp arrival, Markelle’s shot looked completely different than what we saw in college.

This was one of the first clips to result in a bit of confusion:

Interesting how dramatically different Markelle Fultz's FT stroke looks here compared to @ UW (65%). Has lowered release point considerably. pic.twitter.com/6REIFX0qtR

— Mike Schmitz (@Mike_Schmitz) September 28, 2017

Said Markelle back on September 28th, during his rookie year:

It seemed like nothing at the time, didn’t it?

The yips?

Markelle disputed that claim at media day:

In retrospect, that might have been the beginning of the end.

The deleted Hanlen tweet

Fultz struggled through the early part of this season, resulting in the following Twitter exchange between trainers Clint Parks and Hanlen:

“He’s still not healthy,” said Hanlen.

We were able to ask Markelle about that tweet on November 2nd of 2018, which resulted in this exchange:

Did you have a conversation with (Drew Hanlen), to ask what his intention was?

Fultz: “I’m not going to speak too much on it. Like I said, my mindset has just been to come to practice and be the best teammate and player I can be.”

Are you 100% healthy or close to it?

That ended up being the last time we spoke with Markelle.

Total silence

When Fultz returned to the Sixers last spring, he played pretty well in a home win against the Nuggets.

After the game, I asked him about his shoulder injury, to which he responded by staring straight forward and saying nothing at all:

youtube

He also responded to a follow-up from Sarah Todd with total silence. The post-game availability became national news and was all over ESPN the next day.

Shooting from his back

Remember this one?

Markelle Fultz shooting from the floor (April 2017) pic.twitter.com/g2V2ZTlhEd

— The Render (@TheRenderNBA) June 8, 2018

The video is from April 3rd, 2017, so it predates the NBA draft and summer league. Apparently it was just sitting there on Andrew Sharp’s Instagram before it found its way into the news cycle.

Double clutching

If the Hanlen tweet was the beginning of the end, this brought us much closer to the end, the free throw heard around the world:

This is worse than we have ever seen Fultz's free throw form look. pic.twitter.com/FhCYpNpd5b

— Kyle Neubeck (@KyleNeubeck) November 13, 2018

Fultz said the ball slipped out of his hand.

Brand said this:

The NCAA probe

Back in February of last year, Markelle was named in the sweeping NCAA corruption case:

Wrote BWanks at the time:

It ended up being no much of a thing, not that I recall, but it was another one of those, “holy shit, what’s next?” kind of moments at the time.

Security cameras?

Strange report from earlier this season.

A story in the Washington Post alleged that Markelle’s mother, Ebony, installed security cameras inside his house.

Wrote Candace Buckner:

….

Scapular imbalance… or dyskinesis?

Markelle was originally diagnosed with something the Sixers referred to as “scapular muscle imbalance” last season.

Said Bryan Colangelo, on March 27th, 2018:

But when Fultz did a TNT interview during a national broadcast, the injury was referred to as scapular dyskinesis:

youtube

A Liberty Ballers story looked into this weird disconnect in terminology.

Not having his back

Among the first (and few) to publicly suggest that Markelle Fultz was being let down by the people around him, Joel Embiid first dropped the hint in February of last season:

ICYMI: @JoelEmbiid joined the #FastBreak Postgame Show to talk @sixers win over the Knicks, Markelle Fultz and burner accounts!#TTP pic.twitter.com/8iyw2bJmGR

— NBA TV (@NBATV) February 13, 2018

Said Embiid:

“I don’t feel like a lot of people around him have had his back.”

Fluid drained.. or injected?

Remember the agent, Raymond Brothers, telling ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski that Markelle had fluid drained from his shoulder to help alleviate the problem of raising his arms over his head?

Brothers had it backward, and revised the comment:

Strange stuff all around, but it’s Orlando’s problem now.

The post Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments appeared first on Crossing Broad.

Markelle Fultz’s Sixers Tenure Was Filled With Bizarre, Head-Scratching Moments published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

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