Hello wonderful KingsFans.com team!
I missed this space! I didn't bother checking my old comments to see if there was anything particularly mean or out-of-time before I'm doing this, so forgive my teenage-to-early-20s self, as I'm a 33-year-old man.
My real name is Kimani Okearah, and some of you may have seen my photography over the last 10 years working for various communities throughout the House of Beam. I cut my teeth in sports media on this very site, writing pre-game and post-game threads with the great crew here as far back as 2005! Maybe 2004? I didn't check.
I've traveled to 11 countries in this world, went to college, joined show business for money and the field of cognitive linguistics for enlightenment about my own cerebral constructs, which has led me to three original theses in that field.
One of those theses is that humans aren't any more or less sentient than any other creature, surviving this planet. I don't feel this outlook challenges anybody's religious perspective of the world and our roles here. I look at like this - "sentience" is a scientific claim of divination. In order to understand this, we must first understand what "sentience" is, as a concept.
Humans create a subjective reality, of which language is the cement. You're not "reading" this sentence - you're processing a series of runes I'm laying out in a specific sequence to describe an intended meaning. The wreid tnihg is it wrkos eevn if you splel tignhs wnorg. In ancient times, "magi" used "runes" to cast "spells." A Spelling Bee.
That's exactly what writing is. We're all fundamentally equipped with "magic," these days. We celebrate it as a step above the survival mechanisms of other creatures and call it "sentience." We are a species of ape that have survived through two primary traits.
Pattern recognition - every single aspect of information humans are able to process rely on our ability to interact with a pattern, which introduces what I call the "C.O.D.A.R Conundrum." We have extremely limited cognitive detection and ranging, and it's a frustrating thing to experience in real time, like when you're surrounded by a beautiful language you don't understand. Shouts out to Krakow, Poland. One of the greatest cities in the world.
Empathy - our brains have two doors for information. Understanding or judgment. Confusion is a judgment.
In order to illustrate this with content, I performed as a character on the sidelines of our beloved Kings called #Lensface. I became a self-absorbed photojournalist who deliberately produced "terrible content" to reflect the "terrible team" I covered. I think it's a hilarious running joke as a body of work. I produced 119 episodes of this, which can be found on YouTube.
I started working on a television sitcom about a fictional world of sports media built around this character, and I've since launched that show as a community collaboration by defining my intellectual property as a puzzle, with unique art pieces, serialized on a permanent, public ledger. The show is called "Press Pass," and it's best described as a series that's reflective of The Office mixed with a 30-for-30. I've been working on this and pitching this since 2016, so it's no coincidence there's more than one basketball mockumentaries that have beat us or are racing us to market.
My platform is a film studio, organized as a professional resource collective through equity-backed collaboration. Once again, a puzzle, with open market pieces on a serialized, permanent, public ledger. We actually invented this "Digital Collectible Experience" model as one of the first innovations in a new sector called "Film3."
The studio is producing Press Pass: Here We Stick. It's a 24-episode doozy about the sports media circuit in the 2012-13 season in "The Basketball Syndicate of America," where the "Sacramento Majesty" are threatening to leave town.
People willing to buy a $12-45 ticket (it can fluctuate. I'm not soliciting, just explaining... no links here or in profile) may help us produce content in the archive for Season One. They become "Lore Producers," and can create and register one character - specifically not a player or a coach - in the archive through a 7-second meme. It can be anything from a Vine-style sketch to an Office-style cut-away about a moment in our fictional history. Folks need a new ticket for every new piece of content they want to add to the archive, and can only create one character per era in the lore. There's 5 eras, and I personally think it's hilarious if characters have historical dopplegangers. All content approval is community-governed, and voters in that system are paid via quarterly measure of impact as a focus group. Those with more tickets get a higher issuance.
Folks that buy the $25-75 ticket may create players and coaches in the lore, or claim existing ones that I've made up.
We have 30 fictional teams, each season in each team's history can on-board 277 content registrations. Each Lore Chapter is developed by one or more "Lore Masters," the folks with at least 25 tickets. They walk through their chosen season with the other folks who've signed up for that Lore Chapter. We already know who won the championships, we're exploring the history between the details.... like a sports documentary.
We do this through a D&D-style campaign, where you bring your character to your Lore Chapter meeting and discuss various situations and game results from that season and what your character was doing. Then, form some sort of archive contribution based on the details. Lore Masters can submit pieces up to 5-minutes long, and Lore Producers can submit pieces up to 7-seconds long. All the pieces that are approved for the archive are sold as digital collectibles with 1,000 editions each on a community-governed price scale. Creators keep 50% of the value generated, flat, and 5% of any re-sale value... permanently. Content can be live-action or animated (artistic renderings in a sports documentary... lol).
You can take your character(s) into many chapters in many eras. They just have to be grounded in our comedic reality, so there's not exactly superheroes or otherworld stuff. If you make that content and it's approved, keep in mind our Writers can dress it into the documentary however they want. Use in Season One receives significant issuance, use in advertising receives significant issuance, use as digital merchandise receives 50/5 or 15/1.5 if your content is derivative, and use in future Seasons receives significant issuance.
Now, I'll hit you with the kicker... At 19 years old, I met my biological family for the first time. My grandmother's uncle is Robert Earl Jones, making James Earl Jones her cousin, and my "grand-uncle." This doesn't make me any more special than anybody else, it's a fun fact of my life. For the purposes of show business... it means Sacramento is going to Beat LA at their own game.
If I have the moderator's permissions, I'll respond to any questions, and post appropriate links.
If not, thank you for reading anyway, and my apologies for my prolonged absence. I've since retired from working for the Press or media platforms, focusing on our endeavor and opportunity.
Each ticket comes with 0.000018% ownership to Season One while holding it, which helps us measure commitment and keep issuances sustainable against the treasury, which tracks and distributes marketing/distro expenses and 100% net earnings for our community. If you have any questions from a legal perspective... please read the LMO Structure for Tokenomics, familiarize yourself with The Howey Test, read case precedence, familarize yourself with various market regulations where art is concerned, particularly when it comes to "facility for investment." I'm happy to answer any and all questions to help understanding after those steps are taken.
The simple answer to it all is this:
I'm at the Farmer's Market with a registered business, fees paid. I'm offering a "Collectible Experience."
I'm sitting there, with a an open table, and a partially-completed 15,000 piece puzzle. The pieces need to be painted a certain way. I'm charging $12-75 for a piece, depending on where it fits in the puzzle.
With it comes a serial number, proving that piece is yours in the puzzle. If you paint the piece and help find where it goes, you'll receive a hot cup of your favorite tea and a foot massage while doing do. You also literally own that piece of the puzzle. That's your property.
Since you helped put it together, you'll enjoy the reflective success, in the exact amount defined by the amount of pieces you've collected. I've already put in 4,500 pieces, so there's guidelines in place for where your piece goes and how the whole thing is supposed to look. We have to pay the production company to put in 5,250 pieces, hence the ticket price. They are professional puzzle-makers, so the puzzle quality benefits from those 5,250 pieces being painted and placed by masters of the craft. We have to hire a team to facilitate the professional vision, so we're going to distribute 3,000 puzzle pieces throughout each and every laborer who worked on the team. They'll all own pieces of the puzzle, reflective of their time and liability in the puzzle.
This leaves 1,500 exclusive pieces for the crowd at the farmer's market. If the puzzle can sell all 1,500 pieces, even over a sustained period of time, the community has generated over $18,000 to hire the masters of the craft and the laborers to finish the puzzle. The goal is to finish the puzzle - in this case, a season of television content. Once the puzzle is complete, we've united to create a work of art. We'll offer it to galleries (content distributors) to add to their archives AND influencer streams, with shared rights on up to 14 revenue flows. All hired collaborators, the original creator, and the production company receive a direct reflection of net earnings after community-transparent marketing/distro costs.
Unfortunately, at this time, that 10% cannot pay out to individual puzzle-piece owners. What we do is hire a separate entity that you have the right, as a puzzle-piece owner, to participate in. This entity - a democratic initiative arranging everybody who has a puzzle-piece in any of our puzzles - facilitates the focus group initiatives that govern quality control over community content. Voters in that focus group share 3% of the net earnings produced by Season One through this market-compliant mechanic, 3% is shared by content creators, and 2.5% is used as a community treasury for your own events and small content launchpads for more ambitious projects in the lore. 1.5% goes to a charity / multiple charities the community decides to support.
I've been kinda shut out in Sacramento Press with this thing - they think I'm making fun of them... Some with the Kings think I'm making fun of the team.... I'm making fun of the vibe presented about Sacramento in the context of national media, but there's no nuance where the glitz and glam is concerned.
Some facts about our show:
- Luke Barats is playing a lead character
- Johnny Taylor Jr. is playing a lead character
- Alex Caan is playing a supporting character
- Matthew Earl Jones is an adviser to the platform
- Local great Brittni Barger is playing a key role
- Local great and KingsFans.com OG with me, Tarig Elsidigg, is playing a KEY ROLE LMAOOOOO. Two words: Black Fraternity.
- Local great musicain known as Autumn Sky, my personal friend Otto Sky, is playing a key role, and an Associate Producer.
- Renowned documentary maker Rebecca Pierce is a Director and Producer.
- Our "mayor" character in this story is a community reporter played by Imani Barbarin, so we're not approaching reality.
- The Sacramento Majesty won the 2001 Championship. This was community-generated, I had no choice in the matter.
The drama causing the local shut-out for 18 months:
- #Lensface, overall. Nobody "got it." Which made it even funnier.
- '20-21 season, I had credentials and vaccines, and it was my retirement year before grad school, pandemic or not.
- My brother turns up missing in November of '20. He was ex-Navy, and refused to tell anyone of his situation or ask for help. I put together a plan to find him, but I need to earn a few dollars so I can fix my car. It had been 9 months with income at $12-1500 a month from one client, which kept a roof over my head, and feeling lucky during the pandemic. No overhead, and I'm beyond zero right now, still climbing.
- I'm prevented from accessing product on the floor despite meeting NBA approval. Other photojournalists are allowed. There's only 11 of us, full-time. Sort of an all-or-nothing situation in a tax-payer funded, 20k seat building.
- I am told from December thru May I'm not allowed access - the whole season - preventing my only feasible income boost during a really tough time.
- My brother dies in a tent in People's Park, Berkeley on April 10th. I don't find out until May 12th due to mistaken identity.
- Being that it was my last year in sports media working for press platforms. I won't in the future because of the nature of the sports media beast. The narrative-crafting against Boogie and then Bagley... 19yo kids while I first covered them, that's when the negativity formed. I watched them wilt and suffer from it, just as any 19yo would. Cousins fought back, Bagley never said a word. His dad challenged the dynamic without his blessing, but his dad has been in pro sports a long time and sees the politics.
- On the season-ending media call, the team was patting themselves on the back for "community uplifting," and gave Harrison Barnes an award. I asked him if he thought awards during the pandemic were a performative gesture. I said something around the lines of "I only know what I've experienced. I'm a photojournalist who was prevented by this team from earning a living while my brother died in a tent. So I do challenge you to think on the performative nature of these awards." I listed a series of vital community causes that we never see team reps support. I then informed Media Relations and the Kings Herald of my amicable retirement from the press circuit. About an hour after this call, the Kings Herald had tried to "fire" me by saying they were never going to provide credentials to me again, as I had threatened their access to the team with my "unprofessional comments" or some bullcrap like that. I reminded them of my retirement, and that I wished them the best in their endeavors.
They didn't know I had already filed a complaint over Media Relations to the FTC, because pandemic or not, removing 4 of the 11 photojournalists from the circuit and a giant building like that is a blatant conspiracy to limit competition. Two of the culprits are no longer with the team, and now I'm a bad guy in the Sacramento Press. They've turned my hard work since 2016 into some sort of reactionary attempt to bring down the team... Meanwhile, I'm pitching the benefits of the team's involvement behind-the-scenes.
Everybody is afraid I'm gonna litigate, but the simple fact is this. My brother made his own decisions, and despite the ifs and buts, we're talking about a conditional outcome that I may not have been able to affect if the Herald or the team signed me to a $500k contract in November. It's simply a situation where too many chose to be crappy at a crappy time, adding insult to injury. I called them out on performing otherwise, and moved on. It's no surprise Bagley is thriving in Detroit at all.
The pain there, limited to myself, is simply the loss of my childhood favorite team to politics sewn by out-of-towners, working in Media Relations, and others involved who weren't scapegoated. I love everything I experienced, and I'm very happy to move onto the next chapter of my career, which is cementing family legacy before time moves too fast. I'm not seeking to cause anybody to turn away from the brand or the product, nor did I deserve this ongoing trial behind-the-scenes in the Sacramento Press. We've been starving on the market with a world-changing economic innovation, local to Sacramento, for 18 months. Now, nobody wants to be on the wrong side of the story, so the wall of silence continues.
I suppose the irony of it is that our platform is a community collective, through the puzzle model, that has a 4% net earnings commitment to transforming dead commercial properties into permanent, dignified living centers for our unsheltered neighbors, each organized around an intersection of need (elders that need hospice, ex-cons, folks overcoming drug afflictions, young adults needing safe haven, etc). My theory is that with about $480m commitment, every 5 years - I know, I know, that's the actual number though - from local businesses, we can sustain a network of buildings that keeps around 60,000-100,000 people off the street in the Greater Sacramento Area.
Incidentally, that's about how many people sleep outside right now. Your city's answer (three counsel members are crooks) is to spend $1b in your tax dollars on a jail expansion. With the state of our roads, parks, and schools? How much are you paying to register your kid for a sport right now? Shouldn't those programs be sponsored by our taxes? Where is the Beam Team on this? Do the rapidly-increasing amount of out-of-town property and business owners care that our young people are being set up for jail and criminalization? Punishment is prioritized over potential... not because there's any social benefit. It's because the folks at the top make money.
I want to spend half that, from private success, on permanent housing initiatives and stabilizing these folks away from need and scarcity - the root of crime.
TL
R;
Thank you to KingsFans.com for being my foundation, my genesis, in sports media. Some of my work here helped James Ham understand my potential in this industry. He hired me, despite not having a budget from ESPN to pay me, and let me keep the rights to the content I produced. This set the tone for my work, and I own every shot I've ever taken, and every clip I've ever recorded. You're all humans, and for my part, I really miss most of you and that early-aughts optimism we used to share.
We're going to celebrate that... sort of... through Press Pass.
I missed this space! I didn't bother checking my old comments to see if there was anything particularly mean or out-of-time before I'm doing this, so forgive my teenage-to-early-20s self, as I'm a 33-year-old man.
My real name is Kimani Okearah, and some of you may have seen my photography over the last 10 years working for various communities throughout the House of Beam. I cut my teeth in sports media on this very site, writing pre-game and post-game threads with the great crew here as far back as 2005! Maybe 2004? I didn't check.
I've traveled to 11 countries in this world, went to college, joined show business for money and the field of cognitive linguistics for enlightenment about my own cerebral constructs, which has led me to three original theses in that field.
One of those theses is that humans aren't any more or less sentient than any other creature, surviving this planet. I don't feel this outlook challenges anybody's religious perspective of the world and our roles here. I look at like this - "sentience" is a scientific claim of divination. In order to understand this, we must first understand what "sentience" is, as a concept.
Humans create a subjective reality, of which language is the cement. You're not "reading" this sentence - you're processing a series of runes I'm laying out in a specific sequence to describe an intended meaning. The wreid tnihg is it wrkos eevn if you splel tignhs wnorg. In ancient times, "magi" used "runes" to cast "spells." A Spelling Bee.
That's exactly what writing is. We're all fundamentally equipped with "magic," these days. We celebrate it as a step above the survival mechanisms of other creatures and call it "sentience." We are a species of ape that have survived through two primary traits.
Pattern recognition - every single aspect of information humans are able to process rely on our ability to interact with a pattern, which introduces what I call the "C.O.D.A.R Conundrum." We have extremely limited cognitive detection and ranging, and it's a frustrating thing to experience in real time, like when you're surrounded by a beautiful language you don't understand. Shouts out to Krakow, Poland. One of the greatest cities in the world.
Empathy - our brains have two doors for information. Understanding or judgment. Confusion is a judgment.
In order to illustrate this with content, I performed as a character on the sidelines of our beloved Kings called #Lensface. I became a self-absorbed photojournalist who deliberately produced "terrible content" to reflect the "terrible team" I covered. I think it's a hilarious running joke as a body of work. I produced 119 episodes of this, which can be found on YouTube.
I started working on a television sitcom about a fictional world of sports media built around this character, and I've since launched that show as a community collaboration by defining my intellectual property as a puzzle, with unique art pieces, serialized on a permanent, public ledger. The show is called "Press Pass," and it's best described as a series that's reflective of The Office mixed with a 30-for-30. I've been working on this and pitching this since 2016, so it's no coincidence there's more than one basketball mockumentaries that have beat us or are racing us to market.
My platform is a film studio, organized as a professional resource collective through equity-backed collaboration. Once again, a puzzle, with open market pieces on a serialized, permanent, public ledger. We actually invented this "Digital Collectible Experience" model as one of the first innovations in a new sector called "Film3."
The studio is producing Press Pass: Here We Stick. It's a 24-episode doozy about the sports media circuit in the 2012-13 season in "The Basketball Syndicate of America," where the "Sacramento Majesty" are threatening to leave town.
People willing to buy a $12-45 ticket (it can fluctuate. I'm not soliciting, just explaining... no links here or in profile) may help us produce content in the archive for Season One. They become "Lore Producers," and can create and register one character - specifically not a player or a coach - in the archive through a 7-second meme. It can be anything from a Vine-style sketch to an Office-style cut-away about a moment in our fictional history. Folks need a new ticket for every new piece of content they want to add to the archive, and can only create one character per era in the lore. There's 5 eras, and I personally think it's hilarious if characters have historical dopplegangers. All content approval is community-governed, and voters in that system are paid via quarterly measure of impact as a focus group. Those with more tickets get a higher issuance.
Folks that buy the $25-75 ticket may create players and coaches in the lore, or claim existing ones that I've made up.
We have 30 fictional teams, each season in each team's history can on-board 277 content registrations. Each Lore Chapter is developed by one or more "Lore Masters," the folks with at least 25 tickets. They walk through their chosen season with the other folks who've signed up for that Lore Chapter. We already know who won the championships, we're exploring the history between the details.... like a sports documentary.
We do this through a D&D-style campaign, where you bring your character to your Lore Chapter meeting and discuss various situations and game results from that season and what your character was doing. Then, form some sort of archive contribution based on the details. Lore Masters can submit pieces up to 5-minutes long, and Lore Producers can submit pieces up to 7-seconds long. All the pieces that are approved for the archive are sold as digital collectibles with 1,000 editions each on a community-governed price scale. Creators keep 50% of the value generated, flat, and 5% of any re-sale value... permanently. Content can be live-action or animated (artistic renderings in a sports documentary... lol).
You can take your character(s) into many chapters in many eras. They just have to be grounded in our comedic reality, so there's not exactly superheroes or otherworld stuff. If you make that content and it's approved, keep in mind our Writers can dress it into the documentary however they want. Use in Season One receives significant issuance, use in advertising receives significant issuance, use as digital merchandise receives 50/5 or 15/1.5 if your content is derivative, and use in future Seasons receives significant issuance.
Now, I'll hit you with the kicker... At 19 years old, I met my biological family for the first time. My grandmother's uncle is Robert Earl Jones, making James Earl Jones her cousin, and my "grand-uncle." This doesn't make me any more special than anybody else, it's a fun fact of my life. For the purposes of show business... it means Sacramento is going to Beat LA at their own game.
If I have the moderator's permissions, I'll respond to any questions, and post appropriate links.
If not, thank you for reading anyway, and my apologies for my prolonged absence. I've since retired from working for the Press or media platforms, focusing on our endeavor and opportunity.
Each ticket comes with 0.000018% ownership to Season One while holding it, which helps us measure commitment and keep issuances sustainable against the treasury, which tracks and distributes marketing/distro expenses and 100% net earnings for our community. If you have any questions from a legal perspective... please read the LMO Structure for Tokenomics, familiarize yourself with The Howey Test, read case precedence, familarize yourself with various market regulations where art is concerned, particularly when it comes to "facility for investment." I'm happy to answer any and all questions to help understanding after those steps are taken.
The simple answer to it all is this:
I'm at the Farmer's Market with a registered business, fees paid. I'm offering a "Collectible Experience."
I'm sitting there, with a an open table, and a partially-completed 15,000 piece puzzle. The pieces need to be painted a certain way. I'm charging $12-75 for a piece, depending on where it fits in the puzzle.
With it comes a serial number, proving that piece is yours in the puzzle. If you paint the piece and help find where it goes, you'll receive a hot cup of your favorite tea and a foot massage while doing do. You also literally own that piece of the puzzle. That's your property.
Since you helped put it together, you'll enjoy the reflective success, in the exact amount defined by the amount of pieces you've collected. I've already put in 4,500 pieces, so there's guidelines in place for where your piece goes and how the whole thing is supposed to look. We have to pay the production company to put in 5,250 pieces, hence the ticket price. They are professional puzzle-makers, so the puzzle quality benefits from those 5,250 pieces being painted and placed by masters of the craft. We have to hire a team to facilitate the professional vision, so we're going to distribute 3,000 puzzle pieces throughout each and every laborer who worked on the team. They'll all own pieces of the puzzle, reflective of their time and liability in the puzzle.
This leaves 1,500 exclusive pieces for the crowd at the farmer's market. If the puzzle can sell all 1,500 pieces, even over a sustained period of time, the community has generated over $18,000 to hire the masters of the craft and the laborers to finish the puzzle. The goal is to finish the puzzle - in this case, a season of television content. Once the puzzle is complete, we've united to create a work of art. We'll offer it to galleries (content distributors) to add to their archives AND influencer streams, with shared rights on up to 14 revenue flows. All hired collaborators, the original creator, and the production company receive a direct reflection of net earnings after community-transparent marketing/distro costs.
Unfortunately, at this time, that 10% cannot pay out to individual puzzle-piece owners. What we do is hire a separate entity that you have the right, as a puzzle-piece owner, to participate in. This entity - a democratic initiative arranging everybody who has a puzzle-piece in any of our puzzles - facilitates the focus group initiatives that govern quality control over community content. Voters in that focus group share 3% of the net earnings produced by Season One through this market-compliant mechanic, 3% is shared by content creators, and 2.5% is used as a community treasury for your own events and small content launchpads for more ambitious projects in the lore. 1.5% goes to a charity / multiple charities the community decides to support.
I've been kinda shut out in Sacramento Press with this thing - they think I'm making fun of them... Some with the Kings think I'm making fun of the team.... I'm making fun of the vibe presented about Sacramento in the context of national media, but there's no nuance where the glitz and glam is concerned.
Some facts about our show:
- Luke Barats is playing a lead character
- Johnny Taylor Jr. is playing a lead character
- Alex Caan is playing a supporting character
- Matthew Earl Jones is an adviser to the platform
- Local great Brittni Barger is playing a key role
- Local great and KingsFans.com OG with me, Tarig Elsidigg, is playing a KEY ROLE LMAOOOOO. Two words: Black Fraternity.
- Local great musicain known as Autumn Sky, my personal friend Otto Sky, is playing a key role, and an Associate Producer.
- Renowned documentary maker Rebecca Pierce is a Director and Producer.
- Our "mayor" character in this story is a community reporter played by Imani Barbarin, so we're not approaching reality.
- The Sacramento Majesty won the 2001 Championship. This was community-generated, I had no choice in the matter.
The drama causing the local shut-out for 18 months:
- #Lensface, overall. Nobody "got it." Which made it even funnier.
- '20-21 season, I had credentials and vaccines, and it was my retirement year before grad school, pandemic or not.
- My brother turns up missing in November of '20. He was ex-Navy, and refused to tell anyone of his situation or ask for help. I put together a plan to find him, but I need to earn a few dollars so I can fix my car. It had been 9 months with income at $12-1500 a month from one client, which kept a roof over my head, and feeling lucky during the pandemic. No overhead, and I'm beyond zero right now, still climbing.
- I'm prevented from accessing product on the floor despite meeting NBA approval. Other photojournalists are allowed. There's only 11 of us, full-time. Sort of an all-or-nothing situation in a tax-payer funded, 20k seat building.
- I am told from December thru May I'm not allowed access - the whole season - preventing my only feasible income boost during a really tough time.
- My brother dies in a tent in People's Park, Berkeley on April 10th. I don't find out until May 12th due to mistaken identity.
- Being that it was my last year in sports media working for press platforms. I won't in the future because of the nature of the sports media beast. The narrative-crafting against Boogie and then Bagley... 19yo kids while I first covered them, that's when the negativity formed. I watched them wilt and suffer from it, just as any 19yo would. Cousins fought back, Bagley never said a word. His dad challenged the dynamic without his blessing, but his dad has been in pro sports a long time and sees the politics.
- On the season-ending media call, the team was patting themselves on the back for "community uplifting," and gave Harrison Barnes an award. I asked him if he thought awards during the pandemic were a performative gesture. I said something around the lines of "I only know what I've experienced. I'm a photojournalist who was prevented by this team from earning a living while my brother died in a tent. So I do challenge you to think on the performative nature of these awards." I listed a series of vital community causes that we never see team reps support. I then informed Media Relations and the Kings Herald of my amicable retirement from the press circuit. About an hour after this call, the Kings Herald had tried to "fire" me by saying they were never going to provide credentials to me again, as I had threatened their access to the team with my "unprofessional comments" or some bullcrap like that. I reminded them of my retirement, and that I wished them the best in their endeavors.
They didn't know I had already filed a complaint over Media Relations to the FTC, because pandemic or not, removing 4 of the 11 photojournalists from the circuit and a giant building like that is a blatant conspiracy to limit competition. Two of the culprits are no longer with the team, and now I'm a bad guy in the Sacramento Press. They've turned my hard work since 2016 into some sort of reactionary attempt to bring down the team... Meanwhile, I'm pitching the benefits of the team's involvement behind-the-scenes.
Everybody is afraid I'm gonna litigate, but the simple fact is this. My brother made his own decisions, and despite the ifs and buts, we're talking about a conditional outcome that I may not have been able to affect if the Herald or the team signed me to a $500k contract in November. It's simply a situation where too many chose to be crappy at a crappy time, adding insult to injury. I called them out on performing otherwise, and moved on. It's no surprise Bagley is thriving in Detroit at all.
The pain there, limited to myself, is simply the loss of my childhood favorite team to politics sewn by out-of-towners, working in Media Relations, and others involved who weren't scapegoated. I love everything I experienced, and I'm very happy to move onto the next chapter of my career, which is cementing family legacy before time moves too fast. I'm not seeking to cause anybody to turn away from the brand or the product, nor did I deserve this ongoing trial behind-the-scenes in the Sacramento Press. We've been starving on the market with a world-changing economic innovation, local to Sacramento, for 18 months. Now, nobody wants to be on the wrong side of the story, so the wall of silence continues.
I suppose the irony of it is that our platform is a community collective, through the puzzle model, that has a 4% net earnings commitment to transforming dead commercial properties into permanent, dignified living centers for our unsheltered neighbors, each organized around an intersection of need (elders that need hospice, ex-cons, folks overcoming drug afflictions, young adults needing safe haven, etc). My theory is that with about $480m commitment, every 5 years - I know, I know, that's the actual number though - from local businesses, we can sustain a network of buildings that keeps around 60,000-100,000 people off the street in the Greater Sacramento Area.
Incidentally, that's about how many people sleep outside right now. Your city's answer (three counsel members are crooks) is to spend $1b in your tax dollars on a jail expansion. With the state of our roads, parks, and schools? How much are you paying to register your kid for a sport right now? Shouldn't those programs be sponsored by our taxes? Where is the Beam Team on this? Do the rapidly-increasing amount of out-of-town property and business owners care that our young people are being set up for jail and criminalization? Punishment is prioritized over potential... not because there's any social benefit. It's because the folks at the top make money.
I want to spend half that, from private success, on permanent housing initiatives and stabilizing these folks away from need and scarcity - the root of crime.
TL
R;Thank you to KingsFans.com for being my foundation, my genesis, in sports media. Some of my work here helped James Ham understand my potential in this industry. He hired me, despite not having a budget from ESPN to pay me, and let me keep the rights to the content I produced. This set the tone for my work, and I own every shot I've ever taken, and every clip I've ever recorded. You're all humans, and for my part, I really miss most of you and that early-aughts optimism we used to share.
We're going to celebrate that... sort of... through Press Pass.
