Prepare your thumbs: All-Star voting is now open

For fans of basketball, democracy, and freedom, your time of year is officially on. Fan voting for the 2016 NBA All-Star Game is now open and you have 39 days to cast your vote and select the East and West starting lineups. Of course, you already know that the game is in Toronto and takes place February 14.

How to Vote

NBA.com has a pretty easy-to-follow set of instructions on how to vote, but to summarize:

Fill out a ballot on NBA.com: Follow this link or use the NBA Gametime app and vote for two guards and three forwards for each conference. Build your dream team and click submit. You can do this once per day. Yay!

Vote social: Using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, you can post anything you like, as long as it has the full player name and #NBAVOTE in there somewhere. You're allowed one player per post and ten votes per account, per day. Cool!

Vote by text: Send a textual message to 6-9-6-2-2 (MYNBA) with the full player name. You can vote for up to ten different players once per day. Old school!

Vote Google: This one's new. By searching anything related to the All-Star Game, Google smartly pops up a ballot near the top of the search results. If you want to refine by team, just search NBAVote Raptors (or whatever). Enter your selections and you're done. New wave!

Other: The Sina Weibo and Tencent QQ apps are also possibilities. I don't use these apps so I defer to the NBA website.

Why to Vote

To be cool! But seriously, earlier this week, I wrote a rationale for how Kyle Lowry and DeMar DeRozan could conceivably be the first teammate guards to start an All-Star Game in 41 years. Not to get all Fox News on your voting choices, but you should check that out as background homework before casting your vote.

So yeah, #VoteTheNorth and all that jazz. What do your starting lineups look like?