Final Four.

By | April 1, 2024
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A day later, and it still feels like a dream. For the first time in 44 years, my Purdue Boilermakers are going to the Final Four – the first in my lifetime. I know there is a contingent of “hE’s JuSt tAlL!” idiots out there, but watching Zach Edey and company go to work has been awesome, and I hope they reach the championship game.

Something tells me that game – staged on April 8th – might be special if we were to make it. That same day, the state of Indiana will go dark beneath a total solar eclipse you may have heard about. All eyes (safely guarded, I hope) will look up at the moon. A moon whereupon the first and last1 person to walk upon its surface came from the same school – Purdue University.

#BTFU

  1. to date! ↩︎

Monday, Mar. 4th, 2024: Titular Line!

By | March 4, 2024
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I love a good, in-depth bit of research on a fun, esoteric topic. I always look at my wife and say “Titular line!” any time a character says the name of the movie they’re in. Someone did the research to see how common it is, and while movies with names of protagonists as titles do really well in producing such events, only about a third of movies have “title drops”.

Wouldn’t it be nice?

By | November 29, 2023
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“A revival of the good old future — a belief that progress will take us to a better place. And not just a world of hologram hamburgers. How nice would it be if we could reverse the trend of culture feeling like it’s prepping everybody to expect the worst possible future as an inevitability? Living is hard enough already. Maybe we shouldn’t be going out of our way to ‘Mad Max’ our minds.”

-Jeff Tweedy, (from NYT “What We’ll Be Obsessing Over in 2024“)

(He also had a nice quote about everyone dresing like “lumberjacks going to a rave”, but I digress…)

This thought resonated with me. I have a tendency to ruminate on worst-case scenarios, and he’s right that the entertainment industry tends to lean into dystopian futures, underscoring my own worst tendencies. Of course those dystopian futures are a real possibility – we’re seeing the worst of humanity’s impacts in conflict areas, in the climate, in wealth inequality – but it would be nice to have just a glimmer of hope reflected in our entertainment.

Mental image of happiness

By | July 28, 2023
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Do you have one? The mental image when you feel content and at peace that might flash in front of your mind’s eye?

I imagine myself sitting on the grass hill on the west side of the East Elementary playground, both a small woods and the sun behind my back. It’s sunny. Warm enough to be slightly uncomfortable if it weren’t for this cool breeze meandering through the scene like the stream in front of the house I grew up in.

No one’s out there, strangely. It’s just me, looking at the school, listening to the breeze.

Take me out to the ballgame…

By | July 25, 2023
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Even though I was in Detroit, and the Cubs were not, it was still “root, root, root for the CUBBIES…”. Why was I even here?

My good friend and brother-in-law is a Padres fan, and as we’re in Central Indiana, he has to take advantage of whenever he’s able to see them at a stadium within a reasonable drive of home. Obviously it’s best when they’re visiting Wrigley, but sometimes calendars don’t align.

It’s also kinda funny how we’ve corrupted each other’s kids a bit. My niece/his daughter lives in Chicago now and we’ll be visiting her for a Cubs game soon, while my son/his nephew claims to still be a Cubs fan, but was wearing a sweat-stained brown Padres cap – the one he’s been wearing non-stop all summer – this past weekend in Detroit.

My son and brother-in-law in Padres gear, while I matched the green seats.

It’s tough to blame him. The nirvana of the 2016 World Series was just after he turned seven, half his lifetime ago. He remembers them shipping off Baez (who we got to see in Detroit) and Bryant and Rizzo and the rest of the squad in the years since*. Cubs ownership launched Marquee Network, and made it so that you could only watch it on cable or on streaming services as expensive as cable. For a variety of reasons**, Marquee isn’t available to him. The games he gets to see are national games on ESPN or Apple TV. And while the spending on big names hasn’t necessarily translated to wins for the Padres, it seemingly has increased the frequency with which the Padres are featured in those games as compared to the Cubs. He doesn’t have the luxury of every single game being broadcast by WGN like I did at his age. Really short-sighted by the Cubs in particular, and MLB in general.

I mean, I guess it’s not the Cardinals with whom he shares his fandom with, right? At least it’s another historically hard-luck NL squad.

*I will give Jed Hoyer credit; you could argue that every one of those guys who left the Cubs and ended up signing contracts with other teams have been overpaid in terms of bWAR vs. money spent by their new clubs.
**I find MLB’s TV landscape is at best adversarial to fans, and the Cubs in particular are atrocious about this. Maybe I’d shell out the extra money if the front office was trying to win and stopped pretending their ownership is broke. Central Indiana is covered by 4-5 different local team blackouts, so even if the Cubs are playing away, there’s a good chance I couldn’t watch their games on Regional Sports Networks anyway. Screw Sinclair.

Friday. Two random thoughts.

By | July 22, 2023
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There’s something about really old websites (Web 1.0) that really take me back to the days of dial-up and how the internet seemed so new, and could still be anything. If you want a dose of that nostalgia, wiby.me is a site that searches specifically for Web 1.0 sites, as well as a fun “surprise me…” option.

There is a cheeky copy editor somewhere who is dying to write the headline “USA finally defeats Vietnam” with the sub-head of “USWNT prevails 3-0 after 20 minutes of stoppage time.” Seriously felt like the US had put more in the back of the net, but the Vietnamese keeper, Trần Thị Kim Thanh, was everywhere, even blocking a penalty kick.

I want to get rid of my Apple Watch.

By | July 20, 2023
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I want an Apple Fitness Tracker instead. I really, really love the Fitness tracking, closing your rings, the Workouts app, etc. I just don’t use the watch for notifications. And I’d frankly like to use a regular watch – I have several I’ve stopped wearing – and so would love a slimmed down version of the Apple Watch: the Apple Fitness Tracker. Fitbit currently has a whole line of trackers at about the size I’d like to see Apple make. All it needs to do is show me the rings, kickoff a workout and keep track of health stats. I don’t need to make calls or text anyone – I honestly dislike doing either from my Watch.

The internet, going forward (for me).

By | July 19, 2023
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Twitter was bought by the villain from Glass Onion and the people I followed are no longer there. Facebook is for grandparents and right-wing echo chambers. LiveJournal – remember LiveJournal?! – was my original fix, before it was purchased by a Russian concern, purportedly to tamp down on dissidents. Reddit is reaching the final stages of enshittification – implosion – like a distant star going supernova. LinkedIn is generally full of people talking about their work so much you’re curious if they actually do their work. Mastadon is confusing. Discord is great for small groups, but quickly devolves into noise after you add the 20th person to the server. Instagram was fine until I never got to see my friends’ posts anymore, instead being shoveled content from people I would actively avoid in real life.

But I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t been written about many times before.

The best parts of social media, to me at least, was keeping tabs on friends (particularly as we left college and begun our adult lives) as well as being exposed to ideas related to topics and hobbies I care about. I find myself posting to social media less and less, since my friends don’t necessarily see my posts and I don’t necessarily see theirs. Social media isn’t about building or maintaining communities anymore; it’s about building a platform to keep you engaged as long as possible to sneak in as many ads as it possible.

In short, I’m not being served the content I came looking for – my friends and hobbies – but yet I would flit between social mediums, chasing that content. I’d be served it for a time, before more ads needed to be sold, the content no longer focused on friends and hobbies, but instead on memes and rage-bait, and I’d decamp for the next platform.

That cycle seems untenable going forward. Slowly over the years, as I’ve been finding sites and blogs and newsletters, I’ve been subscribing to their emails or (more typically) their RSS feeds to cobble together My Internet. All the neat corners of the web, containing all the information I care about related to my interests and my hobbies, as well as reputable news sources. My RSS reader (and to a lesser extent my email inbox) is now my social media, just like it was back in 2002. So not long ago, I deleted the social media apps and any free-time scrolling was limited to just my RSS feed.

People, I got fucking bored. I had to end up reading a really long article I saved for myself a few months ago. It took me 40 minutes to read. It had multiple, complex points. It was well-reasoned. It gave me a more nuanced view. It was marvelous. If nothing else, this approach has shifted my time away from lots of short, empty dopamine hits to longer, more intellectually ‘nutritious’ reading.

It’s not a complete replacement. Unless a friend has a site or similar, they don’t show up in my RSS feed. Of course, algorithms pushed a lot of my friends out of my social media feed over the years. (The comfort social media provided to some to share to some abhorrent views forced me to remove others.) And while I’ve deleted the apps from my devices, I’ve not deleted the accounts. For better or worse, memories were made on those networks that AI models can now use for training. And you never know when you might want to revisit past haunts.

So what’s this blog for, then? Well, the outbound posts. I’ll probably limit it to one a day, though, probably as a string of random thoughts or things I’ve learned or found interesting throughout the day. We’ll see.