Documenting Life

“So then what of the next few months? Activity combats anxiety. Those four movie ideas I’ve been excited about? Pick one and write it, then another, and another. The TV show I was thinking of pitching? Sit down and write the pilot (we’re told no one buys TV specs any more, this, like all the “rules” of Hollywood, is nonsense). 

Keep talking to people. The execs are at their desks with their heads in their hands. Maybe they can’t buy right now, but they can still talk. Be the light, be the energy, be the person who isn’t opining the state of the industry but instead seems to have a ton of ideas and enthusiasm. That person is their first call when the money tap gets turned back on”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/where-im-at-october-2024

“None of this is to fault Skinner, who consistently namechecked his roots whilst booking artists like Kano, Donae’o and Tinchy Stryder for features and remixes instead of the big white house names his label preferred. (Skinner has also remained heavily involved in the production, management and release of non-white British hip hop artists throughout his career.) But what it does underline is that who did and who did not get to go overground during the early 00s was sharply political”

https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/the-streets-a-grand-dont-come-for-free-review/

“The past decade has ushered in cataclysmic shifts that have upended the fashion industry and changed the way we shop. E-commerce made designer fashion globally accessible, while fast fashion grew into a billion-dollar business, much of which is built on designer dupes at a fraction of the price. Social media disrupted traditional advertising’s influence and reach. Fashion influencers speak directly to consumers and suck up the robust advertising budgets that once funded the pages of Vogue or GQ. This paradigm shift leaves mass market brands like Roots in a tricky spot. If they go too fashion, they risk alienating loyal customers. If they play it too safe, they risk irrelevance”

https://thewalrus.ca/roots-sexy/

“Klein’s research concentrated quite a lot on fire chiefs and the decisions that they made on when to bring a crew out of a building. This is an unusual case – it’s a high-stakes decision that needs to be made under time pressure, by a single individual. It turned out that one of the most important inputs to that decision was whether the floor of the building was reported by experienced firefighters to be “spongy”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/spongy-floors

“The two games were a disappointment to EA, the studios that made them were closed, and Pick was shunted to another internal studio instead. A new studio EA had bought to embrace the zeitgeist of the time: Facebook games. Specifically, The Sims Social Facebook game. Pick didn’t care for it at all. “I hated every minute of it,” he says. All day long he’d stare at huge leaderboards showing which in-game pieces of furniture were making the most money. “I felt sick to my stomach working there,” he says. So he left.

This, really, is where the trail on Simon Pick starts to go cold, because it’s the point he turns away from the games industry”

https://www.eurogamer.net/from-daredevil-dennis-to-die-hard-trilogy-simon-pick-has-a-hell-of-a-tale-to-tell

“But frankly, none of it has ever remotely interested me, and not out of an indifference to science or sporting morality but because to reduce Pogacar to a soup of numbers and chemicals is really the narrowest and most boring way of appreciating him; the most boring way of appreciating sport”

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2024/oct/01/tadej-pogacar-has-delivered-an-alternative-reality-for-the-true-believers

“That’s another dimension of the problem. Some proportion of people who a decade or two ago might have written a substantial book are now instead dabbling in podcasts, newsletters, or YouTube channels. Some of them find the work as satisfying as writing—the feedback is instantaneous—although it’s equally unremunerative. The new platforms are as susceptible to blockbuster economics as the publishing world. They, too, lack a middle class”

https://shush.substack.com/p/the-us-has-a-nonfiction-crisis

“They really are angry that the Conservatives have the brass neck to attack them for the early release of prisoners, a decision whose alternatives were, broadly speaking, “invent a time machine” or “legalise crime”. They might be wrong. But they do mean it. The best – the true – answer to “why is your messaging so gloomy?” is “We really are gloomy”. Sometimes, it’s not about tactics at all.

Starmer’s genuine anger about the state of the nation was behind what was, for me, the most effective part of his Conference speech: a dividing line about populism as “the politics of easy answers” and the need to be honest about trade-offs: providing more prison places means building prisons, cheaper electricity means overground pylons, having more houses means putting them in actual places, processing asylum seekers means granting asylum, and so on”

https://dividinglines.substack.com/p/doom-and-gloom

“Or if you don’t like the Silver Bulletin or 538 or RealClearPolitics averages, I’ll offer another alternative. Make your own average. Seriously, it’s not that hard. But I do have one stipulation: you have to publicly specify the rules ahead of time. I think you’ll find that when you’re forced to be consistent, to set standards that aren’t governed by your ad hoc sense of the vibes or by your partisan preferences, you’ll have a lot more sympathy for the polling aggregators — and you won’t be as surprised when one of the outliers turns out to be right”

https://www.natesilver.net/p/trust-a-pollster-more-when-it-publishes

“The Constitution’s framers worried that individual states might try to grab too much power in the House by creating dozens and dozens of congressional districts, so they specified that a district could not be smaller than 30,000 people. But they put no upper limit on district sizes. After the 1920 census revealed that urban Americans outnumbered rural Americans, the House in 1929 capped its numbers at 435 to keep power away from those urban dwellers, including immigrants, that lawmakers considered dangerous, thus skewing the Electoral College in favor of rural America. Today the average congressional district includes 761,169 individuals—more than the entire population of Wyoming, Vermont, or Alaska—which weakens the power of larger states”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-20-2024