Documenting Life

“This is how the grind works for many players, scraping and clawing and getting cut and not getting playing time and trying to hang around as best as they can, looking for any opportunity. There are far more of them than there are phenoms who float from big college programs to the draft lottery and guaranteed roster spots. Summer league, ultimately, is for the former kind of player, the kind who has precious few chances to show the world what he can do. Which is my point about Arms – he’s exactly the kind of player who needs summer league the most, who needs the publicity that summer league can generate the most. Again, I understand that it’s summer league. Certainly one good game can’t boost his odds of catching on in the league long-term that much. But with so many incredible players trying to earn one of a limited number of roster spots, every inch counts. Every moment counts”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/why-is-nepotism-bad-ask-adonis-arms

“But … it’s a big step from noting that things can go off the rails in this way, to presuming that it’s an intrinsic failing of the bureaucratic state, and that it’s all about techne/metis and therefore blah blah anarchism. Couldn’t it just be a design failure? Early rockets and steam engines blew up, a lot, but that didn’t mean that they were intrinsically bound to fail as a means of propulsion – it just meant that when you’re designing something based on the use of heat to expand gases, you need to spend much more time and effort on ensuring that the gas expansion happens in a controlled fashion with ways to vent excess pressure, than on the comparatively easy problem of pushing a piston or directing an exhaust”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/seeing-like-a-state-machine

“The story of this massive change in our economic order is important, because it shows that, while there is no silver bullet for social change, it’s also not that complex to constrain the power of concentrated capital. What’s happening with non-competes is an ideological story, what I’ll call a ‘Gang Tackle for Justice,’ and I’ve seen it happen in other areas”

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/are-non-competes-really-ending

“In that sense “Amarillo” is pulling on the longest thread in this whole blog series – the way Britain’s light entertainment establishment, centred on the BBC, is so crucial to pop and to the charts. The infrastructure of British pop was born from it, from the old music hall venues pop stars performed in, through the Light Programme their records were played on, down to details like George Martin’s background as a Goon Show producer. For a long time it felt like ‘light ent’ was a skin UK pop had shed, transforming itself into something new and young and highly exportable. But when you take ‘what’s popular’ as your metric, you find that light entertainment is always there, tapping patiently at the window of pop”

https://popular-number1s.com/2024/07/31/tony-christie-ft-peter-kay-is-this-the-way-to-amarillo/

“This was a very-1970s guerrilla production. Before it was over, Goldman had stolen rain and snow overlays from Disney’s garbage. A young Glen Keane created the sound effects for a truck’s exhaust pipe. Bluth, Goldman and Pomeroy animated most of the film, but Bluth’s main memory of Banjo was mixing cel paint by his swimming pool.

Gradually, the production (and the rows of work desks) outgrew Bluth’s garage and took over his whole Culver City home. Guedel recalled that Bluth “literally lived with only his own single bed and a dresser in his small bedroom” — every other space “was filled with animation equipment.” During the busiest periods, Banjo artists slept where they worked and sleeping bags dotted Bluth’s house”

https://animationobsessive.substack.com/p/don-bluths-garage-band

“In the place of a legion of 15 really good NFL quarterbacks, we are left with about four or five excellent ones and the rest dependent on consistently inventive schematics, marginal improvements made through advancements in coaching and technology and the whims of their owner and general manager (along with their ability to acquire surrounding talent).

Miami’s problem is not unique but there’s also no reasonable solution. Next to having one of these genetic-defying quarterbacks, the next best option is to hold on dearly to one good enough (because the dropoff between good enough and horribly bad is far worse than the one from genetic-defying to good enough)”

https://www.si.com/nfl/dolphins-leap-of-faith-tua-tagovailoa-extension

“There are several explanations for Vance’s drift. In the aftermath of his book’s unexpected success, he grew wary that readers would use his memoir as an excuse to look down on his Rust Belt and Appalachian kin. “If you’re an elite white professional,” he said, “working class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty about being a racist or a xenophobe.” After the 2016 election, he felt that liberal curiosity about Trump’s voter base had mostly evaporated, as the traditional media emphasized the primacy of non-economic factors (racism, sexism, Russian interference) over material ones, captured in scornful liberal references to MAGA supporters’ “economic anxiety.” Vance was beginning to doubt that his coastal readers were as concerned about the opioid crisis or the outsourcing of jobs as they had initially seemed”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/democrats-might-want-to-take-jd-vance-seriously.html

“As you might expect, the wealthy Silicon Valley types who have jumped on the Trump bandwagon with both feet, are being extremely normal about everything. In the wake of the assassination attempt, we were all treated to a rather unpleasant glimpse into the personal fantasies of some of these folks, which seem to follow a similar script in which they each rise up from their keyboards after years of endless tweeting and board meetings, perfectly prepared to step into the role of heroic warrior protagonist in a civil war film”

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-62/

“The update, which was meant to teach the system how to spot a particular type of cyber-attack that had already been observed in the wild, instead “triggered a logic error that resulted in an operating system crash”.

I’ve been covering this sort of thing for more than a decade now and my guess is the “logic error” will turn out to be one of two things. Either something in one of the most complex systems that humanity has built in its history will have a barely comprehensible fail state and an almost inconceivable combination of bad luck will have led to something catastrophic happening; or someone did something tremendously dumb”

https://www.theguardian.com/global/article/2024/jul/23/why-crowdstrike-style-chaos-is-here-to-stay

“I find never progressing past the musical tastes you had when you were 17 a little sad, and there’s a whole world of discovering new music without trying to stay in the scene as your hair greys. But I do find sticking with what you already loved vastly more adult and sympathetic than the alternative, which is being a 37-year-old parent and starting a TikTok to aggressively display how much you love Camilla Cabello”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/a-few-indisputable-points-about-poptimism