Documenting Life

“Jayson Tatum on a three-on-one break pulling up to clang yet another awkward three off the front rim, and doing so because that’s what he’s been explicitly coached to do, doesn’t look like dominance. It looks like an ugly, boring war of attrition. And I don’t care that it’s effective. I don’t care. I’m not a GM. The point of being a fan is not to be a mini GM, despite what Twitter would have you believe. The point of being a fan is to watch and enjoy the product, and I don’t enjoy the product. It’s frenetic, there’s no rhythm, and it gives me exactly the feeling I get when a middle infielder who weighs 180 pounds sopping wet takes a wild hack and flies out with a 3-1 count because he’s been taught to prioritize launch angle. Do you really want to be baseball, NBA? Do you really?”

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/fuck-the-modern-nba

“Once the dust had settled, and new Prime Minister Keir Starmer had begun appointing ministers on the basis of expertise rather than political expediency, and Chancellor Rachel Reeves had used her first speech to talk about the need for growth and the importance of planning reform – an important but politically contentious change which a government needs to do immediately or it simply never will – I felt the first glimmers of hope about Britain I’d had in some time.

It doesn’t matter, right now, that Labour only got 34% of the vote, not 40%. It doesn’t matter, even, that Reform has five MPs. For the next few years, Britain has a Labour government that can do, within reason, what it wants, without constantly worrying about the prejudices of elderly homeowners or the Daily Mail”

https://jonn.substack.com/p/the-dust-settles

“From 2016 to 2019—mostly during Trump’s administration—those rural left-behind counties, which make up about 18% of the U.S. population, added 10,000 jobs. In 2023 alone, they added 104,000.

Tankersley notes that Trump overwhelmingly won the support of voters in these counties, but their circumstances did not improve during his administration. Under Biden, they added jobs five times faster than they did under Trump. Still, voters there appear to continue to back Trump”

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/july-9-2024

“The fan brain thinks about what is. It worries about “canon” and wants to preserve the work like a sacred object from critics, vandals, and barbarians. The artist brain thinks in what could be. It looks at the object not to vandalize it, but to come up with a new object. Actually, let me shift my metaphor to the “artist’s eye.” The artist’s eye is always looking for openings, cracks, and canyons to explore. And yes, fans can have an “artist’s eye” too. Isn’t the main impulse of fanfiction “What if this thing I love had been done differently?”

https://countercraft.substack.com/p/seeing-with-an-artists-eye

“Elden Ring is a horrible game if you’re trying to complete it as fast as possible with extremely limited time – most games are. It’s a wonderful game if you’re focused on the adventure you’re having in the moment. I spent about 40 minutes in a small smouldering church, trying to beat a red phantom warrior with a gigantic cleaver who could kill me in two hits, just to see if I could. When I got her – after two successful parries and a flurry of desperate sword swipes – I was beside myself. That was a moment I would have missed entirely if I’d been fixated on getting through the game”

https://www.theguardian.com/games/article/2024/jul/02/pushing-buttons-elden-ring-making-time

“As media becomes more of a constrained business — a troubled asset class — it becomes more of a technical one. You are managing decline. You’re fighting at the bottom rather than living at the top — but that can be a business opportunity as well as any other. Zucker is a good operator. Possibly a great one. In a world of limited media opportunities, he is able to discern the small successes. And, if you have to go low — and it is media, after all — he knows how low to go. He is shameless, certainly, and yet proud”

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/jeff-zucker-telegraph-bid.html

“The Michigan Supreme Court found that “a business corporation is organized and carried on primarily for the profit of the stockholders [and that] the powers of the directors are to be employed for that end,” and intimated that cash surpluses should not be saved to invest in upcoming projects, but distributed to shareholders, because Ford had shown that it was good at making money. Ford was directly forbidden from lowering prices and raising employee salaries, and forced to issue a dividend.

To be clear, the statement around corporations’ duty toward shareholders was made “obiter dicta.” This means it was not actually legally binding, despite over a hundred years of people acting as if it was”

https://www.wheresyoured.at/tss/

“One of the key edicts of management cybernetics is that “it is not necessary to look inside the black box in order to understand its behaviour”. But this is only true a) if you’ve made the right decisions about how to divide things up into black boxes and b) if you’re prepared to accept that the behaviour of the black box might often be really quite illogical or pathological. Most of the time, corporate decision-making systems are what Beer called “muddy boxes” – the extent to which you can understand the internal workings depends on how much effort you are prepared to put in. And in my view, it’s often important to spend at least some time wiping the glass on the muddy box, to be sure that you have an accurate picture of the true inputs and outputs”

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/being-legible-to-oneself

“A notebook crackles with potential energy. Between the covers, myriad scribbles hold ideas, observations, quotes, anxieties… This is pure thought, suspended in time. Only when an idea is extracted from the book and exposed to daylight does it start to decay. Nothing lives up to the original idea, or at least nothing lives up to the feeling you had writing down that original idea. Structures are imposed on stories, third-party requirements; “Can it be more like…” The original note is the spark of life. As soon as it leaves the womb, it starts to die.

Even the act of writing itself is a process of decay; the translation from thought to word dilutes and distracts. And when you make up stories for a living, they only ever really get worse. Sure, there are good bits, upticks on the graph, but generally the feeling of a new idea is as good as it gets. Everything after that is a compromise”

https://developmenthell.substack.com/p/bits-of-the-minds-string

“Look, I could talk your ear off about how the tech aspect of this alone improves the odds for these new publications. (Content management is business strategy! Open distribution platforms are fundamentally politically radical!) But the more important thing is that regular people, people who aren’t nerds who’ve spent two straight decades worrying about how insufferable writers in Brooklyn can make money publishing snarky but smart shit on the web, are finding value in this work”

https://anildash.com/2024/06/14/the-new-alt-media/