The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People

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The 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People:

  1. Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.

It’s KD’s Fault

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Craig Fehrman, writing at Slate:

The NBA has been bad for two years, and it’s Kevin Durant’s fault.

If the Warriors beat the Cavaliers on Friday night, they’ll clinch a second straight title, compiling a playoff record of 32–6 along the way. This team has erased two seasons of potentially exciting basketball as thoroughly as Ted Williams’ military service erased several years of his prime.

The Warriors aren’t the ’96 Bulls. The Warriors were the ’96 Bulls—a 70-plus-win team with a superstar and a championship-level supporting cast. Then they added the second-best player in the league. It’s as if David Robinson decided to join Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago and coast his way to some mid-’90s titles.

I love the NBA and have hated this year’s playoffs and finals. It’s not fun to watch. This article really gets to the why and how an un-competitive league is bad for basketball.

Second Life: Rethinking Myself

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Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:

I used to be obsessed about not being “behind” and being one step ahead of everyone in terms of tweets and news and emails. Now I understand that’s a battle I can’t win and a fight I don’t want to participate in. It wasn’t healthy and it prevented me from enjoying everything else happening around me. I went on vacation multiple times over the past few years and all I could think about was work and todos piling up in my task manager. That’s absurd, and it’s not a job I enjoy. Perhaps it’s one of the common pitfalls of being self-employed and working from home. I want to work at my own pace; even during the busiest periods of the year, I won’t let the anxiety of being “productive” get in the way of spending time with my family and enjoying everyday life.

God damn can I relate to this.

The World Still Spins Around Male Genius

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Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic:

The added tragedy of all this — kicked, climbed, son, gun, months — is the fact that Karr was not, specifically, making allegations. As Jezebel’s Whitney Kimball pointed out, “The fact that [Wallace] abused [Karr] is not a revelation; this has been documented and adopted by the literary world as one of Wallace’s character traits.” D.T. Max’s 2012 biography of Wallace, Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story, documented those abuses: Wallace, Max alleges, once pushed Karr from a vehicle. During another fight, he threw a coffee table at her. Karr, in her tweets, was merely repeating the story she has told many times before. A story that has been treated — stop me if this sounds familiar — largely as a complication to another story. In this case, the story of the romantically unruly genius of one David Foster Wallace.

A Conversation Adam Silver

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Adam Silver, the commissioner of the NBA, talked with Strategy Business:

We promote the posting of our highlights. The highlights are identified through YouTube’s software, and when ads are sold against them, we share in the revenue. We analogize our strategy to snacks versus meals. If we provide those snacks to our fans on a free basis, they’re still going to want to eat meals — which are our games. There is no substitute for the live game experience. We believe that greater fan engagement through social media helps drive television ratings.

This is a really good interview that dives into how the NBA is using data and the internet to grow their product. Very forward thinking.

Download Streaming Media

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This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.

ECV asked:

How do you rip audio from YouTube? I’ve been meaning to rip a Bellows acoustic session from YT for a while now but I want to make sure the audio quality is good, I figured you know the best way of doing this haha.

So there’s the easy way, and then the way I do it.

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Getting Out of a Creative Funk

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This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.

David Parke asked:

Jason how do you get out of a creative funk? I’m working on a project I can’t motivate myself to finish. Always looking for new ways to cope.

Most of the time when I find myself in a creative funk it boils down to me not feeling inspired. There are times where there’s just something I don’t really feel like doing, and so I end up procrastinating.

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How Do You Use Drafts?

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This question was originally answered in the Q&A Thread in the forums.

Deanna asked:

[D]o you have any sort of organizational system in Drafts? My issue seems to be putting something in there and never remembering to go back to it/act on it. Also, do you have it open a new draft every time you open the app? I can’t decide if I like that or if I want it to just go to the last used/opened one.

And what type of stuff do you usually put in there? I’m hoping to mainly use it for when I get recs from someone, article ideas, and things like that.

So by and large what Drafts is for me is the starting place for everything, and not the end. Where things end up and how I store most of my text files/notes is a much longer post (combo of flat text files and Ulysses). But what I use Drafts for is a way to quickly get things down and then do something with it. I’ll dive into that process a little more.

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In the Spotlight: 50 Bands You Need to Hear in 2018

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In the Spotlight (Part 1)

Last year we brought back, and re-branded, one of my favorite features from the AbsolutePunk days: the “Absolute 100.” And as we enter May and the weather finally starts to turn around a little bit, it’s the perfect time to once again team up with our contributors to bring you a whole bunch of new music to check out.

Just like years past we’ve compiled a list of 50 artists we think are worth your time. Some of the artists recently released their debut albums and some have been around for a while now but have flown under the radar. However, the one thing they all have in common is that we think they should be in the spotlight and are worthy of your ears. You’ll find the first group of 25, along with blurbs, recommended songs, and sounds like comparisons, below.

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The Disgrace of Minor League Baseball

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The Ringer:

So why do minor league basketball and hockey players get a better deal than minor league baseball players, despite those leagues’ parent clubs bringing in less money overall? It’s not because basketball and hockey owners are less interested in maximizing profits at all costs—many baseball owners have a stake in another pro team, and even if the people running the NBA, NHL, and MLB aren’t literally the same people, they all went to the same business schools and hang out at the same golf courses.

No, it’s about power and leverage.

Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley

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M.G. Siegler, writing on Medium:

There’s something that has been in the back of my mind for some time now. And while it pre-dates the Facebook fiasco, that situation certainly brings it to the forefront. Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.

You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People — really smart people — saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if they were able to take a step outside of their own heads and hear, they’d be embarrassed by.

Bohemians – “Start Creating” (Video Premiere)

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Today we’ve got the premiere of the new video for “Start Creating” from the band Bohemians. The band reminds me a little bit of Bad Suns mixed with Spitalfield-like melodies. It’s an upbeat and relaxed sound. Describing the video the band said:

We loved the idea of a video where the audience sees from the perspective of a piece of art, as if it were staring back and studying it’s creator and the people who interact with it. We’re quite closely acquainted with the feeling of putting our work out into the world and wondering how the folks who receive it react. So this video became the literal manifestation of that curiosity.

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What Did the Stoics Think About Fame?

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Daily Stoic:

Much of Stoicism has to do with reacting to what comes at us with equanimity and poise. But this, too, is important: Quelling and quieting that voice in your head that becomes seduced by the desires for accolades and applause. You don’t need them. You think you want them but that’s because you don’t actually understand what they are. In truth things are nothing by themselves. In practice, they are liabilities and not assets.

A Gentleman’s Guide to the NBA: When Players Agree to Take Plays Off

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Bleacher Report:

Thanks to Jokic, Bell learned earlier than most this important lesson about NBA life: In a sport in which games can last nearly three hours and seasons almost nine months, it becomes essential to save strength for the more important moments. After all, 100 percent effort on 100 percent of plays would sap even the greatest of deities of their godly gifts and transform contests into stumbling slogs.

And so to avoid this descent into the mud, many players strike unofficial pacts with their opponents. Possessions are punted, secrets are traded, game plans are passed along. It’s not that these players don’t care about the outcomes of games. Think of it, instead, as a sort of gentleman’s pact between players, one governing action across the NBA.

I found this article fascinating.

Watch MLB TV in Picture in Picture on a Mac

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Six Colors:

It’s baseball season again, and there’s some good news for people who use MLB TV to watch out-of-market games on their Mac: This is the year that Major League Baseball has finally ditched Flash or Silverlight or whatever they were previously using for desktop streaming. This is nice, because it means I can use Safari (my preferred browser) rather than Chrome (which I keep around for sites that aren’t compatible with Safari or require Flash). But there’s a great side effect: It finally gives Macs the ability to do what iPads have been able to do for a couple of years, namely pop a baseball game into Picture in Picture mode, so it floats above other windows on your screen without any browser chrome getting in the way. […] Still, I was able to enable the Picture in Picture mode by using PiPifier, an app in the Mac App Store that adds a picture-in-picture button to the Safari toolbar.

You can grab the extension here. It works great.