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Blog - PAGE 24

Second Life: Rethinking Myself

Jason Tate

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

Jason Tate

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

Basketball
Jason Tate

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.

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Getting Out of a Creative Funk

Jason Tate

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.

Read More “Getting Out of a Creative Funk”

How Do You Use Drafts?

Drafts
Jason Tate

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.

Read More “How Do You Use Drafts?”

The Disgrace of Minor League Baseball

Jason Tate

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.

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Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley

Jason Tate

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.

What Did the Stoics Think About Fame?

Jason Tate

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

Basketball
Jason Tate

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

Jason Tate

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.

Clueyness: A Weird Kind of Sad

Jason Tate

Tim Urban:

At the time, my dad didn’t think much of it—pretty normal day in their lives. But later on, he found himself remembering that day, and he always felt bad about it. He pictured his father sitting there at the table, now alone, with all the cards and pieces laid out. He pictured him waiting for a little while before accepting that it wasn’t gonna happen today, then collecting all the pieces and cards he had laid out, putting them back in the box, and putting the box back in the closet.

Pretty random story for my dad to tell me, right? The reason he did was because it was part of a conversation where I was trying to articulate a certain thing I suffer from, which is feeling incredibly bad for certain people in certain situations—situations in which the person I feel bad for was probably barely affected by what happened. It’s an odd feeling of intense heartbreaking compassion for people who didn’t actually go through anything especially bad.

I do this all the time.

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The Intellectual We Deserve

Jason Tate

Nathan J. Robinson:

Jordan Peterson appears very profound and has convinced many people to take him seriously. Yet he has almost nothing of value to say. This should be obvious to anyone who has spent even a few moments critically examining his writings and speeches, which are comically befuddled, pompous, and ignorant. They are half nonsense, half banality. In a reasonable world, Peterson would be seen as the kind of tedious crackpot that one hopes not to get seated next to on a train.

But we do not live in a reasonable world.

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