It was announced on Tuesday that the editor of Deadspin, Gawker’s sports-oriented website, was fired for “not sticking to sports” by his equity firm corporate overlords. Deadspin has been a daily stop of mine for years now, partially because of the sports reporting, but more because of the ancillary content: it’s often the stuff that’s on the periphery of sports that I like to read. I’ve always enjoyed the editorial voice found there, and the writers they’ve collected over the years were original and interesting. The Outline puts it well:
No other publication has turned such a consistently critical, interrogative, moral, and necessarily cynical eye toward an industry rotted through with bullshit, while also maintaining the levity and humor sometimes required to think seriously about what many people see as children’s games, and more importantly, provide an enjoyable reading experience.
The editor was fired because they told him to run more ads and mess with the formula that made the site profitable. It should be said that the new owners have no prior experience running a media outlet. One of them made his money building an internet advertising company, which is why Deadspin is now suddenly covered in autoplay videos. Yesterday, pretty much the entire staff up and quit.
The media landscape is getting more and more grim as the days go on. Excellent sites are shutting down, being sued out of existence, or just quietly dying on the vine. Go home and hug your family, and make sure your subscription to the New York Times is paid in full.
Update: Drew Magary quit this morning. Removing the site from my reading list.
Look at that. It’s going to be a couple of days before we can do anything with it, but I can’t wait to park on it.
There’s a crew outside with a bobcat scraping inches of dirt, rock, and mulch off the top of the driveway to prepare it for crushed gravel. They’re going 3″ down before they build things back up, so they’ve already uncovered a hand-built “drain” that was put in to the right side of the garage door at some point 30 years ago which had completely collapsed. All of the mulch is gone, as is the curb on the far side. We’re widening out the front to make it a true two-lane driveway, as well as building up and leveling off the far side so that we don’t need to continually parallel-park on a slope.
It’s about 16′ at its widest, which is a tight two-car width, but that’s worlds better than a 1-car dirt pathway. And that fucking curb is gone! They’ll be back to put down the asphalt tomorrow.
Huh. Good thing I bought a second-hand Apple Watch, I guess: Alphabet is in talks to buy FitBit. Sounds a lot like Nest a few years ago. Time to download all my data and delete my account.
This thread on the Binder Planet is amazing: a guy in Pennsylvania bought a roached out Scout II and decided he was going to rebuild the tub one part at a time. He started in September of 2018 and he’s already got the tub bedlined and in the middle of sanding and blocking. His metalwork skills are superb. This makes me want a full shop and a couple of months of spare time SO BAD.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I had a couple of hours yesterday to start moving piping around in the bathroom yesterday. First up were the drainpipes, which were pretty easy to get to and easier to extend with the right replacement fittings. The one on the right took a bit longer because I had to notch out one of the wall studs to get the pipe to clear. The one on the left might have taken 15 minutes in total, from cutting the wallboard to cementing the extension in place.
Then I started on the water supply piping. You can see where the cabinet edges are by where the blue tape is. I had to shut the main water supply off because I was still getting pressure upstairs, but I moved the left-side supply over and got one of the right-side pipes moved before I had to stop last night.
Does that look like shit? Yes. Will it clean things up under the cabinets and make life easier? Hell yes. Will anyone ever see it? Only if you’re looking at this post.
Next, I’ll make a pass-through notch on the underside edge of the cabinets, then re-measure the supply pipes and use the hole saw to cut access holes through the backs and bottoms of each cabinet for the pipes. After that, I’ll set each of the cabinets next to each other and level them out before drilling holes to connect all three together as a level unit. Then I’ll take them apart, set them down over the holes and into place, and connect them back up as one unit before leveling the whole thing off and connecting it to the wall.
Our Velveeta Baby-in-Chief doesn’t like the coverage he’s getting in print journalism, so he instructs all federal agencies to cancel their subscriptions to the Washington Post and the New York Times. I don’t know whether to laugh or be gravely concerned for his mental health. I give him another 3 months before he’s holed up in a room pissing in jars and collecting his own fingernail clippings.
The giant patches of dirt spread across our lawn have started sprouting grass over the last couple of days, which is a relief. I’d been able to water 80% of it about 60% of the time the week it was laid down, but we’ve been living though about a month without rain, so a lot of that moisture evaporated as it came out of the sprinkler. The other issue is that there are a lot of distant small patches that are hard to cover unless you’re out there all afternoon moving the sprinkler around, and I don’t have that ability. With the rain we’ve gotten the last two weeks, things have finally stayed damp and the seed has started sprouting. It’s nice to look out there and see things becoming green again. It appears that the new gutter drainage seems to be working, although I’m going to need to shore up the erosion around its edges when the rest of the grass comes in.
We’ve got the driveway folks coming next week to dig up and lay down pavement, which is exciting! Especially as I’m seeing the tracks of runoff from the front gutters pointing directly at the front of the garage. I’m ready to clean that whole side of the house up and deal with the water over there once and for all. And, to have a solid driveway to work on/ride bikes on/rake leaves on/walk on will be heavenly.