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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The WaPo did a very interesting article on the Christian homeschool movement and some of the underlying ideology behind it. I was surprised to learn how integral they were to the adoption of homeschooling as an alternative to public education but not shocked to hear how xenophobic and isolationist their doctrine is.
Over decades, they have eroded state regulations, ensuring that parents who home-school face little oversight in much of the country. More recently, they have inflamed the nation’s culture wars, fueling attacks on public-school lessons about race and gender with the politically potent language of “parental rights.”
The article follows a family who began to question their fundamentalist beliefs and sent their daughter to public school, only to find it wasn’t full of satanic child molesters, as they’d been told.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation: How to Enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, and why you should. I’d like to set this up among all of the devices we have here, but we run a lot of older gear that won’t be covered under this seup—and the idea that if I do enable this, we’ll lose some functionality on things like the Apple TV or this old laptop doesn’t thrill me.
Andy Baio has made many amazing things for the internet, one of which is/was called Belong.io, which was a tool using the Twitter API to scrape interesting links from the feeds of a bunch of interesting people daily. With Phony Stark blowing up the service and charging for the API, he’s shut the whole thing down:
Truth be told, it was already dying as those interesting people slowed down their Twitter usage, or left entirely in the wake of Elon Musk’s acquisition and a series of decisions that summarily ruined it as a platform for creative experimentation.
bummer.
The Washington Post did a deep dive of the dataset used to train popular AI models like ChatGPT, and as you might expect, the big websites got crawled heavily. Interestingly, IdiotCentral here didn’t show up at all, but billdugan.com ranks 1,078,227th.
Songslikex is supposed to be a tool to suggest other songs you might like based on something you suggest. I’ve put in a couple of slightly off-center suggestions and it’s returned a list of songs that were OK, but I don’t know that I’d put them all in the same category. I don’t know how they’re developing their list, but I guess it’s OK.
