For Your Consideration

After a fervent sweepstakes, reigning American League Most Valuable Player Shohei Ohtani has agreed to terms with the Dodgers on a record-demolishing 10-year, $700 million deal, according to his agent, Nez Balelo.

This is incredible, ridiculous, and frustrating.

Incredible

No free agent in any sport has ever received a contract worth this much. It’s a huge play by the Dodgers, and a windfall for Ohtani who definitely has nothing to worry about financially. Time will tell whether the deal is good when considering Ohtani as a player long-term, but as a move they can leverage as marketing it’s likely going to pay for itself rapidly. Ohtani is a superstar across the world, particularly in Japan and the United States. Between the merchandise the Dodgers will sell and the butts in seats they’ll get even in the next two seasons, I have to imagine they know it’s worth the investment. If they can make some deep playoff runs, that’ll do even more.

Ridiculous

What the hell, Dodgers? Can you let any other team have a fighting chance? They really are become more like the Yankees than the Yankees in terms of throwing money at problems (while also annoyingly being quite good at developing their own players). The money in this deal is absurd and I can’t imagine being matched by any deal within the next decade.

Frustrating

With the Giants being my second team, it’ll be infuriating how much I’ll want to go to games when the Dodgers are in town so I can see Ohtani play, and it’ll also be infuriating as I sit here along with all the other Giants fans wondering how we can possible compete in the division now. It isn’t actually impossible—baseball is a strange sport, and the Dodgers still haven’t figured out their pitching situation—but boy is it tremendously disheartening at first glance. Why couldn’t he have gone to Toronto?

It’ll also be awful seeing the national networks and MLB fawn over him as a Dodger. It was charming and fun to see Ohtani do his thing in Anaheim because the focus was on the player. He was and is incredible, but it wasn’t part of a juggernaut team that doesn’t seem to have any particularly fun vibe. Now it’ll be in the context of the Dodgers, and MLB will be pushing the Dodgers hard every time they get a chance. I’m going to be sick of it very quickly, even though I’ll still watch every good Ohtani highlight that comes out in the next decade. He’s good, I just wish he could be good on some other team.

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I’ve never done a blogging “quote post” like this, but I’m toying with using this blog for a little more than just my Monday updates. We’ll see if it sticks, but I might as well use my own website’s capacity and see how it fits.

December 4, 2023December 7, 2023

NaNoWriMo 2023 Recap

I just completed my NaNoWriMo project for 2023. I wrote three stories for The Last Question world in thirty days, totaling 30,984 words. You can find the drafts on the NaNoWriMo page of this blog, with the caveat that they are indeed drafts. Let’s get into how this all went.

November 27, 2023November 26, 2023

Let Work Be the Work

I enjoy playing with technology, trying new apps, and adjusting my processes. I listen to podcasts that nominally focus on productivity and the tools to get work done. You can look at my track record of changing writing setups to understand what I mean. It’s easy to conflate optimizing how you work and the work you’re trying to do. It’s rarely the case that these are one and the same, so it’s good to remember that the only way to accomplish a task is by doing it.¹

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Some of this post was discussed in OHAC 52.

November 20, 2023November 19, 2023

NaNoWriMo 2023 Check In

I’m behind my 30,000 word goal, which is why I’m writing this post as a fallback instead of something longer and unrelated to NaNoWriMo. It’s still possible for me to maintain a pace that gets me done on time, but I haven’t been making as much progress in my free time as I’d like.

My biggest issue this year is that I’m still not allowing myself to write freely. I’m thinking a little too much in the moment, trying to self-edit, and not just getting a story out there that can be refined at a later date.

Yet I’m happy with the work I’ve done so far. I think I have the bones of compelling stories, and I look forward to coming back to them after this month is over when I’m ready to do some editing in earnest.

November 13, 2023November 12, 2023

Problem-First Thinking

I was in a position to provide some talking points for my company’s upper-level math textbooks. It was written in the aftermath of customer-induced pique regarding how we sell ourselves. While it’s focused on my company, the core idea of a problem-first approach extends beyond what we do in particular.

November 6, 2023November 3, 2023

2023 World Series Review

The Texas Rangers won the World Series in five games over the Arizona Diamondbacks, and by the end it looked as inevitable as the 4–1 victory shows. I was fairly neutral going in—I have some connections to the Rangers via the Twins, but felt myself rooting for the underdogs in Arizona more often than not—and so my hope, as always, was for a tense series that went at least six games. That didn’t transpire, and viewership was down as the matchup was panned across popular sports media, but that hardly matters to me.

October 30, 2023October 29, 2023

NaNoWriMo 2023 Announcement

I’ve done something for National Novel Writing Month each year since 2019. That first year was the only time I’ve “won” by getting to fifty thousand words, but I’ve always appreciated the exercise and change of pace required to make a reasonable attempt. November is just around the corner, so it’s time to consider my plans for this year’s effort.

October 23, 2023October 21, 2023

(Another) iPad Writing Setup

I switched back to Ulysses and refined the Writing homescreen on my iPad. I have no idea how long this particular setup will last considering the short time spent since I previously discussed this, but it feels stable, all my writing can live in a single app, and I can drop the dance I’d tried with iCloud to make iA Writer work across all my devices.