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Playball for Terminal

I came across the javascript terminal app Playball. It’s fun and slick, and I’m enjoying using it. It gives you a way to view MLB Gameday data from the terminal, and it’s beautifully done.

When you first run the app after installing it via npm, you are greeted with the day’s schedule, and the box scores of any games.

Keyboard navigation hints are shown at the bottom of the window at all times, so you can easily look at scores from previous days, or check out the schedule in the future. You can jump back to the current day at any point. Navigating any screen can be done with either the arrow keys or vim keybindings.

Standings are available as well, following the same format you would see in the MLB app.

The gameday stream is excellent. It provides a complete boxscore up top, a left pane containing information about the at-bat, and a right pane with all play-by-play information. All of the colors can be configured to your liking, and I’m particularly a fan of the occupied bases diagram.

After watching a Snazzy Labs video about terminal apps, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using the terminal more. I lost that part of my computing life when I switched to macOS, but it’s delightful to reenter the fold.

Playball is a fun project that is actually useful because it takes away all the cruft and clutter of a web app, stripping it down to present the core information in a highly readable way with no loss of functionality. Give it a shot.

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Student Monitoring, Safety, and Privacy

In my weekly perusal of education newsletters, I came across a Time magazine article about new attempts to bring AI and machine learning to monitoring student behavior on school devices. While the article focuses on student mental health—suicide prevention in particular—I looked into the companies mentioned therein and discovered that the scope of monitoring efforts is broad and deep. It is a fascinating and discomforting topic, with each company working on a different aspect of student safety with rhetoric to match.

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Frankenstein and Retelling Old Tales

I just finished Frankenstein, which I last read during my British Literature class in high school. It reminded me of the phenomenon of Disney retelling an old story with key details removed and altered to make it kid-friendly,1This most recently came up when running trivia for some friends a couple months ago, when I learned the original written version of Pinocchio ends with the puppet being hanged on a tree. though in Frankenstein this happens in reverse.

Every representation of the monster2Indeed, we all know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, and he creates an unnamed monster. in popular media that I’m aware of is a green, slow-moving, large man, often with bolts in his neck. In reality, the book shows a monster who learns much about the world by observing a small family in a cottage, eventually becoming literate and quite eloquent. He also possesses superhuman speed, strength, and stamina while requiring only a limited vegetarian diet. It’s a fascinating tale that explores the concept of sin, revenge, and responsibility; most of that is lost in the classic “monster movie”.

I fondly recall the surprise I had at this in high school, and rediscovered a similar enthusiasm reading it a decade later. I wholly recommend Frankenstein to anyone who is willing to wade through flowery British prose from the 1800s.

  • 1
    This most recently came up when running trivia for some friends a couple months ago, when I learned the original written version of Pinocchio ends with the puppet being hanged on a tree.
  • 2
    Indeed, we all know Frankenstein is the name of the scientist, and he creates an unnamed monster.
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Elemental, a Pixar Film

I’ve watched nearly every Pixar movie. I have some I entirely adore and will happily rewatch whenever the opportunity presents. The others I still enjoy but they don’t have an ongoing impact on my life. Elemental is firmly in the second category. Its charm and inventive physical humor kept me delighted, and its role as a modern fable about immigration and racism makes it worth watching, but its story had inconsistent pacing with confusing characterization.

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Writing With Care

I read a short dialogue with the previously-mentioned Frederick Hess, in which he complains about researchers intentionally obfuscating their ideas behind a wall of jargon. He argues that plain writing, using diction that is clear and precise, is the ideal way to present ideas. Anything else is grandiose and an attempt at an appeal to authority. While I don’t agree with several details in that discussion, or the flippant attacks hidden among the core of his argument, there is insight worth exploring.

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Cory Wong in Oakland

After a bout of COVID in November of 2022 stopped Erin and I from seeing Cory Wong in San Francisco, I’ve been eagerly awaiting his next tour. He announced tour dates last August and I immediately jumped on tickets and invited friends along. It was a magnificent concert, easy to enjoy, fun, funny, thoughtful, and precise.

Cory is a musician’s musician, but straddles the line of speaking to a knowledgeable fan-base while creating music and entertainment for a broad audience. His Cory and the Wongnotes variety show dives into musical topics in collaboration with amazing musicians. His On the One series discusses details of music production and what decisions go into making a finished piece of music. Meanwhile, Wong on Ice is impressively absurd.

I’m not a huge fan of musical artists in general. I never followed anyone closely growing up, and don’t have a strong knowledge of any particular band’s discography. I don’t often go to live music. But something about Cory Wong continues to capture me, and I’ll continue to see him whenever I get the chance. I’m rooting for my fellow Minnesota boy.

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“The Great School Rethink” and Assessing Ideas

Last fall I read The Great School Rethink by Frederick Hess, who works with the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute. He focuses largely on education policy initiatives, many of which might be familiar: school choice, assessments, funding distribution, and curriculum adoption, among others. While I find these topics and the debates around them interesting, my main takeaway from reading this book was broader. It reminded me that a person is not static, and when we talk with someone we have to focus more on the thoughts they’re presenting and not conflate that with our notions of who the person is when taken as a sum of their parts.

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