I’m a certified card guy. A notable greeting card enthusiast. A frequent mail-based correspondent. I think Bob at my local post office recognizes me. I purchase two or three birthday cards from my local grocery and drug stores each month, and I don’t cut corners. I am steadfastly selective. Below are my card criteria I recommend everyone use to ensure a meaningful choice, and to encourage card manufacturers to improve their options. ...
I’ve played hundreds of hours of Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch,1 and though I don’t fancy myself a leading expert on the game—I’m still short of my 10,000 hours—one picks up a thing or two after seven years of gameplay. I bought the Nintendo Switch 2 to play Mario Kart World and have played a few hours in both solo and split-screen modes. I’m conflicted by their new take on the original Grand Prix while remaining intrigued by the new Knockout Tour option, and I’m too afraid of my free time to dive into Open Roam. Since I’ve spent most of my time with traditional Grand Prix races, I’ll focus my thoughts on them. ...
I discussed morning pages just over one year ago when I was one month into the practice and, as it turned out, one month away from dropping it. My last set of morning pages was July 27, 2024. I’ve been in a creative rut over the last couple months, often writing blog posts last-minute, not making progress on other projects, and not even taking time to read consistently. It’s hard to pin down a cause but that doesn’t mean I couldn’t try a treatment. I’ve written 1000 words of morning pages each day of the past week, having made two changes that I hope will help it stick. ...
I’m fairly confident all Major League Baseball players have gotten bigger over time, but I specifically decided to use the newest version of the Lahman Baseball Database to look at the average weight of catchers by the decade in which they debuted. Their listed weights are static so we can’t be certain what their debut weights were, but we’re looking at large trends. I also required any catcher in the list to have caught at least 200 career games. ...
I just updated my post answering a question from a coworker. It feels good to put that to rest.
This delightful contest celebrating the command of language by constructing concise opening sentences to hypothetical novels bursts into my awareness each year as internet denizens share the best (worst?) entries. Nominees display subtlety and nuance by brazenly breaking as many written and unwritten literary rules as possible with fewer than 200 characters. This contest appears built for social media, despite starting in 2001. It drives to the core of good and bad writing by isolating a single sentence, perhaps two, given only the context that it begins a book you’ve just plucked off the shelf. The analysis of each worthy submission is deep and, most importantly, funny. ...
There are better sources for exploring exactly how the current political regime’s actions rhyme with other populist and fascist movements. Instead, let’s consider a story that is tamer while also being emblematic of current policies. In 1897, a state representative in Indiana attempted to legislate that a disproven mathematical statement was true and, in the process, implied that π is equal to 3.2.1 ...
Tapestry by Iconfactory has significantly improved my internet experience. Similar in some ways to feeeed, which I wrote about last fall, Tapestry combines my social media accounts and RSS feeds into a single timeline. While feeeed separates itself by a larger number of built-in source connections and its “magazine” approach of curating recent items, Tapestry is focused on a linear display that holds place. You don’t scroll back to find older items you may have missed; instead, your position is held, and you scroll forward in time to see what has happened since you last opened the app. It’s the only sensible way to interact with news and media, and matches what I and many others love about the Mastodon client Ivory. ...
I don’t recall what I was listening to when this popped into my head, but I was curious about the origin of fan used to mean a “supporter” or “devotee.” I recently installed Terminology across my devices and set the Online Etymology Dictionary as a preferred resource. According to them: 1889, American English, originally of baseball enthusiasts, probably a shortening of fanatic, but it may be influenced by the fancy, a collective term for followers of a certain hobby or sport (especially boxing)… Fan mail attested from 1920, in a Hollywood context; Fan club attested by 1930. ...
The San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres split their four-game series last week, with each team winning two games by one run. In our #social-baseball slack channel, my coworker asked: any data whizzes wanna figure out how many MLB 4 game series have ended 2-2 with all one-run games? I put myself on the case. UPDATE JULY 6, 2025 I finally took the time to do this properly. I exported game-by-game data from Retrosheet since 1900 and (with the help of Claude) used pandas to analyze the data for these split series decided by one run each game.1 ...