- I’m on the plane to Orange County, Calif., and took in this Economist article about the ubiquity of digital recording. As I read it, part of me was doing the older-person “These broad changes to society are bad!” reaction, but I told myself years ago that I wouldn’t be one of those people who can’t deal with change, and I’m already accepting this idea. Part of that is because I already recognize how useful it is to have a digital life-augmentation device thanks to my smartphone — seriously, they are miracle devices on a historical scale — and we’re already finding an incredible number of uses for recording data, so images are no different. The other half accepts this because those who grow up in this image-capture reality aren’t going to know any different. To me, it seems horrifying that the most difficult times of a kid’s life (hey 7th grade!) are being captured for posterity, but the relative impact of living with that when all of your peers are also living with it is much different. It has and will forever be impossible to live two people’s lives, so there’s no way as a young kid to grasp what it would be like without ubiquitous recording. You read about this image-capture paranoia, then you look at the selfie epidemic: people adapt. I will too!
- I’m with this blog post: it’s way hyperactive to think that the extensive ACA website troubles of 2013 are going to have a definite impact on the 2014 elections a full year from now. If they’re fixed sooner rather than later, nobody is going to remember this. A monster typhoon tore up the Phillipines just last week, and it’s already out of the news cycle this week. Presuming that the site is fixed by at least Q1 2014 or so, expecting modern America to care about something that happened a full year ago isn’t very realistic. I don’t really think short memory like that is a good thing, but it’s nonetheless a thing.That said, I certainly sympathize with this lady who had her insurance canceled. If you support the ACA, the proper response to her situation is “Man, I hope that gets fixed, as that’s a pretty big flaw” instead of “Shut up and accept that that extra $5,000 per year is going to a cause greater than your family budget.” There’s always a short end to the stick.
- It wasn’t a single injury or fight or Ray Emergy idiocy that finally crystallized my opposition to fighting in hockey; it was this extremely calm and rational article in which I couldn’t argue with a single one of the points made. So yeah, I’m officially anti-fighting. And that’s coming from a major hockeyfights.com fan and web professional who occasionally cites hockeyfights as a website that delivers exactly what someone interested in hockey fights would want it to deliver. Sorry, hockeyfights, but I’m arguing that you should move your extensive informational skills to some other topic from now on.
- Scoring is way up in the NFL in the past few seasons, thanks largely to the rules changes to protect passers and receivers, and even if it pains me to admit it as a dude from the supposed home of “blue-collar, lunchpail, smashmouth football” (never mind that the Steelers abandoned that a while ago), watching a high-scoring passing game is the best. It also makes me feel a little less guilty about enjoying pro football: take out some of the forceful, repetitive collisions from a run-oriented game and pro football becomes more of a game of athletic skill, with less of the downside of watching grown men give themselves traumatic brain injuries. You could criticize that from either end of the spectrum — “You’re still a heartless capitalist pig who enjoys watching men injure themselves for money” vs. “Football without the smashing of mouths is a game for princesses that just reflects how far America has spiraled into Kenyan socialism” — but the NFL and I both know that watching seven TD passes by the best athletes in the nation is an ongoing visceral thrill, so screw off.
- After overdosing on Metallica in the wake of their being Spotified, I can confidently say that Master of Puppets is the best Metallica album. Consider that confidently said.