Only the most delusional person would ever think they could play alongside seven-footers
Seven things to read this weekend.
1ď¸âŁ On Losing Everything to the Climate Crisis, except for Hope
âYesterday my home burnt down to ashes. It couldnât be saved from the forest fires currently raging across California. Iâm of course still in shock and deeply sad about losing my house and everything material I owned. But Iâm still able to be calm, keep perspective, and even hope. I wanted to share this note with some immediate reflections from my side with everyone who has been sending me some much support and love.â
2ď¸âŁ The Wildest Insurance Fraud Scheme Texas Has Ever Seen
âThereâs a guy smoking a cigarette,â said T.âR. of the purchase overseas, âand he comes in real shady. You hand him your briefcase full of cash and you hope to God that six weeks later your containers and MiG parts arrive in Californiaâwhich they did. So now I have, by my math, two hundred yearsâ worth of [parts] for my L-39. Well, what am I going to do with that? Iâm going to do the same thing that I did with my junkyard business in 2005: I start putting them online.â
3ď¸âŁ Sweatpants Forever
âWhen Sternberg says âglobal fashion system,â heâs referring to the ecosystem of designers, fashion media and stores that puts us all in clothes. Fashion week is where those entities meet. The reason spring collections are shown in the fall (and vice versa) is so they can be ordered, reviewed and produced in time for the actual season. As with most things, this system was upended by the internet. Once normal people could view collections online â which, confusingly, they couldnât buy until six months later â everything began to accelerate.â
4ď¸âŁ How MSCHF managed to dominate the internet â with fun!
âTheir first drop, in May 2019, was a 2008 Windows laptop running six pieces of malware, which have collectively caused $95 billion in financial damage. It eventually sold for $1.34 million. After that, MSCHF put out âMan Eating Food,â a YouTube channel that had videos of a guy eating any food viewers requested; it obviously went viral. Then there was a version of Times New Roman that was slightly wider than the original font (âTimes Newer Romanâ), a Slack-based guessing game (âWord of the Dayâ), a Google Chrome extension that let you watch Netflix at work by making it look like you were on a conference call (âNetflix Hangoutsâ), and a website that converted any article on Wikipedia into academic prose (âM-Journalâ).
The feeling of stumbling across a MSCHF product in the wild is a little like discovering a TV show you love and then realizing you still have four perfect seasons left to watch.â
5ď¸âŁ Homesteading the Twittersphere
âGift cultures work fine when the value of gifts being exchanged are well understood, but they work even better when the value of those gifts are hard to know exactly. The optimal return for you is to give something away thatâs highly, but imprecisely valuable; and new, but not completely new.
If no one knows what youâre talking about at all, your gift is valueless - but if youâve recontributed something thatâs already in the public domain, that isnât valuable - itâs like duplicating an existing open source project for no reason. The group will actually assign you negative social capital for doing so - itâs bad form. Itâs the same template for getting in the door and earning your first bit of social capital in Silicon Valley: âCan I join your group? Iâm like you; almost.ââ
6ď¸âŁ The Conscience of Silicon Valley
âTech oracle Jaron Lanier warned us all about the evils of social media. Too few of us listened. Now, in the most chaotic of moments, his fearsâand his bighearted solutionsâare more urgent than ever.â
7ď¸âŁ Ball Donât Lie
âBasketball has always generated a different set of metaphors than football and baseball. Part of the distinction comes from the sport itself, which, like boxing, presents the athlete as both ordinary person and superhuman. Because it is played without caps or helmets and in a relatively small space, basketball allows us to see not only the emotions a player experiences during the game but also the beauty and extraordinary skill that goes into every minute of action. Itâs possible that you or I might close our eyes and picture ourselves playing second base for the Mets, but only the most delusional person would ever think they could play alongside seven-footers with forty-inch vertical leaps.â