Thursday 10/17/24
People don't understand the difference between "favorite" and "best." That's how loath they are to think and how narcissistic they are. Social media fosters narcissism. People start thinking they're this important, central character in this nonexistent story/drama they build up in their minds. There are no outside, contributing factors to what they say. They don't apply concepts--or questions--of sense. "Is this logical?" They answer to this emotional impulse which, over time, and more and more hours on social media, is increasingly unchecked until there is nothing to stop it, nothing it answers to or is tempered by.
You also have people who say "This is my favorite whatever" because it gets them attention. It's not their favorite anything. They don't listen to it, read it, watch it. They picked it in this context because they thought it would help them look a certain way. Increasingly, that's why everyone does everything. A result is that they lose every aspect of the real self. They have no identity. People know them for these things that they are not and they don't know themselves at all, because there is nothing there for them to know. They're just an empty pit.
Bumble was a dating app where women had to send the first message. You swipe, and if you match, the first message had to come from them. They would often write " " because most women believe they should not have to say anything in order to receive compliments, which is what most of them are on these datings apps for: That and attention. Then they are alone, miserable, depressed, almost certainly a self-billed cat mom, and hate men, go off about the patriarchy, and will either die alone, unloved by all, because if you're like this, things go much further than a lack of a boyfriend or husband, or will pair up with someone they don't love at all, whom they will slow-burn hate over time. That's how it works in our society. Equality! But the guy has to say something first. Well, this proved too hard to do for these women, so Bumble changed things, so that they no longer have to write first and they can just sit back and wait for the guy to do that so they can blow them off, be rude to them, get that attention, and hate men more. Ah. Sounds smart.
Do you know how much better the world would be for everyone, how many difficulties would be removed, how less stressful it'd be, how much more rewarding, if everyone agreed to try just a tiny bit harder, and made an attempt to be a tiny bit less lazy, and a tiny bit less of an absolute moron? So many of the things that people bitch about--the people who make life this way, I should say--and are depressed about, and can't deal with, and cry about, would either go away or be lessened.
Why can no one see this? We are all in something together, to various degrees. Try a little harder.
Quite often, being less stupid is a choice. I'll give you a good example of that soon in a stand-alone entry concerning a psychologist--she may have been a psychiatrist, I'll double check--on a dating app.
Today I took a wet paper towel to the inside one of the mugs from which I drink my tea. The dishwasher has not worked in like ten years. That paper towel became black as a coal mine.
There's all this information, data, studies, about how people who drink a lot of black tea live longer. So someone says to me, "Then why don't British people live longer than anyone?"
Because a lot of them put sugar in that tea. Sugar is your enemy. Sugar will kill you. Processed sugar. Avoid as much of it as you can.
Drink your tea black. Drink your coffee black. Stain the mug!
I watched a stilted, poorly acted, but fairly faithful adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow from 1999. The fellow who played Ichabod Crane--Brent Carver--was easily the best member of the cast (the female lead mispronounced "gibbet"--and the director just left it in, I guess--and the guy who played Brom Bones was worse than any kid you'll see in a high school play). I looked him up after and was saddened to see he died at only sixty-eight. Had a long theatrical resume.
Was looking at these Gold Glove finalists. I'm actually unsure if there were Gold Glove finalists in 1975. I feel like this is a more recent development. But I have to admit: I've never really believed in defensive metrics that much. I think they're misleading and they don't tell you a lot. It's better to watch the fielder field.
Jarren Duran is a finalist for the AL Gold Glove in center field. I don't care what someone wants to do with numbers, he's not a very good outfielder. There are worse outfielders, but he's by no means great. He's better than he used to be. But he gets late jumps, he still takes the occasional bad route, his arm isn't a strength. In reading reading the summaries for the three players at each position in both leagues, I saw that it all came down to arcane defensive metrics. Everyone was nominated simply because of those analytics. On the whole, I don't believe they're a reliable indicator of defensive efficiency.
I hate how everything is now like this. The MVP is now more akin to an award for who had the highest WAR. That's not necessarily the "Most Valuable" player. You can be more valuable to your team than any other player is to theirs and have lesser stats than some other players. It's the Most Valuable Player. Not automatically the guy with the best advanced metrics.
I recall Carlton Fisk making a comment once about how he must have only been good enough to win a Gold Glove his rookie year. He was being peppery. You could tell that was something that had stuck with him. I'm not saying he should have had seven, but he should have had three. When I watch his games now I'm struck by how athletic he was behind the plate. A catcher-athlete is different than a catcher-catcher. A super athlete all-around.
Yankees-Guardians is unfolding as I expected it to. Two brutal base running errors by the Yankees in the same inning in Game 2, though. How does that happen outside of spring training? If they had lost, you would have heard a lot about those two bonehead plays.
A decent team that's not actually that good is going to win the World Series. There are no great teams right now, and I don't believe there are even any very good teams. It could be the Yankees. As a Red Sox fan, you'd think I would say that'd bother me, but it wouldn't. If Sox-Yankees was the rivalry it had once been, the Yankees winning might even be good for the Sox because then ownership would conceivably try to put a competitive roster together. I just don't think they care, though, either way.
When the Jets brought in Aaron Rodgers I thought there was no way that would work. This guy has such a bad attitude. He was older, wanted to get paid one last time, is a perpetual malcontent now. Did people think that was going to lead to...what? A title? He's a colossal underachiever for the kind of ability he had. Certain guys get the most out of their talent, other guys don't get as much as they should. In sports, you can have less talent and be far better than guys more talented than you. You need talent. Don't get me wrong. You see these ridiculous narratives where certain guys are talked about like they can barely hit a ball off a T or shoot a puck into an open net. That's nonsense. People talk about Wayne Gretzky like he had the physical skills of a plus-level beer leaguer and everything else was his brain. But talent means a lot less when you don't do right by it. Write that down.
I threw away many of my drugs. That sounds like something else. I mean aspirin and what not that had expired. The recent Neosporin discovery has me on the lookout. I guess I sort of figured that over the counter drugs lasted indefinitely? Seems like a racket that they don't. I need to have all of that aspirin and all of that cough syrup by this date or they just don't work anymore? Okay. I don't like this. I've been throwing out some good stuff. Or what I thought was good stuff. For any eventuality.
I saw someone argue that Pee Wee Reese might have been one of the top twenty baseball players of all-time if he hadn't missed three years to service time. This is so wrong, but I love the argument! He wouldn't be top twenty, but he might very well be top 100. Pee Wee Reese is one of the most underrated players in the game's history and he'll become more and more underrated. He'll become forgotten, once people who are now a certain age and above die off. No one below a certain age is going to know anything about any kind of history. I've always known history. All forms of history.
It never entered my min to think I should just know about the world in my time on it. That would have been a crazy idea to me at six-years-old. I would have been baffled by the very thought of it. Out of the question. I know to the right on the timeline, I know to the left, I know what's happening during the dot I'm standing on. The ignorance and arrogance of thinking you should only know anything about the world during those years of your physical existence blows me away. It's a speck in time. Why would you confine yourself to a speck? People will say, "You weren't around..." at he start of a conversation as their reason why the person they're talking to couldn't possibly know this thing they're about to discuss from 1969, and I'd be so embarrassed if that was me. What does me being around have to do with me knowing anything? Once you are around you can know it all. Or at lot.
Analytics has killed off an understanding of baseball. People just look at those numbers and highlights. Baseball has always been a numbers game, and yet, analytics are worse for baseball than perhaps any other sport. You see things when you watch games that are not in those analytics. You see how players contribute to wins in ways that don't get statistically codified. Take those shortstops from the 1950s. Those players could be so much more than their numbers. They were the soul of a team. Without them, it wouldn't have worked. They were often the most important player in terms of that team's success.
Catchers are also like this. Or they were. They were counted on for more than they are now. Certain players are the embodiment of a spiritual leader by how their game functions within the context of the team construct. They pull everything together. They help each part work as well as it does. That's a huge job. That's what i see with a Phil Rizzuto. Everyone else now--or the few who even know who he is--see a guy who shouldn't be in the Hall of Fame. It goes beyond those numbers. And Pee Wee Reese was quite a bit better than Rizzuto. As for modern analytics: Give Reese those three years he missed and his WAR might have been over 80.
The Ohtani coverage is ridiculous and speaks to how dumb and lazy people are. Media outlets can't think up stories and no one can write well, so you just have post after post of bullshit about Ohtani. Autopilot. I saw this photo of him sliding into second--poorly--and then some words beneath that photo from an author going on about how he put his body on the line. By sliding. Wow. It's like he took that hill during the battle all by himself. It's so over the top.
Yesterday I saw where someone said Taylor Swift--who is as mediocre as mediocre can be; like a neighbor who plays the guitar some and writes simple songs about the same exact things from her simple life--is so popular because people want repetitive, bland, dull songs. God that's depressing. It's true. Which is why it's so depressing. You don't just need to lay back, open your mouth, and wait for shit to be shoveled into it. There's nothing in this music. Our age worships mediocrity. It is mediocrity that provides comfort, because everyone is barely alive. They are barely anything. So they partake of things that are barely anything because it's like them and that provides the comfort. It gives them no reason to question or doubt themselves. We are not alive. We are here. Can people really not see the difference? We don't try. We don't open our minds, our hearts, our souls. We open our mouths for the shit. If you liked this--and I don't believe anyone likes Taylor Swift's music as music; I think they like what she represents to them, or they just aren't aware of very much else--imagine how much you'd like other things that are actually amazing if you explored a little? Imagine how much fun that would be? How exciting? How rewarding? If you think Wonder Bread is the most amazing food there is, because you don't eat anything else, what might you find if you went to the grocery store and had a look around?
You know what Taylor Swift has really done? She has mastered the brand of mediocrity. All of these destructive strands of our age. Social media. The lack of being alive. The lack of rising up. The lack of searching. The need to be enabled. That men are bad. How easily we're threatened. How insecure we are. How much we lack for self and an identity. How little focus and purpose we have. Our short attention spans. Our unwillingness to think more, to go deeper. Our need to think that someone else is "achievable" and not beyond us and our capabilities. Our need to only like and say we like that which many others say they like so we feel less alone. Our lack of confidence to be ourselves. Our need for cliches. For triteness. Our fear of substance. Our need to be enabled. Our need to hear, "I'm so sorry that happened to you" when nothing of any note did.
All of these things have come together for a perfect storm of mediocrity. That's what Taylor Swift is. That's what she's harnessed, knowingly or not. Certainly intuitively. That's what it is, that's what she, as this cultural thing, is. That's not a good thing. That's not good for you, it's not good for the world. It's not good that that's where so many people are at and where the world is at and where humanity is at. It's not, "Hey! Let people enjoy what they enjoy," which is one of the dumbest things people say. There is a greater good. And there's a personal good, too. Those things are far more important.
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