This morning I saw a kid wearing a Maradona jersey on the soccer field by my office, and now I have questions for that kid’s parents.
The best poker variants are generally the worst ones
There are two kinds of poker nights: the serious kind, where people play Texas Hold ’Em all night, and the good kind, where the game is dealers choice, no one’s at risk of losing rent money, and you can play wild games like “Pass the Trash” and have two players split the pot with royal flushes. Going through some old files this morning I found a document I wrote up in hopes of organizing the latter kind of night—and it has awoken a desire to get something organized again soon.
I never finished it—lots of the odder games still need to have their rules laid out. But it did include a variant I made up called “Game of Thrones.” It was seven-card stud with the following additional rules:
- King in the North: Kings are high and aces low.
- Noble families: A “blaze,” or a hand consisting of five face cards, is a valid hand; it beats a flush and loses to a full house.1This apparently used to be a valid hand in regular poker; learning about it was, I think, the inspiration for this variant. However, this hand probably won’t occur often, especially with the one true king.
- You may only have one true king: Each player can only have one king showing. if you receive another king up, it’s dead and you do not receive a replacement card. Kings in the hole are safe.
- You win or you die: The winner must have a king or queen in their hand. If the winning hand doesn’t have one, everyone re-antes and the deal passes to the left. This happens even if everyone but you folds: you better have a king.
I am torn between being sad that we never actually played this and being relieved, because this game would have been chaos. On the other hand, it’s not even the dumbest game on the list:
Night Baseball is there! But the only notes for it are, “Jesus, are we really this drunk?”
Bring back the Morning Edition!
Of all the things that I miss most about the old print news paradigm, I miss discovery the most.
That feels like a weird thing to write today when there’s literally infinite content out there and it’s easy to fall down rabbit holes at Wikipedia or TV Tropes or Reddit, but that’s not the same type of discovery I’m talking about. Nor, exactly, am I talking about the kind of discovery that might get someone to read what I’m writing here—the ability to get your thoughts out into the world.
Instead, I’m thinking about the way that I used to read the newspaper every morning, or various weeklies when they came out: for the most part, I read them cover to cover. Starting on my high school commute, I would read the Times backwards to the front. I’d usually start with the Arts section, scanning the front page for the article that caught my eye first before ultimately reading every review, interview and blurb; then I’d move on to Sports and BusinessDay before reading the op-eds and then ultimately the news.
And the result was that I wound up exposed to a lot of stuff that I definitely wouldn’t have clicked on. I might not read an entire article about the new lead dancer at the New York City Ballet, but I’d see the headline and read at least the lede and the nut graf. In the front section, thanks to the old pyramid AP style, I could read about each item until I lost interest—but at least I could get the gist of things.
But today, when I only get the Times on the weekend and my local paper usually gets delivered after I have left for my commute to Manhattan, I’m reading most of my news on a tablet. And reading online, with its bottomless well of content, means that I’m reading far more narrowly than I did before. Because I can never have the sense that I’ve finished reading the paper for the day, I’m more likely to scan the headlines a few times a day and maybe click on four or five articles to read them in more detail. I’m missing a lot of things I would have discovered serendipitously in the past.
(more…)Quick thought 18 April 2023
What’s the odds that the final season of Barry will have a 100 gecs needle drop? 2:1? 5:2? “Most Wanted Person in the United States” would be a perfect fit. This is a show that ended an episode on “Davey Crockett” so anything is possible.
Anyway, Barry’s back! Our long national fever dream about fame and violence is coming to a discomfiting end!
Quick thought 15 April 2023
Even for the Times, this is a ridiculous alignment of subject matter and author.
Dining in Style, at 90 Miles an Hour (The New York Times)
Champerty is bad
The New York Times reported this morning that the founder of LinkedIn, Reid Hoffman, has contributed funding to E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit against the former guy. And it made me think about how Peter Thiel funded a few different lawsuits against Gawker until succeeding with Hulk Hogan’s suit, which led to the Deadspin or Splinter folks introducing me to the concept of champerty.
These days “champerty” is not considered a crime anymore, and to that end it has been renamed to the more anodyne “litigation finance.” But it still kind of sucks! Rich folks being able to fund lawsuit after lawsuit against a desired target until they get a result is yet another thing that’s poisonous to the rule of law, and it doesn’t matter whether I like or hate the target in any given case—
—Hang on, I am just getting word that the article continues:
Mr. Hoffman is part of the so-called PayPal Mafia, a network of well-connected tech executives and investors who got their start at the payments company in the late 1990s. That crew includes the tech mogul Peter Thiel, who is a prominent Republican donor and has secretly funded lawsuits. In 2016 Mr. Thiel paid $10 million for the wrestler Hulk Hogan to sue the media outlet Gawker Media for an invasion of privacy, ultimately leading to Gawker’s bankruptcy.
Holy fuck! I probably shouldn’t be posting this!