Posted on in Sports

The World Baseball Classic is cool and good and should happen every June

At this blog, we’re going to take it for granted that Shohei Otani is cool as shit (and should be a Met by this time next year). The World Baseball Classic had a ton of highs, and I’m sad that it’s already over and excited for the next one. But the WBC is such a weird baseball event that even though I followed the tournament in gamer and YouTube clip form, I didn’t watch that many of the games themselves.

Part of it is that it happens in March, sure: I spent my sports-watching chits on the NCAA tournament over the weekend (though I seemed to have other things to do Saturday around noon). I’m not opposed to winter baseball, but the rhythm isn’t there yet.

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Posted on in Economy, Readings, SFF, Sports

What I’ve Been Reading (20 March 2023)

  • Larva Pupa Imago by Eric Schwitzgebel at Clarkesworld. I’m always a sucker for an SF story with alien biology, and this one—from a philosophy professor at UC Riverside, no less—delivers the goods. It’s not just looking at the lifecycle of post-Anthropocene butterflies, but a dive into personhood and memory as well. Highly recommend.
  • This Isn’t the Middle Age Millennials Expected by Jessica Grose in the NYT. A wide ranging look at the millennial generation as we start to enter middle age (and on the precipice of yet another damn recession). I’ve got thoughts on this that I’m trying to get sorted into a longer, actual structured essay, but it boils down to our generation making the most out of a bad hand, and that this isn’t too different from what generations other than the Boomers really faced.
  • Two Rivals, One Bedroom by Rory Smith in the NYT. Two footballers in the top flight of Dutch soccer, playing on rival teams—and still sharing their childhood bedroom!

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Posted on in Stupid

Today is not pi day. Pi day is 22 July:

  • Support the more efficient date format
  • Support the higher-precision pi approximation
Posted on in Reviews, Sports, Web

First Thoughts: ESPN Redesign 

An infinite scrolling news site I actually like.

ESPN’s new site design, which it launched last week, is the strongest implementation of infinite scrolling that I’ve yet seen. More and more sites seem to be moving in this direction, and while I’m not convinced that it’s ideal for every content provider, it does seem to fit sports perfectly.

The new site was launched April 1, which seems like a weird day to do that until you realize it was the twentieth anniversary of espn.com. The new site isn’t an equivalent leap online, but it does feel like a major step forward.

ESPN has clearly been working on this for a while. Conceptually, a lot of the design ideas that ESPN implemented here have been tested on ESPN FC, the company’s soccer vertical. That site—rolled out last year, just in time for the World Cup—also features infinite scrolling on both the front page and the news pages. (more…)