“even the most skilled player can’t account for randomness.”

Count me in the camp that likes the original more than the sequel, though both are all-time classics for me. Just a little bit tighter narratively, a little more shocking and moving.

Following the Nerd, there is now a sect of voices on YouTube whose platform is entirely based around angrily criticizing what they view as “social justice”-infected media, often decrying when creators try to increase diversity, if not openly standing against critics using a feminist or other political lens.

The cool kid sports media take right now is to say that fans should devote their time, money, and attention to sports, but also that it’s pathetic for people to get emotionally invested in them. That allows sportswriters to do pretty much the only thing they do anymore - look down their nose at the snobs - but makes…

Barry, you are voicing the overwhelming opinion of the sports media and acting as though it’s a daring, contrarian take. And you did that all the time.

But the RPM stats love him! (More than Kyrie!)

Fair enough!

No, the point I’m making is that sports commentary has overreacted to the Hot Take so thoroughly that entire subcultures (analytics-oriented baseball fans, NBA Twitter) that base their entire enjoyment of sports on contrasting their own more enlightened attitudes against those dumb, deluded fans who deign to get…

Indeed, it’s a product baked into the system. And yet you and Deadspin and the entire Woke NBA Fan Industrial Complex don’t blame the system; you blame fans, who give you the convenient target of people you can look down your nose at. Funny about that.

And you are spending your Fourth of July getting off on this website by looking down your nose at him and his sad, working class commitment to a sports team. So. You know.

Yeah it’s crazy that fans who pay hundreds of dollars to go to a game, even more on merchandise for their team, whose cities spend hundreds of millions of dollars to build stadiums under threat of teams leaving, who are constantly badgered by those teams to care more, invest more, be “better fans,” might get upset…

Yes, we get it, you’re an enlightened sports connoisseur who looks down on fans, who are forever getting emotionally invested in teams that invest enormous amounts of money in getting fans to emotionally invest in them.

In the post-hot take sports world, I know a lot of people are rushing to defend this decision, and I get it, I do. But I just find a league with the KD-Westbrook Thunder and the Curry-Klay Warriors — two really good teams that both have a good chance of winning the title — much more interesting and fun than one…

It’s worth saying that from the standpoint of a rank-and-file union, this system is good; it rewards veterans and spreads wealth rather than concentrating wages in the hands of a few superstars.

The problem with this discussion (not just your essay but writ large) is that people are talking about their idealized form of affirmative action rather than the actual affirmative action that is practiced at many colleges and universities, particularly the elite. Colleges game the affirmative action system like they…

headline perfection

Yeah that makes sense. I just always end up feeling like the weak link in competitive multiplayer games, but I don’t have the time to play them enough to get good.

I’m not sure what you mean by “at a high level.” In general, multiplayer gaming still has this broad problem: what makes games fun for people who play them a ton makes them totally unwelcoming to people who can’t or won’t devote the necessary number of hours to absorb all this stuff.

perhaps we were losing because we didn’t have a formation, I was the only support, nobody was tanking or flanking, and it seemed like everyone assumed that our seventh teammate, Casper The Friendly Ghost, would push the payload

This is why I can never get into games like this: everyone is required to think in terms of…

How about “because increasing representational diversity in fictional universes such as comics and video games is not a meaningful way to create actually meaningful social justice in the real world and the obsessive focus on same distracts us from the interests of actually-existing humans from marginalized…