San Francisco’s Crissy Field is a treeless stretch of grass nestled in the armpit of the Golden Gate Bridge. The setting is picturesque, but the location—foggy, windswept, inaccessible—sucks. This did not stop Senator Bernie Sanders from summoning his supporters there on Monday, for what would turn out to be the last…
Probably the first and most persistent question I had when my partner and I started our own company was, “When does the company actually start?” Babies have due dates, and it turns out that companies (thanks, Scalia!) are people. So on what date would our company be considered born?
In case you momentarily forgot which website you were reading, let me say right here up at the top that I am not a textile expert. I’m actually not even particularly fashionable. To me, obsessing about fashion is silly. There are better things to obsess about, such as the optimal marinade for skirt steak. The fact…
Popular music becomes harder to wrap your head around as you get older, but shit’s so weird these days that you don’t even have to be that old to find yourself flummoxed by it. The majority of people in their forties don’t get Taylor Swift, lots and lots of thirtysomethings are baffled by the success of Drake, and…
It's true: I could really use some elfroot. It's hard to find. Why is it so hard to find? Wait, is it hard to find? Have I just been looking in all the wrong places? Given its importance to this particular video game—you need elfroot for, like, every healing potion—I'd expect it to be more plentiful, the way ammo is…
It's around 3 p.m., and I'm starting to run out of gas. My brain just has no juice. I'm a writer, and I work best in the mornings, so I try to be typing by 7:45 a.m., and with any luck I make it till 4 before the gears start to grind and the works gum up. But not today. Today, by like 3:15, the work feels grueling,…
Tech companies make my blood boil. I live in San Francisco, where I'm surrounded by them. What's worse, I'm surrounded by their employees—by droves of social-media strategists and integrated-marketing specialists, by dev-ops leads and database engineers, by bro-grammers. So, so many bro-grammers. This phylum…
I'm totally going to jinx myself by typing this, but here goes: After 10 years of religious urban bike-riding, nothing terrible has happened to me. I've never been doored or side-swiped, my bike has never been stolen outright (though parts of it have), and I've never caught a flat while flying down one of San…
I love Sundays, but not the way I used to. Time was, it was a day for sleeping in, going to brunch, watching sports, ordering a pizza, dicking around. But here's the new itinerary: Wake up early, go to the farmer's market, buy a boatload of awesome produce (produce being a thing I now consider awesome), rub and/or…
Like eating hot wings rubbed with ghost chilies or swimming to Alcatraz, listening to a new Nickelback album requires an intrepid spirit, a certain pain tolerance, and a thirst for endorphins. Among the many scintillating things you can say about this band—and there are many, and we will say them—is that they've…
Last night I watched in horror as high-tech commandos blew up the Golden Gate Bridge, sending huge chunks of my city's signature landmark showering down onto a fleet of Navy vessels. Burst-jumping down the bike lane I've personally used many times, I did my best to stop the atrocity. Alongside my comrades—each of us…
For someone who spends an inordinate percentage of his waking life staring at screens, I don't watch a lot of television. What a lot of folks consider to be a godsend—the so-called Golden Age of TV—is to me more of a pain in the ass: Just how many shows am I expected to watch? Also, no matter how many great shows…
My beloved Oakland A's are shitting the bed. One minute they're the toast of baseball— with the game's best record, its highest run differential, its best pitching staff—and the next they look like the Washington Generals, playing well under .500 ball since the All-Star break and struggling now to even limp into the…
Paul McCartney is like the Grand Canyon, or bangers and mash: There's no sexing him up. At 72, he's the rare individual for whom the phrase "living legend" feels like kind of a slight. Bigger than Jesus? Quite possibly. But how many records did Jesus ever sell, and what has he done for you lately? That's what I…
The promise of Watch Dogs was simple, and explained much of the anticipation leading up to the wantonly hyped prestige video game's May release: Finally—finally! (finally?)—someone was going to make hacking cool. In this case, it was the developer Ubisoft, whose ambition to make coding as engrossing as urban…
It's the rare band that makes Smash Mouth seem edgy by comparison. It's the rare band that makes Sublime seem arty, that makes 311 seem novel, that makes Jack Johnson seem… tolerable. But here we are, and here we go: Magic. Oops, make that Magic!—the exclamation point being one of many red flags indicating that these…
Loyal readers of Deadspin might be interested to know that this site's esteemed editor, Mr. Tommy Craggs, is a preternaturally gifted Halo player, or at least used to be. This would have been almost 10 years ago, in San Francisco, in the House of Debauchery, where most of us lived. We were a small but loyal band of…
So a new Borderlands game is coming in the fall. Now, a guy like me gets all kinds of news throughout the course of the average day—Facebook ate a baby, girlfriend has a rash on her foot, another A's pitcher's getting Tommy John surgery—but this cut through the clatter like a broadsword through Ned Stark's neck. A new
Up Up Down Down is an occasional column about video games.
I am on a rampage. Having recently been laid off from my posh tech job, the one with the free sodas and Work From Home days, the one where the employees put the casual in business casual and there's non-stop tension between the Product and Design teams, the one where the staff, like its counterparts dotted all up and…
