The_Admiral

They had intended to fire him anyway, now they get to claim the moral high ground in doing so. Cancel culture only works when you didn't like the person to begin with (inverse: Justin Trudeau doing blackface and getting re-elected anyway).

I don't know where else to put it but I saw that they've finally started tearing down the old Colisée, having just taken out all the seats a couple weeks ago. Seems like they can't implode it because of all the buildings around it, they'll have to do it the hard way, so it'll take like a year. Still hope the new arena gets an NHL team before I peace out of following this dumbass league for good.

Always gotta wonder how long Rouyn-Noranda can hang on in the dear old LHJMQ. Town and arena look like something out of Slap Shot, but more so. I'd hate to see them wind up in another suburb of Montreal; who will keep Val d'Or company?

I think it's cheating a little bit because the gap between the Grateful Dead and Dead & Company is not insignificant and they should be appreciated as separate entities. But a "Bob Weir playin' with dudes" banner wouldn't be as interesting.

I like the idea of just one guy running around The Big Long Table Of Despair trying to do everyone's jobs, like when Mr. Burns and Smithers try to run the nuclear plant by themselves, but it's just churning out "Why A LeBron/Beyonce Ticket Is Actually Good" and "Look At This Dumbass Being A Dumbass" so that people will watch autoplay ads. 

39 minutes ago, McCarthy said:

Never read it.

 

I think I just mean in conversation. It's like "OKAY. GATHER ROUND. ALLOW ME TO A PAINT A PICTURE AS I PUT YOU IN MY EYES AND EARS WHILE I SPIN THIS YARN. So I"m on USS Constitution and I see this guy..."

I have a feeling I do most of my recounting in present tense, often including the unacceptable "go" for "say." It's more lively that way, n'est-ce pas?

Everyone's already mad enough at me for not being in lockstep on properly mourning Deadspin, so I really should quit while I'm behind, but I remember that they tried to half-pivot to video under Univision and it was all crap. At best, it was "Children's Sports Movies You Liked Are Actually Bad," which itself was Actually Bad, and at worst, it was Kaufmanesque anti-content like taste-testing milk. I'm pretty sure they were sandbagging all of it because they didn't want to do it. This is fair in the sense that they all had the presence and charisma of cottage cheese and surely knew that if Deadspin were to do video well, it would not be by putting alienating twerps like Tom Ley and Barry Petchesky in front of a camera. On the other hand, it took a loooong series of wrong turns for Deadspin to get to this point and I'm pretty sure taste-testing milk to own their boss was one of them.

17 hours ago, monkeypower said:

Per the Barstool blogging discussion, I think their real cash cow now is podcasting and the more visual/audio content, along with merchandise, instead of the blogging.

Of course it is, they all write at a third-grade level.

On 10/31/2019 at 12:02 PM, McCarthy said:

 Actually, I think I just hate it when people tell stories in the present tense. I find it irritating and presumptuous as if they're saying, "let me, the grand storyteller, set the scene for my amazing story".

You didn't like Rabbit, Run?

The ranger badge in the serif of the R is one of those well-meaning but worthless touches, like the old NY scribbled into the Mets logo.

It's a good logo. A rare example of major-league whimsy. I'll take a baseball wearing a cowboy hat over the Not Expos logo they've been content with for like 17 years now.

The unused Nordiques logo is awful and wildly inappropriate for a city whose defining characteristic is being really really old. 

14 hours ago, Digby said:

If they run it like a co-op or a nonprofit, maybe it'd work?

Jacobin seems to have money lying around, they can relaunch Deadspin as an exciting new vertical. Jockobin.

I had to dig into the Wayback Machine as I always have to do with him, but my all-time favorite internet writer Freddie deBoer (ret.) really articulated the love-hate relationship with Gawker properties that I came to share. It's almost ten years old now, but Ashley Feinberg mourning the death of blogging lit up the one brain cell that retained this from all those years ago, and I don't think much has changed since: https://web.archive.org/web/20120114151521/http://lhote.blogspot.com/2010/03/how-to-think-about-gawker.html

Quote

Credit where it's due: I think Gawker has been a smarter, funnier and more entertaining website that it once was for over a year now. I've been a rather scalding critic of Gawker, at times, not that I have the kind of audience where that matters much. There was a period for awhile there where the site was really quite a :censored:-show. The bloggers working there had seemed to have taken the criticisms from the notorious n+1 piece and decided, ":censored: it, we'll double down on empty sarcasm and cruelty." But it really has improved, I feel like, in the last year or two.

Why? It's funny, because judging by the comments, many people who comment there seem to prefer Gawker be meaner. To me, though, it's much better when it tones down the cruelty. Not just because of that whole morality deal, but also because usually it's meanest when it feels the most aggrieved, when whatever particular blogger gets it into his or her head that he or she is striking against some wrong doing or, even worse, taking someone down a peg. Please: you are not a modern day Oscar Wilde, your bloggy musings aren't a corrective for whatever minor injustice you are railing against, and nobody asked you to return balance to the Force.

And this is the thing: Gawker is at its worst, its absolute worst, whenever it allows itself to lapse into self-mythologizing. Do you remember when MTV used to run specials about the Video Music Awards every 6 hours or so? They'd create these documentaries, about MTV, made by people from MTV, and show them on MTV, over and over and over. And the content would just be people who work at MTV talking about how cool and hip and crazy MTV is. This kind of self-fellatio would be offensive even if it weren't for the fact that MTV is :censored:ing painfully uncool and filled with employees who are exactly the kind of people who used to sit around in high school pining for the day they could work for MTV. You know, the people who think a cable conglomerate can be cool.

Anyway, that's the sort of attitude you very occasionally get at Gawker, this same sort of self-mythologizing. It's just as bad when Gawker does it. To be fair, this mostly happens when Nick Denton himself rears his head, as in the second half of this post here. But it also comes up a lot, for example, when Gawker bloggers insist on trumpeting every bit of bad news about the newspaper and magazine industry, and declaring again that (wait for it) the Internet is the future! That get's tiresome. I wouldn't be surprised if that stuff, too, came from Denton's edict; it's long since been revealed that Nick Denton is history's greatest monster. Either way, the whole "there's, like, a holy war between old and new media, and we're winning" shtick is lame and tired, and every time they trot out those cliches, my eyes glaze over and I find myself instinctively clicking over to Fleshbot. Yes, magazines and newspapers are in trouble, no, neither you nor I nor anyone knows exactly what's going to happen, no, blogs and "the Internet" are not going to replace what is dying, and no, you aren't some culture warrior valiantly flailing away at the old guard. Look, a pretty accurate gloss on Gawker would be "Brooklynite whites who would rather work for Conde Nast or The New York Times talking about Conde Nast and The New York Times." That's no insult; I live in Rhode Island, I write navel-gazers about post-structuralism that nobody reads and I own a Jeep that is missing its back window. This is the Internet; there's no need to stand on false pretenses.

 

14 minutes ago, CS85 said:

I'd be surprised if there wasn't a snarky version of The Athletic with many of these cast off Deadspin, Sports On Earth, Onion/AV Club/etc writers to do their own thing.  I'd subscribe, as I imagine would others.

Magary quit this morning, and because he's not only their bell cow but the guy with a family and a massive head wound, I would take this as a sign that the gears are turning to get the Deadspin No Homers Club up and running very soon. A subscription model would certainly make sure they're beholden to no one but their readers, but that might be a risk this early on. 

Hard disagree on the notion of Deadspin being more than the sum of its parts. If anything, it was less than the sum of its parts: terrific longform journalism and investigative reporting brought down by ten times more vapid, paid-by-the-pageview blogsnark and petty grudges with other rich people's crappy kids. 

RIP blogging. It ended with Barry Petchesky. He was the last one. There will never be another. All content henceforth will only be Dave Portnoy declaring himself the king of bum fights into an iPhone camera, for we have lost the last blogger.

Post your favorite memories of blogging. There's no more blogging.

Well, doing that by buying an internet publication with a famously petulant staff and then alienating them is a really stupid way to do that, because without talent, what else do you have of value but the office furniture? Private equity isn't the good guy here, but I'm not sure Deadspin is either, no matter how much they and all their journalist friends insist that they are the last beating heart of journalistic integrity in America (they're not or it never would have come to this).

Technically, there's not really a market for most internet content. Venture capitalists just throw money at websites until the money runs out. It's all a house of lies for people who have earned the comfort. There's definitely a huge readership for the Deadspin crew, that's undeniable; the extent to which it can be monetized is much trickier.

Again: Megan Greenwell walked out one door and right into another. There's no reason to believe anyone else who quit on principle today won't do the same. This is soap opera for posting, right down to the big bad wrestling heel Dave Portnoy. Peter Thiel didn't kill Gawker, they just had to hide it inside Deadspin and Jezebel. Univision going broke owning the remains of Gawker didn't really kill it, and everyone SCDPing out won't kill it either. Maybe the real Gawker lives within us all (if we went to Oberlin). 

Perseverating on being diametrically opposed to Dave Portnoy at all times is a big part of why they're in this mess to begin with.

All your favorite writers will either pop up on other sites or get one of their dads' colleagues to fund a new playplace for them. Nothing will end, everyone who matters will be taken care of. Barry Petchesky graduated from Columbia University; he's not gonna be out on the street.

Many Deadspin writers were Actually Good. Deadspin as an entity was Actually Bad. Does that make sense?

On 8/23/2019 at 5:08 PM, the admiral said:

The private equity people shouldn't have bought Gawker. No one should have, because all you would get for your money is a gaggle of private school brats who throw big public bitchfits whenever you suggest that maybe they don't have to do twenty posts a day about their grudge against Dave Portnoy, and then cry about how they want their daddy Nick Denton back, who, pace all the Gawker mythos, did plenty of content-steering by quietly firing anyone who didn't generate enough pageviews for him. We did this whole dance when Univision bought them: there are new executives, we don't respect them, they're mean, they're compromising the sterling integrity of the Brett Favre dick picture Hulk Hogan sex tape website, we want Daddy back. Then they bled Univision out and had to be sold for pennies on the dollar to private-equity vultures. There's no real money in blogging (as I understand it, the whole content side of the operation is essentially the loss leader for their Groupon-esque deal site) and we're on the precipice of everyone learning this the hard way. Including Barstool? Especially Barstool! Idiots though they may be, at least they figured out the real money is in t-shirts.

I posted about yet another sippy-cup rewrite of "Baby It's Cold Outside" earlier and now I can basically apply everything from two months ago to whatever Deadspin is doing today. Everything is the same thing over and over and over again. Nothing ever gets better, it just gets worse and we keep doing it.

The Deadspin brats are having a meltdown again.

The Marlins built a low-capacity stadium that failed to fix supply and demand and cost too much money to build. I don't like going under 35,000 or over 45,000. 

The Eiffel 24 (which is no eiffel-65) is okay but eventually it gets to be like St. Louis and the Gateway Arch, like, there's gotta be more to this city. 

The lettering reminds me of Toulouse-Lautrec posters, too.

That's pretty inspired. Tres chic!