Stick to baseball, 2/11/23.

My top 100 prospects and team reports have been running for the last 12 days, finishing up today with the AL West team reports/top 20s. You can see the index of everything I’ve written here, which includes direct links to the reports for every team, the top 100, the farm system rankings, my chats on that site, and more.

My latest review for Paste actually went up last week, and even I missed it in all the hubbub. I reviewed the board game It’s a Wonderful Kingdom, the two-person variant of the popular game It’s a Wonderful World, but I have to say I think the original is a better game, even for two people. It’s a bit like 7 Wonders meets Century Spice Road, but with a little more to it than that might imply. You can buy It’s a Wonderful World here on amazon if you’re intrigued.

My free email newsletter has been almost-weekly this year, and I’ll send out the next iteration this weekend. I skipped my podcast this week because I was writing so much. I think it’ll be back next week. Maybe. Life is full of uncertainties.

And now, the links…

  • The Toronto Star looks at the fall of Jamie Salé into conspiracy theory and denialism. The 2002 Olympic gold medalist, previously best known as one of the two skaters originally cheated out of the gold by corrupt judges, has become a COVID and vaccine denialist – and, of course, now she’s trying to profit off these false views.
  • Intelligencer looks at the increasing “junkification” of Amazon, where legitimate products are getting harder to find as the company tries to muscle its way into more spaces. My outsider’s take: this is what happens when a company needs unbridled growth to prop up a stock price (or a billionaire owner’s wealth).
  • The BBC profiles the French author Colette, calling her “the most beloved French writer of all time,” although in the English-speaking world she’s probably best known for writing the novel Gigi that became a hit musical and film.
  • Is disdain for the less educated the “last acceptable prejudice,” as Michael Sandel writes in the New York Times? He also argues that it’s a problem for the Democrats, and a perception they need to shed.
  • Iowa Republicans introduced a bill that would expand child labor in the state, including jobs previously deemed too dangerous for kids like those in mining, logging, and animal slaughterhouses.
  • We’re seeing fewer big scientific breakthroughs, with the pace dropping steadily for over three-quarters of a century. Part of it is that breakthroughs are harder to come by as the low-hanging fruit is long picked, and part is that nations don’t invest in basic science research without promise of immediate financial returns the way they used to.
  • This blog post arguing that Dominion killed replayability in board games makes a great point – the need to constantly buy expansions to is a great business model for a very small number of games/publishers but not sustainable for the industry as a whole.

Comments

  1. Thanks for linking my Dominion/Replayability article Keith. We’ve never met but I freelance and we have written for some of the same outlets (Polygon and Ars Technica). Maybe we will run into each other at Gen Con

    • I’ll be there! Looking forward to meeting in person. Thanks for writing that piece.

  2. Brian in NoVA

    The conspiracy theorist in me suspecting the Florida bill wasn’t just about stopping trans kids from participating in sports (evil enough in its own right). It was also about potentially finding pregnant teenagers and stopping them from getting abortions. Also I’m not sure if you saw this bill from Mississippi which would be as close to getting away with new segregation as you can get. https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/08/mississippi-house-oks-new-court-system-to-be-appointed-by-white-state-officials.html https://www.npr.org/2023/02/09/1155827686/why-a-majority-black-city-could-wind-up-with-a-new-white-appointed-court-system

    • What, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck?

    • Holy fucking shit.

      I’m not even a democrat (I hate the two-party system and generally vote independent / third party), but leading up to this last election the GOP finally made me angry enough to just vote for the democrats for everything, and something like this just makes me wonder WHY DON’T THE POOR AND LOWER CLASS AND OPPRESSED AND MINORITIES (and ANYONE with a conscience!!) just outvote the republicans in every election?

      How difficult would it be for the Democrats to get their shit together and galvanize their demographic, which in theory should vastly outnumber the demographic for the GOP? I mean, the number of racist rich white males is far smaller than the number of …. EVERYONE ELSE, and I have no idea why anyone else would vote GOP.

    • @FrankJones To be fair, the results of the 2022 elections (and the special elections leading up to it) point to a nudge in this direction. But to your larger point, the reason the masses don’t flock to the Demoratic Party is that the party itself has been hostile to such a thing, instead preferring to go after “moderate” republicans. Failing to codify Roe, extra funding for cops, breaking the railworkers’ strike, letting extended childcare benefits and extended Medicaid eligibility expire…there’s just been zero outreach to make such a galvanization happen.

    • @Mike

      Yeah, I perhaps didn’t really phrase my question the way I intended. I know that the Democratic Party has failed to seize on a good opportunity, and I know it’s because they have focused on the wrong issues.

      What I’m asking, somewhat rhetorically I suppose, is, “WHY? Why can’t they figure out what would galvanize their main demographic and then actually do it?”

      The things the party supposedly stands for and fights for have much broader appeal than the extreme things the GOP currently stands for and fights for. A party such as the GOP that is so hateful and hostile toward so many groups of voters should not be winning any elections except in areas that are predominately populated by voters predisposed to vote that way no matter what. (Pure red states, in other words. Or pure red counties, pure cities, etc).

      I’m not really rooting for the Democratic Party because I detest the two-party system and I strongly believe it needs to be dismantled in favor of a better system.

      But the GOP must be thoroughly demolished first, because they’ve lost any semblance of sanity or logic or reason, and they’re very dangerous to peace and freedom and science and pretty much everything.

      So, first I want the GOP to fail and be dissolved. Then I want people to realize that the Democratic party isn’t all that great either, and that we should have a lot more than two political parties and a system that recognizes the voices of ALL parties.

      We would see a lot more people vote third party / independent if they didn’t feel that they were “wasting their vote” or that they “have to vote against the greater of two evils”.

      (Ranked choice voting would certainly help. It would have enabled me to indicate preference for the democrat over the republican while still showing my overall preference for the candidate of third party for which I am a registered member.)

    • A Salty Scientist

      @Frank. IME, non-MAGA GOP voters (including my own extended family) ignore this kind of thing until it actually affects them. There’s an unfortunate empathy gap. I honestly have no idea how to bridge the gap–it’s like there are two different types of brains in the world that don’t understand each other.

    • The problem at the federal level is the democrats just had two years of a situation where every democratic senator had to agree to every piece of legislation. And two of them were not liberal at all / did not want to agree on most things.

      Now they can lose one senator but they lost the house because of gerrymandering and the disfunction of New York democrats.

  3. Brian in SoCal

    Has anyone watched “Gigi” lately? I have (within the past five years). In the film, a grown man gradually comes to realize that he is romantically interested in a 15-year-old girl, to whom he has been like an uncle throughout her childhood. It’s… problematic. The fact that Leslie Caron was 27 years old playing the 15-year-old doesn’t save things. And the song “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” is downright creepy, especially when it reprises at the end of the film. I’ve seen every Best Picture winner, and this might be my least favorite.

    • I’ve never seen it, sort of for that reason but also it always sounded very dated overall.

  4. The hemorrhagic fever in Equatorial Guinea has killed eight people, not over 200. That is the number of those who have been quarantined and are so far asymptomatic.

  5. I backed It’s A Wonderful Kingdom on Kickstarter, so I could be biased, but I do strongly prefer Kingdom to World at 2 players. Part of that is that my son strongly prefers games with direct player interaction, so he gets bored with the passive/indirect interaction in the drafting in World, while the “I split you choose” combined with bluffing in Kingdom really works for him, and therefore for us. We also end up using the Menace module more than the Advisor or Quest modules, since it adds a little bit more direct interaction/”take that” to the game.

  6. Just read your recent newsletter and I had some questions. I figure others may have a similar question, or maybe an answer, so I figured I’d post it here. How did you daughter figure out what schools she wants to visit? Does she know what she wants to major in? Is she looking for a certain type of school, like large school in a fun college town or a smaller school in an urban setting? Does she know others who have attended and they liked it? Were they all part of college night at her high school? My 7th grader is closer to this than I realize and I never really went through the process myself before I went to college.

    • My kids’ school has a college guidance department, so they’ve helped assemble that longlist. They also had over 100 schools either visit the campus or do zooms with juniors this past fall, so my daughter added schools that way. I’ve only added two, I think. I’d rather let her drive the process with her counselors so she feels more ownership of the ultimate decision. My parents largely drove my process, and all I really did was decide at the end between the final two. I don’t think that was ideal for me and it definitely won’t be for any of our girls.

  7. I’d say the phrase “Soros-funded harridans” betrays The Revolver’s politics. The level of self-parody is bemusing.