I started to read Ben Thompson's email newsletter
Stratechery this morning, it was about Trump on Joe Rogan's podcast, which I didn't want to listen to, because I am overdosing on Trump, again. I was surprised to see it begins with the story of podcasting, which has my name in it, which was gratifying. A lot of people will read that. I'm including a
screen shot of the beginning because his newsletter is not something you can read without a subscription.
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The people who are alive right now are the first to create knowledge that we know in advance will be part of LLM databases. So far we've heard from the resisters, the ones who don't want any part of this. But what about people who want to create knowledge in the maximally useful form? Are there any howto's for this? A busy writer's guide to creating human knowledge?
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It appears Trump expects to lose.
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If the Washington Post already had their endorsement written when is it going to leak?
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Listened to
Charlemagne tha God for the first time on the
New Yorker podcast. I agree with everything he said. Really glad that people with clear mind and purpose are using our medium to do the good we hoped for. Best part was where he quoted Obama agreeing that things don't change when you elect a new president. Change can't come that fast unless we bring a substantial majority of other Americans with us. The vote isn't a way to make change, it isn't a way to express yourself, it's
your role in governing our country. It's not the First Amendment or the Second Amendment, it's the whole Constitution. It's the most power every one of us gets. Even the president doesn't have the power of our votes. You don't get a specific result from your vote, that would be the fascism that we're trying to avoid. It's the consenus that build that makes the difference. And Obama is too modest because he made at least a couple of big changes. First, everyone has a right to health insurance now because we elected Obama. That's no small deal, coming from someone who has depended on health insurance to survive, a couple of times. And second, we stirred the racial pot in this country in a positive way. Not to say we got peace and love as a result. Because there are a lot of white folks who don't want that pot stirred. But that was change nonetheless. The only way we get there, and I've said this many times, is by working together. Blame is powerless. Acceptance is powerful.
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I bet Bezos wishes he owned Twitter instead of Musk.
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Lots of Yankees fans at the Garden yesterday to see the great Knicks team of last year show up for the first time. The game in Boston on Tuesday was disheartening. It's a new team with the core of last year's team. And when the fans started roaring when there was nothing happening on the court, last night at the (NY) Garden, it was because the Yankees had scored in the World Series game
2794 miles away in Los Angeles. This is the
inconvenience of being a Knicks fan who hates the freaking Yankees. We have to share an NBA team. The Knicks are much more like the Mets than that other team. That's why it's so incredible to see the 2024 Knicks be able to manage both ends of the court, and completely shut down a team that last year beat them in playoffs, the Pacers, just like last year, but better. A validation of everything. Now the team has to stay healthy. But, even if they don't fly the Nazi flag at Trump's rally tomorrow, you know that they want to, and some of them probably brought them. It's a funny time for the Garden. The owner of the Garden btw is
James Dolan. We try to overlook that he owns the Knicks and he seems to be cooperating by staying out of the our faces. But he is known as a
vile man to the people of New York.
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BTW if you're thinking why don't we just go for the Nets. As I've said here many times, there aren't actually any Nets fans to speak of in NY. That was the huge self-parody
Kevin Durant did when he claimed there was some kind of rivalry between the Nets and the Knicks. Really unfortunate unforced error he could have just asked a few people where are all the Nets fans.
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So when the Dodger hit the
walk-off grand slam last night, half of me was ecstatic because the Yankees were beaten, but oops, but I hate it even more that the freaking Dodgers won. This World Series is unique in that I desperately want both teams to lose. What do you do with that??
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- It probably does no good to cancel your Washington Post subscription. It's hard to imagine Bezos would lose any money from a complete writedown. Any loss would offset gains he would receive from selling a tiny bit of Amazon stock, it would wash out on his balance sheet.#
- You can't hurt him with money. In fact I'm pretty sure we can't hurt him in any way. So why not keep the reporters employed, for once the seem to be doing the right thing and keeping us in the loop on why they're doing the awful thing they're doing. Usually we're kept in the dark. #
Maybe political parties should have strongmen, that might have prevented us from having one as the head of the government.
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I just changed the header graphic for my blog from the
1969 Mets, to the
2024 Supreme Court. They're Americans too, and I have a feeling they're going to be on the train to Aurora or Springfield before too long, if the worst happens.
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What a sad situation. What started with the open web in the 90s is now owned by billionaires, who, looking for new worlds to conquer have adopted a fascist buffoon as their frontman. It was never supposed to be owned by anyone.
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- The Washington Post announcing it wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president is the first glimpse we’ve had of how news publishing in the US has been devastated by fear of fascism. This must go back at least as far as the 2016 election and Hillary’s emails. The editorial people broke the wall, deciding to give the readers the first glimpse we’ve gotten into the inner conflicts of one two most influential news orgs in the country. #
- Until now this was the one story they would never report on. Truly a milestone. And now that the window is open, open it further. Report on how a major news org holds back stories that would be of intense interest to the people, if only the news orgs did their jobs. This is where the "public editors" never went, and should have gone. #
- Why hasn’t the NY Times run a story that takes Trump at face value and explains to voters what it would be like to live in that United States? It should have been updated and run every time Trump ups the ante. #
- An example. Trump says Americans who criticize the Supreme Court for overturning Roe v. Wade should be imprisoned: “These people should be put in jail for the way they talk about our judges and justices.” #
- A news story on this subject should include calls to all the justices on the Supreme Court to ask if they agree or disagree. It's time to bust some new norms. They are above reproach, traditionally, but they decided that the president can do whatever he wants, break any law without penalty. Are they concerned that perhaps they might be imprisoned if they make a decision that Trump doesn't like? Let's learn from them, how they think American citizens should feel about this. After all they are American citizens too, aren't they? If we can be jailed, or worse, for our speech, why not them? 😄#
- Of course if they refuse to answer, which they probably will, that should be part of the story. No deference allowed, by the journalists. Simple factual statements. #
- We've relied too much on the Democrats to stick their necks out, when in fact all our necks are on the line here. So if you have something to say about this, now is the time to do it. In a couple of weeks it might be too late. #
When your house is on fire there aren’t two sides.
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If only voters understood that government isn't a TV show.
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Last night I was surprised to see Wolf Blitzer reporting, on CNN, on all the worst things Trump has said, with supporting video. On CNN, one of the worst
sanewashing sources for our would-be despot. I can't imagine what happened there. Or maybe I can. Is it possible that the
owners of
CNN who might have gotten an education and possibly studied a little history from teachers who remembered WW II, and understood that Trump's lines are straight from
Mein Kampf, and maybe perhaps possibly maybe with only two weeks to go before the election started envisioning themselves and family on trains to American death camps. After all CNN ran some perceivably negative stuff about Trump, and who knows maybe President Trump won't be so discerning and might just have all media people euthanized.
It could happen. Maybe visions of their own mortality caught up with them and they decided to let Blitzer do what he can to douse the flames. Oddly the same thing seems to have happened at the
NY Times and the Atlantic, and Trump's former
Chief of Staff has gone
on the record now, with audio, explaining what we all know is waiting for us if the US actually goes down the path it appears we quite possibly are going down.
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I think it's probably too late, anyway. Journalism should have reported, constantly, that the house is on fire. And nothing else. Biden's age didn't enter into it you fools. The much bigger story was and is that Hitler wants to be president, and this time he has a plan. It was true then and it's true now. The next question is what will Biden do if Trump wins. It was tough watching Obama greet Trump at the White House in 2016. I can't see Biden doing that. I wonder what ideas they're workshopping in the
actual Situation Room.
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Don’t depend on Threads to validate the Fediverse. That’s not what they’re doing. Some of the people working there have good hearts and mean well, but Meta is a huge company, competing with other huge companies, and the goals of the Fediverse do not show up in their roadmap.
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I got a notice that Threads had deleted one of my posts because they said it violated their rules. They thought I was claiming to have written something I had not written. I didn't keep the notice (it popped up when I signed on). I shrugged it off when I got it, but then realized that we are very far away from the web. It has been turned into Disneyland where the cops are algorithms and they err on the side of stopping innocent things. I was just passing on a
link to someone else's blog, something I thought an informed person would want to know about (that's the idea behind every link I share). We really do need to dig our way out of this hole, again. This is of course no better than Twitter or Facebook. Not a place to get work done.
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It's amazing that the million-plus Americans who died from Covid during Trump's tenure aren't even mentioned as a campaign issue. Maybe people don't want to be reminded of those dark days.
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- I'm continuing to develop on WordPress. I see the opportunity regardless of what else is going on. #
- I could be wrong, I have been before. I kept using Twitter for identity after Musk took over, even though as time went by it was increasingly obvious that developers weren't part of his plan. I've been there before, with Apple, after Jobs came back. We had a great developer community for the web on the Mac, better than anything on Windows or Unix, and the management before Jobs, Heidi Roizen advising Gil Amelio, seemed to value our contribution, even if we weren't prospering. But there was a moment when Jobs introduced the open source equivalent of some of our products -- and that basically spelled the end of our little adventure, since Apple was putting the spotlight on them and not us.#
- But it doesn't always go that way. I kept investing in the Mac in 1985, a very bad year for Apple, and in 1986 we had a huge hit, and because we were almost alone in sticking it out, we were rewarded with booming sales. Of course it mattered that MORE was a lovely product. But if no one looks, it doesn't matter how lovely it is! #
- Anyway, the WordPress world is huge. Far bigger than the blogosphere in the 90s and 00s. Maybe somehow the trouble with WordPress will mean that people who see WordPress as a writing platform will all leave now, or stop considering new ways of writing. But honestly I don't think that's very likely. I have a few sites at wordpress.com that are archives, that I pay for, that I will continue to pay for. My father's memorial site, for example. Things would have to get incomprehensibly bad for me to consider moving it and where exactly would I move it?#
- But on the other hand, there isn't anything else out there that's offering something new for the writers. I think I'm pretty much alone working in this area. And maybe people need some good news? #
- My new product is a medium size writing tool. Less than a full word processor and more than a tiny little text box. I think there are a lot of WordPress users who will like it. And I think there's a chance they might notice it. So I'm going all the way with this one. I may lose the bet, but wtf, let's give it a try.#
- Last night the Mets were eliminated by the Dodgers playing in Los Angeles.#
- And I don't know about you but I'm really happy with how the season turned out. I didn't think the Mets would make it through any of the hurdles, making the playoffs, and beating the Brewers and Phillies. That was amazing. And the energy of this team, their humor and inventiveness, professionalism and perseverance. The Mets of 2024 were a great team, and they give us something to look forward to in 2025. #
- People say Mets pitchers walked too many Dodgers, but the walks were a result of discipline on the part of the Dodgers hitters. Most pitchers throw a lot of crap, and the hitters swing at it. The Dodgers are more discerning. If the Mets pitchers had thrown strikes they would have hit home runs. It's another way of saying that the Dodgers, no matter how much we despise them, this year at least, were the better team.#
- And there is a silver lining. I wasn't sure I wanted the Mets to beat the Dodgers once we knew the team from the "other" league was going to be the Jankees. Last time the Mets played them in the World Series, they beat us in Shea Stadium and as a result we had to tear it down and start over. I don't think any of us wanted that, or even to risk having to tear down Citi Field. I don't like to be reminded that the Jankees even exist, much less be forced to watch them play. And honestly between the Dodgers and the other NY team, I want them both to lose. Is there any way to arrange that? I don't even want to know. #
- Anyway thanks to the Mets for being such a wonderful team, a constant inspiration. So onward. Next year. And now..#
- The Knicks begin their season tomorrow night in Boston against the Celtics.#
Some of us do most of our writing on desktop computers. I guess we're in a very small minority. We can use a much better twitter-like system than the people who use mobile devices to tweet. I'm one of the desktop people. So I want
textcasting. Mobile people either don't care or don't want it. So it stands to reason we need a different user interface. We can use the same network, we just need a different UI for editing. Since the twitter-like systems already carry links to stories written by people on desktops, there's room in their pipes for our writing too. And it can work more efficiently if the stories are part of the message as opposed to living off-site. Think of it as a web of writing. A writer's web that also carries short messages.
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I did a
podcast this morning about the reality of Musk owning Twitter, which is now completely settling in. He might have enough influence on the election to push Trump over. He wins even if Trump loses, he gets a moon mission project to boot up a Musk Party. It's coming for sure, either way. Probably will pick up what's left over after Trump, who clearly is losing it, and even if he's president, someone else will be pulling the strings. I can't imagine the billionaire will let JD Vance do it. And by "billionaire" I mean Musk.
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A second elimination game for the Mets tonight. I almost don't want the Mets to win, because the World Series opponent from the "other" league are the Janks from the Bronx. I love the Bronx. That's about all I have to say about that at this time.
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Eugen Rochko, the lead developer of Mastodon: "Fediverse integration in Threads is still in a sorry state over a year since launch. They need to be able to follow us back. They need to see when we mention them. Those are such basic things." They got what they wanted, they got the users and press to relax because they’re Facebook who we know, but this is different, it’s the fediverse. And they got Eugen and others to validate them. This always works, standard tech playbook. they give up nothing, then the priority changes. I don't like being right. But they're never going to change in Silicon Valley. They do what works, and take advantage of newcomers who want to believe.
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It's possible the Dodgers let the Mets win as I
begged them to yesterday, but it's also possible the Mets just
crushed the Dodgers, but either way, the Mets are still in it. The series is now 3-2, and returns to Los Angeles tomorrow. So we don't have to tear down
Citi Field after all. If the Dodgers win it'll be in their own stadium. The Mets were magnificent! Absolutely inspiring. A three-run home run by Alonso started things off. Everyone got on base. Doubles and triples. It wasn't without the concern that our wonderful and lovable Mets would do the usual Mets thing and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but they held out. The final score was 12-6. We're still in it. Lets go Mets!
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I asked ChatGPT to
illustrate my post. Not bad. Very colorful!
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Bloggers, here's an idea. When you write a piece you're proud of, end it with a sentence like this: "And that's why I have a blog." It plants a seed, which through repetition and appearing in many places, might help people appreciate the purpose of a blog. We've had a lot of mud slung at us, let's start undoing that.
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The Dodgers
soiled our lovable slumping Mets last night. It was a sad sight. One to forget as soon as possible. And don't forget folks, there's always next year. If I were the Dodgers, I'd expect the Mets to win tonight, and the Dodgers will probably begrudgingly go along with it. Otherwise we'd have to destroy Citi Field as we did when the Yankees celebrated their World Series victory in 2000 on the field of Shea Stadium. I was actual there the night that will live in infamy. Back then at first I objected to the destruction of our shrine to the glory of past Mets teams, but then I realized we could never again rise to the peak of Mets philosophy in a chapel so soiled by the infidels. So if you don't mind Dodgers, we'd like to keep Citi Field, so we won't object if you let our Metsies win tonight's game. The song for tonight's game is
Ain't Too Proud to Beg by the Temptations.
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There's this great story in the Fargo TV series where one of the villains says there's a point when an animal that has been captured, relaxes when it realizes that it is no longer a being and
has become food. "At some level food it knows it's food." Evolution has been kind to us that way. At what point in last night's game did you realize that the Mets were no longer a baseball team and had become food?
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- Will the NYT make it through the election without running an editorial that says clearly if we elect this mad king fascist and give him nukes and our military, and our industrial might, and what remains of our virtue, then we deserve the hell that will rain down on us. If this were a Hollywood movie, we'd be waiting for the climax, but I have a feeling they will exit existence with a whimper. #
Are we in a loop??
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- Imagine the editorial the NYT runs the day after the election when Trump wins and it dawns on them that it's really over. For good. No backsies. We're going down. Sayonara. Thanks for the memories. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when. #
It was nice knowing you.
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One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing -- they don't break users. The code I wrote to run against WordPress in the 00s still runs today. To me as a developer this speaks very loudly. It means it's safe to develop here. It means there's discipline in their development organization. Most companies don't do this, but the ones who do, have earned my deep respect. For all of Microsoft's sins, they were incredibly good at this too. It's why I liked working with them, and also why we laughed at each others' jokes if you can believe that. In some ways all the open source stuff is too complicated. I understand the concept of "development org" -- so I look at it that way. I dig around their codebase, see how they do things, and figure it'll work out pretty well if I just do it that way. Because the last people they're going to break are themselves. What I see on their latest APIs is maturity and completeness. They didn't rush off to the next thing before finishing. I found that in their Calypso API, which I've been building on. Honestly this is my kind of platform, it's what Manila's API would look like today probably if we had continued developing it. I'll see if I can find the docs around here somewhere. Long time ago. ;-)
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I made the
reallySimple package for Node.js because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to read feeds in Node apps. It should be as easy as reading a file. Give it the URL of a feed, get back a JavaScript object that's as simple as feeds are. It can read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds, but you get the same object regardless of what form the feed was in. I'm up for creating some example apps if you're interested. There is a very simple
Hello World app included in the package and a set of
demo apps. It's MIT-licensed, so you can do whatever you want with the code. It would lovely to see it ported. The idea is to plant some seeds in the Node.js world to make it easy for developers to try out new ideas with feeds, figuring the easier it is, the more people will do it. Be creative. Blow our minds! :-)
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The question has come up in various contexts, is a Substack feed a blog? Yes, I think it can be. For some reason people thought I'd say no. In 2003, I compiled a list of
things that make a blog a blog, and it's not about the software you use, rather it's about who's writing it, and whether they're being edited. Now it's a different question to ask if I would use it. I would not. Because it forces you to use their editor. And that's a
pernicious form of lock-in. It might sound like a small thing, but it means you can't easily try out something new. You are not available to other software developers as a possible user, so no software will be designed for you. I know how well that kind of system works. And that's probably why they lock you into using their editor. If I can't switch without breaking everything, I'm not going there.
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Mathew Ingram
asks if AI will save us or kill us. It could both save and kill us. That's what's so disturbing about evolving. We live such short lives, people aren't really designed to evolve, but because of medicine and other tech, we are often forced to do it. Evolution can come many ways. Losing a job may force you to evolve. The dissolution of a marriage. Having life-saving surgery with a long recovery saves you for sure, but it might also kill you because you can't go back to being the person you were before. There might not be a path back. One thing's for sure we
need saving. We can't survive without radical change. We're on a path that doesn't work. Is there any way for us to change radically without a complete collapse? Well, actually kind of looks like we might have been given a path out through AI. But it means we must give up control. But here's the funny thing about that. We aren't giving up anything because no one has any control. That's a political question in the US, can one person become a mad king and thus gain complete control. But he's 78 and not in good health, and that control could only last a few years at most. We will need saving from that. If somehow we could configure AI so it did what humans can't and won't do, at least our civilization might have a way forward if not our species. Just some random thoughts. Maybe unthinkable, but they occur to me anyway, which is why I have a blog.
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I keep writing on my hybrid
WordPress/Mastodon blog at my kitchen table. This morning I wrote about why I don't believe in the Ya Gotta Believe, a baseball slogan coined by a 1973 Mets pitcher Tug McGraw. It's on-topic because the Mets are in a challenging series with the Dodgers for the National League championship. No matter how it turns out, this is a historic year for the Mets, and no matter how it turns out I won't love the Mets any less if they lose. I think true believers believe in that -- love -- without any expectations, win or lose, or maybe
even more if they lose. BTW, I know the rendering of the post isn't complete on Mastodon, and there are errors. I'm working with the people at Automattic at getting this right. I'm glad to see that Mastodon has the flexibility to do that. Anyway, I believe in the things I believe in, not because I "gotta." I don't like the slogan because it doesn't reflect how I feel about the team. My philosophy is respectful (in a way) of the teams the Mets beat, because I understand that their fans don't love them any less because they lost. If anything I think the better slogan for the Mets would be this:
Wait till next year! 😄#
Gruber gave me an idea when he put his
NYY logo on his
blog. I thought that was both interesting and weird. I don't get how anyone I know can be a fan of the that team. An American League team in a National League city. Kind of like rooting for Staten Island. Anyway, the Yankees may win the
ALCS, but what does it mean? It's not going to make New York love them. But then Gruber is in Philadelphia so why isn't he thinking about the Phillies, who btw, the Mets beat soundly in the division series, earlier this month. In any case, I have made the
team picture of the 1969 world champion Mets as the banner image on Scripting News for now and into the forseeable future.
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BTW, I've been too busy to keep up with the
Podcast0 feed. Not sure when I'll be able to pick it up again.
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Threads just added an
online status feature, where it'll show your icon to others with a green dot if you're online. I turned it off. I don't see this as a social network, I see it as a two-way publishing medium. Big fundamental difference. My words speak for me here and on Threads. It's a strong argument in favor of "Follows" being the default algorithm, btw.
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Everybody's maxing out on Wordle today. I stopped with one step left. Stumped. I may lose my streak today. A lot of people are.
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- A long time ago I ran a free service called weblogs.com. It was the early days of blogs. RSS didn't exist yet, so there was no way to find out which blogs had new stuff other than going through your blogroll and clicking links. #
- So I built a simple server, running in Frontier, that handled pings. When you updated your blog, you'd send a message to weblogs.com saying your blog updated. It would then read the HTML of the blog and verify that it changed, and it would be added to a list of blogs that updated, in reverse chronologic order. It also published an XML version of the update list called changes.xml, so if you wanted to run a search engine off the list, you could do that too. #
- There were several ways to send a ping. You could go to a web page and enter the URL of your blog. Or you could save the URL as a bookmark and click the bookmark when you updated. Or if you used blogging software like our Manila or Radio UserLand, or later EditThisPage.com or weblogs.com (which eventually hosted blogs itself), it could ping on your behalf, automatically. #
- Aside: Here's a snapshot of the weblogs.com site, preserved. #
- A number of search sites appeared. And we were happy, until another developer, funded by venture capitalists, who expected a return on their investment, built on our open and free changes.xml list, started asking for and receiving pings on their own, and (key point) they didn't make their change list public. This struck me as highly un-weblike and unfair, but they could do it and we had to live with it. #
- Based on what Matt has been saying it sounds to me like it's something like our experience. Except weblogs.com was a short term thing, and not a business, and it didn't last twenty years, and it didn't have a payroll to support. #
- But it still felt wrong that they weren't giving back as they received. If it had persisted like WordPress has, it would have eventually been a seriously diseconomic and unsustainable problem. And I can imagine I might write about it publicly as Matt has and maybe even get a famous lawyer like Neal Katyal to advise me. And here we are. #
- Have we heard anything from the other side, or anyone who is familiar with what their position might be. Do they not feel obligated to support the continued development of WordPress or maybe there's another issue we haven't heard about. #
- I can't imagine that Matt would make such a big deal out of this if it weren't actually a big deal. He probably knew in advance how disruptive this would be. And I imagine the others knew it would be too and counted on him not wanting to make a fuss. #
- I have gotten embroiled in these kinds of things in the past, and I don't like it. I love to make software and make users happy and then make more software, round and round. Anything that involves lawyers is not me doing what I was made to do. #
- And I do see a silver lining. As with twitter-like systems, I now see the possibilty to help WordPress serve writers better in the future. Before this, people didn't think change was possible in the WordPress world, like they didn't see the possibility of change with Twitter. But now Twitter has quite a bit of viable competition. I know that WordPress could be better tuned for writers, and the product has a very nice API that would make it possible for lots of writing tools to flourish. It is a strong platform that's debugged, scaled, documented and worked on for a long time, and they don't tend to break users. And where commercial vendors like Facebook and Twitter often have excellent technology, ultimately they are run by execs and bankers who don't believe in being open, where this is something that has been deeply ingrained in the WordPress culture from the beginning and would be hard to change and that's a good thing for users and developers. #
- Here's the exciting part -- between WordPress and Twitter lies a product that would bring the web back to life. Imagine a twitter-like system with the writers features of WordPress. Amazingly, we are on the cusp of that being a reality.#
- There's lots of opportunity to better serve writers here, and that's what I love to do, and honestly I think Ghost and Substack have left themselves open to a writing environment built on WordPress that doesn't try to lock users in. And at the same time, I think we can use this platform to help all the twitter-like services to support all kinds of writing, not just severely limited tweets typed into tiny little text boxes. Somewhere along the line they got the wrong idea that taking features out of the web was a good thing. I want to bring these features back so we can get going again with the web as a writer's platform. #
- Anyway, I don't need to think anyone is right or wrong here, and I don't think anyone else should either. I think this platform is very nicely open and we can do lots of interesting new stuff here. I hope to open a new thread here, focused on writers and the web. It's been too long. #
Highly recommend
today's Olbermann podcast. I've seen video of a recent press interview where Trump said he's use the military to arrest and in some cases kill Americans, starting with but not limited to Hispanics. This is not being reported in the major news orgs. We can't wait for them to fix it, we have to create new channels for news flow that have credibility and work, and we need it before the election. People need at least have a
chance of understanding what they are voting for.
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Of course she loves the Mets. Especially the grand slams.
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BTW, why doesn't Netflix buy
Metacritic and integrate their ratings aggregator in their user interface. I predict I'd watch far more stuff on Netflix than I do now. Or Apple TV, Max, Hulu, Disney, etc. The idea that such a valuable resource is not part of the user experience is crazy imho. What a waste. What reminded me of this is Plex has integrated the equivalent of Bingeworthy in their service, which is also a good idea and will glue communities of users to you. The idea is to systematize recommendations. If I know a specific friend liked a movie or a show is valuable information for me, not just advertisers.
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Someday I have to reboot
Bingeworthy, it's the
software snack I miss the most. It broke when Twitter broke their identity system.
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I am totally having a blast with my
hybrid blog, built by
textcasting WordPress and Mastodon. Just wrote a
post about the day the NYT signs off, finally realizing how fcuked we are if Trump is elected or manages to steal the election next month. Their final headline in this story is
GOOD LUCK AMERICA.
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Textcasting shows up as a
slight blip (or less) on Google Trends.
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I would switch to any
podcatcher that let me edit my subscription list outside their app, because I use that list in different contexts, also because I’d like to share my list with others, and would like that to be a dynamic connection, so I could add feeds as I learn about them, or remove feeds that have stopped updating. Also because there are lots of others, aka influencers who’d like to too. You’d own the market if you did this.
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Cynicism isn’t always the right explanation. Sometimes people just want to share something good with you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re stupid, maybe they just like you.
#
The common denominator between journalism, business and politics is that none of them have any respect for people. To rise in influence, money or power you have to give up imagination, and be ruled by cynicism. If you don’t believe this, show me a journalist who listens, a business that makes products for thinkers, or a politician who lets individual people lead them.
#
- BTW, the reason there's such a confluence of power between WordPress and Mastodon is this.#
- WordPress has a complete, debugged, deployed, scaled and frozen API. It's been around since 2016 or so.#
- In contrast Mastodon, while they're doing excellent work, is trying to wrangle an already large community into a set of consistent interfaces. It's very hard for an outsider like myself to approach, esp when you're overloaded with your own work (which we all are).#
- Meanwhile, Automattic has a small team whose only job is to make WordPress work with Mastodon.#
- So I can build software that works with Mastodon without venturing into the rough seas of Mastodon-land. I can stay on the cruise-liner, which is the WordPress API.#
- I didn't even know they had this API until last summer. My jaw dropped when I first saw it. It even works with Node.js. And now that I'm on the other side, I haven't hit any insurmountable obstacles or had to wait for something to be decided.#
- This is the proper way to build interop. Implementors make things work, not W3C committees (I say that with decades of experience with this, btw).#
- I thought it deserved an explanation.#
- Well we know who the Mets are facing, starting tomorrow, in the National League championship series. #
- Last time we played the Dodgers in the postseason we kicked their ass. And now they have the nerve to show up again. Geez some people never learn. #
- And we haven't forgotten how Chase Utley broke Rubin Tejada's leg, deliberately, basically ending his major league career. We thought he should have been arrested for that, no kidding -- it was a vicious un-baseball assault. He and the Dodgers showed no remorse. #
The only payback that matters is victory.
#
- Update: The Jankees are playing Cleveland in the ALCS, and while some people with limited imaginations wish for a Subway Series betw the the two NY teams, I do not. I have a rule, I always root for the team the Jankees are playing. Thus I hope to see a World Series between the Mets and so-called "Guardians." And of course the Mets would be heavily favored in that contest because the Cleveland team has changed their name to something impossible to pronounce, ethically. When you change your name, like tearing down your stadium (something that took the Mets a long time to recover from) you basically put a hex on your team making it virtually impossible for your philosophy to prevail. So Mets v Guardians, while not necessarily what I predict, rather is something I hope for, and as long as the game is played with philosophy, that's the real victory! So get em METS and never forget there's always next year. ❤️#
Summarizing the last 18 years on the web. Between Twitter and Google Reader, the web was cut into two, and they didn't get along. We may now be on the cusp of fixing that. Why? Because WordPress and Mastodon work with each other in unforeseen ways. We got lucky, because I don't think this was done consciously by the developers of either product.
#
- I have a morning ritual which begins with breakfast and iced coffee, and my laptop, on the kitchen table, to review the news, sports, whatever. Write a few tweets or share a few links. Usually with WNYC playing in the background until I find something I want to read carefully, then I shout at Alexa to go away. When done, I head upstairs where the work begins, often with a blog post, as I'm writing now, and sometimes with a bit of code, but that usually waits until my brain is warmed up. #
- But today I had a different assignment. Instead of tweeting, I wrote a few wordpress/mastodon posts, a new hybrid, a medium that I may well be the first person to explore, to do actual writing in. #
- I have a writing tool I call wordLand, it connects directly to WordPress, and from there, one of my sites is hooked up to Mastodon via ActivityPub. I choose to view it that way, to keep from going crazy. I know that it's hooked up to the "fediverse" -- meaning my writing can be viewed by any other app that supports the protocol Masotodon supports which is kind of ActivityPub+ -- where the + is the Mastodon API. Not sure what the ratios are, and I don't care. In this context I am a user, and happy to be that. The developers at Automattic are taking care of the technical details. #
- Here's the conclusion that appeared in one of the posts I wrote in my kitchen this morning -- "I am more excited about the web than I have been in a lonnnnng time." I am. I explained why in one of my posts, but it comes down to this. I have most of the features I asked for in textcasting (!) and I am typing in a respectable editing window, where I retain copies of my writing, and there's no freaking tiny little text box. And because I'm hooking in through a protocol (here's the punchline) this writing can go anywhere. Anywhere. Let me say that again. Any. Where. #
- Like I said the other day, I doubt if Automattic knows what they have. I seriously doubt it. But in a few years, we're going to look back on this as the moment when Twitter stopped controlling our writing, as they have since 2006. #
- No more character limits. Posts can have titles, or not. We can use links, as many as we like. Styling works. We can edit our posts. And the really big payoff, I can use a writing tool I love and you can use a tool you love and they work together perfectly well. And if one day you feel like using mine, and I feel like using yours, it just works. So in one step, we turn the clock back to 1994, when the web had all the features a writer could want.#
- Links to the stories I wrote earlier, on Mastodon:#
- WordPress versions are linked to from the Mastodon posts. #
- Enter this in the address box: @daveverse.wordpress.com to follow this blog in Mastodon.#
Quick note about last night's
Mets win over Philly. The series is over, the next game on Sunday will be against the winner in the west, either San Diego or Los Angeles. Last night's game was stressful, low scoring, until the Mets star shortstop hit a
freaking grand slam home run, and that was all the scoring we needed. The Mets are the hottest team in baseball. It doesn't feel like a long time since
2015 when they got to the World Series before crashing. Who knows how far we'll get this year, honestly -- I'm surprised (and pleased) we got this far. And in the meantime, I caught a tiny bit of last night's preseason game between the
Knicks and some other team I don't care about. They have two new stars to add to the roster after
losing one star as a free agent, and trading two others for the
second new star. All in all, very enticing. New York has some excellent sports teams, which is unusual, because it isn't just the Jankees this time, a team I will, I promise,
never root for. Quite the opposite. I will root for whoever they are playing. You can probably tell I don't like them.
😄#
I'm posting
development notes on the
wordland product in my wordpress/mastodon account. I'm starting to like using the new editor. Today I switched the format we save drafts in from HTML to Markdown. More consistent with my belief that Markdown is the
ideal subset of web writing features for the
social web.
#
Isn't it weird that businesses
work hard to get better position on Google search, but fight the other way with AI to be
excluded. At some point they could realize that one of the approaches isn't correct.
#
- A tweet that says something that's obviously true until you realize it's not. "No kid remembers their best day in front of the TV." In fact I have four memories from my youth, watching TV. #
- I remember my father rolling around on the floor when the ball went through Buckner's legs. My father never rolled around on the floor, before or since. But I liked seeing him let go just that once. #
- Another with my father. When the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan he said they were wearing wigs. He knew that because no man would actually have hair like that. I was 8 or 9 years old and remember telling him I didn't think he got that right.#
- I remember exactly where I was when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. At the Newport Folk Festival and about 500 people were watching a tiny TV on top of a VW bus. Somehow everyone could see. It was outdoors and it was silent, everyone was in awe.#
- One that's only peripherally about TV. I remember every time I went to see a game at Shea Stadium as a kid I was blown away by the color, because most of the Mets games I saw were on TV, in black and white. #
- Here's one from adulthood. Watching young Barack Obama give his victory speech on election night in 2008 in my house in Berkeley with a group of friends, with tears running down all our faces.#
After Katrina I
went to New Orleans to see what was left, esp in the areas where there was a 15-25 foot storm surge in coastal Mississippi. If you went inland from the coast for a few miles there was nothing left. No trees, only a few skeletal all-concrete buildings where the beach used to be, otherwise
everything destroyed. What you don't necessarily realize that it isn't just 15 feet of water, it's 15 feet of stormy ocean with cars and building debris being pushed around floating in the water. This
video on Threads provides a visual illustration of what a 9 foot surge is like.
#
Summary of my posts about New Orleans in December 2005.
#
Thanks for all the good wishes re the
30th anniversary of the start of blogging here. It's not the same as it was at the beginning, but it's still pretty good. And to all the friends no longer with us, and there are plenty of them -- you are appreciated, respected and missed.
#
Podcast: I was able to write a post that appeared on Mastodon using ActivityPub. Via the WordPress API. Congrats to the ActivtyPub community, Automattic and Mastodon. "It just worked."
#
Okay this is blowing my mind. My friends at Automattic showed me how to turn on ActivityPub on a WordPress site. I wrote a
test post in my simple WordPress editor, forgetting that it would be cross-posted to Mastodon. When I just checked in on Masto,
there was the freaking post. After I recovered from passing out, I wondered what happens if I update the post in my editor, and save it to the
WordPress site that's hooked up to Masto via ActivityPub. So I made a change and saved it. I waited and waited, nothing happened. I got ready to add a comment saying ahh I guess it doesn't update, when -- it updated. Oh geez look at that. Folks, I did nothing here but write an app that can be used to edit WordPress posts. And I got in return an app that is part of the freaking Fediverse. And I never had to write a line of ActivityPub code. Think about that. I don't know if Automattic understands what they have, honestly.
#
BTW, it also supports HTML pretty well, but the title does not appear on the Mastodon version. That's going to be a problem. Actually the title is visible at the bottom. Let's call that an anachronism. Of course the title should/must be at the top.
#
Om Malik, a long-time friend,
NBB and supporter: "The best version of Dave is the Hopeful Dave." I agree. That's certainly when I'm happiest. Because it means someone is working with someone else. Imho, that's the only source of hope in our world.
#
I'm really proud of
what John Gruber said about me as a blogger in his Daring Fireball
yesterday: "Winer is rightfully renowned for his technical achievements — outliners as an application genre, RSS in general, and RSS in the specific context of podcasting in particular — but what’s kept me reading Scripting News for the entirety of Scripting News’s 30-years-and-counting run is his writing. He has such a distinctive writing voice that is impossible to imagine in any medium other than the web. But I think that’s because he helped define what writing not just on the web, but for the web, even meant."
#
- Guy Kawasaki and I have been going back and forth privately about what we want from our personal ChatGPT. Here's one thing for the list. When I go to Google and search for NBB, it should take me to this page on my blog. It shouldn't even require me to click on Feelin Lucky. Google has had 26 years to get to know me, and it still thinks I might mean National Bank of Blacksburg. Folks, this is my blog, read it and use it as context when I ask a question. And they don't have to even read my blog, NBB is defined in my glossary, which I make public and is used in rendering all my pages. #
- A few years back, Google, when I searched for my mother, using her correctly-spelled last name, which happened to also be my last name, showed me results for Eve Wilmer.#
- Back to Guy. I asked if he's written about what an evangelist is. To me, he is the prototypical evangelist. He's #1 and there isn't a #2 or #3. He has written about it, in the Harvard Business Review in 2015. But his story is, excuse me, bullshit. I should record a podcast about what an evangelist is, as I was very well-schooled in this by Guy. Let me try here. #
- The evangelist for a product or organization is the person who deliberately tilts the playing field in favor of developer products that absolutely must get out there for the organization to achieve its mission. How is the tilt determined? Intuitively. If some random schmuck approaches him out of the blue at a developer conference, and explains their problem, where most BigCo people ignore them, the evangelist listens carefully. Helps without a second thought. And his door is open, if the developer wants to follow up. He helps route his needs through the organization. No developer is on their own if Guy is there. #
- And when the killer product comes along, the one that will give Mac users something to get charged up over in 1986 when the hardware problems were being solved (they were!) and the software flow had dried up, Guy gets the developer the $400K they need to keep the doors open to ship the freaking product. The level playing field approach, which most tech companies follow, results in dead developers and platforms whose capabilities go unexplored. Users get bored, and move on to where the excitement is. #
- I've seen products and companies fail to look around them to see what's possible. They only look inward at their own organizations who fail year after year to create products that users love. There's a reason for this, but you don't need to know it -- you just need to keep looking at every possible victory and when one comes along, do anything it takes to get it out to users.#
- I've applied Guy's teaching in every project I've done since I got to know him in 1983 and when we, together, rode the wave of success in the Mac in 1986. He was like a member of our team inside the Mac Division at Apple. And we did have the hit product that year. And Guy pulled every string to make sure the world knew. #
- This is how I applied the lesson. When I saw the potential in another developer and a way for their project to help me achieve my goal, I go for it. I know those things are very rare, and not to worry if it doesn't arrive in exactly the way I expected it to. #
Today is the 30th anniversary of this blog.
Hola! #
I did a
roundup of thoughts when this blog turned 25. I stand by what I wrote then, but I'd add this. My blog started because I needed content to test a script I had written that sent emails on my Mac using
Eudora, which was an early
scriptable app and I had a nice scripting system that worked with it. I looked around for
something to send (30 years ago today), and shot out an email to the people whose business cards I had collected at various tech conferences. It was a thrill, so I did it
again, and
again and
three more times, before I realized hey I could use this thing to get
my own ideas out
there. And thus began
this thing that I still do to this day. Look at the
two posts I wrote about WordPress in the last few days. There may be hope to find a blogosphere buried somewhere in there. And it may be possible to give them some sweet new writing tools so they can get excited about writing on the web the way we did all those years ago. I actually am kind of optimistic about that. Maybe we can stand up something in the midst of the noise. When we booted up podcasting, approx 20 years ago, we had a slogan -- "Users and developers party together." It worked! That is still the way I want to build stuff, it's the only way I know how to do it. Blogging started out as a programming adventure and eventually became a form of literature. How about that. I'm up for doing more of that if you all are. But please expect to make contributions, don't expect it all to come to you for free, because as we know nothing really is free.
#
Today's the big day. Thanks to John Naughton's wonderful
piece in the Guardian, I'm hearing from people all over the world about what blogging means to them. I appreciate all of the messages, but would appreciate them
even more if they were on your blog. We need to keep using the tech. Blogging is kind of lost, and I would like to see that change. Every time you post something you're proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don't support linking, the web is still there and it still does.
#
Interestingly, the
clock at the bottom of the nightly emails does not agree with the clock on the home page of Scripting News. It's a hard thing to test in real life. And it's completely fitting, given the motto of the blog is:
it's even worse than it appears, which could be the motto of all programmers everywhere, and probably bloggers too. We always focus on the bad news, of course -- that's human nature -- but always remember, it could actually be worse.
#
- Today's podcast has nothing to do with the 30 year milestone, except that it is totally unscripted, stream of consciousness, for 30 minutes, on two topics.#
- The idea of what a programming language is, is about to be completely overturned. The verbs and nouns will, at least at first, be pretty much exactly like we do it now, but the way you specify how they work, how they interact both in the UI and on the backend, will be done more or less as you would document the user interface. The AI system is almost ready to work at that level. With a few more iterations by human designers it should all meet up in a place where the slogging type work I've been doing for 50+ years will be obsolete. We will all become anachronisms. All of us. Get ready for it. And btw I was the biggest skeptic of the idea of a higher level more human way of programming. Scoffed at the idea. Repeatedly. Never say you can't teach an old dog new tricks.#
- The second part is about kitchen-table conversations in families, the bored rantings of our ancestors, passed on lovingly from generation to generation. Should have realized that we did not turn a racial corner with the election of Obama, we all should have gotten prepared for the backlash from children of the slavers and fascists, who were raised alongside us as victims of slavery and fascism were raised to feel persecuted. We all revert to our comfortable roles. The question is can we rise above that and forget for a moment what our ancestors taught us as gospel and take an interest in going beyond that, or do we have to do another loop around the genocide and its consequences, which this time will be far worse than they were in the 1940s because of all the new war and computer tech and the damage done by the post-war growth. #
- I feel good about this podcast, because it has nothing to do with the milestone. I have an idea of what it feels like to have been blogging for 30 years, but no conclusions to offer that would mean anything to me or anyone else, except perhaps a psychologist. #
- I've been watching a lot of sports recently and the interviews with star athletes saying the same predictable bullshit after being asked how it felt to do whatever heroic thing they just did. All of TV and news is like that, none of it is news, all of it is predictable bullshit. That is probably why they have so much trouble reporting the truth about Trump and Musk. It doesn't fit into their job description, it's not in anyone's job to tell the truth. And that's the truth. #
I think a lot of confusion about AI products comes from the name. It's not clear what intelligence in humans is or how it works. We just believe it exists. So then the question is, can machines do the same thing? The truth is no one knows. It could be that human intelligence, once we figure out what it is, will be as trivial as they tell us the AI "intelligence" is. So if you're trying to make sense of it, or if the idea is offensive, try pretending that "intelligence" was "pomegranate" or "cauliflower" -- these are two terms
John Lennon suggested George Harrison use in place of words in
lyrics he hasn't come up with. Say ChatGPT is "Artificial Cauliflower" and that should be less offensive, yes? It would make as much sense as calling it intelligence. On the other hand, conversation with my favorite Artificial Cauliflower app does feel pretty much exactly like conversing with a human. A very patient and very knowledgeable and intelligent (whatever that means) but not infallible human.
#
An idea for
Gabe at
Techmeme. Here's a
screen shot of a
story on Techmeme. I don't have time to click on each of the links, but a machine can. I would love to get a AI-generated summary of all the links, the range or reactions, or a consensus if one has emerged.
#
- We are a Mets family. Around the kitchen table in my childhood home, the default question was "What did the Mets do?" Before I was born we were a Brooklyn Dodgers family, always National League, but the Dodgers left shortly after I was born and the Mets came along when I was seven, and that was it for us. It was the one thing we all agreed on -- the Mets. Much later when my Mom and I would fight about something, a pretty regular thing -- I invented what I called Shea Stadium Rules, which meant that a disagreement could be tabled when we remember that underneath everything we are true Mets fans, and ultimately Mets fans can find something to agree on -- that rain or shine and there was plenty of rain, we always stood with our team. A deeper truth of the Mets was we didn't really mind when they lost. Because underneath it all at a whole other level, the Mets have a philosophy that is strong. We are the Mets and that's all you need to know. #
- Anyway, last night it wasn't lookin good. It was a winner-take-all game with the hated (for now) Milwaukee Brewers. We hated them because it looked like they were going to end the Mets season in the first round of the playoffs. I was getting ready to take off my Mets cap for the year, and put on my Knicks cap, when Lindor walked, then Nimmo singled, and with runners on first and third and one out, Pete Alonso comes to the plate. He's been cold all year. I hoped for a base hit or at least a long sacrifice fly to bring in the runner on third. I couldn't watch but forced myself to. And then it happened. #
- We who have been joined at the heart to this team and have been through it all, have come to expect failure, but sometimes winning happens, as it did last night. A big swing. The bat connects. Oh please let it land anywhere but the glove of a Brewer, and then all of a sudden Alonso is jogging around the bases, and delirium takes over, in the living room of my mountain home and everywhere Mets fans were at that fateful hour. #
- We figured at that point they might as well just retire the side, but the Metsies, who Casey Stengel, the first manager asked "Can't anyone play this stinkin game!" -- brought in another run, which it turns out we didn't need. #
- The Brewers were overwhelmed. They tried to score in the bottom of the ninth but the Mets philosophy was too strong.#
- It's like every baseball kid's fantasy -- the count is 3 and 2 ,the team's back is to the wall, up comes the slugger, the crowd is silent and then he hits it out of the park and the team emerges victorious and the young person's fantasy saves the day. We've all been there, many times. Last night we got to live it, again, this time for real. #
- And now we go to Philadelphia to give them a proper dose of New York love. #
- Meet the Mets meet the Mets, step right up and greet the Mets, etc. #
- Game 1 of the NLDS begins tomorrow at 4PM. Good times will be had by all (except Philadelphia fans of course).#
- PS: This wasn't Mookie in game 6 of the 1986 World Series, but it was along those lines of improbability.#
- PPS: I love that they give a realtime readout on screen of the probability of each team winning. At the top of the ninth, before all the michegas, the Mets had only a 6% chance of winning. I think every game should come with a graph over time of this stat. It would be an emotional map, much more interesting than the other stats.#