You should look into Eileen Gu. Many sketchy things going with her citizenship status. Grandfather was a CCP official, no one knows who her father is. Criticizes the US through BLM but does not dare say a word about China’s human rights abuses. Her and her tiger mom are all about cashing in.
Feb 12, 2022·edited Feb 12, 2022Liked by Royce Webb
After reading the Woj article and some comments below, I feel that a decline in NBA viewership could be attributed in part to missing truehoop or daily dime like basketball coverage. Maybe I'm conflating my own personal experience, but truehoop used to get me interested in all different parts of the NBA. It was a great nexus to waste time reading about different teams and their situations. Something like daily dime was helpful in boosting interest as well as informing fans. It made me interested in watching NBA games that weren't just the warriors. I first started giving a shit about the NBA at large because of an ESPN the Magazine article in like 2003 that laid out all the playoff storylines. So did their nba blogs make espn money? Probably not directly, but using it as a place to foster excitement about a key product definitely did.
Making Woj their focus for NBA is such a mistake. It used to be great to go to a curated site to read about the NBA at large, with a collection of national and local writers. Maybe there's somewhere that offers that now and I'm just unaware. Now it's mostly transactional stuff that is great in the moment but doesn't create new fans.
Don't have a hot take, just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the Woj piece. NBA media and coverage is so bizarre. It really is almost like state-sponsored media (like you said in the callin.) LeBron has a media apparatus. There are people on tv whose job is to "argue" that LeBron James is great at basketball. With Woj, who seems like a lowkey sociopath, I don't understand the point of him. Information has never been easier to come by. Nobody cares if they hear about a trade at 11:34 am or 11:51 am except for him and ESPN. Then you have the social justice part, which I won't get into, and I even agree with most of the points, but I have to imagine there is a very low % of people who enjoy being lectured about what's wrong with the world when they turn on sports. It just seems like actual basketball games is down on the priority list for NBA media and coverage, which seems like a strange strategy.
It’s interesting to see how the science changes once polling shows these mandates are less and less popular. Also the coverage difference by the main stream media for BLM and the truckers is red pilling a lot of my very blue friends. Even they are coming around to the double standard.
I'm addicted to information. The podcast/substack/twitter/smartphone world has ruined my life. I need crap pumped into my brain at all times otherwise I'm bored. The information fills in for social interaction (Podcast conversation make me feel less alone), substacks makes me feel like I am part of club(Like the secrets of the stonecutters but without the social obligation), and twitter is just a info-faucet that is always on. Its always there and there is always more.
Everything bad that has happened the last few years is just the butterfly effect from Kenny Mauer's overturned charge call on Durant in Game 1 of the 2018 finals. Changed the course of history.
I think the Nets came out much better from this blockbuster trade than people think. Simmons is a perfect addition (distributor, great defender) that they need, and Harden's role was almost redundant with the scoring of Durant and Kyrie. Add in Drummond (top tier rebounder) and Curry (to go with Mills and Harris), if/when Nets get healthy I think they are going to be the best team in the NBA down the stretch and win the finals.
Our country would be in a much better place if the Republican Party was normal and tried to grow their base using policy and not IDPOL complaints. Especially in more lefty pockets like the Bay Area. Maybe have an actual platform for actual people instead of just trying to make democrats look bad, which isn’t even hard to do.
I am doing my children a favour by shunning the Olympics in our house. The IOC is a morally reprehensible exploitive commercial organization and not an athletic organization emblematic of fair play and credible competition.
I worked in film development in 2000 and Jet Li was gaining credibility as an actor in hollywood with Romeo must die. Li was attached (from what i was told) to a really good sci-fi/time traveling script that was anti- china, anti communist- it was very similar to blade runner. Premise was we are in the near future 2020-2030 area and China controls the world (and the US). Little privacy and human rights abuses everywhere.
It was a good script, but the producers i worked for scoffed that it could never be made. No one wanted to piss of China even in 2000. The film script never went anywhere- and jet li did a different time traveling film instead with “the one.”
Jet Li complained afterward about china censors always disallowing his films and i have always been curious if that anti-communist film scripy he was attached to did it. And again, i am unsure if Li was ever really formally attached.
I thought it was crazy how verboten china criticism was even back then. It seemed natural that the movies would make China the big bad villian and supplant the red russians from the 80s.
The West's escalating internal culture war is actually a distraction constructed by the rich and powerful to hide in plain sight the real issue underlying pretty much every social problem we have - ever-deepening wealth inequity.
Disney ruined Boba Fett. That is obviously not a hot take. That's the internet consensus... And if we say that as a character he's ruined because he's something the opposite of the purpose of his character in our minds (for more than three decades) that is one thing but then I'll jump on the bandwagon that Robert Rodriguez is inappropriate as a director to fulfill our mind's eye of what made the previous mandalorian TV series so successful -- not being cheesy. What's interesting though is the context of the Mandalorian as a novel character and being what we all wish Boba Fett could have been as an entity. It would have been a slam dunk for them to just make a show called Boba Fett, to begin with, and lean into every fact we know about Boba Fett being a part of his series. So much of Hollywood is presenting and recycling known characters especially something as nostalgic as Boba Fett. They kind of went backwards with mandalorian as this new thing that was amazing and successful and then thought they would fall into success, with Boba Fett, no matter what. Yet did not come close to achieving the same amount of success or recognition.
Collectively, we should be emphasizing much more vocational education and much less phony academic "education." https://seliger.com/2017/06/16/rare-good-political-news-boosting-apprenticeships/
Women's MMA is by far the best women's sport because it is not positioned or marketed as "women's sports".
You should look into Eileen Gu. Many sketchy things going with her citizenship status. Grandfather was a CCP official, no one knows who her father is. Criticizes the US through BLM but does not dare say a word about China’s human rights abuses. Her and her tiger mom are all about cashing in.
After reading the Woj article and some comments below, I feel that a decline in NBA viewership could be attributed in part to missing truehoop or daily dime like basketball coverage. Maybe I'm conflating my own personal experience, but truehoop used to get me interested in all different parts of the NBA. It was a great nexus to waste time reading about different teams and their situations. Something like daily dime was helpful in boosting interest as well as informing fans. It made me interested in watching NBA games that weren't just the warriors. I first started giving a shit about the NBA at large because of an ESPN the Magazine article in like 2003 that laid out all the playoff storylines. So did their nba blogs make espn money? Probably not directly, but using it as a place to foster excitement about a key product definitely did.
Making Woj their focus for NBA is such a mistake. It used to be great to go to a curated site to read about the NBA at large, with a collection of national and local writers. Maybe there's somewhere that offers that now and I'm just unaware. Now it's mostly transactional stuff that is great in the moment but doesn't create new fans.
Don't have a hot take, just wanted to say that I really enjoyed the Woj piece. NBA media and coverage is so bizarre. It really is almost like state-sponsored media (like you said in the callin.) LeBron has a media apparatus. There are people on tv whose job is to "argue" that LeBron James is great at basketball. With Woj, who seems like a lowkey sociopath, I don't understand the point of him. Information has never been easier to come by. Nobody cares if they hear about a trade at 11:34 am or 11:51 am except for him and ESPN. Then you have the social justice part, which I won't get into, and I even agree with most of the points, but I have to imagine there is a very low % of people who enjoy being lectured about what's wrong with the world when they turn on sports. It just seems like actual basketball games is down on the priority list for NBA media and coverage, which seems like a strange strategy.
It’s interesting to see how the science changes once polling shows these mandates are less and less popular. Also the coverage difference by the main stream media for BLM and the truckers is red pilling a lot of my very blue friends. Even they are coming around to the double standard.
Super bowl commercials are not entertaining.
I'm addicted to information. The podcast/substack/twitter/smartphone world has ruined my life. I need crap pumped into my brain at all times otherwise I'm bored. The information fills in for social interaction (Podcast conversation make me feel less alone), substacks makes me feel like I am part of club(Like the secrets of the stonecutters but without the social obligation), and twitter is just a info-faucet that is always on. Its always there and there is always more.
Ben Simmons won't be in the NBA in 2025.
NFT's are an incredible scam.
Everything bad that has happened the last few years is just the butterfly effect from Kenny Mauer's overturned charge call on Durant in Game 1 of the 2018 finals. Changed the course of history.
I think the Nets came out much better from this blockbuster trade than people think. Simmons is a perfect addition (distributor, great defender) that they need, and Harden's role was almost redundant with the scoring of Durant and Kyrie. Add in Drummond (top tier rebounder) and Curry (to go with Mills and Harris), if/when Nets get healthy I think they are going to be the best team in the NBA down the stretch and win the finals.
Our country would be in a much better place if the Republican Party was normal and tried to grow their base using policy and not IDPOL complaints. Especially in more lefty pockets like the Bay Area. Maybe have an actual platform for actual people instead of just trying to make democrats look bad, which isn’t even hard to do.
De-criminalized weed is the root cause of the homelessness epidemic and, in a way, the spike in street crime in major cities.
I like wearing a mask in public. It keeps my face warm, lessens sun exposure, and helps make me more "anonymous."
I am doing my children a favour by shunning the Olympics in our house. The IOC is a morally reprehensible exploitive commercial organization and not an athletic organization emblematic of fair play and credible competition.
Re: China discussion with Schwartzel.
I worked in film development in 2000 and Jet Li was gaining credibility as an actor in hollywood with Romeo must die. Li was attached (from what i was told) to a really good sci-fi/time traveling script that was anti- china, anti communist- it was very similar to blade runner. Premise was we are in the near future 2020-2030 area and China controls the world (and the US). Little privacy and human rights abuses everywhere.
It was a good script, but the producers i worked for scoffed that it could never be made. No one wanted to piss of China even in 2000. The film script never went anywhere- and jet li did a different time traveling film instead with “the one.”
Jet Li complained afterward about china censors always disallowing his films and i have always been curious if that anti-communist film scripy he was attached to did it. And again, i am unsure if Li was ever really formally attached.
I thought it was crazy how verboten china criticism was even back then. It seemed natural that the movies would make China the big bad villian and supplant the red russians from the 80s.
The West's escalating internal culture war is actually a distraction constructed by the rich and powerful to hide in plain sight the real issue underlying pretty much every social problem we have - ever-deepening wealth inequity.
Is it not blazingly obvious that Epstein was a Mossad / CIA blackmail operation, like Robert Maxwell and so many other operations?
Harden and Embiid will not mesh well on or off the court and the Harden trade will be Morey's first massive failure.
Disney ruined Boba Fett. That is obviously not a hot take. That's the internet consensus... And if we say that as a character he's ruined because he's something the opposite of the purpose of his character in our minds (for more than three decades) that is one thing but then I'll jump on the bandwagon that Robert Rodriguez is inappropriate as a director to fulfill our mind's eye of what made the previous mandalorian TV series so successful -- not being cheesy. What's interesting though is the context of the Mandalorian as a novel character and being what we all wish Boba Fett could have been as an entity. It would have been a slam dunk for them to just make a show called Boba Fett, to begin with, and lean into every fact we know about Boba Fett being a part of his series. So much of Hollywood is presenting and recycling known characters especially something as nostalgic as Boba Fett. They kind of went backwards with mandalorian as this new thing that was amazing and successful and then thought they would fall into success, with Boba Fett, no matter what. Yet did not come close to achieving the same amount of success or recognition.
Mild take Monday - "hot takes" don't feel hot anymore
You got to give credit to Woj to somehow replacing a press release and turning that into a 7 figure a year job.