"So, What Do You Do?"
Happy football season everyone! A football blowout preview spectacular is below. Don't care about football? Happy second week of September! You did it!
And now the links:
At parties, people often ask "So, what do you do?" It's highly likely your job didn't exist 10 years ago, so the answer is a bit squishy and the explanation is long. But I think the harder it is to explain your job, the better. So I wrote this thing about how I think we should kill the job title.
Ever since the senseless murder of Google Reader, Digg Reader has been the best RSS reader around. Now, the devs have added "Digg Deeper" which surfaces links that the people you are following on Twitter are most tweeting.
Oh hey, look! It's another venture capital-baked content startup that underpays its writers! (As an aside, I once interviewed a VC who said he'd only invest in content if it was based on user generated content. Bootstrap your content startups, people.)
Instead of "leaning in" should we just be paying more attention to women like Milenda Gates?
Continuing a thread about Ivy League "sheep" from last week: Peter Thiel (best known as the man behind PayPal and Palantir, investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, among may others) was on the fast track form Stanford, to law school, to a prestigious finance job. But then he got depressed and quit.
If you've ever yearned for the distraction-free nature of a flip phone with the modern amenities of a smart phone I have an idea for you.
Can I just state, for the record: who gives a shit how many spaces you put after a period?
Elizabeth Spiers on The downside of conversational writing.
"A lot of people who work in internet media secretly—or in many cases, not-so-secretly—hate it, and some even suspect they are actively making the world a dumber place, as they very well may be." A pessimistic take on writing for the internet. My thought: quality always always always wins in the end. It just may take longer than we had hoped.
And now the Sean Blanda NFL fun fact link swarm: Did you know that NFL players are twice as likely to face weapons charges but half as likely to face drug charges?... Here is Jim Cramer in an Eagles jersey. See? Not all Eagles fans are obnoxious ... We are judging kickers on the wrong thing ... Want to know what it's like for billionaires who have been successful their entire lives to finally regress to the mean? Ask Jerry Jones ... NFL players and the general public are in favor of keeping the name of the Washington professional football team ... No one cares about your fantasy team .... "I wouldn't have any idea where to get a Molly or what a Molly is." ... For the record: this is the most vicious hit in NFL history... If you want to know how good a football team really was, you need to know their Pythagorean projection.
And now my official preview: I'm going to go chalk and say the Seahawks repeat, the Eagles go 8-8 after Foles or McCoy get hurt, and the nation will collectively know all the words to approximately 145,121 stupid beer and car commercials.
As always, thanks for making space in your inbox for this little ol' letter.
--Sean
And now the links:
At parties, people often ask "So, what do you do?" It's highly likely your job didn't exist 10 years ago, so the answer is a bit squishy and the explanation is long. But I think the harder it is to explain your job, the better. So I wrote this thing about how I think we should kill the job title.
Ever since the senseless murder of Google Reader, Digg Reader has been the best RSS reader around. Now, the devs have added "Digg Deeper" which surfaces links that the people you are following on Twitter are most tweeting.
Oh hey, look! It's another venture capital-baked content startup that underpays its writers! (As an aside, I once interviewed a VC who said he'd only invest in content if it was based on user generated content. Bootstrap your content startups, people.)
Instead of "leaning in" should we just be paying more attention to women like Milenda Gates?
Continuing a thread about Ivy League "sheep" from last week: Peter Thiel (best known as the man behind PayPal and Palantir, investor in Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, among may others) was on the fast track form Stanford, to law school, to a prestigious finance job. But then he got depressed and quit.
If you've ever yearned for the distraction-free nature of a flip phone with the modern amenities of a smart phone I have an idea for you.
Can I just state, for the record: who gives a shit how many spaces you put after a period?
Elizabeth Spiers on The downside of conversational writing.
"A lot of people who work in internet media secretly—or in many cases, not-so-secretly—hate it, and some even suspect they are actively making the world a dumber place, as they very well may be." A pessimistic take on writing for the internet. My thought: quality always always always wins in the end. It just may take longer than we had hoped.
And now the Sean Blanda NFL fun fact link swarm: Did you know that NFL players are twice as likely to face weapons charges but half as likely to face drug charges?... Here is Jim Cramer in an Eagles jersey. See? Not all Eagles fans are obnoxious ... We are judging kickers on the wrong thing ... Want to know what it's like for billionaires who have been successful their entire lives to finally regress to the mean? Ask Jerry Jones ... NFL players and the general public are in favor of keeping the name of the Washington professional football team ... No one cares about your fantasy team .... "I wouldn't have any idea where to get a Molly or what a Molly is." ... For the record: this is the most vicious hit in NFL history... If you want to know how good a football team really was, you need to know their Pythagorean projection.
And now my official preview: I'm going to go chalk and say the Seahawks repeat, the Eagles go 8-8 after Foles or McCoy get hurt, and the nation will collectively know all the words to approximately 145,121 stupid beer and car commercials.
As always, thanks for making space in your inbox for this little ol' letter.
--Sean
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