This is so obvious that I hesitate even to mention it, but it hadn’t occurred to me before yesterday, and on the off-chance it hasn’t occurred to you, dear reader, I have decided to post it. If you don’t have a Tumbl of your own, you can stop reading…
…now!
The Problem
In addition to its canonical location on my website, this blog can be read in several other places, RSS readers, the Tumblr dashboard, in emails. This is fine. This is good. But several of the things that you get in the PREMIUM WYWG experience on my site won’t show up in these other places. Animated GIFs don’t work on the Tumblr dashboard, some email clients or RSS readers might strip out images, and you can’t get jazzy starsANYWHERE other than on my site.
Oftentimes this doesn’t really affect anything, but occasionally essential meaning is lost due to jazzy-star-deficiency, and these times, the obvious solution is to add a little note mentioning that for the FULL, SEXY, WYWG goodness, readers should visit my actual website.
But then keen followers of WYWG that always read on the website get pestered by all these meaningless, confusing instructions to visit the site they are actually already currently looking at. No good.
The Solution
Then it came to me in a flash. Add this to your Tumblr theme or custom CSS:
.offsite
{
display: none;
}
And then mark up your exhortations to go visit your actual site with the offsite class, thusly:
<p class="offsite">
Go visit <a href="http://tumblr.whileyouweregone.co.uk">my site</a>!
The grass is greener there!
</p>
Now, these messages will appear on the dashboard, in RSS, etc., but won’t appear on your actual website. Simple. Effective.
Neven Mrgan wrote an incisive post in which he used the rather low average of the App Store ratings for Apple’s home-produced apps to point out the flaws in the app ratings system itself. If you haven’t already, you should go read it now.
But he neglected to include the actual ratings for each individual app. I thought it might be interesting to see those, and so here they are. I’ve used the ratings for the current versions because, really, who cares about the past, but I’ve used the all-time ratings as a tie-breaker where necessary.
For jazzy CSS star ratings, click through to my site; they won’t show up in the dashboard.
But wait, I heard you all ask, when I described Flinder Boyd last week as a WYWG-Favourite, what’s so great about Flinder?
Apart from his name, obviously.
Well, I told you before but as you obviously weren’t listening, I’ll tell you again.
Flinder has a blog and it’s genuinely fantastic. He intersperses silly but amusing posts, such as his recent email and YouTube campaign to play for Arsenal, with intelligent, candid, funny, and occasionally poignant posts about his life as a “d-list basketball star”.
For example, this piece, where he compares being an unemployed athlete to waiting for a bus and wonders why he does it.
Or this post, about losing the final game of the season:
We headed to the locker room dejected, and waited for confirmation from the other game that we had, in fact, been relegated. I slowly pulled off my sweat-soaked jersey and shorts and headed to the shower with the other players surrounded in silence, under a cloud the scent of abject failure.
Standing there naked with the water pouring over my head I heard a scream from the other side of the locker room. I turned my head swiftly thinking there was a fight between players. Then I heard more screams and the walls reverberated with excitement. The general manager came running to the entrance of the shower yelling the final score of the other game. They had lost, a last second shot had sealed their fate, and only a monumental collapse from the only team more pathetic than us had saved our season.
As the news came in, one guy on his way to the shower took a 5 gallon jug of gatorade and drenched the coach as we looked on from the shower and cheered. The general manager came in with a bottle of champagne and sprayed it everywhere. One guy grabbed him and threw him in the shower soaking his suit as we jumped up and down around him in celebration.
There we were, 10 grown men, naked, smiles as wide as a 6 ton truck, screaming at the top of our lungs and high-fiving each other in the middle of the shower after losing by 25 points at home. Celebrating the fact, that although we were inept and useless there was still one team more hopeless than us.
Where else can you read insights into an professional sportsperson’s life like that? Nowhere else, is where.
Some other recent hits:
This post where he elicits an email from the Dorchester Hotel that implies he might be able to bring his pet donkey with him to stay.
This post where he likens the L.A. Clippers to “a bald-headed step child”, and explains why it’s good to root for a terrible team:
But imagine if we actually beat a good team, guess what? Party time! If we beat a bad team, guess what? Party time! So do the math, 82 games in the season even if we just win 20 and lose 62…guess what? 20 parties a year, every win is celebration time for the fan of a bad team. Who needs a championship when you can party 20 times a year. Of course your expectations have to be low, and if you support a team like the Clippers you don’t only judge a single game in terms of a win or loss, you judge it if they beat the spread. For instance, the Lakers are supposed to beat the Clippers by 10 points and we only lose by 7, fantastic. Not a win, but we can say things like, ‘man, we had that game, just a little bad luck at the end.’
This post where he explains why Thierry Henry’s “hand of frog” wasn’t cheating, with terrific video examples of both a). cheating, and b). a handball.
This post a detailed explanation of the problems facing City Hall in its attempts to fund local sports facilities in London, completely serious apart from the reference to Boris Johnson as “BoJo”.
What’s that you say? I’ve just posted links to every single post he’s made in the past six months?
I rest my case.
Oh yeah, and there’s some posts about music; I completely ignore those.
In slightly cheerier British basketball news, Britball reported back in May that WYWG-favouriteFlinder Boyd made the roster for team GB’s squad for its qualifying campaign for Eurobasket 2011.
Other notable* names on the list are current NBA players Luol Deng and Ben Gordon, Kieron “Length” Achara, Pops Mensah-Bonsu, Mike Lenzly, Germayne “I gotta get my stance right” Forbes, “Jared” Hart, and Nate “Top Rankin’” Reinking.
“ Professional cyclists often talk about how the love of suffering itself is something all good cyclists must have on one level or another. More and more, I feel the same way about being a sports fan. If you’re waiting for that one game, one moment, one play, one championship, three championships, that will make all that suffering go away and let you feel nothing but warm inside when you think about your favorite players and teams, I suggest taking up quilting. To be a die-hard fan is to suffer. You just have to enjoy the little victories that you find while you’re suffering. ”
—John Krolik, on LeBron James’s depature from the Cleveland Cavaliers.
FIBA secretary-general Patrick Baumann has revealed that Great Britain’s men and women may have to wait until next summer before learning whether they will get a place in the 2012 Olympic Games.
…
The news is likely to disappoint British Basketball, who have long been frustrated at the lack of clarity over the issue, having originally been told that the national teams would have to be “competitive” to earn an invite to London.
Well that sucks. Especially considering GB’s performance at Eurobasket last year—where GB narrowly missed out on toppling the eventual champions Spain, without the help of their best player, Luol Deng—pretty much proved the team could be “competitive.”
“ As expected, people like to draw male reproduction organs all over the place, and an annoying one was people scribbling on top of nice drawings. It was so annoying that I even had to tweak the brush algorithm to discourage such actions. The faster you move the cursor the less opacity the pencil has. Stupid solutions for stupid problems. ”
According to the D.C. Sports Bog, the John Wall Dance was played out well before the above video was made, way back in February.
I don’t think the craze made it over the pond, though, and somehow I never got around to checking it out the first time round, so the recent resurgence of the dance when Wall was the no. 1 pick in the NBA draft was a welcome reminder.
I’ll be sure to break this one out next time I hit the clubs.
“ of the approximately 750 children who will drown next year, about 375 of them will do so within 25 yards of a parent or other adult. In ten percent of those drownings, the adult will actually watch them do it, having no idea it is happening. ”
