PicoBlog

Before the match analysis… In the coming days I will be turning on payments. This newsletter has been a passion project of mine for two years. I consider myself a tennis coach first and foremost, but the consistent growth and engagement has been really encouraging. Open rates remain above 60% with more than 2500 subscribers. Writing these pieces takes considerable time — often late into Sunday evening after finals. However, the beauty of writing is that the author learns more than the reader.

Hello, How are you? I thought today I’d do something I haven’t done on this newsletter for ages: chat about a book! Just before Christmas, I finally read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. Let’s leave aside the frankly baffling fact that it took me this long to get round to it and concentrate on this: it is brilliant. Stop-in-your-tracks, reread-a-sentence-in-awe, yes-that’s-it brilliant. I loved it. For those of you who don’t know, Lorde was a black, queer, feminist activist in a time when being any of those things, let alone all of them, wasn’t exactly celebrated by society.

If you’re anything like me, then you too are relieved to have finally restocked your supply of fiber capsules. And perhaps, also like me, you have fallen asleep each night and awoken each morning of the past two weeks with the same song playing in your head - “Sitting” (feat. TJ Mack) [Josh Mac Version] by Brian Jordan Alvarez. As the old proverb sayeth, “The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

James Grady published Six Days of the Condor—an excellent, tight, highly recommended spy novel—when he was just twenty five years old. That’s insane; remember, Tom Clancy was 39 when he published The Hunt for Red October I just listened to the audiobook for the first time. It fits so well into the broader umbrella of The Hunt for Tom Clancy’s مهمة I couldn’t help but include it. Jim Grady was a writing prodigy from Shelby, Montana, who spent just enough time working for a senator during college at the University of Montana that he was able to write what he knew and imagine the rest—after spending some time out and about, absorbing the world he walked in through the eyes and ears of a novelist.

Large-box board games are, in many ways, the things that drive the board game hobby. In my nascent days in the hobby, I was drawn to those Euro-sized square boxes. I wanted the games that had weight to them, and that was a signal to me. I think that’s changing these days — the perception, I mean. There have long been great games that come in small boxes, and this isn’t even the first time I’ve written about the topic.

Netflix unceremoniously dumped their next half year of content performance data last week and it was all my fault. I had been speaking with a colleague that morning about putting together a concerted crunch and insight extraction for this next batch of numbers, proclaiming “yeah, I think we probably have 4 – 6 weeks to get organized”… Netflix obviously overheard, and then dropped to spite me. The period they’re looking at this time is July to December 2023.

To investors, We hosted the inaugural Bitcoin Investor Day on Friday. There were over 800 people who attended the event, which made it the single largest gathering of institutional investors interested in bitcoin in history. Insane to see that level of turnout for an event that was put together in less than 100 days. The speaker lineup was really strong and I learned quite a bit. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways:

Core memory unlocked: It’s summer 2003. I’m 10 years old and attempting to escape the humidity in the basement with my little sister and our babysitter. Earlier that year, I had received a CD in my Easter basket, one with a grainy blueish cover featuring a teenage girl in baggy black pants and dark eyeliner. (I thought it was an unusual choice for the Easter Bunny, tbh.) It’s playing in my blue boombox now, blasting loud enough to (hopefully) scare off any spiders lurking in the basement’s unfinished storage area, waiting to terrorize us the next time we dug through our dress-up bin or pulled out a craft project.

Ska had reached its mainstream peak in 1997. That summer, a young VJ named Carson Daly, dressed in a too-large, Blues Brothers knockoff suit, hosted the embarrassing 2-hour special Skaturday. Surrounded by a parade of goofy ska dancers, Daly spouted off slightly incorrect ska history, while presenting the genre as the latest craze to grab a hold of the ever-fickle beast known as ‘youth culture.’ For anyone unfamiliar with ska, MTV’s brief rendezvous with ska presented the scene as silly dance music from Orange County where legions of ska kids dutifully dressed in plaid suits and Hawaiian shirts and ran in place till they passed out from lack of oxygen.