Day 2,345, Quasi-Quarantine: The Snipers Were Out In Full Force Along The Scooters' Draft Freeway

 

So we've all had that fantasy football experience where it feels like the person picking before you in the draft takes the player you were targeting seemingly every time during the course of the selection process. Most of the time, you look back and realize that it happened way less than it felt like.

And other times, you look back and realize you weren't exaggerating at all and it happened around a dozen times. 

Yeah, so that was this year for me.

I got sniped so many times in this draft that I was literally angry for no reason I was able to coherently articulate. ESPN sending its unasked-for draft grade moments after the conclusion didn't help -- especially since ESPN doesn't understand how superflex drafts work (arguably, neither do I).

There were eight instances where the player I wanted as picked directly or two picks before my spot that were particularly damaging to my overall efforts:

• Ja'Marr Chase (1st round)
• Derrick Henry (3rd)
• David Montgomery (6th)
• Kenneth Gainwell and J.K. Dobbins (ninth)
• Jordan Mason (11th)
• Chris Godwin (13th)
• Alvin Kamara (14th)

What really got me steaming was the back-to-back of Godwin and Kamara, as Godwin was someone who fell that I was excited about and I had a plan to immediately stash Kamara on IR and fill his roster spot directly following the draft.

Other examples that didn't upset me quite as much:

• Amon-Ra St. Brown (2nd)
• Nico Collins (4th)
• Emeka Egbuka (5th)
• Woody Marks (12th)
• Keaton Mitchell (15th)

I feel like I pivoted really well after my strategy got torpedoed early on, but the draft-day results followed on the heels of a highly frustrating season that saw me win the winner's consolation ladder, end up in fifth place, and wrap up the season 10-7 after back-to-back wins over my least-favorite owner.

I really liked my roster in the final weeks of the season and finished on a heater, but the combo of injuries and shite luck -- I allowed the second-most fantasy points in the league -- proved too much to overcome.

Now I'm left to hope that a testing draft isn't an omen that the upcoming season will go down a similar path as last year's.

Go Scooters.

Day 2,344, Quasi-Quarantine: Silicon Valley Vet Shares How To Navigate Aggressive Tech Landscape In "Build"

“The ultimate job of marketing is to find the very best way to tell the true story of your product.”

A comprehensive look at the confluence of ideas, people, and corporate politics, "Build" does a nice job of using concrete examples. Tony Fadell includes useful diagrams and anecdotes, never shying away from hard truths (a chapter on assholes is particularly insightful).

“As a manager, you should be focused on making sure the team is producing the best possible product. The outcome is your business. How the team reaches that outcome is the team’s business.”

Some of the concepts feel a little dated and tend to lose sight of work-life balance at times as he documents starting, building, and losing companies. Fadell also tends to focus on more, more, more, making portions of the book feel pretty finance bro-coded.

“To do great things, to really learn, you can’t shout suggestions from the rooftop then move on while someone else does the work. You have to get your hands dirty. You have to care about every step, lovingly craft every detail. You have to be there when it falls apart so you can put it back together.

“You have to actually do the job. You have to love the job.”

Overall, however, this is a fascinating and instructive read. At a seminal moment for the technology industry, "Build" serves best as a catalog of the questions we should be asking ourselves, one another, and our customers.

“What you're building never matters as much as who you’re building it with.”

Limerick Friday #652: A Confusing And Stuttering Draft Marks The Return Of Fantasy Football -- Day 2,340

My QBs are the best

At tight end I'm blessed

My receivers are deep

Running backs make me weep

But I can figure out the rest

On rock bottom they alit

Before they remembered how to hit

After a trade-deadline purge

The Mets started to surge

Now they're winning for a bit

"Silo" is in its third season

Still addictive beyond reason

But juggling timelines

And different lifetimes

Has the pace kinda wheezin'

After years of dooming

Another long season looming

Thanks to decades of fail

We're in dead-cap jail

Better times ahead, I'm assuming

A bizarre fantasy draft

My roster got the shaft

Like six times I got sniped

Cursingly, I griped

But at the end I shrugged and laughed

Last time ...

Day 2,337, Quasi-Quarantine: Wet Leg Rocks KEXP In Their Very Distinctive Way

Wet Leg was probably my band of the year for 2025 after following up their self-titled debut in 2022 with "Moisturizer."

Led by pyrotechnic lead singer Rhian Teasdale, this band has a unique sound, a piquant presence, and a scintillating catalog of bangers. Be sure to check them out if you haven't yet.

Day 2,336, Quasi-Quarantine: "The Keeper" Serves As Perfunctory End To Trilogy Of Ex-Pat Ex-Cop In Ireland

 

“She looks like she popped out of Instagram by mistake and someone should put her back in before she gets smudged.”

In the finale of the Cal Hooper trilogy, the former Chicago cop finds himself embroiled yet again in an unlikely crime in rural Ireland. 

As part of a rather on-the-nose farmers-vs.-townies encounter, he helps unravel the mystery surrounding the death of a young women torn between her fiance and the village she loves.

While most of French's plots require some suspension of disbelief (see my review of "The Searcher"), this one felt even more difficult to entertain than most. The narrative wanders and the characters feel a little too one-dimensional, leading to a novel that ends up feeling like the conclusion of a trilogy that was proposed and wrapped up all in one motion.

“She says, ‘C’n Kate come for dinner as well?’

“Cal is hit by a sudden sense of wonder. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘She like tacos?’”

Day 2,331, Quasi-Quarantine: Greek Bacchanal, Mysterious Professor, And Insular Clique Drive Uneven "The Secret History"

“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.”

Elitism and accountability clash at a small liberal arts college in New England, as a group of impressionable students gravitate to an iconoclastic professor in Donna Tartt's first novel. The narrator, Richard, ends up there from California almost without agency, falling under the spell of his classmates and their teacher.

“After class, I wandered downstairs in a dream, my head spinning, but acutely, achingly conscious that I was alive and young on a beautiful day; the sky a deep deep painful blue, wind scattering the red and yellow leaves in a whirlwind of confetti.”

"The Secret History" often feels like a fever dream, with interiority being a challenge for the novel. Richard is often bullied, but he is also comes off as a bit of a fraud, which detracts from his reliability as a narrator.

“It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.”

The intense connections made between the characters can feel rushed and misunderstood. The dominant female character, Camilla, is granted little in the way of voice or autonomy, leaving her feelings about the events of the story unexamined.

As the action escalates out of control, a reader might wonder why Richard didn't just leave, especially as his place within the group feels unsecure and unnecessary. 

“He had never seen a gunshot wound. He kept asking what it felt like? dull or sharp? an ache or burn? My head was spinning and naturally I could give him no kind of coherent answer but I remember thinking dimly that it was sort of like the first time I got drunk, or slept with a girl; not quite what one expected, really, but once it happened one realized it couldn’t be any other way.”

As an unabashed fan of "The Goldfinch" -- the Scooties award winner in 2021 -- I was expecting a bit more from this work, but acknowledge that it may simply feature the growing pains of a new novelist. "The Secret History" is certainly absorbing, but some may be left with a sense of incompleteness and a wish that Tartt had spent a little more time exploring the interpersonal dynamics.

“Religious slurs, temper tantrums, insults, coercion, debt: all petty things, really, irritants–too minor, it would seem, to move five reasonable people to murder. But, if I dare say it, it wasn’t until I had helped to kill a man that I realized how elusive and complex an act a murder can actually be, and not necessarily attributable to one dramatic motive.”

Day 2,329, Quasi-Quarantine: Remembering San Fran Along The Outer Banks

 

A beautiful new tradition we've started is an anniversary-week getaway to Duck for some restorative quiet time.

During this year's visit, we tackled a 500-piece Puzzlefolk puzzle. The subject was San Francisco, to commemorate the recent spring-break visit to the amazing city.

The puzzle featured a stellar design and unique art, and we actually ended up starting and finishing it in a single evening. I would have preferred drawing it out a little more for prolonged enjoyment, but my partner was incredibly motivated.

8.6, would jigsaw overlooking the Atlantic again