In-case anyone questions Taylor Swift’s business acumen:

Taylor Swift didn’t sign $100 million FTX sponsorship because she was the only one to ask about unregistered securities, lawyer says

Taylor Swift Avoided $100 Million FTX Deal With Securities Question: Lawyer

As far as I’ve read, she’s one of the only people to do so: https://www.businessinsider.com/taylor-swift-avoided-100-million-ftx-deal-with-securities-question-2023-4

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Since I started running again last month, a number of folks told me they listen to podcasts to make the run go by faster.

I’ve always been a music listener because I tend to run to the beat, use it to get my pumped up, etc.

But I’m always open to new ideas!

Anyway, Overcast has been my long-time podcast app of choice, but the experience with downloading episodes to the Apple Watch has been incredibly frustrating and unpredictable. And I’m only taking my watch with me on runs.

Turns out, I’m a lifetime member of Pocket Casts +, which means I’m privy to some great features, including Watch support. So I’ve decided to switch over to that for a week or so to see if it’s better.

I’ll likely do a comparison write-up in the near future, either here or over on Podcast Liftoff.

If there’s anything you want to know, leave a comment!

Max Scherzer was ejected from the 4th inning after Phil Cuzzi decided the legal substance he was using was too sticky.

Is anyone actually surprised Phil Cuzzi made this about Phil Cuzzi? Now that pitcher checks are becoming more common again, the “look at me” umps must be so excited.

I’ve long-felt Spotify is the superior music listening app, but lately I find myself using it over Apple Music for a different reason.

Inexplicably, both my AirPods Pro 2 and Max cut out when I use them with my Mac Studio. Some sort of interference. So instead, I connect them to my phone to listen to music at my desk.

Thanks to Spotify being strongly cross-device, I can still control my music from my computer, sans-cut outs.

It’s dumb to need this workaround, but I’m glad it exists.

I keep a set of poker chips at my desk. I like to shuffle them while I think about stuff.

I would do the same thing playing poker. Thinking about the cards I’ve been dealt, the bet I want to make, and if I think it will pay off for me.

Playing poker is a lot like running a business. You want to make little bets here and there to see if they pay off.

And you need to make bets. You can’t just keep paying the ante, hoping to win small pots. Eventually, you’ll bleed out.

But you don’t want to go all-in every hand either. You’ll lose everything fast being reckless.

You want to think about your strategy, what you know about the field, and play the cards you’ve been dealt to the best of your ability.

99.9% of the time, I don’t miss Twitter. I don’t miss the nonsense and drama and public shaming and ill conceived thoughts.

But something I was acutely aware might happen was that once baseball season started, I’d feel a small void from not being able to live tweet games.

And I felt it when Aaron Judge hit his first HR of the year, in his first at-bat of the season.

I won’t be going back to Twitter for all of the reasons I stated above (I still get news from my Baseball Twitter list thanks to Reader by Readwise), but I might be turning to Mastodon more…at least during baseball season.

I started running again. Well, more accurately, I ran this morning. I’m trying to reform the habit.

This was the first time I ran outside since I ran a 10K in November 2016, IIRC. I decided to start again because I need to do something, and running requires the least amount of setup.

Something that excites me is running without my phone on me, which I may have done on occasion in the past. But now that I have an Apple Watch Ultra + AirPods Pro 2, it’s much more plausible for me to run, listen to music, and still have enough battery life to get me through the day.

It was really nice not having a monstrous phone swinging back and forth in my pocket.

In the booth for LinkedIn Learning today. Shout out to Lab22 and Sara Dietschy for the new gear for my scripts!

More coming soon when I update my desk post.

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This piece by David Kagan at The Dispatch perfectly captures all of my issues with the MLB’s rule changes…and the clear evidence that Manfred doesn’t care about baseball.

Finally, we have the ghost-runner rule, Manfred’s most notorious bastardization of the game. The rule places a base runner at second base to begin every extra-inning frame. Initially adopted during the COVID-shortened 2020 season, it was introduced to spare the arms of pitchers in the 60-game sprint to the playoffs. The purported explanation was that too many games were going deep into extra innings, and the league couldn’t afford overtaxed arms late in the season. In reality, the rule is there to keep extra innings to a minimum. Apparently fans can’t be asked to sit through more than a couple innings of sudden death baseball.

Above all others, this rule is the furthest deviation from the national pastime. Once a game hits extra innings, it’s no longer baseball. As Joe Morgan said in Moneyball, “You have to steal, you have to bunt, you have to sacrifice, you gotta get men in scoring position and then you gotta bring ’em in.” Not in extra inning games. A bunt and a sacrifice fly—or just a bloop single–can win you a ballgame.

Except not in the playoffs. Because the MLB thinks it would be silly to decide important games like this.

Read here: Manfredball and the MLB’s Crisis of Confidence – The Dispatch

I had a live stream today and decided to use my iPad Pro to draw some stuff. Created a scene in eCamm Live and I’m pretty psyched it worked: