The Dice — 025

It’s the morning after or that’s how it feels. I haven’t read much or listened to the news since Wednesday. I’ve scanned headlines while waking up, but much of what’s put on there right now has little to no interest to me. We typically watch SNL on Sunday mornings through breakfast and refills of coffee. I’m hesitant to turn it on because I don’t want to see the crushed look on the actor's faces behind their staged performances. And to think Loren Michaels once asked Rudi Gulianni if it was okay to “be funny” during the cold opening of SNL when it returned after 9/11. That’s how far we’ve fallen. The distance between then and now is unfathomable. I can’t believe I just wrote that but that’s how it feels right now. Heavy.

There’s only one roll related to the election, I promise. Grab a drink and let’s go.

The majority of articles, blog posts, and social rants right now are fixated on finger-pointing and blame. Yesterday I made it clear that “why” and “how” aren't the problems to focus on right now. It’s time to slam the reset button and Ken White has laid out next steps perfectly on his blog, The Popehat Report. His post, And Yet It Moves: Thoughts The Day After is worth reading all the way through and then again and again. “Are Americans inherently good, freedom-loving, devoted to free speech and free worship, committed to all people being created equal? That’s our founding myth, and isn’t it pretty to think so? We’re freedom-loving when times are easy, devoted to speech and worship we like with lip service to the rest, and divided about our differences since our inception.”

More thoughts worth reading come from John Gruber and Craig Mod.

“When I want information, like the real stuff, I go to forums,” writes Chris Person, “This blog is a salute to those forums that are either worth participating in or at least looking at in bewilderment.” Forums are still alive, active, and a treasure trove of information is a long, curated list of bulletin boards that includes one hosted by an old, favorite client of mine (I’ll have to write about that guy someday). It’s great to see that these communities are still alive and well. Makes me wonder what’s happening on Usenet these days aside from industrial-scale rampant piracy. From what I could find, Eternal Summer is one of the very few, if not only, Usenet services devoted to conversations.

We are ten days into Noirvember and I can’t think of a better distraction right now. The Criterion Collection has the entire month covered (in hindsight, I should have published this last week) with titles that go beyond the black-and-white classics. For those who are new to the genre, consider Polygon’s shorter list that features a good portion of the hits. My favorite list—I’m just going to call it the best list—comes from That Shelf with double features and modern films like Minority Report, Fargo, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, and the Big Lebowski.

Not at all related: Somebody thought it was a good idea to have another go at The Office set in Australia.

NFL players appear to have an unhealthy appetite for crustless peanut butter and jelly snacks. This comes from brilliant investigative reporting by The Athletic. “Based on the information collected, it’s safe to say that NFL teams go through anywhere from 3,600 to 4,300 Uncrustables a week. When you factor in training camps and the teams that did not share their data, NFL teams easily go through at least 80,000 Uncrustables a year.” Now we can’t talk about numbers and football without making the obvious correlation so here it is: “The Uncrustables eaten by the NFL in one year would cover over 18 yards of a football field.” I’m so used to seeing things measured in entire football fields that this statistic seems kinda lame, but if I tell you that the Denver Broncos consume 700 of these things a week…uf-da.

Related: Watch this lady go through hell and back trying to reverse-engineer Uncrustables at home.

We love a good board game at Storeyhouse, so when I caught a glimpse of the packaging, the board, and the pieces, I had to check out this new title called GHQ. “[It] is a fast-paced two-player battle game in which each player maneuvers military units — infantry, armored vehicles, artillery, and an airborne regiment—to capture the other player’s headquarters.” The box design looks like it was created by Saul Bass and the feel of the game itself is straight up mid-century. That’s all intended as the game was created in the 1950’s by a man you likely know better for his books, author Kurt Vonnegut. The game “is similar in mood to chess, and it is played on a standard checkerboard” wrote Vonnegut in his unsuccessfull pitch game to publishers nearly 70 years ago. Today it is available to buy exclusively from Barnes & Noble.

Jokes and satire about Comic Sans have surely jumped the shark by now but I feel the need to slow clap Slate magazine for their treatment of an interview with Simon Garfield, author of Comic Sans: The Biography of a Typeface. They set the entire page in the font despised and frowned upon by many. Now and then I reach out to Jason Santa Maria to tell him how much I love looking and reading Slate because of his design direction and choice of typography.

Meanwhile, Slate seems to have a real thing for Comic Sans. 

Published in Tacoma, Washington while jamming out to by The Low End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest.