I don’t really understand rss other than it is the magic bit of code that tells my feed aggregator there is something new to look at. I really don’t care what the method is as long as the bits I want to read land on the platform I will see them.

RSS has been pronounced dead for a while, but I’m not convinced. It’s true that technically it’s kind of an abomination, having metastasized early into many not-quite-compatible dialects. And it’s XML, whose time has probably passed. But that need for individuals web sites to be able to publish feeds, on their own, without Google’s mediation, remains. RSS came out of that “Web 2.0″ obsession with syndication, and wiring up web sites with data feeds. And that remains a good idea, even if it doesn’t fit with Google’s centralized business model. This might be a good time to revive the idea of independent site-centric feeds.

This reminded me little of the John Scalzi novel The Dispatcher. The premise of that novel was that for some unknown reason people the world changed and people that were murdered almost always came back to life in their bed perfectly healthy. Death of natural causes or suicide kept you dead, but you couldn’t be murdered by another. An industry sprang up from it, where legal dispatchers came to murder people about to die during an operation etc. I don’t remember the specifics, but there were rules. Of course the gray and blackmarket had their dispatchers as well and sometimes people worked in all three.

The idea was a weird one to build a novel around, but Scalzi managed to make it work and never once tried to explain the phenomenon behind it. Likewise with this one.

Jon Bois is a name I will keep an eye on as well.

A trio of adolescent sentient space probes, laughing at the antics of the immortal football players of Earth. What a concept.

Thanks, and please post if you come across more stuff like this from Jon Bois. I’ll remember that name.

Neat. He paced it to draw out the suspense, but revealed episodes fast enough to keep you on the hook. May be a lesson there for Netflix and Amazon.

Not so coincidentally, that’s my personal style of “binge-watching”. No way on Earth could I ever spend a weekend on the couch watching episodes back-to-back. But I can space a standard 13-episode season over a couple of weeks right neatly.

The wikipedia article has quite a lot of information for only being 4 days old. Probably somebody in the know is the main author of the article.

Looks like the series ends tomorrow if wikipedia can be believed:
“The series is expected to end on July 15.”

Damn. I guess it makes sense though, the rapid pace of new content didn’t seem sustainable.

http://www.tor.com/2017/07/06/jon-bois-future-of-football-17776-story/

I don’t even follow sports, so had never heard of Jon Bois, nor would I have come across this any other way.

Yesterday I was browsing through Jon Bois writings at sbnation, they seem a bit odd and eclectic. Its a perfect trap to guile someone who doesn’t watch sports into the fold. Danger:

https://www.sbnation.com/authors/jon-bois

I think what impresses me as much the juggernaut of it is the gonzo originality. I just finished the long segment [SPOILER] about the destruction of the famous Livermore lighbulb after ~17,800 years, interwoven with the tale of Lacrecia’s 10,000-year bad luck streak. The light bulb’s a real thing (today), and it’s a tickle that it’s portrayed as lasting almost 18,000 years, and audacious to break it in the story. It’s a plot twist completely out of nowhere.

So what’s the backstory with this thing? I visited the SBNation front page, and couldn’t find any link to it there or through the menu. How did you stumble across it?