John’s Blog

Drew Lerner for Awful Announcing:

Tuesday’s MLB opener between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Chicago Cubs in Tokyo, which featured several high-profile Japanese baseball stars including Shohei Ohtani, drew an audience of 25 million viewers in Japan, according to MLB PR. For reference, the total population of Japan is around 125 million, meaning one in five Japanese citizens watched the Dodgers’ win on Tuesday. […]

To put the game’s Japanese audience in perspective, 25 million viewers is larger than any American baseball audience since Game 7 of the 2017 World Series between the Dodgers and Houston Astros which drew 28.2 million viewers stateside.

Incredible numbers, and one man to thank: Shohei Ohtani. He’s the best player in the league by a mile, and probably the best athlete in the world.

Good take by Federico Viticci at MacStories:

In working with my iPad Pro over the past few months, I’ve realized something that might have seemed absurd just a few years ago: some of the best apps I’m using – the ones with truly desktop-class layouts and experiences – aren’t native iPad apps.

They’re web apps.

Great desktop web apps are also great on the iPad, especially when using a connected keyboard.

One example: I’ve been running GitHub Codespaces in a browser on my iPad a ton this year. It’s really great for reviewing Pull Requests, running a console, and making some light code changes. Plus I can add it to my home screen to remove any Safari browser chrome from around the window. It’s really quite amazing that this is even possible.

I’ve moved this site over to use Ghost as a CMS moving forward. Previously I was using a static site generator called Hugo, which I also really enjoyed.

The issue I had been facing is that a static site builder like Hugo, or any other site builder, typically requires me to be at my computer and at my desk. Yes, I can sometimes publish remotely through various means, but it was surely cumbersome. That feels like doing work. I don’t want blogging here to feel like work.

I’m becoming more of an iPad user lately and I often reach for the iPad when I’m not doing real “work” things, or if I’m on the go and don’t need a full laptop.

So now I can post from the iPad (and the computer!) which I’m hoping will mean I post more about what I’m thinking and reading. Here we go.

Apple has dropped the latest video in its “immersive experiences” category on the Vision Pro. This time it’s a short concert film featuring Metallica. Here’s the teaser on YouTube.

I haven’t watched all of the other immersive videos, but I have been more than a casual Metallica fan over the years so I had to check this one out.

It’s phenomenal. Absolutely an incredible use of this platform. This is what the Vision Pro should be. I was locked in to the entire 25-minute or so performance. This event sets the bar for what entertainment in an immersive environment can be.

I watched the same event(s) without the immersive video afterward, and it’s night and day. Watching this on the Vision Pro, you feel the raw energy of this band and its fans. So cool.

But why can't we get a full length concert? I'd to see the whole show from these perspectives, without the automatic cutting between cameras. The beauty of this platform is the ability to get completely immersed yet every time the camera changes automatically it takes me out of that immersion.

Also, nit picking here, but whoever produced this film clearly isn't a musician. Anyone remotely familiar with playing in a band or an instrument would highlight the performer that's actively playing at the time. There were several guitar solos that would have been really cool to watch played but instead the camera was panning around the crowd or showing one of the other band members that wasn't doing anything interesting.

Really lovely visualization from ESPN noting how the car design and technology has changed from 1950’s first season until today. Nicely designed and implemented here.

New album, officially available to stream today, from Jason Isbell. This album is just Isbell himself, without his great band The 400 Unit. Excited to give this a listen this morning!

As soon as the game play for the Super Bowl started this weekend, I couldn’t think about anything but the new “Fox Box” scorebug graphic at the bottom of the screen. I took some photos of it on my phone so I could come back later and talk about it.

Thankfully John Gruber noticed it as well, and has a brilliant piece on Daring Fireball summarizing the changes and the history of these style of graphics.

So I started studying and considering the changes to Fox’s scorebug. I quickly not only warmed up to the new scorebug, I decided I really like it. It’s better than Fox’s old one, and better than every other network’s (which all largely look the same), in almost every single regard.

I really like it as well.

Bigger and bolder typography adds clarity. But removing the background chrome lets viewers “see through” to any game action that happens at the bottom of the screen. To me, after just one game, the old Fox scorebug looks hopelessly dated; old-fashioned without any nostalgic charm. If anything, the new typography-first design is the one that looks timeless, evocative of the graphics from classic NFL Films productions.

The bigger and bolder text also has two major benefits: 1) visibility from far away, such as in a bar or restaurant and, more importantly I think, 2) better visibility when viewing on small mobile device screens.

It was a dominating win for the Eagles in last night’s Super Bowl. They clearly were the better team, and the result was never in doubt.

The Chiefs had no answers and were out classed in every aspect. Quite shocking, really. One would think that the Eagles were the team going for a three-peat, not the other way around.

Congrats to the city of Philadelphia. Grease those light poles and enjoy.

Jamison Hensley, for ESPN:

In the biggest surprise of Thursday night’s NFL Honors ceremony in New Orleans, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen overcame the prevailing trend to beat Baltimore Ravens quarterback Lamar Jackson for The Associated Press’ NFL Most Valuable Player award.

Allen is the first player in 21 seasons to win MVP without being selected first-team All-Pro. Since MVP was first handed out in 1957, the only other players to win the award despite not being a first-team All-Pro were Broncos quarterback John Elway (1987, when Joe Montana was first-team All-Pro) and Titans quarterback Steve McNair (2003, Peyton Manning).

Congratulations to Josh Allen and the Bills Mafia. I’m so happy for him, what a great player and an amazing year.

Sad that neither Allen nor Lamar Jackson will be playing this weekend. (next year!)

Tapestry, The Iconfactory’s brand new unified timeline app is out today. It’s been about a year since I backed this Kickstarter and I’m so excited to give it a spin.

Late on Saturday night, the Dallas Mavericks announced that Luka Dončić had been traded to the Los Angeles Lakers.

This was a complete shock to the basketball world, and certainly here in Dallas. Luka is the Mavs’ franchise player. He’s the face of basketball in this town, and he’s gone.

Luka is truly a generational player, in his prime. You just don’t trade someone like that.

We’re all wondering the same thing: why. There has to be a bigger story here. Can’t wait to find out what it really is.

I don’t really know what to write these days. Since November, I’ve basically tuned out the vast majority of news. I keep up with the few areas of tech news I’m interested in, mostly centered around AI these days. I used to enjoy keeping this blog as a record of links and news stories I’ve been interested in, but that’s a challenge when you don’t consume much news!

So far this year I have my head down. I’m extremely focused on creating and building good things. I’m doing everything I can to put out positivity and good vibes into the world. I’m removing a ton of distractions from my life, and it’s been incredibly satisfying.

I have a renewed sense of purpose for my work and where I devote my attention right now. I’m not burying my head in the sand, I am quite aware of the noise around me. But I’m choosing to focus on the good in the world and where I can contribute to it.

I’m excited to take this site in a different direction this year. Perhaps more personal. Perhaps less links and more reflection. We’ll see. Here’s to figuring it all out and keeping on blogging.

I’m winding down over here for the year. It’s been an extremely busy, but productive year. So much to be proud of. Looking forward to another in 2025.

Merry Christmas to all. And, Happy New Year.

Nilay Patel, for The Verge:

Today we’re launching a Verge subscription that lets you get rid of a bunch of ads, gets you unlimited access to our top-notch reporting and analysis across the site and our killer premium newsletters, and generally lets you support independent tech journalism in a world of sponsored influencer content. […]

A surprising number of you have asked us to launch something like this, and we’re happy to deliver. If you don’t want to pay, rest assured that big chunks of The Verge will remain free — we’re thinking about subscriptions a lot differently than everyone else. […]

$50 per year, or $7 a month is a great deal.

It’s no secret that lots of great websites and publications have gone under over the past few years as the open web falls apart, and it’s clear that directly supporting the creators you love is a big part of how everyone gets to stay working on the modern internet.

At the same time, we didn’t want to simply paywall the entire site — it’s a tragedy that traditional journalism is retreating behind paywalls while nonsense spreads across platforms for free.

As someone who runs a (mostly) paywalled site, this really resonates with me. I wish all great sites could be free and accessible without paywalls, but the economics just aren’t there yet—especially if you want to avoid gross ads and privacy-invasive data policies.

The print magazine looks amazing too. Worth signing up for me to get full text RSS feeds. I’m rooting for Nilay and this team. Still doing things the right way after all of these years.

In sports news, this piece on ESPN caught my eye:

Los Angeles now owes deferred payments of $1,006,500,000 to seven players.

“It’s just how you account for it,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said Tuesday at a news conference to introduce Snell. “You have to fund a lot of it right now, and having that money go to work for you, we have – a lot of our ownership group are from financial background and can have that money going to work right now, and just making it – not something that sneaks up on us. We’re not going to wake up in 2035 and [say], ‘Oh my God, that’s right. We have this money due.’ We’ll plan for it along the way.”

This is incredible. Over a billion dollars in deferred payments. Is this the future of sports salaries? How do any teams besides the big spenders keep up with this?