Housekeeping Notes
First off, I apologize for the many typos in the last few posts— I’ve since corrected them on the site, but I can’t go back and do it for the emails that went out. I think it’s my eyesight getting worse (still no glasses/contacts at 52) and working on the 13-inch-screen laptop. I re-read them on the large desktop monitor, and I’m aghast.
I have a few thoughts about what Real Man Sports will entail for this year, but please feel free to give feedback in the comments if you’re strongly inclined. (I probably won’t heed it, but if you have conviction about something Real Man Sports-related, I want to know.)
I’ll probably write up the week’s slate and standalone games as usual. I’ll have a weekly pod/videocast with Alan Seslowsky on Survivor and the weekly spread-picking contests. (I didn’t make it to Vegas this year, so no Circa Millions or Survivor, but we’ll track those lines, and we have our own smaller survivor pools.) I’ll also have short, text-versions of those.
I might make the weekly Monday morning posts shorter. This isn’t where you go to get the exhaustive rundown — only the things I find important. There are many places, RotoWire among them, where you can get an overview of everything that happened.
Other ideas: I’m toying with putting more of the posts behind the paywall, then offering free links to them on NOSTR, the social networking protocol I’m fairly confident will win out over the walled-gardens of Twitter (X?) and Facebook (Meta?) eventually the way the open web killed AOL.
NOSTR isn’t an alt social network like Mastadon or Parler, it’s a protocol like SMTP for email or HTTPS for web. It’s going to obsolete the current model entirely the way email more or less obsoleted sending letters via the post-office. (Twitter is the post office.)
Once the technology exists to have a permissionless social network, there’s no reason to have a middleman owning your content and telling you what you can and can’t read. I’ll go deeper into this on chrisliss.substack.com in the next couple months, but I’m convinced it’s a matter of when, not if. (Substack will be toast too, but it serves as a better version of Wordpress for me for the time being.)
Accordingly, I’ll put some of the paywalled stuff there via link in the posts. Let me know if you (paying subs) have a problem with that, and if you (free subs) would not click a link to see the full article.
My goal is to get people to NOSTR where you can be sure those who follow you will see your posts, and you’re not dealing with a black box algorithm at whose mercy you toil. Better to re-build the foundation from scratch on solid ground even if in the short term it costs you.
Relatedly, a lot of you know (and interact with) me from Twitter. I will be on Twitter only once a week every Tuesday. I chose Tuesday because I got back from my vacation last Monday night, and because I can say “See you next Tuesday!” when I sign off. But interaction will be on this site and NOSTR mostly. Accordingly, if you DM me or tag me, and I don’t respond for a week, that’s why.
NOSTR might seem a little complicated at first, but it’s actually pretty easy. Certainly easier (and lower stakes) than the other world-changing decentralized technology, bitcoin, for example.
Finally, I’m open to doing more short-form podcasts and videos — 10 minute thoughts, ideas, etc. I started this newletter/site last summer, and basically just copied what I had been doing at RotoWire, but I doubt that will be its final form. Things are bound to change, and maybe even get weird. The weirder the better.