Monday Morning quarterback
The week of Sept. 24th - I went to a WNBA game
Welcome to Monday Morning Quarterback.
This is where I share the coolest things I saw this week (TikTok’s, Tweets, quotes, essays, etc.) and a real-life experience.
Experience:
They don’t want you to go to WNBA games. They’ll call you a liberal (you DO NOT want to be a liberal) and say you don’t know ball.
“The basketball sucks”
“They don’t make money”
“They’re subsidized by the NBA”
You know someone is stupid (and don’t be fooled, there are a lot of stupid people), if they have an opinion on something they’ve never experienced. A lot of people have stupid opinions. But these are the people who will tell you exactly why they deserve a statue outside of stupid stadium.
“Basketball wasn’t mean to be played by women. The league has low ratings for a reason.”
Some call it opinions, I call it subjective stupidity.
Sorry, Steve, but averaging 2.4 points per game on JV as a senior doesn’t give you the authority to determine who enjoys what sport.
My roommate and I said fuck it. Let’s go watch the New York Lady Liberty. We snagged tickets for $37 each not too far behind the basket. Since we live within a potato gunshot of the arena, we left 30 minutes before the tip to get there with time to spare. We picked up some sour skittles and sugar-free fruit drinks at the bodega and joined the legion of purple-haired lesbians and white dudes with button-ups and flat-billed snapbacks.
I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t know if I was going to the game as a joke, because I wanted to watch basketball, or scout the sport for myself.
If I’m being honest, the sport is incredibly dull on TV. The paint-drying Olympics is more stimulating. But watching someone do the old “in out in out” or rap in front of a crowd is also dull over the TV. In-person, it’s a different story. Keep an open mind, Bill. Don’t be an ignorant twat.
When we pulled up to the Barclays British Bank Center and it was moving…
Hip hop music rang through the Brooklyn night, the smiles of parents and the laughs of young children stood out, and people shuffled to the DJ’s song. The atmosphere was electric. There was joy in the air you don’t feel at a normal pro sporting event. A happiness to be there. Compared to a Nets we were in a Rembrandt painting and they were in an Orwellian novel, forced to watch the game against their will.
Before we crossed the security line I looked at my roommate and said, ‘Yo this is lit.’
The hallways in the arena were sparsely filled. They closed off the top bowl so you could only sit in the lower section. We neglected the pregame drink and popcorn and rushed to our seats to get a whiff of the pregame ceremony.
Once we sat down, we didn’t get back up until the 3rd quarter. The crowd and on-court hype brigade was live. EDM music, t-shirt launchers, and the wave (when the crowd flaps their towels up and down in unison.) The game was also entertaining. Sabrina Ionescu hit 9 3s. The DC Mystics played hard as hell. The skill was on-par with the NBA even if the athleticism definitely was not.
But the most surprising part of the game was the crowd’s intensity.
There were guys shouting rotations to the players. Getting visibly upset when someone made a mistake. Talking over strategy with the people in your section. Even the moms were yelling at the women and cheering the team on.
IDK if it’s because the tickets are cheaper, the game day experience is better, or if the team is just easier to root for, but the experience of a Liberty game blows out the experience of a Nets game. It’s not even close.
The Liberty game stands up there with any pro-sports experience I’ve ever had.
TikTok: I loved you more than poetry
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A beautiful poem about poetry and a failed love. Keep the tissues close. I’m going to watch more PoetryTok and may even start writing more myself.
Essay: ‘The goal is to automate us': welcome to the age of surveillance capitalism
The essay discusses the book, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” and interviews the author, Shoshana Zuboff. Zuboff says surveillance capitalism was created in the wake of the financial turmoil from the dotcom crash. Google needed a way to make money, so, they sold user data to advertisers.
By opening up this revenue stream, they began the conquest of the last virgin wood, the private experience.
Today, every company strives to capture the surplus production of our private experience and repackage the data to advertisers. Google took the one thing that hadn’t been colonized, our private experience, and commoditized it.
As the rise of the Tube girl shows us, it doesn’t matter what holds our attention. It doesn’t matter how, where, or when we spend our private time, it just matters that we create data our surveillers can sell.
Quote:
Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.
Shoshana ZuboffMedia: What’s up Doc?
Car chases, Buster Keaten gags (famous stunt man from early Hollywood), kidnapping, government spies, stolen jewlery, and an Austin Powers-like art benefactor all wrapped into this funny-ass film from the 70s.
You’re not emotionally attatched to the character, but they are loveable in their own, quirky, off-beat way. Barbra Streisand plays a seductive and brilliant character you want to learn more about in every scene.
Nowadays, every film tries to make meaning. There is always some bigger meaning or lesson we’re subjugated to learn. What’s Up Doc, avoids that. It’s just a film you laugh at. You’re not worried about the moral progression of the main character or the societal commentary.