29 Sunset

I keep thinking about Jimmy Eat World and happiness

June 20, 2022

Earlier this month, Jimmy Eat World released the lead single off a new album. The song is fine, but it’s also an opportunity to highlight the band’s unusual lineup history. It is not unusual for who has left and who was brought on, but for who stayed despite changes to who does what.

There's nothing complicated about those Rays players' bigotry

June 6, 2022

When I played high school baseball in the late 1990s, there was a guy on the team who said, without irony, that he had no problem with gay people but that he did not appreciate them shoving their gayness in his face. There was rampant homophobia at my school so this conversation would have been unremarkable except that several other guys on the team pushed back and asked him what, precisely, he meant by that. Was he really asking people to not be themselves? What if someone suggested he not shove his straightness in everyone else’s face?

We didn’t get anywhere with him, but I thought about that day when I read that several Tampa Bay Rays had refused to wear Pride-themed patches and caps.

Stephen Curry needs help to win championships, just like everyone else

May 31, 2022

If you have spent much time interacting with NBA Twitter, you are probably aware of how stan culture has created a series of rip currents just under the surface of broader NBA fandom. It’s not unique to the NBA, but I’m still often taken aback by the rabid reactions to random people with triple-digit followers expressing opinions about star players.

For the most part, NBA player stans aren’t on the same level as, say, the Beyhive or Army, but it is still disconcerting how certain stan groups will go off when they feel their beloved player has been disrespected. Maybe there’s something to the notion that when a person stans for a celebrity — athlete, entertainer, politician, or whatever — it is because the celebrity has come to represent something in the stan’s identity, so a perceived slight of the celebrity is a slight on the stan.

All that is prologue for what I really want to write about, which is that Stephen Curry’s greatness may be overstated by his stans, but I also feel he is held to an unfair standard when it comes to historical greatness, just like every other modern basketball star is.

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