sean

@snkhn.bsky.social

5204 Followers 600 Following

a hopeless transcription of young thug’s verse on black portland’s “movin”
precious harold, a black cat, dozing in a pose that looks like a cubist rendering of the “thriller” dance
screenshot of a subscription appeal from defector.com: Earlier this year, Defector published a profile of skater, actor, and photographer Jason Lee. It is stylishly written, recounts his improbable career trajectory, and gives you a real sense of what makes him tick. And then, about halfway through, Lee melts down in response to a gentle question about his relationship with Scientology. This profile was originally slated to run in a national magazine, but that magazine’s editors killed the story after Lee’s publicist invoked lawyers. So although Lee is the nominal subject, the piece doubles as a profile of contemporary PR tactics and the browbeaten media ecosystem in which they are deployed. Being willing to ask Jason Lee about Scientology is not quite publishing the Pentagon Papers, but the lack of proportionality between the innocuous question and over-the-top response tells you how busted that corner of media is. These are the late stages of what Patrick Redford called the triumph of marketing over journalism; it is one reason the authorized celebrity documentary has become a defining form of this moment. Defector can publish work like this profile for two main reasons. First, unlike National Glossy Magazine Co., we don’t need to preserve access to future potential profile subjects who share representation with Lee. And second, our subscribers enable us to pay for lawyers of our own to fend off nuisance suits threatened in response to our reporting. Strike a blow for journalism with a Defector subscription. You can try a month for just $1.
Defector blogs can be put to many uses, but their best use is nourishing the youth. One of our subscribers is a seventh-grade English teacher who recently structured a lesson around two Defector stories on the same March Madness buzzer-beater. Apparently the kids had a great time, except for the Duke fans, so it’s all working as intended. We are always eager to work with educators to provide classroom access, so long as they keep in mind that Ray Ratto blogs are rated PG-13 (may contain crude humor and mild peril). As a kid, I loved tearing open those sticky blue plastic bags to read the Star-Ledger and the Times on the dogshit Isiah Thomas-era Knicks. Along with the box scores, I started paying close attention to bylines, well-chosen verbs, pungent quotes, and quality of take. Language is so powerful that it can help a child fall in love with basketball, in spite of the dishonor his 23-59 team brings to the sport. I dread a future where childhood sports fandom is devoid of reading. There is amusement to be had in viral podcast clips and deep-fried memes, but nothing steeps you in the esoterica of true fandom and enriches your understanding of the characters that populate this strange world like good writing. There are fewer outlets doing that kind of writing than when I was growing up, but Defector will never give up on turning tangy phrases for the curious reader seeking to make sense of what they watched. I am still that reader; perhaps you are, too. Or maybe you’ve got an emergent fanatic in your life who would appreciate good sportswriting. If so, you can try a month of Defector, which comes with the ability to curate gift links for that reader, for just $1:
pitbull voice when the moves are smooth #fridayfeeling (post is a screenshot of a 2016 pitbull post in which he is wearing a long coat that is too tight and has a raised fist gloved in leather; the post is captioned #FridayFeeling)
screenshot of the x-axis of a ggplot in R, it reads "goblin percentile"
a nightengalian photo of a sheetz price board from last month which i'm like 85% sure says "$3.29 per gallon"
the baseball card of brian "banknotes" harper, apparently a 1993 upper deck joint. he's wearing a short-sleeved nylon windbreaker with a twins logo on his left pec, and he's holding a brick phone to his right ear with an insouciant look befitting a titan of industry
Have you seen the news? Or, not the news, but the press releases? “Prediction markets,” which are fundamentally gambling companies that benefit from preferential regulatory treatment, are shacking up with putative “news organizations.” In December, CNN and CNBC signed “multi-year exclusive partnerships with prediction market platform Kalshi to integrate event-based probabilities across its TV, digital, and subscription products from 2026.” Polymarket has cut similar deals with Dow Jones, Yahoo, and Substack. This is a familiar playbook. Outside of Defector and a few other oases, contemporary sports media primarily functions as the top of the funnel for gambling interests. There is an addled, soulless logic to running this scheme back with the political and financial press. To their credit (?), Polymarket has put a fresh coat of heavily leaded paint on the approach: The post announcing their Substack deal highlights an anti-vaccine and pro-Ghislaine-Maxwell influencer linking to the odds that the US government confirms that aliens are real. They expect you to regard this as the future of journalism; it is followed by a disclaimer that none of this “financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice.” I’ll grant that this is one possible future of journalism. But Defector is another, better future. We don’t feed our readers to gambling companies; we don’t use generative AI; we don’t have outside investors to please. Subscribers enable our critical, independent stance. If you’re as sick of this shit as I am, please consider becoming one.
a screenshot of my results from this morning's 10k road race; i broke 40 minutes for the first time.
a stupid crop of magritte's "memory' (1948) in which your very stupid author has drawn baseball seams on the white orb depicted on the right side of the gloomy, bloodied marble head. base ball is back baby.
Have you seen the news? Or, not the news, but the press releases? “Prediction markets,” which are fundamentally gambling companies that benefit from preferential regulatory treatment, are shacking up with putative “news organizations.” In December, CNN and CNBC signed “multi-year exclusive partnerships with prediction market platform Kalshi to integrate event-based probabilities across its TV, digital, and subscription products from 2026.” Polymarket has cut similar deals with Dow Jones, Yahoo, and Substack. This is a familiar playbook. Outside of Defector and a few other oases, contemporary sports media primarily functions as the top of the funnel for gambling interests. There is an addled, soulless logic to running this scheme back with the political and financial press. To their credit (?), Polymarket has put a fresh coat of heavily leaded paint on the approach: The post announcing their Substack deal highlights an anti-vaccine and pro-Ghislaine-Maxwell influencer linking to the odds that the US government confirms that aliens are real. They expect you to regard this as the future of journalism; it is followed by a disclaimer that none of this “financial, investment, legal or any other type of professional advice.” I’ll grant that this is one possible future of journalism. But Defector is another, better future. We don’t feed our readers to gambling companies; we don’t use generative AI; we don’t have outside investors to please. Subscribers enable our critical, independent stance. If you’re as sick of this shit as I am, please consider becoming one.
a photograph of the baggage claim area at the columbus airport featuring a shoutout to local venture capitalists (?)
photograph of a calendar with a beautiful mountain range (real) behind the columbus skyline
favorite songs not on those albums: Ugnė Uma – “Rage Love Strange Love” Cloakroom – “Bad Larry” DJ Narciso – “Ultra” Ellen Arkbro – “Timing” Rotate – “Lower HZ” / “Cash Swing” Olof Dreijer – “Iris” / “Blood Lily” Nickolas Mohanna – “Past Light Cone” ELLLL – “Ooze” Amina Hocine – “Ātamōn II” t e l e p a t h – “この夢の中で、君は私の心に光を灯すために歌う”
my favorite records this year: Eliana Glass – E Kali Malone + Drew McDowall – Magnetism Paul St. Hilaire – w/ The Producers Carrier – Rhythm Immortal Low End Activist – Airdrop III Sa Pa – The Fool Shinetiac – Infiltrating Roku City Pavel Milyakov & Lucas Dupuy – HEAL HAGEN – Titanic Nazar – Demilitarize
a so-called "flat-headed cat" captured on a black-and-white forest cam with a mouthful of snakehead fish, eyes glinting
Who calls the shots where you get your news? Is it the dull, eyebrowless son of one of the richest men in the world? Is it shareholders, for whom it's expedient to roll over in the face of nuisance lawsuits by the gangster state? Is it one of the private equity firms grinding media companies to dust to eke out returns? Is it someone who will fire a journalist for accurately describing Charlie Kirk’s beliefs? Is it a severely confused Brit? Is it the “rogue employee” who reprogrammed their company’s chatbot to urgently inform users about the “white genocide happening in South Africa”? Not if you read Defector. The 27 of us who work here own the company together. We have no outside investors, so we have no mandate to maximize shareholder value. We don’t take money from gambling companies. We aren’t out to fatten up and get acquired. Defector is uncompromised, a rarity in modern media. When we report, criticize, and analyze, it’s coming from us, not someone upstairs. We answer only to our subscribers. Become one!
screenshot of a subscription appeal email from defector: Too often these days I find myself “choosing” between Bad and Worse. This week’s indignity: Should I want Larry Ellison’s poreless son or a gluttonous, $400 billion company to secure the right to enrich the vile David Zaslav? For all the complaints about how “we don’t make things in America anymore,” the country produces plenty of opportunities to debase yourself by rooting for the merely Bad. Immiserated by a steady stream of these false choices, it’s easy to forget that Something Else is possible. Defector is Something Else. From our blogs and podcasts to the company’s cooperative structure, everything we do reflects the sensibilities shared by our staff and subscribers. We have no access to preserve, no investors to please, and no gambling partner to feed. This lets us see things clearly, say things straightforwardly, and offer refuge from this inhumane moment. We chose Something Else. You can, too:
screenshot of a quote from Maitreyi's excellent blog: "When he signed a record contract with the New York Yankees in 2019, ace Gerrit Cole thanked Curt Flood and Miller, labor heroes he’d first learned about from a veteran teammate in Pittsburgh."
a skin-tone, foot-shaped stress ball featuring troublingly detailed toes, apparently procured by the kent state podiatry school
today's bandcamp friday picks: dj narciso: diferenciado low end activist: airdrop iii kali malone + drew mcdowall: magnetism shallowater: god's gonna give you a million dollars titanic: hagen paul st. hilaire: w/ the producers
So much of contemporary American politics starts with an irritant. Something small with rough edges, often a news story framed in a way that amplifies the binaries that power conservative media. From there, through a process that involves the full-spectrum application of umbrage by cable news programming and always-on influencer types and officials who see this as the work they’ve been elected to do, the irritant becomes something like a pearl. Not exactly like a pearl—it’s worthless and disposable—but small, shiny, and hard. Media produced by this process or enthralled by these baubles does not leave the people who consume it better informed about the state of the world. That isn’t what it’s for. The point is to make people feel wary and furious and overwhelmed, and to produce noise that fills up the time it would take to actually understand things.
excerpt from a good blog at good Tulsa, OK blog The Pickup: “HB 3594 keeps Oklahoma on the side of freedom, defending the right of every Oklahoman to participate in the Bitcoin [sic] economy and laying the groundwork for our state to lead America’s next chapter of financial innovation.”
a screenshot of some ray ratto prose featuring the all-timer "Dre Scofflaw" It all happened when 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw, who occasionally behaves as Dre Scofflaw when it comes to the whistle, torqued DeVonta Smith to the ground in front of the Eagles' sideline and was properly penalized for it.
screenshot of a reddit post about the sad mavs uncs: "From the Mavericks community on Reddit: Ron Harrod Jr. said that the Mavs were playing “Marvin’s Room” by Drake at shootaround yesterday. While he said the players still seem to enjoy being around each other, he said the vibe felt “sad and dark”"
lolo, a black cat with one cloudy eye, is lying on his stomach and looking right at the camera. he looks defeated by the hood-with-devil-horns costume imposed upon him.
When the FBI arrested Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups, the basketball-watching public turned to sports media to help make sense of the story. What explanations were on offer? Before disclosing its own BetMGM partnership, The Athletic called “all of sports” complicit in the scandal. Bill Simmons dismissed the episode as ”a couple bad apples,” growing pains typical of a growth industry. Zach Lowe had ESPN's betting guy on his podcast; together they concluded that these issues can be tinkered out of existence by limiting prop bets and changing how teams report injuries. Lowe's podcast, like Simmons's, began with a FanDuel ad. The takeover of sports media by gambling companies imposes hard boundaries on the domain of these conversations. Most importantly, these captured discussions always obscure the social and political choices that enable the gambling industry to entrench itself. Allowing people to gamble on their phones and allowing sports gambling companies to spend untold sums on lobbying and advertising are choices. These choices, not some law of nature, are why millions of people have started gambling in recent years. Likewise, other sports media companies have chosen to offer up their audiences as prey to gambling outfits. Defector has chosen something else: We never have and never will take money from gambling companies. Subscribers fund our operations, which allows us to remain independent, critical, and uncompromised. Consider making that choice.
a leaderboard from this morning's 5k; the author was under 6 minutes a mile for the first time in a long time.
screenshot of a subscription appeal we sent today: Who calls the shots where you get your news? Is it one of the richest men in the world? Is it the dull son of another one of the richest men in the world? Is it shareholders, for whom it's expedient to roll over in the face of nuisance lawsuits by the gangster state? Is it one of the private equity firms grinding media companies to dust to eke out returns? Is it someone who will fire a journalist for accurately describing Charlie Kirk’s beliefs? Is it a severely confused Brit? Is it the “rogue employee” who reprogrammed their company’s chatbot to urgently inform users about the “white genocide happening in South Africa”? Is it yet another corrosive tech platform? Is it a gambling company? Is it a league you, in theory, exist to critically report on? Is it some donkeys using AI to bring Horny Sports Blogging At Scale to a storied publication? Not if you read Defector. The 27 of us who work here own the company together. We have no outside investors, so we have no mandate to maximize shareholder value. We don’t take money from gambling companies. We aren’t out to fatten up and get acquired. Defector is uncompromised, a rarity in modern media. When we report, criticize, and analyze, it’s coming from us, not someone upstairs. We answer only to our subscribers. Become one!
danny lee looking great in THE KILLER (1989)
screenshot of a classic post from t/witter user @cultpool: "don't really care what the cocteau twins lady is saying i'm worried about my paper my cheddar my dollars"
after much deliberation, my ballot: neil walker, gregory polanco, daniel mccutchen, jared hughes, curt leskanic, josh james, yovani gallardo, allen craig, eduardo escobar
a photograph of last night's haul: chris's new book ("such great heights") signed "defector <3 stereogum" plus a very responsible CD haul (pole, ulrich schnauss, alan sparhawk, tim hecker, the weather station, and two from this mortal coil)
bandcamp friday picks: amina hocine, nazar, lippard-arkbro-lindwall, baan, t e l e p a t h, and eliana glass (i see you increasing the price of your album by a euro between when i put it in my cart and now)
a screenshot of the defector.com menu on which one would manage their comment notification preferences
a side-by-side of: (1) the classic "survivorship bias" plane diagram with a bunch of holes shot into it; and (2) bill belichick wearing a hole-ridden sweatshirt
Wide feet Billy's 4/5 review of some shoes: "Nice fit, very light. Rubber on the is super gruppy"
screenshot of today's bandcamp friday picks: Sa Pa -- The Fool Humeric -- Seeking Darkness Nickolas Mohanna -- Speaker Rotations Shinetiac -- Infiltrating Roku City Rotate -- Lower Hz EP
a vaguely menacing, dril-coded image macro created and shared by new rockies hitting coach (and ex-manager), clint hurdle. the image is a cutout of hurdle's shoulders and head c. 2008 over a lilac background with a quote from the book he has been touring: "Life's going to give you a lesson. And you're going to keep getting that lesson until you learn it / @clinthurdle13"
picture of a zooming metabble which looks like the zooming, metallic porsche in the quoted post
a two-paragraph excerpt from the quoted blog, written by tom ley on defector: "Words ultimately can't obscure the image, though. The administration will make its arguments in hateful speeches and deranged statements and flimsy legal motions while the equivocators murmur. Eventually, one last court will decide if this is a country that allows for political disappearances, and then the administration will decide if this is a country that still heeds the courts. Throughout this whole process, the plain truth told by the images will never change: A woman who committed no crime was walking down the sidewalk in America. Masked plainclothes officers ambushed her from multiple directions. She screamed and recoiled as they grabbed at her wrists. She was handcuffed and taken away. It can be hard to describe or visualize exactly what kind of country you want to live in, but it is not so hard to recognize the one you don't."
a screenshot of my fangraphs end-of-year retrospective. my most-visited player pages were patrick corbin, jason heyward, and martin maldonado.
a screenshot of a message sent by german dub techno label insectorama through bandcamp. i've used CTRL+F to show that they've written the phrase "timeless Dubtechno Masterpiece" 246 times since 2021. it's beautiful.
my bandcamp friday purchases: records by Pavel Milyakov & Lucas Dupuy, ELLLL, Low End Activist, uon, and Mike Schommer
a bar graph showing the 16 MLB teams (white sox, marlins, mets, cubs, cardinals, giants, astros, rockies, yankees, nats, barves, red sox, rangers, pirates, guardians, brewers) who've been outspent by defector dot com this offseason
an erroneous listing for a show at ace of cups by dub musician, the bug. (the show is actually by a zzz band with a similar name.)
a list of dub and dub-adjacent music i liked this year: round five, jah schulz, techno animal, low end activist, ghost dubs, james devane (again)
a list of my favorite albums of 2024: jessica pratt, kali malone, not waving & romance, gerycz powers rolin, parannoul, bríi, and tristwch y fenywod
a huge (18" by 24"), perplexing wall calendar which shows (most of?) the columbus, ohio skyline superimposed on the rocky (??) mountains
a box of mushroom steaks from a brand called Eat Meati, similar to the name of Pelicans rookie Yves Missi
a screenshot from last night's defector trivia stream on twitch. it shows the question: "For how many meals between Monday night and Friday night did Dave McKenna eat White House subs?" it also shows the answer, delivered in the form a slack transcript, featuring grainy photos of some italian subs. the eight staffers on camera are laughing at the reveal.
a photograph looking north on the atlantic city boardwalk at night. several casinos and a ferris wheel are illuminated brightly. one single person is visible ~50 yards away. vibes: not great.
a picture of Jessica Pratt performing in Columbus, OH tonight 🥲🥲🥲
an excerpt from giri's blog: “At his best, Sinner’s tennis feels both languid and violent; it can be difficult to connect the cause with the effect…A compact backswing, a snap, and the ball is gone. The visual is loose and jangly, but the sound is like someone hucking a billiard ball against a garage door.”
one of two paintings by patrick mcdonnell featured in the exhibit; it shows nancy and sluggo in a cubist style
eight heirloom (?) tomatoes arranged in two columns of four; they range in color from bright yellow to dusky red and green
still picture of a CRT-style TV showing a video of a box fan on the floor of tetsuya yamada's "listening" at walker art center in minneapolis.
bomified (flattened, low-res) picture of orlando magic first rounder tristan da silva