An even less belated blog-day.

A year ago at this time, I expressed optimism that this would be the year that this long period where I’ve felt like I’ve completely wasted my life would come to an end. That… has not happened.

I had grand plans for what to do with Da Blog in 2024, ranging from completing series that I hadn’t finished to starting new ones. I even had an idea to start a podcast, representing the biggest evolution of my “brand” since I wrote my book in 2015. Before, during, and after the election, I wanted to make posts exploring what went wrong in American and global politics for things to get to the point where a Donald Trump could get within a thousand miles of the White House once, let alone three times, let alone win the popular vote – including some posts I’ve been sitting on since his first campaign in 2016, if not longer. It would close the loop on the core issue that’s been the monkey on my back for the past eight years.

Instead, this is only the 31st post since my last blog-day post, the lowest total in three years but still a step ahead of the nadir of my productivity. The podcast involved way more work than I was comfortable with putting in, but the politics posts were a real disappointment for me. At least in 2016, even though I didn’t write many posts before the election, I got in a decent number of posts after it, including ones that went pretty far in-depth, despite also juggling the Flex Schedule Watch. This year, my last politics-related post was published the day before the election. I even tried to come up with a new strategy to commit to doing a certain amount of writing every day, but that fell apart remarkably quickly. I don’t know how much of it is my sleep schedule still being out of whack, certain other activities falling at awkward times, continuing to hold myself to too high a standard for how alert I need to be to write at the standard I’d like, having too many frivolous activities on my plate, if I’m just not in the right place to put the sort of energy into writing posts that would be necessary to maintain the pace I want to, or if there’s something psychologically wrong with me on a deep level, or even just that I’ve grown too old, even at only 36, to maintain the posting levels of Da Blog’s halcyon days. What I do know is that I think I absolutely need therapy, or some sort of professional help, if I’m ever going to get back to the level of productivity I want.

Year Eighteen of Da Blog marked a decade since I moved to Los Angeles with my dad, meaning more than half the time since Da Blog launched has been in LA – a move that was supposed to allow me to focus on Da Blog full-time, but has only really been productive for the first year and a half while I was writing the book, and even that wasn’t up to the level I’d like. I do intend to get some political posts in between now and the inauguration, but if I haven’t done any work on them up to this point there’s little realistic reason to think another month will be much of an improvement, aside from the Flex Schedule Watch ending for the season (I hope to get the Week 16 post up in the next 24 hours). The one source of optimism, besides my renewed commitment to getting some sort of help to make me more productive, is that my thinking about politics ended up pushing me in the direction of a larger project I hinted at in this post, but that won’t necessarily result in a burst of new posts in the short term and I’m not sure how willing or able I am to put in the consistent work on it I’d like.

I’m feeling like I’m entering Year Nineteen with less false optimism about my ability to pull myself out of my almost decade-long funk on my own. Whether that’s a good thing, because it’ll lead me to get the help I need, or a bad thing, because it’ll lead me to succumb to despair and frustration at my inability to live up to my own image of myself, is something only time will tell. Either way, this stands to be a pivotal year for Da Blog and my life.

A slightly less belated blog-day.

This is the 39th post since my last blog-day post, a slight improvement over a mark that I remarked at the time was the most I’d had since 2018, and in fact that mark was close enough to the 2018 mark that this is actually the most posts I’ve had since the start of my posting drought in 2016. So you might think this was a year for optimism about my ability to climb out of that drought, start posting more regularly again, and if not return to the halcyon days of the site, at least return to a place where I could put together some sizable projects that would give this site life outside football season.

It hasn’t felt that way, though, and the reality has been decidedly more mixed. I did get in a number of posts about the evolution of sports on television, and the linear television industry more generally, but they often came out well after the point where they were relevant. I put together a series of posts about a college football super league, but I’ve been sitting on the last part of the series and I’m not completely confident I’ll complete it in time for the national championship game. I said on the last blog-day post that I’d been sitting on a good old-fashioned long-form series for the past month or two, and I only managed to post one part of it all year and made virtually zero progress on the rest of it, and now I’m not confident I’ll ever return to it, especially since I’ve been sitting on two more long posts for months (though one of them is something like 95% complete and should be coming out before the new year). Last year I managed to sprinkle in some non-football posts amongst the Flex Schedule Watch; this year the Watch (and Cantonmetrics) completely took over the blog from October onwards, though a lot of that had to do with a) figuring out how the new rules would affect flex scheduling and b) the need to fill out the opening section of the new Flex Schedule Watch posts.

Basically, while I’ve improved my productivity some, I still haven’t been able to squeeze in enough time, and be awake and alert enough at those times, to write long-form posts at the rate I’d like. When I get going I can write most of a long-form post in a single session, but the prospect of it still seems daunting. I might be able to at least somewhat reduce the time I spend goofing off on my phone, but it’s possible that further increasing my level of productivity will require therapy, or perhaps a change in medication, and I’m not sure how able I’ll be to get either of those.

In the end, that might be the biggest cause for optimism to come out of Year Seventeen of Da Blog. It’s not that I started putting together long-form posts more often than I used to; it’s that I actually have something resembling a concrete path to improving things further. Coupled with my sleep schedule approaching something resembling normalcy and some other ideas I have for branching out into new areas, there’s a very real possibility that Year Eighteen marks the year where this wasted period of my life fully and completely comes to an end.

NFL Week 18 Schedule Post-Mortem

Obviously the attention of the NFL world in the past two weeks has been focused on Damar Hamlin and the aftermath of his collapse in the first quarter of what was supposed to be a huge Monday night game between the Bills and Bengals. Thankfully his condition is not nearly as bad as was feared at the time, and less than a week after his collapse he was discharged from the hospital and returned to Buffalo with his release from a Buffalo hospital coming only nine days after the incident, and the NFL world seems to be moving on and returning to a semblance of normalcy, even if the NFL did end up imposing some odd contingencies to make up for the pivotal game that ended up being abandoned (though not nearly as odd as some of the proposals for delaying the playoffs that were floating around, including from me). Still, I don’t want to give the impression that I’m diminishing the Hamlin situation or anything. To be sure, certain forms of empathy don’t come as naturally to me as to most people, and I might sometimes come off as indifferent in my reaction to certain tragedies, but I think since writing that post I’ve come to a better understanding of why people react in the way that they do in those sorts of circumstances, maybe a better one than society itself has, and understand why those things have the import they do even if I don’t necessarily feel it myself.

Nonetheless, I also don’t feel that just because of the undeniably unfortunate situation the NFL world has gone through in the last week, that means the league should be off the hook for what they did in the 24 hours before Hamlin collapsed. Because as it turned out, the decision to flex Steelers-Ravens into the preceding Sunday night, which I called potentially the worst flex decision since 2015, was only a prelude to what, before the Sunday night game was even announced, would be the absolute worst flex decision of the entire flex scheduling era, and it’s not even close. Were it not for Hamlin’s collapse and the way the league dealt with it, the NFL’s boneheaded decisions about which games to move to Saturday could have had a material impact on what teams make the playoffs in both conferences (and the Sunday night pick could still have had that impact in the NFC), and it was entirely avoidable. 

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A somewhat belated blog-day.

Even though I once again allowed the annual blog-day post to slip, and even though I never managed to get out of the rut I’ve been in since 2016 despite a clear goal that should have motivated me for most of that time, this is the most weirdly optimistic I’ve been for a blog-day post in a while. This is the 32nd post since the last blog-day post, not great by the standards of Da Blog’s halcyon days but the most since 2018, thanks to a couple of new projects and getting a goodly number of non-Flex-Schedule-Watch posts in in the past month. That, in turn, is the product of my making a number of realizations about my sleep schedule and other tendencies, and the potential start of a more formal plan to deal with them, that could improve my ability to be productive going forward. I fully expect to start a few more projects in the next year that should bump up my post count further, including two or three in the next two or three months, including a good old-fashioned long-form series.

Not everything is exactly smooth sailing. I intended to start that long-form series last month but only managed to finish one post and part of another before the Flex Schedule Watch and other current events started monopolizing my time, and there’s a post I meant to make a week or two ago that I’ve still barely started on and that I’m not sure I’m going to finish without absorbing into another post. Nonetheless, even though Year Sixteen of Da Blog failed to meet the standards I set for myself, I’m cautiously optimistic that Year Seventeen will prove to be a genuine turning point towards more productivity on my part.

Then again, after I said last year’s post would be short and then it ended up being the same length as the previous year’s, this year’s post actually is short because I can’t think of anything else to put here, so maybe I’m still struggling with some degree of writer’s block.

@GrantWahl’s Blood is on the World’s Hands

I had set a deadline of November 2022 for me to make enough of my life to move out from my dad’s apartment. Obviously, that didn’t happen. What happened instead was that, last Christmas, we reached an agreement for me to spend over a month with my mom in Seattle from before Thanksgiving until after Christmas, with arrangements for how I was to be supported during that time, which I’m in the midst of now.

Why go to all that trouble? Because I fully intended to boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and that would have to mean getting away from my soccer-crazed dad. 

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Written while in a dazed, lightheaded state:

I had a few different ideas for posts this month but didn’t get to work on them, or another project I had assigned to me, until this weekend, and I might still have finished one of them but ran out of time and brainpower. I still plan to finish that post sometime this week and make this coming month more active, but no promises.

Something a BIT more substantial than the typical streak-filler post.

I’ve moved the site search to the top bar, something I’ve been meaning to do for a while; it just got too irritating having to go almost, but not quite, all the way to the bottom of the page to search my site on mobile. Beyond that nothing much has changed since last month; I have an idea for an entire series of new posts partly inspired by the arrival of Twitter’s pending new owner that would be relevant for me potentially moving to an alternative platform, but given my recent history who knows if I manage to write one word of it in the next month or even two. I feel like if it weren’t for the NFL Draft I’d have managed to put out one of the posts I’ve been working on in the past week, but if you don’t see it in the next week you’ll know I’ve been kidding myself about that.

This is really not a good sign.

So I think I’ve abandoned the notion of jumping back into sports TV ratings almost as quickly as I took it up – it was just going to involve too much work for too little reward – but that hasn’t really helped me to work on anything else. There were at least three different projects I was hoping would result in posts over the course of the last month and none of them really panned out. Some of that can actually be attributed to me doing some work for my dad, which is nominally the only reason I’ve been able to get away without getting a real job, but some of it can definitely be chalked up to me going back into the same bad habits that have bedeviled me over the past several years, including yet another mobile game to monopolize my time. I’m vaguely optimistic I can get some work in on at least one of those posts over the course of the next week or so, but I feel like I’m probably kidding myself, because I always feel like I’m so close to being productive and then I never am. I’ve gotten a bit more of an insight into why I might act this way, but that doesn’t really help me to deal with it and I don’t know if I’d be able to get the help I need to deal with it at my age. I just hope there’s some way out of the tailspin my life has been in over the past several years, and that I find it right soon.

An actually on-time blog-day.

I’m going to keep it pretty quick for this year’s blog-day post, as with the changes to the NFL schedule it coincides with the most stressful part of the year for the Flex Schedule Watch, when I try to game out the scenarios for the final week two weeks in advance, compounded this year by a) the chaotic playoff situation in both conferences and b) games being postponed by COVID outbreaks to Monday and Tuesday and cutting down on how much time I have to pull it off. I hope to have a post ready before we get too far into the Thursday night game, but I’m not sure I can guarantee it, and I’m flying up to Seattle on Friday so I won’t be able to get much work done then.

That’s on top of all the other ideas for posts I’ve been juggling. I hope to have two non-Flex Schedule Watch posts next week, both on the changing sports television landscape and one of which I’ve been meaning to write for over two months (I may have given up on writing a post about the changes in college sports in the past year), and I might try to get something in on another front in the new year. I also have a couple other ideas for decent-sized projects for me to work on once football season and the Olympics are over.

One way or another, we’re about to hit a critical year in the history of Da Blog. I mentioned before that I intended to boycott the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, and while my dad has been willing to try and find ways to accommodate, I’d still feel like a failure if I wasn’t in some way self-supporting by then. (It doesn’t help that the pandemic has made a November-December World Cup more defensible than it was before, making it look like FIFA stumbled into a built-in delay to the qualification schedule.) On top of that, last month I ran out of unemployment deferment eligibility on one of my student loans, and while that’s only $40 a month, it’s still something I have to lean on my parents more for and a sign of just how much I’ve wasted the last half-decade-plus. I either take real steps towards becoming self-sufficient in the new year, or I might as well give up on that. Certainly setting yet another record low for posts – this is only the 23rd post since last year’s blog-day post – isn’t an option anymore.

The good news is that while Year Fifteen was yet another wasted year in the history of Da Blog, I feel oddly more optimistic than I felt last year. I’ve still been spending embarrassingly long spans of time working on posts, but I feel like I’ve still been more productive, or at least have been getting into more of the right headspace to work on them. If I can get into enough of a groove and overcome all the distractions and screwed-up sleep schedules in my life, Year Sixteen may yet prove to be a turning point out of my recent rut. That’s obviously a big if, but it at least feels like more of a possibility than it felt like last year, and it’s certainly worth trying because I don’t know if I want to know what the alternative looks like.

(Okay, so I said I was going to keep it quick but this addendum is going to make it longer than last year’s blog-day post. What can I say, there’s a limit to how short these posts can be, and I did spend only a little over half an hour writing this.)

UGGHH.

I hate having to do a gap-filler post for September. I need to do a season-opening post for the Flex Schedule Watch (people are already starting to leave comments on my last post from last year), and probably would have if not for a perfect storm of circumstances. In the early part of the month I was still thinking I was going to do a post about recent developments in college sports, and then a couple weeks ago I suffered a serious injury I’ve spent most of the intervening time recovering from and in no shape to do any sort of serious thinking.

I might still have gotten something in this week, but I have a lot of work to put into it, more so than normal. I want to say something about the impact of the NFL’s new TV deals on flex scheduling (about which we know frustratingly little), and I have to update the Flex Scheduling Primer for not only that and last year’s developments, but some of the more immediate flex scheduling impacts from the 17-game schedule and ESPN getting a pair of Week 18 games. That’s made it seem like a more daunting task for me to get into than it normally is, and it’s had to compete for my time and attention with various other things, including the fast-approaching NHL season and concurrent debut of new TV partners for that league, which has been an especially big time sink given my newfound emphasis on graphics packages, and mock-ups of same, on Twitter.

None of that is to excuse my lack of posting this month and I absolutely should have gotten that Flex Schedule Watch kick-off post in, and I definitely will get it in in the next week, if only because the protection cut-off point is fast approaching. After that we’ll progress week to week as normal, and I have some ideas for what to do after that (including the return of something long dormant), but whether or not next year is any more productive than the past few years have been is anyone’s guess. (But I sure as heck don’t want to still be living with my dad a year from now, if only because I don’t want to be party to acknowledging the most blatantly corrupt and all-around terrible World Cup host selection ever.)