Sometimes Boff isn't Science

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

fanfic that I like

Pickleball — sport's continued explosive growth, October 2025

So like, the thing about pickleball that nobody who writes about pickleball actually wants to engage with is that it's a real estate story before it's a sport story — the whole reason you've heard of it, the whole reason it has the cultural footprint it has rather than being one more retiree hobby alongside mahjong and pinochle, is that it solved a specific problem for a specific class of property owner at a specific moment, namely: what do you do with all this fucking tennis infrastructure.

Because here's what happened. Tennis participation in America peaked in the late 70s/early 80s (the Borg/McEnroe moment, the wooden-racket-to-graphite transition, all of it) and then declined more or less continuously for thirty-plus years, but the courts didn't go anywhere. The courts are capital improvements, they're on the books, they're part of the amenity package the HOA sold the units on, the country club's dues structure assumes them, the municipal parks budget allocated for them in 1978 and the line item never got removed. So you've got this enormous installed base of tennis courts in America — public, private, semi-private, the whole spectrum — built for a participation level that no longer exists, sitting there racking up maintenance costs and producing no revenue, and the sport that was supposed to use them has been bleeding players to golf and (briefly) to running and (more durably) to literally just sitting indoors.

And then somebody figures out — and this part is genuinely beautiful, in a depressing way — that you can stripe four pickleball courts inside the footprint of one tennis court. Four. The conversion costs almost nothing (paint and a portable net), the new sport is dramatically easier to pick up (the underhand serve, the small court, the fact that anyone with intact knees can play passable pickleball within an hour where tennis takes years to be non-humiliating), and crucially the demographic that already owns property adjacent to tennis courts — suburban, aging, time-rich, looking for low-impact social exercise — is precisely the demographic for whom pickleball was designed. The sport is a key cut to fit a lock that was already there.

So the explosion you've been reading about for five years now isn't an organic cultural movement so much as the resolution of a long-deferred capital allocation problem — what do we do with the tennis courts — meeting a long-deferred social problem — what do retired Boomers do with their afternoons now that the kids are gone and the golf course is six hours and seventy bucks. The HOAs were going to do something with the tennis infrastructure regardless. Pickleball was the path of least resistance.

Which is why, by the way, the lawsuits — and there are a lot of them now, this is a real legal subgenre — are mostly about noise. Pickleball makes a distinctive percussive pock sound that the suburban built environment was not engineered to absorb (tennis is much quieter, the felt ball, the longer rallies), and the courts get built right up against the property lines because they were already there as tennis courts and nobody thought about the acoustic profile when they restriped. People are losing their minds in Naples and Scottsdale and the inner-ring suburbs of basically every metro because the amenity that was sold to them as "courts, beautifully maintained" has become "courts, beautifully maintained, in continuous use from 7 AM to dusk by people who could not possibly care less about your home office's Zoom calls."

it's 1pm at the marsh! come on down, we've got

This is the coolest jersey in the history of the nba. Look at it, with it's perfect shade of purple and jagged pinstriping and the red stripes in the collar and arm holes. God damn it's so fucking sick. And what are they running now?

Trash. There's no character here. It's a red jersey with a black chevron. They don't even have a cool font. It's the one gripe I have with the og jersey (even though it does fit the vibe) and this feels like an overcorrection.

Writing this post is also how I found out the raptors haven't worn purple in their primary away jersey since 2006 so I'm pretty fucking annoyed rn. Let's have a look at their alternate away jersey.