Jersey Chore

We’ve had most of a season with the new PWHL team branding now. Personally, I didn’t really miss them in the opening season’s cities-only identities. And some of the new ones are still not feeling quite right. So here’s my reviews of them:

New York Sirens

The Name

Pretty clever: has the double meaning of the sound often heard in New York, and the Sirens of Greek mythology. 

The Logo

Kind of disappointing. I realize it’s difficult to make a symbol for a team named after a sound. What would you do, show a mythological siren holding an air horn? Though the extra bits of letters at the side, to look like an alarm light was very clever.

Colours and Uniform

The teal is borrowed from the WNBA’s New York Liberty, which in turn is borrowed from the Statue of Liberty. Combine it with the dark blue and amber and it looks like a blending of the 90’s and today. Nice.

The use of multiple colours in the uniform is refreshing when so many teams have fallen in love with an all-one-colour look. So now you can enjoy teal without O.D.ing on it like in San Jose. Too bad the word, “Sirens” on the logo is the same colour as the home uniform, so from a distance, you just see these two disjointed chunks of white above and below it.

Toronto Sceptres

The Name

If you’re going to make a bunch of team names, there’s bound to be a WTF entry, and here it is. I have to admit, when I heard the name, my mind went to an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where she fights the old shamen who created the slayers, and defeats one by breaking his staff, which turns out to be the source of his powers, and she says, “I knew it. It's always the staff,” as if to comment on the phallic nature of so many symbols of power. So does it really make sense to name a women’s team after such an item? 

But I’m also thinking they need to read the room. There are places for taking a chance on an off-the-wall name, but Canadian hockey fandom in general, and Toronto in particular, is not it.

The Logo

That was well done; it looks classic without being dated, thus winning back some of the Canadian Hockey cachet that the name lost

Colours and Uniform

You had to go with blue, which was Toronto’s civic colour before the Raptors started dragging it towards the red end of the spectrum. Light blue was bold. But yellow? It’s a little St. Louis Bluesy to me. I normally hate it when sports teams describe their yellow as “gold,” but in this case, it might have been a good idea to darken and dull the yellow a bit and tell everyone it’s gold. After all, what else would you make a sceptre out of?

Boston Fleet

The Name

It’s pretty nice; sounds tough while also sounding modernly singular. Though it loses some marks for being recycled from the Alliance of American Football

The Logo

A "B" shaped like an anchor: The letter-that-looks-like-something is a classic sports logo strategy. And it gets a big bonus for looking like a sideways version of that greatest-of-all-hockey-logos, the Hartford Whalers. Of course, that means that I keep looking for something hidden in the negative space, and being disappointed that I can’t find it. At least it has the surreal quality in that it's an anchor — something you put in water — though it appears to be full of water, like a sporting tesseract.

Colours and Uniforms

Going green was a good choice. You’re copying a Boston classic, without just piggybacking on the local hockey team. And the light green accent is a bold twist on it.

But watching them on the ice, I keep thinking there must have been a mistake at the cleaners. Whose blue pants are these? Okay, there are tiny blue accents elsewhere in the uniform, but the pants still look out of place.

Ottawa Charge

The Name

Kind of generic, I mean, for a modern sports team name. All the possibilities offered by a national capital, and the name sounds like a USFL reject.

The Logo

It’s an O. No, it’s a C. No, it’s a wheel. It looks like you asked an AI to make a sports logo for a team with the initials, “OC.” Though you have to remember that it’s pretty hard to build a logo around the letter O, As some of the Senators’ alternate jerseys have shown.

Colours and Uniform

They’re not bad looking, but well… There aren’t many cities that have coordinated sports team colours. Really just Pittsburgh (Black and Yellow) and Ottawa (Red and Black.) But in Ottawa’s case, they even have a team named after their civic colours. The Charge tried to nod towards that colour scheme with various greys, and they look more like red and black on the ice, but I feel like yelling, “You had one job!”

Montreal Victoire

The Name

I saw some people comment that Montreal “won” the PWHL identities, and I think they’re right. “Victoire” is new, but sounds classic. It’s distinctly French, but doesn’t need explanation in English, like Nordiques did.

The Logo

Again, they won here. Looks good, looks timeless, looks like a bird, has a hidden “M” in it, looks sort of like the board for Atari’s Tempest. What more could you want?

Colours and Uniform

Did a better job than Toronto of paying tribute to the local NHL institution while carving out a new identity. The colours of dark red, dark blue, and really-old-newspaper looks great without tying it to an era. My only change would be to make the logo on the home uniforms reverse colour. Having it on a light-backgrounded shield so it shows up is a little busy.

Minnesota Frost

The Name

They won the first championship, and now they've got a great name too. It’s got the WNBA abstract-concept name style, but without sounding contrived. For most of the PWHL names, we can argue whether they’re better than the city’s NHL counterpart, but this is the only one where the PWHL team wins in a knockout.

The Logo

A nice simple letter in a distinctive style, that’s a classic approach. More for baseball, I guess; but it works here too.

Colours and Uniform

Purple is the colour of two of Minnesota’s most beloved institutions: The Vikings, and Prince. It's a nice color, though it doesn't make one think of frost so much as frostbite. It’s also nice that they included a contrasting lightish red, or magenta, or light purple. I guess it’s lilac. They put lilac in there and just dared you to complain. That's pretty bold.

DJ Got Us Paralyzed With Decision-Fatigue

I’ve started learning to make electronic music. It’s kind of a crazy thing for me to take on because I don’t have a background in music. I was the one playing outside while you were taking piano lessons; it was fun at the time, but now I’m trying to learn music theory from scratch.

But I’m not going to whine about my lack of music fluency; I’m just pointing out something I’ve noticed about music software. I won't bore you with the details, but I'll just tell you that to be a bedroom producer, you'll need a piece of software called a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW.)

There's something weird about the DAW market. See, they can get pretty expensive, so the makers of DAWs usually let you try them for a limited time, or have a lesser, free version. So far, these are the ones I've tried out: 

• Garage Band
• Cakewalk
• Tracktion Waveform 
• Cubase 
• Studio One
• FL Studio 
• Ableton Live
• Reaper
• LMMS
• Bitwig
• Mixcraft
• Acid Pro
• QTractor

And there are many more I haven't tried. A few of the more famous ones: 

• Logic
• Pro Tools
• Ardour
• Reason
• Maschine

What I'm getting at is that there are a lot of options. And out of all those, only LMMS and QTractor are not-for-profit open source projects. The rest are by people trying to make money. 

This isn't modern capitalism! There should be only two options: the crappy one and the expensive one. Or maybe two nearly identical competitors, but people get really worked up arguing which is better. A bunch of these should have merged together. Some of them bought by big companies who lost interest and discontinued them. Statistically, if you have this large a group of tech companies, at least one would have been bought by Yahoo and mismanaged out of business. And either Google or Microsoft should have started their own competitor and run another half-dozen out of the industry. And what about changing focus? Every time there's a new buzzword in tech, one or two should have announced a pivot to the new paradigm, and now they're in cloud computing, cryptocurrencies, or A.I.

But no, somehow this is the one industry where there are dozens of options: synergies and economies of scale be damned. I'm not sure why. One explanation is that it's a labor of love. Music is a business that's very personal, and everyone wants to do it their way. 

Also, the market is at just the right size: there's a fair-sized market available when you consider both the pros and hobbyists. It's enough to keep each of the competitors going, but not enough to attract big companies that will wipe out the competition (save for Apple, which makes Garage Band and Logic, but being exclusive to the Mac, they won't push everyone else out of business.)

There's also a lot of nuances to the industry, where applications have grabbed their own little niche: Pro Tools has established itself as the standard for recording studios, while Ableton Live is the choice for Electronic Music. FL Studio has hip hop, and Logic is the choice of Apple worshippers. Reason is the best for people used to working with traditional electronic music equipment, and Reaper is beloved by the folks who think the best application is the one that can do anything, but in a really complicated way, and thus keep recommending Linux to your grandma.

It's also weird that visual art didn't work out this way. That industry is dominated by Adobe. And yet, you'd think that if any software customers would walk to the beat of their own drum, it would be visual artists. They'd be the ones to ignore the advantages of compatibility to get a product with the right intangibles, or one that's made by a little band of idealists. But no, they've given one giant company a near monopoly. The only ones walking to the beat of their own drum are the ones programming it on a drum machine. Okay, that was pretty corny, and I apologize; I wrote that thing about the artists walking to the beat of their own drum without even meaning to make a joke, and then felt like I had to do something with it, and it all went wrong.

So I don't entirely know why, but this is the one industry where things worked out the way I expected the future to look: Dozens of options, something for everyone.

Hyper Links

There's a new made-for-television golf event called TGL. It's a golf league, though I'm disappointed it doesn't stand for, "The Golf League." I've watched a few times, even though I'm not really a golf fan. I was just curious what it would be like. Strangely, I find it's like looking at an edgy work of art: I'm not entirely sure if I'm enjoying it, but it's so relentlessly weird that I can't look away.

The idea is to repackage golf in a smaller, more viewer-friendly format, with everything taking place in an indoor arena. The courses are all computer-simulated. The golfers tee off, hitting the ball at a big screen showing the virtual fairway. Then the computer figures out from the ball's trajectory where it would have landed. They either hit another drive at the screen, or, if the ball landed on the virtual green, they move to a big putting green, and putt from where the computer said the ball landed. The green can be warped and angled to simulate the lie.

Oh, and it's a team game of match golf.  With fifteen holes for some reason. There's a bunch of other rules that are still a mystery. They sometimes throw a hammer on the green, but I'm still figuring that one out. 

But the basic idea is that it's deconstructed golf: all the parts of golf, but dismantled and crammed into a new form. The shocking part is that I jokingly suggested something similar years ago: I saw a driving range with a mini golf course, and realized it could be a substitute for actual golf. And now, here it is, turned into a televised spectacle.

The whole thing is pretty bizarre. On the one hand, it's like the future we imagined, with people playing simulated sports, surrounded by a wildly enthusiastic audience. Throw in some mortal danger and it would be Rollerball.

But on the other hand, it's lacking in the polish you would expect future sports to have. I can't help thinking there is a weird inconsistency using technology in simulating real golf. Like you have this big mechanical surface that can morph itself into any hypothetical golf green, but it also has sand traps, and they're just plain old sand. Not computer-controlled magnets in the turf increasing the resistance to the golf club to simulate the resistance of sand. No, just a big pit full of sand.

One good thing is that many of the made-up holes are arrangements that would be hard to build in real life, like the tee and the hole are on opposite sides of a canyon. That's fun, but it loses something when it's just simulated, and you're not really watching the heartbreak of the golfer watching the shot come up short and bounce all the way down. Though it might be better if they got even more impossible, like the tee and green are on the roofs of different skyscrapers.

Of course, I'm now wondering what other sports could be deconstructed and remade like this. Auto racing would be an obvious possibility, since it's also a sport that takes up an inconvenient amount of room, and is difficult to watch live. You could have cars on giant treadmills, but that would be dangerous and loud, and even sillier. It would be better if they were just driving simulated cars. But they already have simulated racing; it's been part of eSports for a while now. While it does attract viewers, I don't foresee people packing an arena to watch it. Though it might be fun if — like the simulated golf — they had them drive on crazy, unreal courses. It would also be nice if the drivers could have a casual interaction with one another, like the golfers do in TGL. Maybe people would pay to see live racing simulation if they could hear Verstappen swearing at Hamilton, live and in person. (Lewis Hamilton is an investor in TGL, by the way.)

Of course, that introduces the idea that there would be some sort of interaction through the simulation; a way to get revenge within the sport. Okay, I've just reinvented Mario Kart, haven't I? But seriously, the world's top drivers playing Mario Kart: I would watch that.

Hands Across America

After last night’s college football final, I should mention a weird discovery I made during Bowl Month. Over the holidays, I saw a bowl game involving Texas State University. Yeah, can you believe Texas has a State university? Lyndon Johnson even went there. Anyway, I noticed the coach was wearing a hat with this odd hand sign on it. It looked like this:

 

It's the coach of a large university, so I'm assuming it's not offensive. I figured it was just some obscure clothing brand or something. But then they showed some Texas State fans in the crowd, and they were giving the same sign (and always with the left hand.) Fearing this was some sort of cult, I googled "Texas State hand gesture," and was relieved to see that it was much more innocent than I'd imagined.

Yes, it's the map of Texas. 

So that got me wondering what other states could have their own hand map. Obviously, there's Michigan. 

But don’t forget the Upper Peninsula…

I couldn’t think of any provinces that could be represented with hand signals, but there were quite a few states:

Idaho

I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For

I remember when my hometown library first replaced the trusty old card catalogue with a computer version. I looked up - fittingly enough - books on computers, and I discovered that the system had three related categories: One was just "computers," another was "electronic computers," and then there was "digital computers." Of course, "electronic computers" only rules out the abacus and Charles Babbage's difference engine. But "digital" includes all modern computers, save for some curiosities. So essentially the three categories are the same, and if you're looking up a book on computers, it could be in any of them, you have no idea which.

I bring up this tale from the library of the nineties because I'm amazed at how often the same sort of problems come up. No, not in libraries, but in stores.

You'd think that a modern e-tail store would be able to do better than my nineties small town library. After all, they have decades more technology, millions more in their budget, and they only have to categorize a limited selection of products, not all of humanity's knowledge.

But still, they have the same inability to clarify things. Similar to that nineties librarian, whose classification system was technically correct, but worse than useless, they have difficulty classifying their wares in a way that helps people find things.

Again, I'm having difficulty shopping for an external hard drive. Hard drives can be internal or external. They can also be solid state or, um, the spinny kind. So you'd think I'd just have to make my choice on those two dimensions and look at what fits the category. But often there are weird, imaginary dichotomies, like they have categories for solid-state drives or external drives. So if I want a solid-state, internal drive, I don't know where to look.

(And this is fun: when I typed, "spinny" into my phone, it interpreted it as "spiny" and suggested the hedgehog emoji.)

Another weird aspect of that early computer catalogue were the dates. See, on a lot of old manual typewriters, there were keys for digits "2" through "9," but no "1" key, since that was identical to the lower-case "L" in the old Courrier-like font they used, and apparently keys were incredibly expensive. So I would occasionally see that a book was published in "l985," because it was typed by someone who was still used to those old typewriters. Those entries must have been fun for anyone who had to search for a book by year.

But even today, we're at the mercy of whoever types in the information, just hoping they get it right, and are consistent. When I was looking for the game controller previously, I found Walmart had only four Xbox controllers. Actually, they have hundreds, but there were only four where the underpaid stock boy who enters the info had bothered to add the Xbox tag.

And when I went looking for earbuds, I found that when filtering the brands, there was an entry for "Sony" and another for "SONY" from someone who must have thought it was an acronym. Or I suppose the problem could have been they just didn't know their caps-lock was on, but that just adds to the 90's computer system ambiance.

I'd like to think that we will eventually build up a better understanding of how to organize things. Like maybe once databases are as old and commonplace as that card catalogue was to the librarians in the l990's. Maybe then the understanding will be so innate that people will just naturally organize things in a nice efficient way, and when I'm shopping for my nanobot farm, I'll only have to think "indoor nanobot farms" into my neural interface, and not worry that it will exclude the new transquantum nanites just because the warehouse cyborg entered them separately.

It Can't Possibly Be Da Shoes

I remember a time in my teens when I was at a friend's house, and his mother arrived home from shopping and announced she had bought him new running shoes. I was amazed: when I bought new shoes, I needed to try on at least six pairs to find one that fit comfortably. The idea of just buying shoes based on nothing but the size and then assuming that's it, the transaction is done? That was mind-blowing.

The point is, there are two types of people when it comes to shoes: picky, and not picky. Okay, I guess "picky" then subdivides into picky for fit and picky for style, so, um, that wasn't as neat as I'd hoped.

Our current retail world is really not good for people like me. For most people and most products, ordering things online is great. Essentially, the plus is that you have incredible choice because the whole world is available to you. But the disadvantage is that you can't inspect anything before buying. Oh, there's the whole lack of human interaction too, if you're into that sort of thing. For most products, that's a reasonable trade off: you don't really need to feel a new iPad before buying. But for me, it's trying on the shoes that I miss.

If you find comfortable shoes easily, this world is great for you: type your size into Amazon and you're done. If you're in that choosy-about-styles subgroup,  it's not perfect, but you might trade the ability to try on shoes for the increased selection. But for me, it really sucks. When it comes to casual shoes, there's just Wal-Mart, Foot Locker, and a few locally-owned stores. Previously, I would have gone to Zellers, Target, Sears, Payless for the sweet spot of cheap but with some quality. But they're all gone in Canada. So I'm stuck with super cheap or super expensive. It's the first time I've come up against this problem. I've bemoaned the lack of bricks and mortar options in modern retail before, but this is the first time I've had the experience where I need to buy something, but I'm not really sure where to get it.

Branding New Cadillac

General Motors has been awarded a formula one team. Michael Andretti had been campaigning for an American F1 team, but now he's stepped aside and the team will be more GM than Andretti. And it's going to be called the Cadillac team, as part of GM's eternal effort to associate the brand with something other than your rich uncle Wally's land yacht.

I'm wondering if anyone is taking bets on how long this team will last — or at least, how long it will have the Cadillac name. I'm thinking the over-under should be about 5 years. In recent history, there have been several examples of companies slapping their name on an F1 team, then changing their mind a few years later. Toyota lasted eight seasons, and Honda only three, and I don't see GM being more patient than them. It won't take long for the suits to ask why they're spending tens of millions to finish fourteenth.

The fact is that Formula One isn't a real great investment. It's not just expensive, but it's also hard to get to the top even if you're willing to spend with the big boys: You also need people with specific skills that aren't always available. Worse, there isn't much of a consolation prize: If you don't make it to the top, the whole world hears your name applied to the irrelevant car getting lapped by the champion.

So Formula One is a weird kind of never-ending investment bubble, where new people buy a team expecting great things, then realize there's not much reward in glory or publicity, and give up. But somehow, there's always more investors ready to take any team off the owner's hands and begin the cycle again.

Having said all this, Formula One has been more competitive this season, with four different teams winning races, so maybe this was the best time to buy into the series. But having said that, the other six teams had a combined total of two podiums in the 24 races, so there's still a big gap between haves and have-nots, even if there are more haves than there used to be. That will be the big challenge: those years in the wilderness without success before any chance at a publicity payoff.