Tumgik
adamoco · 6 years
Text
DISNEY PIXAR MOVIE MADNESS! (now, with math)
Tumblr media
On March 21, in the height of March Madness, Twitter user @yeeitsanthonyy unleashed their own viral bracket buster upon an unsuspecting interwebs. Under the title “DISNEY PIXAR MOVIE MADNESS!” they set up a tournament-style, single-elimination competition between 32 films from both studios, spanning from “The Little Mermaid” to “Coco.” Deceptively simple, devised to determine one champion from two brands enjoying long runs of success.
As a Disney employee and superfan of both studios, the bracket rocked me to my core. It’s a brilliant idea that rightfully set Disney fandom ablaze. But I couldn’t help but notice the lack of explanation behind each film’s place in the bracket. The seeming subjectivity of the ordering. And most notably, a couple of glaring omissions. Much like the NCAA basketball tournaments are seeded, there had to be a statistical way to rank these films. One driven by metrics to ensure the correct films make the tournament; one that gives each studios’ substantively better performing and critically lauded works a fairer path toward total glory.
I started work immediately on using data to make a better version of this bracket.
Tumblr media
Above: the original bracket Tweeted by @yeeitsanthonyy.
Methodology
The construct of the original bracket is straightforward and compelling: Disney films fill out one side, Pixar films fill the other. I wanted to maintain this setup, since it ultimately matches up the top Disney and Pixar films in everyone’s bracket for an overall winner. But the reasoning behind which films were selected for the tournament needed to be more transparent.
Using the original bracket’s “The Little Mermaid” (1989) and “Coco” (2017) as start and end points, Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios have combined to make 49 films during the time frame it represents. Disney made 30 of those movies, Pixar made 19. That’s more films apiece than there’s room for in each side of the bracket, so we have to omit a few intentionally. But to be objective about which ones, I wanted to consider every film from both studios during this time period for the tournament.
With room for 16 films on each side of the bracket, 14 Disney films from the time period wouldn’t make the tournament, but only 3 Pixar films would miss the cut. That’s a problem – it’s unfair that it’s easier for Pixar movies to make the field. There needs to be a little more parity added to the tournament for Disney films that would be on the “bubble” quality-wise for making it in, but still have a lot of potential for making a Cinderella-type run (see what I did there?) through the bracket.
Speaking of quality, how do we rank these films? The original bracket doesn’t appear to factor in seeding, and that’s my biggest critique. In the NCAA tournament, teams are ranked #1 through #16 in each region. Across the four regions, a #1 team should be roughly the same caliber as the other three #1 teams in the tournament, the #2 teams should match up with the other #2s, and so forth. 
 Without any qualifications provided for why each movie is placed in its particular position on the bracket, the original gives the appearance of being entirely subjective, possibly based on the original poster’s personal preferences. My goal is to address this.
The Model
We need to rank these movies to set a bracket. Where can we find some data to build an overall metric of quality upon? The internet has made it easier to quantify a movie’s critical reception – particularly a website called RottenTomatoes.com, which popularized the “Tomatometer,” gauging the percentage of movie critics’ positive reaction to a film. It’s not really a statement of a film’s overall quality; for example, it considers a 2.5 out of 4-star review as “fresh,” indicating the critic had a positive response – not exactly glowing. But it’s a highly marketable figure, essentially an update of Siskel and Ebert’s “two thumbs up” with more data points, and it gives us a metric that at least attempts to characterize popular critical response.
The other obvious metric is the movie’s bottom line: how well did it do at the box office? That’s a challenging question, because the answer has changed over the period the bracket represents. Increasingly, it’s not good enough for a movie to just do well in the United States. Global box office has become hugely important to studios; a project’s appeal to worldwide audiences is a huge calculation in slating new releases. And there’s some major winners and losers on global box office among the 49 films under consideration.
But box office numbers can be deceiving. “The Little Mermaid” was a watershed film that marked the start of the original Disney renaissance. But it only made $211 million in 1989, when ticket prices were lower and theatrical distribution wasn’t as wide globally. By comparison, “Zootopia” (2016) cracked just over $1 billion globally. It’s weird to think “The Little Mermaid” would have been a financial disappointment by contemporary standards, so we have to factor inflation into our evaluation.
I did this by looking up the total global box office for each film on BoxOfficeMojo.com, which has a searchable database of box office information. Then, I divided it by the average ticket price for each film’s year of release, yielding a figure I called “admissions” – theoretically, the number of people who saw it in theatres. Since the population of our fine planet keeps growing, it’s not really fair to penalize older movies that fewer people would have had a chance to see. So ultimately, we need to grade box office performance on a something like a curve.
Overall, I used a weighted score to evaluate the 49 movies under consideration. 50% of that score is determined by a movie’s Tomatometer percentage. I took each movie’s Tomatometer  and multiplied it by 0.5; the product is a decimal between 0 and 0.5. (“Finding Nemo,” with a 99% Tomatometer, gets a .495 out of .5 score. “Brother Bear,” the lowest Tomatometer of all films in contention at 38%, gets a .19 score.)
Then, I evaluated box office performance to determine the other 50% of the score. I used the “admissions” figure described earlier — again, the idea is to reward movies that were the strongest performers, but not overly penalize ones that didn’t have a great box office (especially if they were still critically loved). I sorted the films by most admissions to least and assigned a perfect score of 0.5 to the film with the highest figure. Then I subtracted .005 from that score for every position a film fell down the list – enough that high performers are rewarded, but keeping a relative balance in place with critical reception, so that movies need decent scores on both to make the tournament. (“Finding Nemo,” with the highest admissions figure on the list, gets the perfect 0.5 score. “Mulan,” the median entry, gets a .365, and the film with the lowest admission, “Winnie the Pooh,” gets a .26 score.)
Add those two scores together, and we’ve got an overall weighted score between 0 and 1. Now, sort the films by those scores, and we’ve got ourselves a statistically sound-ish list!
Tumblr media
And here’s that list!
I use “sound-ish” because this model almost certainly has flaws. I could have used the “Top Critics” Tomatometer score that filters out all but the most well-known writers, which could have caused variation. As far as admissions, I have no way of knowing how close my theoretical figure is to actual; it’s just the best I can do with the available data. And also, there’s no accounting for the “favorite” factor, that feeling where regardless of critical or box office performance, you just love one movie more than another. And make no mistake – you should love what you love! Data-wise though, it’s just really hard to account for movies that became “cult” favorites, since there’s not really a good way to quantify that performance-wise. For example, you could take social media likes or conversation into consideration, but that might put certain movies (particularly older ones) at a disparate disadvantage. 
One other thing: I’m standing firm on the inclusion of only Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios films, none of their subsidiaries. That means no “Planes,” and as some called out as a miss on the original bracket, no “A Goofy Movie,” either. Rest assured, if I included them in consideration, when the numbers are crunched, none of them make the tournament.
Bracketology
Tumblr media
A look at the results of this model suggests the original bracket had a few key snubs. Most notably, it left “Finding Dory” out of the Pixar bracket. The #9 weighted scorer, its credentials are sterling with a 94% Tomatometer and over $1 billion in global box office. Also snubbed was “Monsters University,” a little further down the weighted list but a certain shoo-in at #25. Much further down the list, “The Good Dinosaur” (#37) and “Cars 2” (#45), which made the original bracket, objectively don’t belong in the field.
Tumblr media
There’s also misses on the Disney side of the bracket. “Wreck-It Ralph” (#26) is omitted from the original bracket, and people forget this but “Bolt” (#27) actually performed comparably strongly on Tomatometer and box office. But right after this, we get to the problem described earlier: there’s a need for some more parity on the Disney bracket. With only three Pixar movies missing the field, we owe it to a few more Disney movies to have a shot at a tournament run. “Hercules” (#28), “Lilo & Stitch” (#29), “The Nightmare Before Christmas” (#30), “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” (#31), and “The Princess and the Frog” (#34) are separated by 0.03 points on our weighted scale. They’re all legitimate bubble contenders.
The NCAA basketball tournament solves for this and makes things more exciting with a “First Four,” where the four lowest-ranked automatic and at-large qualifiers face a one-game play-in against each other to make the official 64-team bracket. That’s how we’re going to solve for this, too: we’re going to expand the tournament field from 32 to 34 movies, with one extra round for those four bubble films to claim the last two spots on the bracket proper.
Probably my adjusted’s biggest snub among movies that made the original: “Pocahontas” is out of the tournament with its #38 weighted ranking. Despite a solid $346 million box office, its 57% Tomatometer is among the lowest in the field; it actually drops it below “The Emperor’s New Groove” and “Winnie the Pooh” as far as movies not making the tournament. (It’s okay, just imagine them all playing in a really fun consolation bracket somewhere.) 
Seeding
As mentioned in the methodology, the bracket should be seeded so that quantifiably better movies earn a little bit easier of a run through the bracket (assuming they’re winners in your heart, too). I subdivided the Disney and Pixar sides of the bracket into a two regions of eight movies apiece, so we’ll have four sets of #1 through #8 seeds. The idea is that each numerical seed is of roughly equal quality to the movies in other regions with the same seeds. The #1 seeds in each region are pretty impeccable – and immediately lent themselves to the idea of organizing the regions by older and new entries from both studios.
“Finding Nemo” tops the Classic Pixar Region, while “Toy Story 3” tops the New Pixar Region. “The Lion King” tops the Disney Renaissance Region, while “Zootopia” might be a slight surprise as the top of the Second Renaissance Region, but the credentials are definitely there.
In the first round, #1 seeds face off against #8 seeds; that winner plays the victor of the matchup between #3 and #4 – technically, the easiest path through the field to the Disney or Pixar final round. The #2 seeds get #7 seeds, facing off against the winner of the #3 and #6 seeds. If the top two seeds win out, the final on each side of the bracket matches #1 against #2.
That means “Nemo” gets “Cars” in Classic Pixar, where my favorite opening round matchup puts #3 “Toy Story 2” against #6 “Ratatouille” – the Little Chef could be poised to cook up a nice run in many brackets. In New Pixar, TS3 gets “Brave,” while #6 “Wall-E” could certainly clean up against #3 “Finding Dory.” 
Now, checking out the Disney side of the bracket. The two play-in rounds are for the #8 seed, meaning “Lion King” gets the winner between “Nightmare” and “Hunchback” in the Disney Renaissance, while “Zootopia” gets the winner of “Lilo & Stitch” and “Princess and the Frog” in Second Renaissance. (Just to get out ahead of this: “Lilo & Stitch” isn’t part of the actual Second Disney Renaissance; it falls in that weird shadow time between the two, but being released on the 2000s side of the millennium line, I decided to lump it in with the movies in the newer half of the bracket.) 
In Disney Renaissance, “The Little Mermaid” is ready to go where the winners go, despite being a #5 seed. In Second Renaissance, I think “Zootopia” might be the most vulnerable of the #1 seeds in the tournament for an early exit, especially considering the crash course it faces with either with #4 “Moana” or #5 “Tangled” in the second round.
Conclusions
What exactly have I wrought with this? A painstakingly calculated, statistically semi-sound bracket that perhaps more accurately reflects the respective pop culture and financial impact of recent Disney and Pixar films, setting up an exceptionally silly, imaginary tournament slightly more equitably. Yet at the end of the day, reiterating a potential shortcoming of this model and all of the math behind it, you love what you love.
I posted my adjusted bracket and hundreds of social media likes and responses rolled in, with comments ranging from “The hero we needed!” to “This is a work of Evil.” But a few people noted that, even with corrected seeding, they still came up with the same final four and eventual winner as the original bracket. If your favorite Disney and Pixar movies were already on both brackets, there’s a very good chance you were faced with the same eventual final picks anyway. You just arrived at them in a somewhat different manner.
So, a closing thanks to @yeeitsanthonyy for their blindingly bright idea that sparked cheerful, passionate participation and conversation across the Disney fandom. I recognize it most importantly as an attempt at creating joy, and there’s objectively nothing to critique about that. But to those craving logic and order in our increasingly chaotic world, I hope you rest just a bit easier tonight.
Tumblr media
And finally, my bracket, in case you were curious. 
7 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Photo
Tumblr media
Today, Dean Spanos and Roger Goodell turned their backs on generations of loyal Charger fans who have supported professional football in San Diego since 1961.
We’ve had some time to prepare ourselves. For somewhere around 15 years, Spanos held my hometown at something akin to ransom for a new stadium. (To be clear, San Diego needed a new football stadium. Qualcomm Stadium, now 50 years old, is basically a pit with a trolley stop.) But the rub resulted from Spanos pushing for financing primarily though public funds, during a period where authorizing them would be irresponsible for the city on many fronts. A year ago today, NFL owners gave the Chargers another year to work out a deal in San Diego, or move to Los Angeles and become the tenants of Rams owner Stan Kroenke, who is currently building an economically questionable, $2.6 billion monstrosity of a new home for his team in Inglewood. You know, Inglewood! By the airport.
The Chargers had made strong preludes to leaving for LA throughout late 2015, which escalated in the weeks prior to that January 2016 announcement, generating sorrow among Chargers fans akin to a wake. Today, as Spanos announced the team's real departure in a gutless letter posted to Twitter, along with the unveiling of the absolute worst logo in American professional sports today (above), the feeling is of good riddance.
The circumstances that ensued between the team and San Diego in the year following have softened the blow. Given one last extension to work with the city and reach a mutually agreeable financing solution, the Chargers instead fell back on the same, scorched earth, my way or the 5 Freeway approach. They demanded a new stadium downtown, with a convention center annex no one at the San Diego Convention Center authority asked for, to be paid for with a crazy four percent increase to the city's hotel occupancy tax. And then they put it on the ballot, where it failed in November by a laughable margin.
The Chargers and the NFL had the power to keep the team here. The Chargers franchise is valued at over $2 billion, and the league was projected to gross $13 billion in revenue this year. Surely they could have arranged to kick in more than one-third of the cost for this $1.8 billion downtown “convadium.” Instead, they nervously pushed the check to San Diego and hoped they’d stick out-of-town visitors and Comic-Con guests with the bill. But voters didn’t forget the bad deal the Chargers stuck the city with to pay for the 1997 renovations to Qualcomm Stadium. This time, San Diego called the bluff, and it will be much better for it.
The Chargers' move to Los Angeles underscores the greed and heartlessness that increasingly characterizes the NFL, who are right in the mix now with the FIFA, the NCAA and IOC for likability. But what particularly defines Spanos and the Chargers' leadership is their aloofness. You could see it in their product on the field for the past three years, and you can see it in their abandonment of San Diego for a market they quietly coveted behind the scenes. They’re already feeding local media the lines: Los Angeles is a homecoming for the Chargers. They played their first season here in 1960! And then they left for San Diego! What a great tradition we’re reviving? See? This guy remembers!
Throughout their threats to move over the past two years, the Chargers claimed over and over that 25 percent of their season ticket revenue came from the Los Angeles area. Seriously. Don’t ask them for references. Who’s making that drive to and from San Diego on Sundays, exactly? Do you know how bad the traffic is here? I grew up in San Diego and have lived in the Los Angeles area for more than 15 years. There's no Chargers fandom here. I can name three Chicago Bears bars in Burbank, but I can't name a Chargers one. It's part of a complicated problem the Chargers face as they fight for market share: LA has become a city of expat NFL fans.
Even after they abandoned LA in 1994, probably the biggest team here remains the Oakland Raiders, whose chances of coming back are officially gone now. The Rams generated huge excitement when they announced their return from St. Louis, but as they lost on the field, the enthusiasm quickly dissipated. Throughout December, they played to tens of thousands of empty of Coliseum seats.
Even still, the Rams ranked 7th in attendance last year, while the Chargers ranked a paltry 31st. That means they will enter the LA market, at best, as the #3 football option in this town. But if we're counting the Trojans and Bruins, as college football happily filled the market vacuum with a lack of an NFL presence for 20 years, they're really option #4 and on a good UCLA year, perhaps even #5. The Chargers must know this, because instead of joining the Rams temporarily at the Coliseum, they will play at Stubhub Center, where the primary tenant is a Major League Soccer team. It seats about 27,000.
Maybe the Chargers are right about that 25 percent of their revenue coming from Los Angeles. But they've certainly just alienated the other 75 percent. San Diego residents made clear at the ballot box that they won't stand for a crummy deal, and they're making hilariously, awesomely clear now that they won't stand behind a team that abandons them. Who else would? Who's making plans to buy season tickets and become a Los Angeles Chargers fan, support a treacherous money-grubbing owner and incompetent leadership? Furthermore, who in Los Angeles want to drive to Inglewood? No one wants to go to Inglewood! There’s a reason the Kings and Lakers left.
Charger supporters have been used to having their loyalty tested, particularly in this last year, as Spanos and the organization made great strides in poisoning their relationship with fans. They retained head coach Mike McCoy after a 4-12 season last year, and put safety Eric Weddle on injured reserve for his final game with the team in a move many saw as punitive, before trading him. They failed to sign a contract before pre-season with defensive end Joey Bosa, their #1 draft pick, despite league rules that are designed to make this super easy. They finished 5-11 this year, losing their last five games at Qualcomm Stadium.
The frustration got evident, as picked up on by the TV broadcasts showing pictures indicating that many of the fans in Qualcomm Stadium during home games – on some game days, arguably even a majority – have been supporting the visitors. It’s frustrating to feel like you support the NFL's permanent road team. And now, the Chargers have hit the road permanently.
This has nothing to do with the Chargers players, who weathered this drama admirably and are beloved unconditionally. Dan Fouts, Hank Bauer, Junior Seau, Stan Humphries, Drew Brees, Ladainian Tomlinson, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, Nick Hardwick and Antonio Gates remain legends to me. I will never forget the Super Bowl season of 1994, or the deep playoff runs of the late 2000's. (Side note: we lose the Charger Girls, too. That kinda stings.)
But I side with the near-universal sentiment among Charger fans, and can no longer support an organization led by anyone who would abandon a half century of tradition in America’s Finest City. No reason suffices, least of all money.
Los Angeles Chargers? Nope. Absolutely not. I’m done.
2 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Link
Thanks to my little sister’s Pochacco love growing up, I’m fairly Sanrio knowledgable... this is an amazing addition. My favorite part is the Street Fighter 2-style rage meter at top-left. “Tomorrow is a new day!”
3 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Link
"An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people." -- Thomas Jefferson
It’s easier than ever to verify the accuracy of most any statement that’s put in front of us. But we don’t, and that’s our first amendment right. 'Merica!
337 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Photo
REMINDER: Any contractor working on that Death Star knows the risk involved.
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
The drawings of the planet-killing not-a-moon may look like gobbledygook to you, but to a trained designer, they’re fair game for criticism. And when WIRED asked a bunch of designers, architects, and other professionals for their assessments, most were not kind. That’s not just because of the Death Star’s evil connotations, but due to obvious design flaws.
READ MORE: Architects and engineers shove a lightsaber through the Death Star’s bad design.
346 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Photo
"Does that blow your mind? THAT just happened!"
Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media Tumblr media
IMPORTANT ME UPDATE-Adam proposed to me at a speakeasy in Vegas. We’re getting hitched!
31 notes · View notes
adamoco · 8 years
Video
youtube
RIP, John Glenn.
1 note · View note
adamoco · 8 years
Link
There are times when Wade wonders what it would be like to write an article he truly believes in. "In a perfect world," he says, it would have nuance and balance and long paragraphs and take longer than 10 minutes to compose. It would make people think. But he never writes it, he says, because no one would click on it, so what would be the point?
A little late on this, but it’s scary to know how much influence people like this have now, purporting lies and and fostering extremism under the guise of journalism ... all for easy money. Post-truth because post-skepticism.
0 notes
adamoco · 8 years
Link
[McKnight] was “trying to apologize," as the man yelling then shot him multiple times.
The shooter then “stood over” the victim and said “I told you don’t f--k with me” before firing another shot, according to the witness.
28 years old. Dead because of someone’s “road rage.” Yet not even the first NFL player in New Orleans this happened to this year.
This is America, for some reason.
0 notes
adamoco · 8 years
Video
youtube
I was driving to work yesterday on the first really cold morning of fall, where I could see the water vapor of my breath as I exhaled – and it made me think of 12 year-old me watching Alanis on MTV, singing in her freezing cold car – and I was all, I gotta hear this song RIGHT NOW and it gave me all the feels.
0 notes
adamoco · 8 years
Link
“It’s not just about taking big rigs and smashing them into the sides of cars... although that’s a big part of it when I’m playing it...”
“That’s a blender, dog.” “Yeah. This is a car blender.” “I need you to be inside of that.”
1 note · View note
adamoco · 8 years
Link
I’ve had the pleasure of experiencing the last two Delusion shows – their 2014 one, “Lies Within,” is the best immersive theatre piece I’ve seen. With help from Robert Kirkman’s Skybound, they’re adapting that show into a VR experience, which is literally the first VR thing I’ve ever been excited about. Good things happen to good folks!
0 notes
adamoco · 8 years
Text
I almost think we don’t deserve social media anymore. We have this amazing, collaborative, transformative communication technology at our fingertips, yet it’s provided and used in ways that ensure anyone can be hurt or disparaged from anywhere, anonymously, for any reason or none whatsoever. And that’s just on a direct basis. Now, there’s proof it’s hurting us much more broadly.
In America, this last election underscored that social media has deepened our political divides and driven the emergence of a primary news source that is “post-truth.” Social media makes it easier than ever to surround ourselves with whatever news feeds, blogs and pundits we like, not because they’re factual, transparent and provide accurate context, but because they create or maintain a narrative that reinforces our pre-existing feelings and opinions. And when something online backs those up, you can’t possibly be wrong, right?
I’m guilty of this, too. I cultivate safe space in my social media feeds for my fairly typical west coast, liberal worldview. I filter out “news” that’s obviously fake, block opinion pieces that push extreme viewpoints, and unfollow “friends” who post troubling memes about gun rights and climate change. Whatever formula of that I concocted, it basically filtered out the microagressions of this campaign, making the last eighteen months feel like a lot less of a slog than they could’ve been.
The presidential debates seemed to reaffirm what the online worldview I fostered had made clear over that time: the racist, misogynist, unscrupulous, morally reprehensible reality TV personality was categorically unprepared and unfit to be president, and while his opponent was certainly flawed, she was a tremendously qualified and capable alternative. I watched the fivethirtyeight.com forecast nose up to what seemed like a lock, and tuned out until November 8 thinking America knew what to do. 
You know how that went. Your social media world isn’t America. 30 of 50 states voted for Trump, and there’s no going back. The aftermath makes clear “post-truth” goes both ways. I see articles on social saying faithless Electoral College members could pull a switch en masse and go for Hillary, when almost all modern precedent says otherwise. A viral video purporting to show streets clogged with 100,000 protestors in Los Angeles was very clearly shot in Venezuela some time ago. We can think piece, fear monger and hypothesize until we cry about the ramifications this election will have, but there’s a metric about this that’s sadder still.
In all this, the biggest disappointment to me is that 42% of voting-eligible Americans didn’t participate in this election. It’s pretty cynical to think that your voice somehow didn’t matter in this. Voting is our greatest, hardest-fought privilege in this country. I know it’s a hassle – in some states, an unfortunately huge and intimidating one. But it’s one you need to get up for, at least every fourth year. If you work or buy almost anything, you’re underwriting what’s on the ballot with your taxes. Your input is needed. If you gave that privilege up, whether that was an act of protest or not, you have no moral high ground now. You’re complicit in everything that happens from here.
And if you voted, it’s time to take it a step further. Let’s actually get involved at places other than the ballot box (I’m challenging myself on this, too). Let’s read some newspapers and magazines on a regular basis instead of just Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter. Whenever we get pissed off about what happens from here, the social posts are well and good, but let’s also write and call our representatives and make sure they know that we’re pissed off, too. If we’re in a safe state, let’s find a way to connect with and mobilize people in swing states. I’m not sure what that is, exactly, but if their guy falters, we need to make damn sure they understand that the guy who promised to magically everything better lied to them and let them down. The president-elect already pledged to double economic growth in his victory speech; let’s start there. Let’s also try to volunteer, donate or find other ways to support causes and fellow Americans who are now under threat for reasons that are simply, fundamentally un-American. There are some people who can definitely use some reassuring right now, and we can do better than a safety pin.
Lastly, wherever they are, let’s find those 42% of people who are on the fence about all this, and the additional people who might be as the weeks and months ahead play out. I graduated a class short of a political science minor and I clearly ain’t no expert, but one thing that stuck with me is the notion of saints, sinners and salvageables. Pick your side on those first two; there will always be people you can convince, and people you can’t. But there’s people in your life, right now, who the right words or the right actions will build consensus with and pull your way. A referendum is coming in 2018, and the campaign has already begun.
0 notes
adamoco · 8 years
Link
Sherman: "I have to lead this team because nobody else knows the rules.”
1 note · View note
adamoco · 8 years
Link
"I don't know, man. You have to enjoy it, because it ends. There's gonna be a day when no one cares, and they'll be over it." – Jim Adkins
1 note · View note
adamoco · 8 years
Link
The first time I heard Langhorne Slim was when I was watching him live from the audience on Conan as he tore through the title track and "Found My Heart" from his album "The Way We Move." I was also coming down with appendicitis. We listened to the whole fantastic album on the way home. I was in the ER by the next evening and in surgery the morning after. This album was there for me as I recovered and almost every time I've felt blue since. It never fails to get me back to hopeful.
1 note · View note
adamoco · 8 years
Link
“Mexican quarter of Los Angeles. One quarter mile from City Hall. Area has been condemned and will be torn down shortly to make space for the new Union Railroad station. Average rent is eight dollars."
1 note · View note