The Long Shadow Of BS
TTAC published a link to the "Daily Kanban" yesterday. My initial response to this development was negative. As many of you know, Bertel Schmitt fired me from the site a few years ago only to see me first reinstated against his wishes then selected as his replacement. Many of you also know that I've had a fractious relationship with Ed Niedermeyer and his father, both of whom have contributed lengthy comments to this site on those matters.
On second thought, however, I cannot bring myself to really care about it. Nobody reads the DK, because it sucks. It's the precise equivalent of my hiring a twelve-year-old to be my partner in a blog about the cycling industry; I'd be too old and washed-up to have a legitimate opinion and my partner would be too inexperienced to know the difference between shit and a Shinola bicycle. It would be a site where I mindlessly pimped for my business associates and my partner made up stories about a business in which he'd never worked. You get the idea.
Nor can I be terribly sore on Robert Farago's behalf: TTAG has long since eclipsed TTAC in readership, influence, and thought leadership. Ed's decision to ah, help show his former boss the door launched Robert on a rocketship ride of success from which he can barely see our continued existence.
Lastly, TTAC is doing okay and has been doing okay ever since I rebooted it over a year and a half ago, although things could have gone better still had I been awake and uninjured for the first half of 2014. Derek's done a fine job of listening to both the readers and his own conscience. I still have a home at the site and I still contribute a few times a week. In the long run, everybody got more or less what they deserved, except for Michael Karesh, who is still trying to design a sex robot that doesn't self-destruct when it's exposed to the TrueDelta "database".
I like to think of Bertel's year at TTAC as some sort of bizarre dream sequence. Like, one day in the fall of 2013 we found Bobby in the shower and it turned out the whole previous season had just been a nightmare full of tentacle porn and dildos and big-eared Chinese girls. At the very least, I wound up with enough stories for a whole bottle of Ketel One. Isn't that worth something?