Cup of Coffee

May 26 25, 2023: Tween

26 Comments

The boy is entering junior high next year, which means no more after school care. I'm not quite sure I want him spending so much time alone in the afternoon quite yet though.

26 thoughts on “May 26 25, 2023: Tween”

  1. Lots of complaints about the bullpen this year but has anyone noticed how bad the offense is against the other teams' relievers?

      1. Second in MLB in RA. Only the Astros have allowed fewer runs. Twins lead MLB in starting pitching rWAA and by a comfortable margin: 5.8 WAA versus second place Rays' 3.2 WAA. Funny enough, they are also +5.8 WAA overall. The bullpen has been completely offset by the position players.

  2. Had the same concern this year. Aquinas ended up very involved in extra cirriculars and that took care of a lot of his down time. Highly recommend.

    2. The jalapeno didn't have an interest in extracurriculars, and his sports practices are all in the evening rather than after school, which is too bad. Lots of kids are within walking distance of school, so he does sometimes hang out with friends. There is nearly always someone at home these days (yay pandemic silver lining), but he is still on his phone or another screen for faaaaar longer than I prefer after the school day ends. I had assumed he'd need time for homework every day only to learn that the school's philosophy is that homework isn't effective in middle school. It's all strange.

      I guess I would just say that it's good to be proactive in setting up a plan and limits ahead of time. It's SO much harder to try to set more limits after the fact.

  3. Does he start earlier now too? I get why schools do this but they have it backwards. Schools should start later as kids move through the system because teens are wired to wake up later and young children wake up earlier.

    1. Yup, looks like it starts earlier. Damn, I hadn't considered that.

      Freshman year of high school for me started at 7:15am, plus I had a zero hour! Thankfully the next year they pushed it out 1.5 hours.

      1. The funny thing is I also had a seventh hour (after school), so I was able to negotiate an open hour as a freshman, which was unheard of. A bunch of us got busted for skipping class outside of school once. Everyone else got in trouble but they were surprised to find out I didn't actually have a class that hour so I was free to go.

        1. I certainly did. Minneapolis has a magnet program so I was bused across town. They don't cover the zero hour though, so I got dropped off for that (sure my parents loved doing that).

  5. I've been updating HBO Max to Max on the smart TVs, Chromecast, and phones the past couple days, and it's been entertaining to see the ratings stars on the install screen show up lower each subsequent time. This evening it's down to 1.3 stars

    1. I listen to a bi-weekly podcast focused on streaming media, and man, I wish someone would pay me that much money to make obviously stupid business decisions.

            1. You spent too much time in the public sector. What passes for strategy in the corporate world is frequently one part wishful thinking driven by nine parts executive ego.

    2. Got the Netflix thing today. The Boy pays for a "family" package, but it looks like that doesn't apply outside of a single address.

    3. Looking at it this way, it makes sense that David Zaslav & Co. would axe HBO Max purple as soon as they could. The Max rebrand is about broad appeal, about taking everything that made HBO special and hiding it behind a bunch of Food Network bullshit. HBO was the place that said “yes” when other networks said “no.” Stripping HBO Max of its royal purple strips it of its prestige identity. It becomes another basic blue bitch — just like Disney+, Paramount+, Prime Video, DirecTV, the Microsoft Store, Vudu, and the chroma-key backgrounds of a Marvel movie. Actually, that’s unfair to Disney+ and Prime, which at least have picked appealing shades of blue to be. Max blue blares out of a computer screen. It’s obnoxious. It’s eye-watering. It could be cool in a 100 gecs video, but as the main branding of a broadly appealing streamer, it falls flat.

      HBO Max was originally intended to bring diverse voices to the table, something that seems like less of a priority for “both sides” Warner Bros. Discovery. Blue is useless from a branding standpoint unless the goal is to make Max less distinct overall. If the goal is to take what was once a unique (-ly affluent, -ly queer, -ly diverse) streamer and turn it into just another content faucet, then mission accomplished. HBO Max purple is Aperol spritzes on a Mediterranean yacht; Max blue is a ranch-dressing fountain at a gender-reveal party. Congratulations, Max. You played yourself.

      Pour one out for HBO Max's purple

      1. I don't think it's a coincidence they did this a few days before the Succession (and to a lesser extent Barry) finale. Everyone will be scrambling to download the new app.

Comments are closed.