Author: cbcrenshaw

C.B. Crenshaw is a musician, artist, writer, coder, gardener, and maker in Alabama.

Quick Takes from the ‘Noles Loss to Pitt

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This game was both better and worse than the score suggests. Don’t get me wrong: if you only watched a few minutes of the game–at any point–you’d be justified in saying that it was too ugly for prime time. In the end, though, it turned into a decent chess match between two coaches with a limited set of pieces. I think it’s too early to draw any conclusions about anybody, but it was an entertaining, if frustrating, game to start the ‘Noles season. Here are my quick takeaways:

  1. The Seminoles’ interior defense was elite at times. Perimeter defense, not so much. If Pitt had been warmer from the perimeter in the first half, we would have been chasing a deficit through most of the game.
  2. FSU doesn’t have an offensive identity yet. There are still a lot of question marks for me about our ability to consistently create scoring opportunities. We looked significantly better when Vassell was on the court, but Forrest and Vassell put the team on their backs. Together they were responsible for 33 of the team’s 61 points. On the bright side, FSU did a great job picking up offensive boards–which was necessary, because we only made 39.6% of our shots from the floor. Ouch.
  3. Discipline was an issue. The key stat in this game was free throws. FSU made 13 of 15 from the line. Pitt? 22 of 31 attempts. FSU took way too many of these calls on the offensive side of the court, too, because the scorers had to work extra hard to create scoring opportunities in the paint.

In the end it all came down to experience, and that’s going to be a problem all year long. This was an ugly but hard-fought opener for the ‘Noles. You can see the final stats here.

The Gators are up next, at the O-Dome, but I may need to sit that one out since I’m a Gator alum. I’m sure you get it.

Roman Generals

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Reading tonight and thinking about what a bunch of dickheads Roman generals were.

Listen to this nugget, from Colin Wells’s history of the Empire:

“Another of Octavian’s successful generals, Lucius Cornificius, took to arriving at his host’s house on an elephant when he went out to dinner.”

Colin Wells, The Roman Empire

Or this bit from Suetonius, describing a thin-skinned Julius Caesar:

“he had ridden past the benches reserved for the tribunes of the people, and shouted in fury at a certain Pontius Aquila, who had kept his seat: ‘Hey, there, Aquila the tribune! Do you want me to restore the republic?’ For several days after this incident he added to every undertaking he gave: ‘With the kind consent of Pontius Aquila.'”

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (trans. Robert Graves)

What a bunch of jerks.

Late Night Passage

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No, listen, what happened was this: they lied to you, sold you ideas of good & evil, gave you distrust of your body & shame for your prophethood of chaos, invented words of disgust for your molecular love, mesmerized you with inattention, bored you with civilization & all its usurious emotions.

Hakim Bey, Temporary Autonomous Zone

The Daisy

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I have a little yellow Daisy on my front porch that I’ve been trying to keep alive for a few weeks. I’m not doing a very good job of it. The flower lives life on a strange carnival ride of forgetfulness, swinging wildly from healthy, golden vitality to a state of near-death droopiness over the course of each week, and I feel bad for it. I feel guilty just long enough to give it another starvation ration of water from a measuring cup out of the kitchen, that is, and then forget about it for another few days. I really have no idea what I’m doing.

I feel the same way about Twitter. Like the flower on my porch, I abandon it to time and entropy six days out of the week and overwater it on the seventh. It also gives me anxiety. I think, “I need to be better at Twitter.” I wonder, like most everyone with a high opinion of their own voice, “how can I get more engagement?” Just last night, I fell asleep thinking about how social media is a tool that I haven’t learned to properly use. Like an awl, maybe, which I also don’t know how to use. 

Unlike the flower, which needs me to live, there’s no reason for me to feel that way about Twitter. Twitter is probably demonstrably better without me on it. But I can’t help it. I fret over it, like the Tamagotchi I got in a kid’s meal from KFC in 1996 that quietly beeped its way into my psyche until I pulled the battery with a pang of guilt and a whoosh of relief two weeks later. It’s the same mechanic: press one button to clear a need, another to build a relationship.

I need to figure out why the internet makes me feel this way.   

Minute Wild: Olustee Battlefield

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A one-minute video for the nature-deprived. This was recorded on the morning of September 30, 2019 at Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park in Sanderson, Florida. With apologies for the spot on the lens.

I’ve been putting these on Vimeo, but I decided to take the plunge tonight and create a whole branded YouTube thing. So, if you have approximately four minutes, check out my channel, Minute Wild. Thank you so much!

Elegance

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Just came across this quote in C.J. Date’s Database Design & Relational Theory, which is a more interesting book than the title might suggest.

“In computing, elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a quality that decides between success and failure.

Edsger W. Dijkstra

Watching problems that could have been solved years ago by thoughtful design cascade now one upon the other in the systems at work drives this point home. Spend more time thinking than doing.