Remember me? Ty Schalter?

It’s okay if you don’t; it’s been over two years since this “weekly journal of everything awesome” has actually gone out every week.

But in between the last two Gimmes Schalter, in May and July 2023, I registered FunFactorPod.com.

I knew, surely as I knew that I drew breath or that the sun would rise in the morning, that Barry Sanders was a better running back than Emmitt Smith. Teenaged me would insist everybody should just watch them run throughout the 1990s, thinking the disparities between their talent and their opportunities were obvious.

But back then, most football discussions started and stopped with whoever had The Most. Most rings, most wins, most yards. Emmitt had more than Barry, so Emmitt was better. Even the most basic attempt to capture how Barry did more with less--like dividing the yards they'd each gained by the number of times they'd each run--would be dismissed as witchery, spooky numbers concocted by nerds who hadn't been given enough swirlies.

Imagine my joy when twenty-something me discovered Football Outsiders. Founded by Aaron Schatz and staffed by many future peers, colleagues, and friends, FO has been teasing "The Hidden Game Of Football" out of the box score with math, passion, film review, and opinions well informed by all of the above for the last 20 years.

Yesterday, Schatz resigned as Editor-in-Chief.

Ten years ago, at age 31, I had achieved nearly all of my dreams. I was a national NFL columnist for a top-five global sports outlet, with a salary supporting a house in the suburbs, two cars, and a growing menagerie of pets for my wife and our three active kids.

My daily routine was waking up, helping get the kids to school, and writing the best damn football column I could. I'd started writing science-fiction and fantasy short stories on the side, laying the groundwork for a second dream career. In a couple of months, I'd be flown out to a ritzy Manhattan skyscraper overlooking Central Park to meet all my colleagues face-to-face and welcome our new cable-TV overlords.

I thought I was on my way to becoming the next Mitch Albom--or at least the next Mike Tanier.

Instead, the very concept of writing for money online was attacked to the point where I had to go back to a day job before I lost the cars and the house. Turner Sports spent the next decade paring Bleacher Report down to just branding and vibes, which a few months ago made them both easy targets for their new cable-TV overlords.

[CONTENT NOTE: This issue discusses partner abuse, sexual assault, and transphobia]

Two different podcasts recently hit my phone, ricocheted through my ears, and smashed into each other inside of my brain: The latest episode of The American Prospect's "Left Anchor," and "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling." from Bari Weiss's The Free Press. I had no idea the former existed before two of my favorite media critics joined as guests; I had been anticipating the latter in much the same way Damocles anticipated that sword.

As Rowling says in its opening minutes, her Harry Potter books enchant children with wish fulfillment. But they're also wish-fulfillment for Rowling--who, as I've written before, was born with much of what Harry, Ron, and Hermione lacked. And while her characters happily settled down to repeat generational cycles of provincial English life, Rowling struck out for Europe--and returned not long after as a traumatized and destitute single mother, in desperate flight from an abusive ex-husband.

I am a Michigan State Spartan, but I don't want to be #SpartanStrong. I shouldn't have to be.

My heart should be allowed to break for the senseless murder of Brian Fraser, Alexandria Verner and Arielle Anderson, and grievous wounding of five others. I should be able to be shocked that a man with a history of gun crimes and erratic behavior was able to buy another gun and go on a killing spree. To fully express my rage that gun nuts immediately used this tragedy to call for more guns.

I should not have to have spent a night texting with loved ones on lockdown, obsessively refreshing social and messaging apps for read receipts and recent posts. My personal Twitter list of Lansing-centric reporters should not have gone lowkey viral, and I shouldn't have had to constantly remind myself and others of the Breaking News Consumer's Handbook.

I wish I could believe that this is going to mean anything. That the students' powerful Capitol sit-in, and enormous, haunting vigil, will be honored with real change. I wish I could believe that the leaders of a newly-installed Democratic trifecta will be able to back up their words by actually passing the kind of common-sense gun laws an overwhelming majority of Americans support.

NOTE: The ultimate inspiration for this essay, Matt Taibbi, went on Twitter and called it"one of the dumbest things he's ever read," which kicked off a whole thing!

So, hello and welcome. If you'd dumb things like this in your inbox every week or so, totally for free, subscribe here:

I had just been cast in my first high-school musical--in the lead role! I was thrilled.

Since the last issue of Gimme Schalter went out, we found out the platform it had been run on will be permanently unplugged in a matter of weeks, Mediaite declared my reaction to Matt Taibbi's first #TwitterFiles drop one of the Internet's "Most Embarrassing," and the Detroit Lions became a legitimate playoff contender.

Meanwhile, I covered the World Cup for FiveThirtyEight, producing three pieces I'm incredibly proud of:

• The U.S. Played To Win Against Iran -- And It Worked

• Kylian Mbappé Is Having A World Cup For The Ages

• You're Not Imagining Things. There's Way More Stoppage Time At This World Cup.

Also meanwhile, I drummed in the pit for Riverwalk Theatre's production of "A Year With Frog And Toad," an extremely cute and fun musical put on by an awesome cast and crew. I had a blast, and it was a hit.

"If this is to be our end, then I would have them make such an end as to be worthy of remembrance."

—Théoden, King of Rohan, Lord of the Mark, Horsemaster, Father of Horse-men, as quoted by Peter Jackson's film adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's "The Two Towers"

We all thought last night might have been Twitter's last--and it was one of its best nights ever. After the deadline to check yes or no on Elon Musk's ridiculous internal "extremely hardcore" email passed, reports of mass resignations went up side-by-side with last-day-of-the-school year farewell posts and defiant, bittersweet sign-offs by Twitter employees (many collated in this thread):

I know that for many Americans, it’s not easy or convenient to vote. You have to vote anyway.

I know that in many U.S. states, your right to vote is being suppressed on multiple fronts. You have to vote anyway.

I know many people believe their vote won’t matter–just one of the millions all going to the same candidate, or gerrymandered to irrelevance. But local races like school board, judges, and drain commissioner that directly impact your life are frequently decided by triple-, double-, or even single-digit margins. Your vote matters. Vote.

My mother went to Michigan State, as did her father before her. My stepmother also went to Michigan State. My in-laws met at Michigan State, and my wife and her two sisters all followed in their footsteps. I’ve lived my whole life within minutes of the Michigan State campus; most people from around here attended, worked, or works there, or cares about someone who did. For every kind of small business there is, there’s one in town called “Spartan [SMALL BUSINESS].”

So when I was like nine years old, and my babysitter’s older brother showed me some glossy pamphlets boasting about the greatness of the University of Michigan, I saw a golden opportunity to stick it to practically every adult in my life.

Rivalries are fun. They’re a low-stakes way to engage in the kind of senseless tribalism humans usually fight wars over: I wear this color, you wear that one, and when the people wearing my color beat the people wearing yours I get to drink your chocolate milk. Lording it over my parents, teachers, and friends because of our harmless elective affiliations was a hoot.

Before Adult Swim, there was Nick at Nite: Nickelodeon’s post-bedtime programming plan to draw bleary parental eyeballs with re-runs of classic 1950s TV. Baby Boomers were delighted–and 80s babies who tuned in off-hours got a taste of the stuff their parents grew up on.

Around the time I became a parent, Hot Topic started selling T-shirts with old-school Nintendo games on them–and capitalism has been selling our childhoods back to us ever since. From “Stranger Things” to endless re-releases, remakes, reboots, and remasters of all our favorite formative media, GenXers and Xennials are constantly being sold idealized versions of youth.

So we all knew exactly what was happening when Twitter user @wokal_distance called for a return to the simpler, purer, more wholesome days of the 1990s:

A decade before “Shrek” hit theatres, I discovered the incredible tweenage feeling of getting the reference.

I’d just gotten into comic books, and all the cool kids were telling me that I should go back and read the Phoenix Saga. Legendary X-Men writer Chris Claremont told the story over many issues: A core character appeared to die in a space-travel accident, but then popped back up with firey new powers and started going by the name “Phoenix.” By the end–spoiler alert–she’d repeatedly died, transformed, and/or come back to life.

Get it? “Phoenix,” like the ancient Greek myth! And she does what phoenixes do! It’s an allusion!

Decaffinated Rainbows (“Decaf”) Schalter was a terrible dog, but a wonderful person.

She was a year or two old when we adopted her; they told us she was so scarred by neglect that she would never play like a regular dog, never act like dogs should act. We realized on the way home from the Adopt-a-thon that her chill vibe was in fact terrified catatonia.

She learned to run and bark and wag and play, but she never got very good at acting like a dog should act.

Like Cindy Lou Who, I was not more than two, flipping through the pages of “Uncle Art’s World of Drawing” on an otherwise unremarkable evening. Suddenly, the black markings beneath the pictures just sort of…snapped into focus.

“Giraffe,” I said. The black markings were letters that formed a word, and the word was name of the animal being drawn on the page. Giraffe. Flip. Lion. Flip. Hippo.

I was reading.

“Well, you did it,” my eldest said in mock frustration a couple of years ago, during the intro of Final Fantasy VII Remake. “You made me nostalgic for stuff from your childhood.”

It’s the ultimate goal of a storyteller: Conveying your love of a story to the next generation. Do it well enough, and those kids will tell their kids. That story you love will outlive your ability to re-tell it.

That’s what Halls of Fame are for: Building a list of people who matter to whatever the interest, industry, or institution is. They assure every enshrinee, and everyone who cares about them, that they’ll be remembered. In professional football, as in many sports, it’s the sportswriters–the storytellers of the game–who decide which “characters” are worthy.

“Writer’s Block,” as people who are not writers understand it, is mostly bullshit.

That’s not to say writers never spend hours, days, weeks, months, or years lamenting their lack of progress on a work-in-progress. I don’t mean to insinuate that no writer has ever stared into the white abyss of the blank page, guided to nowhere by the incompetent Sherpas of alcohol and nicotine.

But so much more often than not, in my experience, being blocked isn’t about having no idea what to write. It’s being crushed under the weight of all the ideas and possibilities I want to commit to the page.

I know Hamish McKenzie is a writer, because writers process their most difficult feelings by pouring them all out onto the page and hitting “publish,” with no regard for their self-interest.

The Substack co-founder’s latest newsletter issue, “Escape from Hell World,” is a gift I’m glad for: A glimpse into the mindset of a man who set out to make the world better for people like him, but is realizing now realizing he’s not actually ‘like’ all the people he thought were kindred spirits.

Last time I wrote about Substack, I said I was hesitant to do it again. Now, I’m doubly so–but this is a newsletter about life as a producer and consumer of digital media, and I pointedly did not build it on Substack.

Twitter truly felt like The Hell Site to me this week, for the first time since Joe Biden’s blessedly uneventful inauguration. Every time I opened it there was bad news—and not just bad news, but self-perpetuating bad news. Multi-faceted bad news. A dystopian rainbow of bad news: for victims of domestic abuse and intimate partner violence, for people who don’t want to get shot to death, for trans kids (and cis kids). There was even bad news for soccer fans who’d like to get into games they bought tickets for without getting pepper-sprayed by cops.

And of course, to cap it off, the terrible rocket car emerald man’s series of increasingly preposterous decrees culminated in a declaration that Tesla would lay off 10 percent of its ~100,000-person workforce due to his “super bad feeling” about the economy.

Elon Musk, wittingly or un-, perfectly encapsulates why everything’s so terrible right now: The rich and the powerful sense they’ll soon have the opportunity to claw even more wealth, empowerment, and freedom away from us—so they’re getting started early.

For all the controller-throwing, off-switch-pushing, mom-yelling-that-if-I’m-not-having-fun-I-should-do-something-else gamer moments in my life, no video game ever pissed me off like Chrono Cross.

But 22 years after I bought it, beat it, cursed its name and vowed never to play it again, I paid Nintendo $19.99 for the privilege of downloading the HD remaster to my Switch.

I played it again.

I was in my high-school library, assigned to do some kind of school thing but actually browsing the official forums of NEXT Generation magazine, when I clicked a link that blew my mind: the April 28th, 1999 strip of Penny Arcade.

It's a comic! On the web! A Web-Comic!

A full-color comic like the ones in the Sunday paper, but created by and for video-game weirdoes like me. My hacked-up hand-me-down PC was not a “tiny god,” but I was just as pissed that Mac users—MAC USERS!—would have exclusive dibs on the initial public demo of Quake III.