Two months later, that feeling is completely gone. I have a new job, one where the floor is shifting beneath me at the same time as I’m trying to find a solid place to stand. This takes up an incredible amount of energy. The office I work in is sparsely populated compared to its capacity—I’ve been sitting at the same unaccompanied desk for two weeks—and I can still see more people when I bob my head up as I could see at my old office of nine people. Hardly anyone talks to each other, either. Talking to each other is reserved for events. Something happens in the computer machines, and the reward is human contact.

My job was supposed to be work-from-home, but it hasn’t worked out that way. Logistically, I need to be in a place where I can access my new company’s internal server. A special microchip-enabled card I have is supposed to make that happen. It doesn’t work, but it does get me into the company’s office, where I can access the system. What I do nowadays is look at a trend meter, hit refresh, find a few funny things to write about, and write them. You won’t find them anywhere on the web, because they website isn’t live yet.

Until it is—actually, long past that point—I’m going to feel like I’m floating. I wish I had some sort of better conclusion. It’s just so weird after having been stuck at a tiny company for so long. For as much as I wanted not to be there, I didn’t try to escape. I waited for escape to come to me, in the form of a job offer, effectively. What I’ve learned is that everything takes effort, even getting a good job. Which sounds silly, but what I mean is that I’ve quickly adjusted to the fact my new job has serious ups and downs. If I had looked a little harder, maybe it would have fewer downs. Maybe there’d be more people talking. The good part is there’s always tomorrow.

The Daulerio/Leitch dynamic dominated the site’s early years, not entirely without reason: both of them were extremely talented, but they were also friends with divergent styles, and you could draw a line from their friendship to their Nick Denton-sanctioned editorial handover. “AJ RUINED DEADSPIN” became a both mock- and sincere refrain among the commenters who made it their responsibility to feel the weight of the change from Leitch’s aw-shucks Midwestern blend of optimism and cynicism to Daulerio’s pretty much balls-out misanthropy, replete with penis pics. Sex sold, and the pageviews went way up, and three and a half years later here he was answering questions about Will F*cking Leitch.

On January 9, Daulerio will take over as editor in chief of Gawker. He has made Deadspin the most important sports site on the web. ESPN’s aspirant, Grantland, can’t touch it, and ESPN.com and the other sports news sites are fundamentally interchangeable. Deadspin has something no other sports site can totally claim: credibility. It has built a reputation for sniffing out hypocrisy with the efficiency of a team of hard-living bloodhounds, while simultaneously celebrating the greatness of sports. Unlike ESPN, its sine qua non, it conforms to Leitch’s founding principle of Sports Without Access, Favor or Discretion. What Deadspin has gained in access and reputation it has worked to shed in favor and discretion.

As Daulerio departs, he gives way to Tommy Craggs, the site’s one-man Supreme Court. For everyday and even minor glitches in the sports-industrial matrix, the site can rely on its increasingly talented cast of writers, including Emma Carmichael, Barry Petchesky and Tom Scocca. Only the most dire cases end up on Craggs’s desk, and he dispatches them with a firmness that leaves his targets in shambles and the Internet community agog.

What’s next for the site is anyone’s guess, but the changes won’t be as drastic as they were during Daulerio’s tenure. For better or worse, he made the site what it is now: the establishment anti-establishment sports source. For those of us constantly choking on ESPN’s crap, that’s something for which to be thankful.

Nor is the photo of two people kissing during the Vancouver riots, as suggested by Quickish, the sports moment of the year. It wasn’t on the field of play and is tangentially related to anything really memorable. Serendipitous sport-related photo of the year? Bam.

This is the sports moment of the year, with apologies to my cousin:

Now the Clippers are relevant! How awesome is that? It would be considerably more awesome if their owner wasn’t such an odious human being, even by the advanced standards of sports owners. He’s an old, racist kook. It makes it hard to root for them. But we haven’t had to deal with that particular problem for a long time. Now we do.

It’s quite different from what’s going on with the Cleveland Browns, where a proud city and franchise crumble under the weight of their own insecurities. The Browns are the NFL’s worst franchise, if you’re grading on a curve. At least the Bengals have nothing to shoot for. They’re just the Bengals, and always will be.

And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past, with only sports to talk about.

The argument against a Kindle et. al isn’t that it diminishes the reading experience or destroys local bookstores—I’m a book fiend but I can’t stand the pretension of most mom-and-pops. I find it icky. Like it or not, reading is a solitary experience. The argument against Kindles is that you can forget to zip up your backpack and it can slide out and break, as mine recently did, and the half-price you paid for the books suddenly isn’t half-price anymore. I don’t exclusively buy books on the Kindle, just ones I’m reading informationally instead of experientially. (If that makes any sense). I’ll buy a novel, but I’ll also buy a magazine, and a lot of non-fiction is just long magazine pieces.

It’s ironic that writers can get all stuffy about books and also remain beholden to the ideals associated with city living, where space is at a premium. If a book is not good enough to demand it is read in paper form, what obligation do we have to clutter our lives with it? Paper books are bad for the environment, like it or not. Not as bad as vinyl, but not good, either.

We expect novelists to see through their own biases to help the rest of us do the same. By signalling the death of literary culture, they’re failing.

And why am I broadcasting it?

Oh blog, I’ve missed you. It’s fun. I write stuff here and then I hit “publish” and I’ve published something!

I’ve been long-form writing recently, so this is sort of a novelty.

While I’ve watched quite a few NFL games this year, probably more than I’ve watched in years, I don’t find anything that’s happening in the league particularly interesting. The Packers are a great team, but their games reek of formality. The Patriots are standing tall, waiting to be toppled. The Steelers are doing their thing, as are the Ravens. The Tebow thing is not as interesting as the Von Miller thing. The Cowboys and Giants are doing their Cowboys and Giants things. The Jets are the Jets again. The Titans apparently still exist. The Eagles dropped the ball, lost it, pouted about it, and repeated it.

I’ve been a fronter on hockey. I’ve watched a few games but not that many. The Bruins are apparently awesome. I’ll check back in in April.

Now the NBA is back. I am failing to resist the urge to care. The NBA is really, really fun to talk about. Not contract stuff like Bill Simmons likes, but just random team stuff, like where Tyson Chandler is going, because it seems so consequential and inconsequential all at once—the essence of sports. When a big player is moving teams, it often seems legitimately newsworthy, and you’ll forget you’re talking about sports. Not so with the Nene. Nene plays basketball, that’s his job, and we talk about where he’s going to end up the way we talk about what news organization would be best for a blogger. It’s great.

I’m digging the Jalen Rose podcasts more than the Simmons ones these days, but the Simmons intro is still better.

Speaking of Simmons, I’ve noticed that he still likes to get worked up at stat things when he’s against them, but doesn’t refrain from whipping out statistical comparisons between players when they serve his case. As if Garbageland didn’t make it clear, I think the site is throwing Simmons’s flaws into sharp relief. It’s hard for me to hate on a site that has Charlie Pierce writing for it, but Simmons’s personal history with him is still offputting. Nonetheless, a W for Grantland. Still not a great percentage there.

What else? Oh yes, the Christmas music. I don’t know. I just finished season 1 of Sons of Anarchy in about three days and that stuff is heavy. It’s also quite good. The Jacks/Tara stuff brings up stuff from my own (biker) past. I need dulcet tones to come down. That’s a thing, right? Dulcet tones? (/looks it up) It is! And I used it right!

I’m so proud of myself that I’m logging off.

This is not a tragedy. This will dominate certain corners of the Internet for a few days and maybe longer, if Arrested Development is any indication. But given the sheer difficulty of getting and keeping a show like Community or Arrested Development on the air, today’s a day we should celebrate what we have instead of mourning what we’ve lost.

Arrested Development was a great TV show. I watch the entire series about once a year. I’m not the only one, and it’s the ability to consume the show in its totality that leaves fans wanting more, and feeling personally aggrieved that they don’t have more. They think TV executives don’t know shit. Well, the TV executives put the show on the air in the first place. They know something.

Same deal with Community. Even in its first season, a friend and I thought it didn’t stand a chance of a long run, especially if it got weirder and better, which is exactly what happened. The supersaturated talent in the cast alone assured its destruction, the same way Arrested Development sank by giving everyone something to do, all the time. These were complex, intricately layered shows that needed to be followed in their entirely to be understood on a minute-by-minute basis, which differentiates them from something like Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock or The Office, which have also suffered their own ratings problems at various times but could be understood in a self-contained context. You could watch it and get it. Not so with Arrested Development and Community. You were all in or all out.

They’re allegedly making new Arrested Development mini-episodes and a movie, as I’m sure you know. I’ll watch them, but I’m not jumping out of my chair. Remember Michael Jordan on the Wizards? Greatness fades. Sign online petitions for Community if you must, tell your friends if you feel so compelled, but don’t think you’ve really been screwed. You’ve been given a gift. Watch some old episodes and enjoy them, and before you know it, another great show will break through the absurd system with rules that ensure its very demise. It’s America. We always make more TV. Take solace in it.

I’ll just say this: I’m not surprised in the least, for nothing having to do with the specific culture of Penn State. Anyone who believed a fairytale football program can exist is the one spinning the fairytale. I know nothing specific about Penn State except that their team is perpetually overrated. None of this is easy to accept, but it makes it easier. I’m not lying to myself.

That these things happen where they’re least expected should be what’s expected, so we take nothing for granted.