400 Batting Averages, Star Trek, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Professionalization of Everything

If you wanted yet another window into the worldview of the person who keeps writing these newsletters you get, you could do a lot worse than to check out a book from your local library. Any book would do, but a better idea would be to get Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin, by Stephen Jay Gould. It is not a novelization of the hit show Full House. I do not think that the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould ever wrote a single episode of the show, but I could be wrong. Full House had more than 40 writers, not even counting those who only worked on one episode.  

I digress. Full House (the book) tackled a number of misconceptions people have about statistics and large numbers, how we focus on outliers instead of common events, and how we misconstrue evolution as having an arrow of “progress” towards our own form, or intelligence, or “complexity” - ideas you’ve almost certainly seen, pushed by someone busy being wrong.

    One way in which Gould tackled this problem was with a question that has puzzled sports fans since the 1950s: Why is the .400 batting average a thing of the past?

    A quick aside for non-sports folks: A batting average is calculated by dividing the number of times a player hits the ball by their number of “at bats.” 

Another quick aside: “At Bats” are not quite the the same as the number of times the player goes up to the plate, but for the purposes of generally talking about baseball with people who are not pedantic, you can express a batting average thusly: If a player has a batting average of .250 and you throw them one thousand pitches, they will hit 250 of them.

.250 is not a number chosen at random here. The average amongst all players in modern baseball hovers around .250. But the players who had seasonal .400s or who have careers that approach .400, they all earned those averages in a long gone era of significantly less professional professional baseball. Ted Williams, in 1941, was the last.

Yet in those days the average player was still hitting .250. Gould took a look at all this, and since he was a baseball aficionado, took a look at the various rule, gear, and strategic changes that have gone into baseball since 1941. He concluded that these changes were not the direct cause of the demise of .400 hitting. The demise was due to the simple fact that everyone got better.

When batters hit .400 it is an outlier, and outliers are more frequent when lots of highly variable events are in play. In the 1920s you very well might play a night game with no lights, or have a spitball thrown, or play games drunk, against a pitcher who smoked a pack a day. You might get off a train ride and play before sleeping. You might have a bunk while your teammate had a cot in an alleyway. Your team might have better equipment than your opponent. There were fewer players to substitute when an injury occurred. 

There were more variables, more unique events. There were enough of these variables that for the league as a whole, the effect was invisible - the aggregate player hovered around the .250 mark. But for a few, those who were gifted and talented and on the right end of enough random action - .400 was a possibility.

Then, everyone got better. The game became more professional. Schedules were standardized. More players were scouted, brought in, trained equally. Professionalism allowed baseball to become the massively popular sport it once was, but it obliterated the random advantages that allowed .400 hitting.

What does this have to do with Star Trek, you might ask? Quite a bit. What I’m about to say can be generalized to most television, but just as Stephen Jay Gould took a look at baseball because he knew it, I will look at Star Trek, specifically network and syndicated Star Trek, Star Trek before the streaming era.

These shows offer some of the best episodes of television. There are great sci-fi stories in there. But there’s also a lot of crap. One of the most highly acclaimed TNG episodes, Measure of a Man, is in season two, bracketed by some of the worst Star Trek episodes you can watch. 

City on the Edge of Forever, from the original series, won a Hugo. The episode before it, “The Alternative Factor” is considered to be one of the show’s worst. There’s endless examples of this sort of dichotomy.

The production of these shows were plagued by variable events. Gene Roddenberry, writers guild strikes, network interference, spec scripts by random writers, episodes written by interns, having to deal with Harlan Ellison, rewrites by Rick Berman. Yet the best episodes are still considered great to this day.

In baseball or the production of Star Trek, you can imagine each event as having a small benefit or detriment to the final product. Most of the time, things even out - the show bats .250. But on some rare day, luck is with you, and all the idiosyncratic things that happen are all plusses. The fingers all point up and push you to excellence.

It is too early yet to tell if the world of streaming TV and network consolidation will bring around something akin to the popularity of post 1920 baseball, but my money says that it will, that the coming era of TV has already seen massive improvements on the aggregate, while filling in the valley of abysmal shows with the peaks of the great ones. 

This brings us to Dungeons and Dragons. D&D is big these days, thanks in large part to various podcasts and video series and a hard push by the publisher, Wizards of the Coast, to get their material out in front of people.

They did this by combining an easier-to-use 5th edition and being friendlier with the license agreements that allow people to use the game system to do a podcast, or get paid if they sell their own compatible material. 

Key to this rise in popularity was Dan Harmon’s Harmonquest, the podcast and video series “Acquisitions Incorporated” by the old webcomic hands at Penny Arcade, and of course, the biggest of them all, “Critical Role” - a showcase of storytelling, dungeonmastering, and good players. There were a lot of other shows emulating the formula.  I was even in one of them. 

Critical Role and its ilk expanded the number of people who wanted to play the game. At the same time, the launch of D&D Beyond gave players and dungeonmasters the tools to become more professional and standardized. The popularity of the game gave rise to myriad sites providing sources for maps and materials via a quick google search. 

When the pandemic hit, a lot of people began playing online, with tools like skype and discord. This brought a lot more talent onboard - people who were new to the game and needed resources and materials. They all got the same professional materials. 

We will see if this current era, a transition from homebrewed quirky adaptations of a mass-market product to a more professionalized one, is like the transition of baseball from the Dead Ball to Live Ball eras. It will be complicated, because at the moment, Dungeons and Dragons owner Hasbro is attempting to murder all that goodwill by doing a scorched-earth licensing plan, forcing everyone to use a “D&D as a service” online product, and more.

You may be tempted at this point to think that I view this standardization and professionalization as a bad thing. The great 400 hitter is no more, they may never make another The Inner Light, my weird 1881 Steampunk Twin Peaks GURPS game will not be shared with another generation, all that. 

You are missing out on the 1881 Texas Flavored Twin Peaks GURPS… for now.

But for the most part it’s not a bad thing. Just as the revival of baseball rules brought more people than ever to watch the game, or listen on the radio, or watch on TV, now more people can play Dungeons and Dragons. Or listen to a podcast. Or watch it on YouTube. They can also play other tabletop games, as I recommend. 

They can do so secure in the knowledge that they can move on if their table is full of weird gatekeeping, or a dungeonmaster with a rape dungeon. They know there is less of a chance of a terrible game, and probably don’t think about the fact that they might be missing out on their local version of George RR Martin’s Wild Cards. 

The same is true for streaming TV. You can tune in week to week without worrying about watching something awful, and the rising average show has certainly seen some outstanding content as well, though I’m always wary of the phrase “Golden Age of Television.” The new X Files and the classic episodes could be another subset to this article, if I could stand watching the new ones.

  In fact, thanks to social media, relentless algorithms, and google, you can find a high level of professionalism in everything from cosplay to xenophobia. You get Matthews Mercer and Gaetz getting better at getting the word out, you optimize both Magic the Gathering and Marjorie Taylor Greene. So as we snip off the heads and tails of the distributions you get to ask yourself: do you want your dystopia built on incompetence, or skill?

2023 Skidoo

I have a pet theory about "manosphere" guys or incels or Pick Up Artists, or Alpha Male Influencers or whatever iteration of this bullshit we’re on right now. This stuff isn’t new, it’s been part and parcel of the internet since we got off AOL.   

That theory is this: The most successful ones give the worst advice.

It's easy to prey on young guys who aren't feeling "Manly." This is a problem that existed before the 1950s or 1870s or whatever mythic era your weird flamboyant misogynist claims to want to return to. A lot of young guys want help "getting women." That's another ancient phrase with a lot to unpack, as they say.

For most young people, finding dates and a partner is a tough, if fairly straightforward experience: Get your own place, get your shit together a tiny bit, have something appealing going on, don't be an entitled dick, eat some vegetables, go on a lot of bad dates, get shot down a lot.

If that was your YouTube channel, a young person would come in, take your advice, and move on with his life. There's no reason to keep coming back for more extreme versions of this, there’s no need FOR more extreme versions of this, this is not a formula that "drives engagement"

It would work, or it would not, and young people would not return. You might have a mildly successful side-gig as a “life coach.” You would be unremarkable to the internet, to the algorithm. 

Consider then, if you were a Pick Up Artist telling young men to “neg” women. To demand respect as an “Alpha Male.” To shun any woman over 25, to accept only the narrowest standards of beauty.

You would instantly create an undatable, unfuckable man. He would need more advice. He would need more extreme versions of advice. The advice would be outrageous, terrible. Terrible people would share it among themselves as good advice. Normal People would share it to dunk on it.

Ninety nine out of 100 of their friends would consider it a noble dunk. One of them would think “wait, I wonder if this works.” He would search the Google, and find those terrible people from before, conspiring on some forgotten website, talking about this “forbidden genius.”

If this seems outrageous, consider the trend of terrible tiktok “chefs” who create monstrosities of scooped up velveeta and raw meat on a countertop. They don’t do it because it’s good. They do it because you watch it, you share it, you comment on it and make amazing reaction videos. 

Success for the Alpha Male Influencer is not “getting his followers laid.” It’s “getting his followers to send him money.” Just like success for the countertop taco lady isn’t “good tacos,” it’s “millions of views.”

Sell a man a fish, you make a buck. Teach a man to fish well, he'll give you some fish. Teach a man to fish like a fucking flailing freak who baits the hook with wire egg beaters and throws his line into the trees, and he’ll need to buy fishing gear every day of his life.

I do not for one moment think that the brickwits of the manosphere are being outrageous and sexist for the purpose of creating dependent pay pigs. They are not that smart. But evolution is at play, those who make money and have the most demented followers, those are the ones we see, the ones who make the news and get invited to C-PAC. 

Evolution is misunderstood by many, most people seem to believe in a sort of Lamarckian Inheritance: That a group will need a feature, and then that feature will then arise in the future. This is partially due to the way in which our education system fails to teach evolution very well, but also because our cleanest examples of hereditary change are all artificial selection. The Farmer wants a bigger cauliflower, he culls the small and breeds the large. 

Natural selection - be it of antlers or podcasters - is different. To view evolution you must turn back the arrow of time, with bones and fossils and genetic clocks, and know that an almost infinite combination of varieties are not here, they are gone, they had no change in their children in mind, and if they had, they had no way to effect it, and if they had, they did not know what the future would bring. 

We know that the near future brings the year 2023, a nice future-sounding number, one with the portentous number “23” - 23 Skidoo, kids. Enjoy a something I promised this week: A little audio reading. I go all out on the accent and throw a lot of extra sauce on the pronunciations.

This one's special for the newsletter crew. Share it if you want, though. Let people know what they're missing out on.

Phantom Bridges and Lost Highways

Even as a child, I was drawn to bridges with no roads, those vestigial bits of lost highways I would pass in the countryside. There’s one on Highway 22, over Panther Creek, between Canton and Flora. I used to ride that road a lot with my dad, often going slow, with a trailer of cotton or water behind us, unable to go faster than 45 without something truly disastrous happening. 

Old roads sometimes run parallel to their modern versions, but just as often they do not, the old road is gone, or drifts, connecting to towns or farms or roads that no longer exist. People are like that too, going back to old ruins that only provide memory and potential.

But when the road comes to cross a creek or a river, the needs of the past were same as the present - a straight cut without a meander, lest the river take the bridge as it changes beds in the decades to come. 

The bridge over Panther Creek is still there. You can see it if you look to the south when you cross. Panther Creek is named for the animal the farmland replaced, and the creek is being silted in by the construction of the subdivision named after it.

I never found many traces of Old Highway 22, or whatever road crossed Panther Creek in my grandfather’s day. My father grew up near that creek when it was surrounded by dairy farms. In my childhood it was a wilderness of run down barns and collapsing shacks. Those stainless steel tanks and pipes that survived the collapse of the dairy industry in the 70s were often sold off and shipped away, becoming the genesis of independent breweries across the country.

Before I was born there was a small town at the intersection of Highways 22 and 463. We used to see the rotting dairy farm, nothing more than a pond, and a barn, and an old hoop for hay. Then and now they called it Livingston, and these days you can buy a house out there for eight hundred thousand dollars. 

As an aside, you can drive an almost straight line from North West Street in Jackson, all the way to Highway 22, and come out near this old bridge I’m pontificating about. West Street becomes Hanging Moss, becomes Highland Colony, becomes Bozeman Road, becomes Catlett Road, and then after a moment or two when you’re not really sure it’s a road anymore, you come to Highway 22. Surrounding you is a strange mix of rusting farms and multi-million dollar suburban sprawl. 

Other than the stretch of Highland Colony Parkway, which was finished 15 years ago, all of this: West Street, Bozeman, Catlett, has been where it is for 70 years or more.

If you want to see what that drive looks like, of course I've made a map for you.
 

There’s another abandoned bridge on Highway 51, just north of Doaks Creek. Doaks Creek runs about 10 miles north of Doaks Stand, the tavern where the 1820 treaty was signed. I imagine they’re related.

You can find streets and roads named Old Highway 51 in Terry, in Pickens, in Hernando. This bridge belonged to an Old Highway 51. There are other signs as well - old roadbeds worn down into ponds. There are churches and houses that face away from the new highway, toward a treeline, or a ditch.

Long ponds are often made from old roads. Dirt roads wear down with repeated use, leaving gouges in the Earth. These fill with water, and without maintenance and drainage, they stay full.

  Railroads get repurposed as well. In Jackson, they have dug up and torn down the old Illinois Central trestles that run parallel to State Street, near Town Creek. The bridge over town creek still stands, though there’s no way to reach it now. This line of property once belonged to the railroad, and now belongs to the city, which is using it for new projects, probably water related, given all the pipes on display. 

This railroad was part of the famous New Orleans Great Northern railroad, which originally connected New Orleans to the bustling metropolis that was Canton, Mississippi. This section was built around 1906, and abandoned in 1972. It’s the reason for the tracks on commerce street, the railroad to which Hal & Mal's restaurant was a depot.
It’s the reason for the tracks on Commerce Street, it was the railroad to which Hal & Mal's restaurant was a depot. Other things were shaped by it as well, the old Chimneyville Smokehouse on High Street, and the building next door that is now the Cook Out Parking Lot, plus the railroad hotel/brothel turned apartments turned coffee roastery turned real estate speculation on Spengler Street.

The northern end is what would eventually become the Museum Trail. I traced it a long time ago, before the Museum Trail existed, back in 2015. (If you do go back in time 8 years, use the “back” button to visit each subsequent entry, because for some reason I posted them backwards).

Railroads are often repurposed for public use. Their original use is intensive, it requires a reworking of the land for long stretches, adding earth and taking it away in a standardized manner. The earthworks remain long after they are capable of supporting thousands of tons of train. When it is no longer profitable to maintain the line, the leases often revert back to the state or city that sold them off in the first place. Their construction and their “shortest line between two points” positioning makes them perfect for utilities, highways, and bridges. 

This is a pattern in land use and in life. In evolution, this is known as “exaptation” - adapting  an existing structure that has - or had - a different use. Just as your lungs and fingers are the way they are  because of a land-dwelling fish millions of years ago, the city of today is shaped by the locations of railroads in the last century.

 

If you want to learn more about the old railroads of Mississippi, and to see where they now run, this is a great resource: Mississippi Rails, Mississippi Railroad History. There are county by county maps that show you not only these old roads, but also old towns, lost now, that once dotted these lines.  Many of them were logging lines, and logging towns, designed to carry men to logging camps, and logs away. If you live in a rural area, you might well have a “dummy line” road near you.

Someday soon we’ll talk about one of these old lost towns that I share a name with. But not today.

The repurposing of railroads is a metaphor for organizations as well. Old hierarchies become entrenched, power and resources flow to them, shaping the organizations they create long after the old power system is dead. The young disruptor or revolutionary often mistakes these organizations as being therefore hollow, a facade that only has power because of the power it once represented, but they are still as dangerous as ever. White supremacists can still have you killed, the Catholic Church can still ruin your life, a billionaire can still poison us all and not even notice he was fined for it. 

Until next time: stay moving on old roads and new. - FPJEROME

The Newsletter Before Christmas

Greetings from the throne of truth, dear subscribers. For many of you (most of you) this will be your first newsletter, because I have not sent one out in a while. However, as I have faded from Facebook and face the prospect of the downfall of Twitter, I feel it's prudent to start doing these again. Plus we're adding RSS functions to the blog. Slowly. And be "we" I mean "me."

It's been a good few months on the river. While October saw record lows for the Pearl and the Mississippi, we also got to finish up "Eyes of Fear," a (short) look into my past as the Alex Jones Guy in my social circle, back when I was a different sort of paranoid weirdo. If you've been a PRF fan for a while, and it seems likely you are, given that you've signed up for this sort of treatment, you might be interested in the longer version of this story, full of old stories, Pearl River Flow Lore, and a closer look at the weird guy I once was. It's called "I Was the UFO Guy." Because I was. The link between "fun" conspiracies like UFOs and Bigfoot and the dark shit like White Supremacy and anti-vaccination has always been a concern of mine, one we've been over in the blog before! In 2019 there was "Get to Know Your Shapeshifting Reptillian Overlords," in which I examine the way that so many conspiracies become anti-Semitic, starting with the infamous aforementioned Reptilians of David Icke fame. There I said that Conspiracy Theorizing is basically "a kind of folk journalism, amateur investigations of urban legends." And I think I believe that because of a shift I've seen over my lifetime, a shift in how and what "paranoia" means. My first attempt at unraveling this was back in 2016, two days before the 2016 Presidential Election, as I noticed darker conspiracies to come in "All the Pills are Red."

"Eyes of Fear" was a new entry on a theme of mine, admitting that I was wrong about something. We saw it back in 2020 when I brought up the fact that I used to think the Mississippi State Flag, confederate bit and all, was okay. It wasn't. I do blame my segregation academy upbringing for that one, though. Probably didn't help with the future issues in "being wrong" either.

It's not all self-reflection, doom and gloom this time, though. I've also been enjoying a wild new comedy, "The Mississippi State Legislature." This time the goofy ole dipwits have gone and said that they're not a public body, in order to get out of public records laws. Well I'll be coated in skunk spit and spitroasted by bobcats! What else will they get up to?! Let's find out.

Speaking of things that change over time, and things that don’t, I just got back from The Ouachita Mountains. I wish I were better at landscape photography, instead of pictures of old shoes and lost toys, but I did see some rocks.

I love rocks. We don’t get a lot of rocks here. Sure, we get a lot of gravel that’s been washed around for millions of years, and we get some sandstone in places, but there’s not a lot of places to see amazing rocks in mid-Mississippi. 

The orogeny of the Ouachitas is somewhat unknown, though it’s thought to involve the crashing together of the North and South American plates some 250 million years ago. Not that North and South America existed at this time. This is around the same time that sturgeons, paddlefish, and the first frogs evolve. The first dinosaurs are about 25 million years away. This is before Laurentia joined the forming Pangaea. The Ouachitas and Appalachians are older than Pangaea. Older than dinosaurs.

In ages past, the Ouachitas likely intersected with the Appalachians. But during the strange breakings and rumblings of the breakup of Pangea, the eastern half of the range became buried by something called the Mississippi Embayment. The exact method by which the landmass between Arkansas and Alabama became an ocean is unknown, though it’s thought to have something to do with the New Madrid Seismic zone and the Reelfoot Rift. I like the Mississippi Embayment. I like the idea that Mississippi has been underwater and a swamp and a problem for hundreds of millions of years.

People sometimes confuse the Ouachitas with the Ozark Mountains, which are older than the Ouachitas or the Appalachians. The Ozarks were probably a billion years old when the Appalachians first were pushed up, but that’s a story for another time.

  The Ouachitas are famous for quartz veins. The reason that the Ouachitas are famous for quartz veins is their immense age and possibly, the Mississippi Embayment. You see, shale, the rock which forms most of the mountains I was in, forms in sheets that lay perpendicular to the ground, but the tectonic forces that push up mountains tend to bend it into huge sheets, like a rug being bunched up. Shale cracks in regular patterns that cross the planes of sheets, creating “veins.”

And over time, fluid from deeper beneath the earth is worked into these spaces, and very slowly, quartz crystals form in the gaps.  

These are visible at the surface in many places, small and large, both the sheets of shale and the veins of quartz within them. 

As these rocks are eroded - and they are, the Stanley Shale of the area is not a particularly hard stone, the ancient bends of the Earth are revealed, the motions that spread sturgeons to Russia and Oklahoma before ants existed, leave their tracks. At Beaver Bend (which is named after a fellow named Beaver, but also contains beavers) you can see it in the jutting angles of the underlying shale. 

Having lived my whole life in the silt and sands, the paths of these mountain streams and rivers fascinate me. A small mountain stream could easily continue in the same bed for thousands of years. Millions of years. The big sandy rivers and streams I know often change courses several times in a human lifetime. 
 

It’s that time of year when it’s easy to think about change - big or small, fast or slow. Many cultures have a celebration this time of year. It’s a bleak time - the nights have been getting longer and longer, and the coldest days are still ahead, but right now, those who watch the skies wisely will notice the smallest of hopes - the days stop getting shorter, there is now just a little bit more light. 

Note: For more pictures at higher resolutions you can visit this entry on the website HERE.

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