Retro #3: Baseball in progress, nothing else matters

This retro was meant to happen on September 28, but that day I ended up being a little busy:

As these things sometimes go, the baseball just kept on happening, and the Jays kept on going, and now I’m writing weeks late before they play game 6 of the ALCS, which is frankly ridiculous. This team lost 88 games last year and they are playing the Mariners in the ALCS. Again, ridiculous.

Baseball playoffs are relentless—there are two off days in a seven-game series. Yesterday was one of them, and we managed to clean the apartment, bake a cake, go to the gym and have some friends over, all things that have been happening a lot less since the end of September. I’ve kind of dropped off the face of the earth this month and have an encyclopedic knowledge of a few different baseball teams now. It’s great. Jays in 7.

Catching up

If you read my last post about the keyboards , one thing you might notice is that on the old one, the layout is the same as a Mac keyboard (bottom row goes fn, ctrl, option, cmd) but on the new one it’s ctrl, then fn. This has caused me unending frustration, especially since fn doesn’t send the expected signal to OSX, so I haven’t been able to remap it correctly. All my terminal and Rectangle commands have been annoying as hell. New stuff might solve the old problems and introduce its own new problems; please tack this onto the hamfisted metaphor from the last one.

I’ve also been having recurring migraines which I would 0% recommend, so there are fewer other things to note - this will be a relatively lean post. I did really enjoy a few shows recently (Laura Stevenson w/Oceanator, Ace of Wands w/Praises)—I was pretty surprised that Laura Stevenson’s crowd was so young! Like, significant early-20s representation, which is not what I’d have guessed.

Things I liked recently

• Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America by Bridget Read. For fans of scam stories and The Dream, but also of American politics and getting mad at rich people changing the entire course of history (I guess those two things are basically the same). This book was fascinating. I know a lot about MLMs and I didn’t know a ton of what was in here, particularly a lot of the Amway details and how intertwined they were with US presidential politics. Highly recommended. (I listened to the audio.)
• “DAAAAAA YANKEES LOSE!” 👑
• Max Scherzer, For All of Time (Patrick Dubuque)

today I am praying that there will be another Blue Jays game to pray about tomorrow, amen. 🙏🏽

— despacito gaston (@ruhee.ca) October 19, 2025 at 10:43 AM