It’s late and I’m slightly high, so fuck it. I’m sure living it was a million times more intense, but this whole Deadspin conflagration has been a rollercoaster to watch from the outside. I’m really glad you guys got out of there, though. People who actually give a shit about good content and realize that fostering a community is what makes a site long-term profitable have to be reaching out to you all.

The ones left holding the bag, meanwhile, clearly are not used to this turn of events, if other sites reporting on this are accurate. Jim “I Prefer To Be Called Herb” Spanfeller sounds like someone who is accustomed to telling people in a morning meeting to do things that he thinks will make money in 2020 the same way they did in 1980 and then fucking off for the rest of his workday to let everyone else sort out how that was supposed to happen, on pain of I Can Fire You. His playbook never extended to “I have nobody left to fire”, though.
I mean I’m sure he thinks he can Old-White-Boomer manage his way out of this being a permanent stain on a site he was almost certainly gearing up to sell anyway. He won’t/can’t, his move to try to make the site more valuable has now made it entirely worthless, and he’s left holding his limp dick in his hand while the rest of the internet takes pictures and laughs, but you get the feeling he’s just so unused to any kind of consequence for failure that it hasn’t even quite dawned on him how unbelievably inept shit like this makes him look.
I wonder if it’s going to have any effect on his career at all, or if all these private equity chuds have existed in their own bubble for so long that short of a meteor strike on New York, this shit only ends with them all dying of old age and being buried with their money specifically so nobody else can get it “for doing nothing”.
Also? It was…bizarre, honestly, to see Deadspin fall silent (even though the Gawker et al group routinely criticized the goings-on of their site on their own site, which is something I genuinely loved) and then go to Twitter to see what you guys weren’t being allowed to say, but it’s one of the few times I can recently say I was glad Twitter exists.