10/6/24
Getting this basketball doubleheader started with @ParisBasketball Women’s first home game (for their inaugural season).
Our new women’s team is in the fourth tier but we’re hoping they’ll climb the ranks over the next few years.
Love the example it sets for our daughters to have role models to look up to just a few minutes away from home!
9/28/24
As a sports fan following different teams/leagues/sports, keeping track of “what game is on today?” or “I have some free time on Sunday, is there anything good on?” has been a STRUGGLE these past few years.
Usually, there are existing apps you can use, mostly for ⚽️. Or Sports Media apps (like L’Equipe here in France, or The Athletic, or ESPN) etc.
But these aren’t great for the purpose of knowing - What is on? - and When?
“When is there an exciting game around which I can plan to meet my friends, at home or in a bar?"
“How can I schedule my weekend in a way that I get to watch my team(s) while being mindful of family time and running errands?"
These are problems I’m continually experiencing.
To counter this, I’ve been using different websites that publish an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in a calendar app.
But as a self-described sports junkie, I ended up polluting my calendar with games, which made viewing my actual events pretty difficult.
Fast-forward to October last year, when I discovered a service called Fixtured.
I can’t quite remember how it got put on to my radar, but Fixtured has totally changed this for me, and now I have one single place where I can see at a glance what’s coming up.
Today, it’s essentially a web-based calendar app, where you can choose which teams & leagues you follow across many different sports. It’s super easy to use in a “set it up once” type of way. I really like the design, and for someone like me, it is the PERFECT tool and usecase.
On top of that, the team behind Fixtured has been super responsive, keen to hear my feedback, and fast to implement new features/leagues/teams. They’re quite small (3 people) and works fast. In the past, they reached out by email and later via DMs to let me know about upcoming things. It’s been really cool to discover more about their work!
And I started sharing it with my friends in similar situations — my good friend Jeffry sent me this message today: “Fixtured has already changed my life. Thank you forever”
I’m just a fan of what they’re building and want them to succeed. So for any sports fan like me, check out Fixtured! 👋🎤
🏈🏀⚽️⚾️🏉📆
9/1/24
🏈 I’ve been running a league with a few friends for the past 5 years or so, and even won in my 3rd year!
Here’s my team as we get ready for the season next weekend!
8/31/24
“The Creator” - 3.5/5
Glad enough enough time has passed that I could form my own opinion of this movie. Quite liked it and visually/conceptually it was really interesting!
3/25/24
🎶 About last night:
My all-time favorite artist (John Mayer) playing his very first concert in Paris. It was my second time seeing John after attending the Paradise Valley tour back in 2013
It was really cool to see him take the stage by himself for 2 hours! John played mostly acoustic, but it was an opportunity to hear songs from every single album he put out (with the additions of In Your Atmosphere and his iconic Free Fallin' cover!
11/2/23
If you’re fortunate to live long enough, eventually you get The Call. Sometimes it’s an actual call, sometimes a social media post or a conversation on the street. But the message is the same: A friend of your youth has died.
The death of Matthew Perry was sad for all the reasons it is sad when a gifted, nimble, charming performer who has shared his struggles dies too young. But it was deepened by the particular relationship of “Friends” to its audience. If you connected with the show the way the show wanted to connect with you, the weekend’s news was a global version of The Call.
8/5/23
👋🏼 It’s been a few months since I’ve gotten back to freelancing and I wanted to share that I have some availability between now and the end of the year.
💼 I’m looking for additional work in Customer Success / Product Marketing starting at the end of August.
🙋🏻♂️I’m flexible but typically specialize in early stage startups and small companies looking for a Jack-of-all-trade profile, across a wide range of industries.
You can learn more about my work via my portfolio website (http://Tibz.work/) and my DMs are opened for more discussions.
As always, any repost/reshare is appreciated!
3/20/23
I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.
3/11/23
Day 11 of the March Photoblogging Challenge: “gimrack”.
I had to look up what it means, and it turns out it’s similar to knickknack.
My favorite one is this framed letter that Shana wrote after our first date, when I got home and she was traveling for work. Our first date was in London on Feb. 14th 2017, and our second date was a month later in Amsterdam for an extended weekend together.
Next to it stands a Polaroid photo of us on Times Square taken by local friends of ours, in November 2017 as we wrapped our world tour together.
3/2/23
If you’re a subscriber to either Tweetbot or Twitterrific, you can help them out with three simple steps:
Reinstall the app if you’ve already deleted it; otherwise, make sure you’re running the latest version.
Tap the “I Don’t Need a Refund” button.
Feel good and go buy yourself a treat, knowing you helped the good folks at a small company whose work you’ve appreciated (and will continue to).
2/9/23
📣 💼 I’ve been thinking of how best to apply my skills and help companies grow. I can add a lot of value to a team focused on business & product but that hasn’t had the chance to think about how to support customers and how to onboard new users.
My sweet spot is early-stage startups and companies that need to set up and launch their customer experience: setting up their support strategy, help desk, help center, segmenting the customer base and understanding how to educate users in the best practices, how to use features, how to make sure they make the most out of a given product, all the way to community building. Basically anything customer-facing.
All of this to say I’m thinking about going back to freelancing but I need clients…
I’ve been working full remote since 2015, have experience working with international, cross-disciplinary teams in the US, Europe, UK, whether B2B SaaS, B2C, sports, crypto, fintech, Dev tools, consumer, I’ve done a lot…
1/28/23
Really enjoyed this piece on my childhood club: AS Monaco 🇲🇨
The Monaco academy boasts a star-studded list of alumni: World Cup winners Thierry Henry, Emmanuel Petit, Lilian Thuram, David Trezeguet and Kylian Mbappé all graduated from the club. When Monaco tinkered with their successful formula of youth development, signing Radamel Falcao and James Rodríguez for big money, they won Ligue 1 and reached the Champions League semi-finals
1/28/23
Shoutout to employers making missteps
Layoffs are among the most challenging life experiences, causing more psychological stress than even divorce, according to one study. Losing a job can upend workers’ finances and their sense of self, and layoffs in the world of remote work have in many cases been especially destabilizing, with employer missteps fueling uncertainty and unnecessary unknowns.
Felt this part a lot too:
Last year ended with job cuts across tech behemoths […] For many of these companies, these cuts followed years of free-flowing perks and flexible work arrangements that were part of what was called a “war for talent.” “That is one of the great contradictions of corporate life,” Ms. Sucher said. “All corporations say ‘People are our most important asset,’ but they don’t really seem to believe that.” “Calling someone ‘talent’ is quite different from calling them a person,” she added. “People aren’t a resource that can be depleted over time.”
Contrast being told “imma checkin with you and share your profile with my network” and never hearing back with how Nokia did it, at scale:
Actions > Words.
Nokia, when it was restructuring in 2011, gave the roughly 18,000 people who would be affected about a year of advance notice and offered them several pathways forward: The company would help them find new roles internally, get new jobs externally, start their own businesses or begin an educational program, among other options. Nokia’s success metrics were whether people had a job lined up when they left the firm, and whether they were leaving with a positive enough impression that they would be open to returning in the future. Nearly two-thirds of people who left knew what their next steps would be. “This is going to be the lasting impression that sticks with your previous employees, your current employees and all future employees,” said Tanner Hackett, chief executive of Counterpart, an insurance technology company that helps small businesses.
One of the most frustrating part is being told “what a great person you are”, “what a wonderful positive energy you bring”, “how much we value working with you”, and “if things were different we’d hire you again right away”…
But you’re still showing me the door so… 🚪💥 🤷🏻♂️
I do believe that good vibes/energy pay(s) off in the long term in terms of good reputation.
But short/medium term I’m yet to find a leader that values it at the point of backing someone when times get hard(er)
1/12/23
Been making great use of @Letterboxd these past few weeks 🤩
1/2/23
This was too relatable considering my current personal situation and professional predicament.
“Right now you’re in a very specific moment. It’s called liminal space. You’re in the ambiguous or disoriented phase, also known as the middle of a rite of passage. Part of that is just growing up, but it also has to do with what you found out. Now you’re transforming, incorporating that information into your identity. It can be scary, like free-falling.”
12/13/22
”Wout Weghorst briefly went supernova”
”What’s your favorite part? Mine is the bit where Cristiano Ronaldo walks down the tunnel, crying.”
”Next, Morocco gets to play its other former colonizer, France, for a chance to complete the re-enactment of its own liberation.”
“Mbappé has been romping through this World Cup with supreme Meryl Streep Doing Community Theater energy—the talent so vast, the stage so small.”
The bandwagon fan’s guide to the World Cup semifinals - The Ringer
12/13/22
”The letter is typed on AS Bondy headed paper, dated 17 May 2011. It gives permission for a 12-year-old French boy named Kylian Mbappe to attend a four-day trial the following week. Mbappe was on his way to Chelsea.”
12/13/22
“His raw copy was as clean as a Lionel Messi first touch, and the ideas within it always crystal-clear and refined.”
⚽️ 🕯️ The Athletic: Remembering Grant Wahl
11/10/22
I just received this email and I’m unsure how I feel about this…
On the one hand it’s a bit chaotic, on the other it’s very convenient, and allows more people to find alternative transportation methods compared to the Metro/Taxis/Uber.
But emailing your customer base without giving them facts is equivalent to sharing fake news and masking ‘opinion-as-fact’ in a way that is reminiscent of US Republicans and far-right politicians.
I believe more strongly in Regulate It than in Ban It.
Plus, the real problem in my mind lies with people, not in the devices themselves. There are lots of examples of things that don’t work here in France due to people being too selfish or individualists.
6/21/22
As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, _Uber_ed to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.
6/18/22
I’ve waited for SO DAMN LONG to be able to see @AllAtOnceMovie — such an incredible film!
6/17/22
I tried living there for a bit last year, and the ambitions of the inhabitants are not intellectual ones. The message Paris sends now is: do things with style. I liked that, actually. Paris is the only city I’ve lived in where people genuinely cared about art. In America only a few rich people buy original art, and even the more sophisticated ones rarely get past judging it by the brand name of the artist. But looking through windows at dusk in Paris you can see that people there actually care what paintings look like. Visually, Paris has the best eavesdropping I know.
2/4/22
I don’t want to romanticize the French economy or French society, both of which have plenty of problems. And liberals who like to imagine that we could neutralize the anger of the white working class by raising wages and strengthening the social safety net should know that France, whose policies are to the left of U.S. progressives’ wildest dreams, has its own ugly white nationalist movement, albeit not as powerful as ours.
Still, at a time when Republicans denounce as destructive “socialism” any effort to make America less unequal, it’s worth knowing that the economy of France — which isn’t socialist but comes far closer to socialism than anything Democrats might propose — is doing pretty well.
1/30/22
In case you needed a reminder that Guillermo Del Toro is a master director and storyteller, this is a movie for you!
I highly recommend watching this in black and white, preferably in an art house cinema!
Somehow I expected more fantastic/surreal elements but aside from that it was a fun and remarkable movie to watch!
1/28/22
Really went all in at the asian supermarket today, ahead of #LunarNewYear next tuesday!
1/25/22
I don’t necessarily agree with all the points made here, but some things are worth pointing out…
‘Every member of Forbes’s 2021 cryptobillionaires list is a man. A third of them attended Stanford or Harvard. Out of the 12 listed, only one isn’t white. The web3 narrative feels like a TEDx talk given to a survivalist group.’
1/12/22
11/29/21
This is was long and had occasional pacing issues but I’m SO GLAD I finally got to see it and on the big screen!
As someone who loves storytelling and world-building and who grew up as a HUGE mythology geek, I really liked this!
Looking forward to seeing some of these characters again!!!
11/1/21
Happy first decade to The Verge, arguably one of the most important tech media publication of the past decade!
I remember how innovative they were from the very start!
”The Verge predates Alexa and the entire concept of Netflix original programming. We are older than Google Photos, Timehop, and Peloton; we launched with a glossy story on the first Nest thermostat. The very first Oculus VR prototype was shown to us in a Las Vegas parking lot. The Verge is older than Slack; we are about as old as movies in 4K. All of that in just 10 years.”
8/25/21
One of the many perks living in Paris: I’ve got an all-you-can-eat pass to go to the cinema!
This evening I was planning an outing to an art house theater which was planning to show a 35mm screening of Sympathy for Lady Vengeance however their 35mm projector is down. So as a backup they’re showing The Host — which was also in my list…
