You know the expression “inside baseball?” I’m sure you do, a smart, well-read go-getter such as yourself. In the off chance you don’t or perhaps just took a 2×4 to the face and temporarily forgot, I’ll remind you: it refers to things that are only of interest to a small group of people in a very specific sub-community, and would be boring to anyone else. It’s a dive too deep. These Tales From The Slack posts likely border on inside baseballdom, but let’s pretend that’s what makes them fun, somehow! Anyway, this week I want to tell you about a little altercation that was had over a top shot, and the follow-up joke I made in the discussion that is so stupid and obscure there is literally no way the audience for that joke includes anyone but myself, making it all a callow masturbatory use of my otherwise pretty useless Art History degree.
I should explain some stuff here first so you have a bit of backstory: when I say “top shot” I’m referring to the main image at the top of every post. We think these are very important, and we generally try to make them as good as we can, time permitting. There’s usually not much time, but we have a pretty well-established look for these things.
I’m the Art Director of the site, so I defined the fundamentals of the look, which includes things like color and typography but also some guidelines for visual style and tone. One of the important elements of our visual style is that I like it to be a bit playful and break some expected “rules.” This is usually expressed with how parts of images will often obscure the large text we use in our top shots, and images and photographs may appear to obscure or be in front of graphic elements like banners or other elements. You’ve definitely seen this sort of thing all over the place here, and, I’m flatterannoyed to note, even on some other sites I could mention that seem to have bitten off a bit of our style.
Anyway, topshots are generally made by Peter and myself, but almost everyone pitches in and makes their own topshots every now and then. Matt is capable with Photoshop, and sometimes makes some, like he did for a Morning Dump recently, which started all of this. Here’s the topshot Matt made:
As you can see, Matt was having some fun by covering up nearly every important bit of that THE MORNING DUMP banner with engines and tires and transaxles so it was all ridiculously obscured. He was poking fun at our own tendency to obscure the banner by taking it to an absurd extreme. I got what he was going for but I’m the Art Director or Chief Creative Officer or whatever that title is. I better fucking get it. But that by no means means anyone else will, which was David’s point:
David is not getting the joke, and I don’t blame him. It’s a weird mix of too obvious and too subtle, and while I think it’s sorta funny, I do not actually think any of our readers will really get it. It’s extremely inside baseball.
David, our advocate for the readers here, says as much, and I know he’s absolutely right, but I’m feeling sassy, so I type-blurt out the first thing that popped in my head when thinking about this: the Palazzo Del Te. Not sure why I used that accent over the “e,” like that reference wouldn’t be pretentious enough.
Here’s the thing: that’s genuinely what I thought of when I thought about what Matt was doing there. Look at the time stamps; I didn’t have time to Google just the right thing, this was just some weird shit I remembered from Art History class and thought about here. I say this because I wasn’t trying to find the most absurdly pretentious and obscure way to think about this, it just happened.
See, the Palazzo Del Te is an example of Mannerist architecture, and it known for being oddly playful and whimsical and, as far as architecture can be, jokey. Giulio Romano built it between 1525 and 1535, and he included lots of strange little details in the architecture that, if you know what to look for, are basically visual jokes. Which is what Matt was going for, too, as he tries to explain:
So, when I mentioned “broken pediments” that’s what I was referring to, though I didn’t quite use the right words. And, David wasn’t buying it, dismissing this all as “wack,” which, again, he’s right about, but it made me kind of want to double down on the whole thing more, just for fun. I took a moment to think more, then went back to my ridiculous analogy:
I meant to say “frieze” instead of “pediment” but I think the concept gets across. You see, on that frieze, or I guess it’s really an entablature, the triglyphs – those rectangular vertical three-lined things – appear to be broken and slipping down:
This is supposed to be funny, see, because if it was really happening, everything would be on the verge of collapse, but it’s not, so you know, big laffs.
Of course, the idea that somehow this is what people would associate with Matt covering up the Morning Dump banner with an engine is, of course, deeply and richly stupid, and the act of trying to pitch this as a justification to David or implying that somehow this bullshit is what Matt had in mind cracked me up in ways I can’t fully explain. I tried to explain it to a friend of mine, but she just said, basically, okay, as long as you’re having fun, I guess and she’s right.
I think I find it funny for the same reason I always found this joke from The Man With Two Brains funny:
It’s the assumption that everyone somehow knows obscure shit they can’t be reasonably expected to know squat about that’s funny, I think? Whatever it is, it made me, and only me, laugh for a moment there. And now I’m telling you, because, I don’t know, I think I want to feel vindicated in some way?
Also, again, David was in the right here, and I’m glad Matt changed the topshot. I would have helped, but as you can see, I was busy.
UPDATE: LOL
Pete here, this just happened:
Ha ha, wow Matt. Chef’s kiss.
(Pssst, if you tap on the pic, you’ll see the original album cover.)
I started laughing out loud at Jason’s Palazzo del Té description for David, and Mr. Punkcat wanted in on the joke. He had the exact reaction Jason’s friend did.
But I am a member!
I feel like this whole website is already inside baseball on its own.
I really have to see The Man with Two Brains again.
You know how there are movies where a line or two just stick in your head? Well for me there are many movies like that, but amongst the most obscure, The man with To Brains is right near the top. Whenever I have to do something that is unpleasant or probably going to be messy, undoubtedly, I’ll mumble under my breath, “into the mud, scum queen”.
I return you back to our regular site about car stuff…
Goddamn, you Half-Japanese execs do it to me every time
I’m a little disappointed that you didn’t send this out as a member email and further encourage David to believe that everybody knows all about the Palazzo de Te.
The more of these we see, the more I realize that the Jason Torchinsky that writes e.g. Cold Start isn’t a character he’s playing for the site, but what he’s actually like all the time. Marvelous. Never change. May your path be lit eternally by glorious taillights.
I always thought the Weezer cover was just a nod to the cover of the Feelies’ Crazy Rhythms.
https://www.bar-none.com/store/the-feelies-crazy-rhythms
I don’t know about all that. Just here to say Crazy Rhythms is a stone cold jam and thanks.
So, did everyone just agree to pretend that DT’s use of the word ‘wack’ isn’t weird and out of date?
Big, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?” vibes there.
Out of date for the world at large is fresh & new for DT!
Yeah it’s 2024, man. We say ‘wiggidy wiggidy wack’ now.
To the mannerism born?
So it is not about a snobby Starbucks wannabe?
That Palazzo reference sounds like something from a Dennis Miller routine.
I never thought I’d be reading about the Palazzo Del Te on The Autopian, but I’m glad this snippet of esoteric knowledge buried in my brain has finally been used.
Given that I strongly suspect all of those Monty Python references were going over David’s head the other day, and I’m sure this reference flew by everybody, this is absolute gold. And exactly why I subscribe.
Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
This is just like that time on the bus with that kid Grayson.
I got the topshot joke without difficulty. The whole bit about the Palazzo, though, that took more doing and the farther I dove into the absurdity of the whole thing the funnier it got. David’s obvious confusion put it over the top. This is why I love you loons!
This is exactly what I pay a membership for. I believe that Sam the Eagle said it best, “You are all weirdos!” and I love you guys the more for it. Haha
I actually noticed that top shot even in its amended form for the very same reason–that it completely obstructed all the banner verbiage. I didn’t really have a verbalized thought about it, but to the extent that i did, it was something about how the site was really pushing its offbeat visual style. It definitely didn’t occur to me that it was a sort of self-deprecating visual joke. Also, i love how outside baseball-y these posts are. I find listening to interesting people talk about interesting doings even if i can only partially follow endlessly fascinating.
I remember that top shot, I remember barely being able to make out the TMD banner, and I clicked on the article anyways.
I’m so firmly entrenched in the cult of TMD, I didn’t even notice it was covered.
Same.
I can chuckle sensibly about the triglyphs because, thankfully, the trapezoidal nature of the bottom bit guarantees there will be no further downward slippage. Whew!
FWIW I took the topshot as satire for the reasons you stated (obscuring parts of the banner, taken to absurdity) without understanding the historical and artistic underpinnings, so it may well have worked anyway.
What I’ve always wondered about the top shots is:
Do you maintain a selfie library? Does Matt ever request people refill it with fresh ones, and if so, does he specify who and of what sort?”
“Take a picture of you hitting your head against the wall. We have a lot of EV articles coming up.”
We don’t have a selfie library, but Matt has requested we make reaction selfies that could be used at later dates. I always overdo it. 🙂
But who has to be told to ham it up more? It’s Adrian, isn’t it?
Having to explain a joke is usually not funny, but this joke is so arcane it just wrapped around and made the explanation (and the need for an explanation) funny.
The Man With Two Brains is brilliant. Steve Martin as Dr Hfuhruhurr and David Warner (RIP) as Dr Necessiter are amazing. Get that cat out of here!
Counterpoint, the funniest jokes are the ones you need to explain, and even more funnier if they don’t need explaining, but you explain them anyways!
Explaining obvious jokes is 3D chess. People are on tenterhooks waiting for you to reveal something they must have missed, and then bam, they didn’t miss anything.
Crap like this is why we love y’all. I love how often y’all are messing about and David is like the mom who doesn’t get the joke and is trying to get the hooligans to behave for 5 seconds.
I find it extremely funny, but I find joking with David by starting the statement with “you know how most readers understand” even funnier. Take from that what you will.
I appreciate hearing that the obscuring of the text in the topshots is deliberate, and I realllllly appreciate Tales From the Slack, as it reminds me that whatever looks to us like an error has already been debated to within an inch of its life.
With the exception of the copy edit errors which always bug me. It’s not because i’m the grammar police, but because, as someone else mentioned in the comments one day, it undermines the professionalism and polish that the site otherwise exudes.
I also think there’s something to be said for what they often say about being perpetually 10% understaffed or so, that some small errors will slip in, and with enough going on behind the scenes to try to make the site financially viable long term, I can forgive a few typos here and there, but they can be frustrating.
…Especially given the general dumbing-down of the world at large thanks to people thumb-typing on their phones; it bugs me that we are expected to accept that as a sign of modernity, especially in a publication that aims for legitimacy. Too bad they can’t let us pedants edit copy–lord knows we’d do it for free!
Oh yes, but man we would have far too much fun with it haha. It would not have positive results. Sort of like when people get mad at someone on wikipedia and start editing their page to indicate they are a beta male
I bet there’s a way to edit the editors. Like Track Changes, and all they’d have to do would be to review the revisions. Although I guess if they wanted to crowdsource it, they would have already. Like I said, they’ve probably had this very conversation more than once. Oh well, it’s better than some sites.
It undermines the what now?
^^ Thsi