FreeDarko, as a live blog, is no more. Ever since I was first introduced to the site by Langston I have admired the style, breadth, and depth that everyone who has ever contributed to that site has had to offer about basketball, philosophy, and pop culture. In short, it was all that a blog was supposed to be, and it was a blog that made a lot of us realize our own shortcomings. I picked the photo above not because I'm egotistical enough to think that I'm a Hemingway or a Fitzgerald, or that I'm the Hemingway to Bethlehem Shoals' Fitzgerald--that's probably Bill Simmons--but because Shoals, along with Simmons and Henry Abbott, showed us over the last decade the scope of what sports writing, and specifically basketball, can be, and the time in which they did so was when the internet was something that still felt, to a certain extent, somewhat distant and abroad.
My farewell to FD can be found here, at TFT.