The 9th Annual Runaway Open (8/31 in Denver) featured a lyrics contest on the sponsor signs, continuing a pattern we started with the 8th. This year, that same bottom-right corner of the signs had the date of a previous Dick's show and either "first" or "last", referring to the first or last word that Phish sang at each of those shows. Those words, in hole order, made a sentence - and the first golfer to text me the sentence during the tournament, won $75 in pro shop credit. Only one participated - could you be the second to solve it?

And, yes, 15 sponsor signs on 18 holes. Hole #2 was challenges from a Backswing pro, Hole #10 was an optional hole-in-one contest ($10 entry, $10,000 prize), and Hole #17 was the closest-to-pin contest. A full wrap-up on those events, and all tournament results, is coming next week...

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Thanks to Jnan Blau (@thephunkydrb) for this exciting news!]

This, dear reader, is obviously a blog post on our beloved Dot Net. But it is also more than that. This here is also a heads-up, as well as a bit of an enjoinder. Maybe this is also a touch of a plea. It is certainly hoping to function as a woo-ing (not during-a-jam wooing, no no!) — you know, as in to woo (v.) someone. Most assuredly, this is an enthusiastic and genuine invitation to you, my fellow phans.

Indeed, I come bearing what is exciting news about something that maybe should be on your radar and that, it is hoped, will be of interest to many of you.

This writing comes to you on behalf of Phish Studies. Some of you have perhaps heard of us, and of the events we have been putting on the last several years. The first one was on the campgrounds of The Gorge in 2018; the last one happened this past spring. In a nutshell, gatherings of folks who are scholars/academics who turn their keen eyes and ears — and even keener minds and hearts — to unpacking and analyzing and theorizing and deeply appreciating this phenomenon we know as Phish and phandom. Maybe you caught wind of our most recent event, the second official, interdisciplinary Phish Studies Conference, held in May of this year at Oregon State University?

Before I get to the concrete news and invite, allow me to set the stage just a bit more...

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[We would like to thank David “Zzyzx” Steinberg (@zzyzx) for recapping last night's show. If you like this kind of writing you can find more on The Phish Stats Facebook Page, Twitter (mainly for Phish content), and Bluesky (much more present and engaged in conversation). -Ed.]

9/1/24 was Phish’s 42^nd time playing Dick’s Sporting Goods Park. Only three venues – Madison Square Garden, Nectar’s, and The Front – have reached that status. For fans of science fiction, that is a bit of a sacred number. In Douglas Adams’ humorous The Hitchhiker’s Gude to the Galaxy, a massive computer is built to discover the answer to the ultimate question: that of life, the universe, and everything. It was a tricky one that took millions of years and when the distant descendants of the programmers and philosophers who created Deep Thought finally got the information, it turned out that the answer to the question of life, the universe, and everything is – well – 42. You see, it’s that no one really quite knows what the question is. Oh, sorry, spoilers for a 45-year-old book. Oops!

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[We would like to thank Rob (@mikh2wg) for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

So far, this has been a pretty good vacation. My friend and I got into Denver on Friday. We hadn’t planned it, but our flights landed within 30mins of each other. We pulled into the first taco place we spotted, and it was wonderful. The hotel had our room ready when we got there. We saw a pretty damn good Phish show Friday night. A great start to the trip. My friend recently adopted a four year old and I have had a lot of stress at work so far this year, so we were both ready to relax. We started off Saturday with a hike at Lair O’ the Bear.

It was an easy walk, with the biggest incline coming from the parking lot. There were beautiful views and a babbling creek. Lots of time to look out at nature and muse about all the people who have lived and worked in these hills before us. On the way home, we spotted a sign for something called Dinosaur Ridge so we checked that out too. They had a bunch of dino tracks and some cool rock formations. The brontosaurus bulges were our favorites. Then it was back to the hotel to enjoy a few hours of rest and relaxation before lot dinner and showtime. At this point, I may have blissed out too much on nature and hot tubs to bring an entirely objective eye to Dicks’ Night 3, but I will do my best. I take my responsibility to dot net very seriously.

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[We would like to thank Steve Plock (@howiep) aka @steve81573937, drummer for The Curls , and manager of the world famous iO Theater in Chicago, and Justin Mercer @piperpiperworm for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

In a year of Phish already marked by so many monumental events and runs, it’s natural for anyone coming to Colorado this weekend to wonder how the band is going to treat these final four shows of summer tour.

2024 came off the heels of the band’s first full Gamehendge performance in 24 years, then came the Mexico run that showed the band stretching out to new lengths in their jams, a hint of things to come later in the year. In April, Phish took the Sphere for a four night run that makes the Dead and Co subsequent performances look like Cocomelon for hippies, and the last two months have seen some of the longest and most exploratory jamming from the band in their entire history, culminating in their first festival in 9 years.

There isn’t much to say about Mondegreen that hasn’t been said in other reviews here, so I’ll only add that as we drove home from Delaware back to Chicago for 13 hours, I couldn’t help but wonder how Dick’s was going to feel as the coda on a year filled with so many milestones and highly memorable moments.

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[We would like to thank Josh Cohron (@cohron1) aka @JoshCohron for recapping last night's show. -Ed.]

When a band has been around for as long as Phish has and has created the devoted following they have, expectations are naturally going to arise. The fanbase has little idea how much our expectations are felt by the band. When there is a collective disappointment or unrest among Phish fans, does Phish know?

This question was on my mind as I traveled out for the show. With the abrupt, confusing ending to Mondegreen eleven days prior, would the band want to come out firing in their first show since? Did they even need to, given what happened seemed out of their control?

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[“From the Forum” is a new blog feature series that highlights quality posts from the Phish.net forum to share more broadly. This inaugural edition was originally posted by @Profjibboo on August 18, 2024. -Ed.]

38 - The number of shows Phish has played at Dick's Sporting Goods Park. In 2022, Dick's passed The Front to become Phish's 2nd most played venue of all time. It trails only Madison Square Garden, which has had 83 shows. Dick's accounts for 2% of all Phish shows. Commerce City is also securely #3 on the most played cities list, behind New York City and Burlington. At the end of 2024, it will have a 10 show advantage over #4, Noblesville, IN.

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[Thank you Christy Articola for Surrender to the Flow and this post. -Ed.]

The Dicks Colorado 2024 issue of Surrender to the Flow is available here. This issue is FREE to download, but if you would like to pay something for it (donate), we will gladly accept!

This issue is full of good stuff for you! It includes information about Dick's Sporting Goods Park, things to do in Colorado in your free time, and our regular features like recipes, My First Show, My Favorite Jam Ever, 20 Years Later, Phish Changed My Life, Everybody Loves Statistics, Celebrations, fan fiction, a puzzle, and other things we think you'll enjoy.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

This is the fourth and final blogpost regarding the current rating system. Previous posts can be found here, here and here.

Post #2 showed how two metrics—average deviation and entropy—have been used by product marketers to identify anomalous raters; Post #3 showed how anomalous users may increase bias in the show rating. Many Phish.Net users have intuitively known that anomalous raters increase rating bias, and have suggested using a rating system similar to that used by rateyourmusic.com (RYM). RYM is an album rating aggregation website where registered users have provided nearly 137 million ratings of 6.2 million albums recorded by nearly 1.8 million artists (as of August 2024).

Similar to Phish.Net, RYM uses a five-point star rating scale but, unlike .Net, an album’s rating is not a simple average of all user ratings. Instead, RYM calculates a weighted average, where the most credible raters are given greater weight than less credible raters. Weights differ across raters on the basis of the number of albums they have rated and/or reviewed, the length of time since their last review, whether or not the reviewer provides only extreme ratings (lowest and/or highest scores), and how often they log onto the site, among other measures. These measures identify credible reviewers and separate them from what the site describes as possible “trolls”. Weights are not made public, and the exact details of the weighting system are left deliberately opaque so as to avoid strategic rating behavior.

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[We would like to thank Paul Jakus (@paulj) of the Dept. of Applied Economics at Utah State University for this summary of research presented at the 2024 Phish Studies Conference. -Ed.]

The first two blogposts in this series can be found here and here. This post will address the statistical biases believed to be present in the data, and how anomalous raters may contribute to bias.

Statistically, a show rating represents our best point estimate of an unobservable theoretical construct: the “true” show rating. To the degree that an estimated show rating deviates from its true value, the error is composed of sampling variance and bias. In the figure below, think of the bullseye as the true show rating, and the red dots as our estimates (best guesses) of the true value.

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