The Starling Fallacy: 36 Pages of Redemption

It seems it’s the season for publishing big fancy books about your brand. Here’s the latest addition to the bike library, from Starling Cycles: Born i …

By stwhannah

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The Starling Fallacy: 36 Pages of Redemption

This is… bleak AF 0_o

That’ll look sweet on the coffee table beside my Nicolai book

36 pages for £999.99?
Well I have a history of spending lots of money on books but this is a bit steep for me. I got a first edition of the poems of John Jarmain (1945) for a tiny fraction of this. Bloodaxe today publish a new book by Neil Astley and the late Brendan Kennelly and I shall buy it.

10/10 for this one @hannah 🙂

This is all Starling’s work! Nowt to do with me, I just published the PR.

I really hope they’ve gone whole hog on this AF and actually made the book.

Strange thing is – we all know people would/will buy it 😂

@jimthesaint The photos I took in the trees are not mockups 😀

Andrew Major, NSMB, Sept 2021.
Can never quite tell if NSMB are ahead of the curve; intentionally ironic; or just up their own arses. Often amusing to read though.

I believe you totally would, and I might too if it weren’t for what I call the Starling Fallacy.

The Starling Fallacy holds that somehow great geometry and shed manufacturing can overcome the performance issues of a true single pivot bike. And, since we know that great geometry is free and easily duplicated we can further boil down the fallacy to say that shed manufacturing alone can overcome said issues. You don’t even have to produce all your bikes in the shed – just some of them.

And so, riders who absolutely would not accept the performance of a simple no-linkage true-uni-pivot design from a major manufacturer or even a smaller manufacturer (see riders talking about Orange bikes) will gush about the descending prowess of a Starling.

Just imagine the shit talk if Cannondale launched a modern version of their Prophet – light, simple… oh, “it sucks when braking, etc etc etc.”

https://nsmb.com/articles/dreaming-crate-suspension/ go down to the comments

You have to admire Joe’s consistency on this date – I seem to recall a reverse mullet in previous year

Loved reading the email this morning, really well executed effort.

10/10

Can never quite tell if NSMB are ahead of the curve; intentionally ironic; or just up their own arses.

It’s the latter IMO. They are the MTB equivalent of student journalists. Waaaay too self-important and desperately needing a competent editor, with barely a hint of humour (Uncle Dave was hilarious, but stopped his columns ages ago IIRC).

🤣😂 classic Joe. As a proud Starling owner. Who gives a monkies about NSMB. Mine pedals up and it goes down mountains just fine.

Err the date today anyone?

There’s always one.

Considering the ‘one man band’, ‘backlog of orders’ nature of Starling (at least that’s the impression I get though they’ve obviously grown), there’s a ton of effort gone into this for no?? reward (other than of course whatever satisfaction they get).

Still, whatever makes you happy and it’s clear that this guy forges his own path.

(From a Halifax single-pivot owner so perennially Starling-curious)

@scuttler – have you ever done anything in your own time just for the fun of it?

Congratulations @phutphutend that’s a hell of a piece of work. Very aware and self depreciating.

@sargey fair point. Not for a while, my to-do list has been getting bigger for about 20 years. Time for a rethink???

Considering the ‘one man band’, ‘backlog of orders’ nature of Starling (at least that’s the impression I get though they’ve obviously grown), there’s a ton of effort gone into this for no?? reward (other than of course whatever satisfaction they get).

There’s a few people in the workshop these days streamlining and speeding up the process. Yes, quite a lot of effort – but it was a lot of fun too!

@scuttler you should let your curiosity get the better of you…

“ This is all Starling’s work!”

It’s not though, is it? They blatantly stole a load of Andrew Major’s words without any attribution until after they were called out. It’s thoroughly shitty behaviour. Do you have an explanation @phutphutend and @oxym0r0n ?

if they were trying to sell the book it would be shitty behaviour, but as this is a joke.

personally, i think it would have been funnier citing the source, considering the glowing review NSMB gave the murmur.

I’m not sure why he wants credit for saying a load of less than encouraging stuff about a brand that has now done very well, and are proving folk like him wrong.

did he say he wanted credit? i’d assumed, when i read his words a while ago that it was slightly tongue in cheek, especially as he rides a steel rigid bike.

Did he say he wanted credit

https://meatengines.com/f/attribution?fbclid=IwAR16pQjEEt9Qr7RKoV_Y1Pwg0hgGSyp-Bu9Su_GOaNbcQtWC-JZWOx_JSdw

ahh. i get his point about something that polished costing money, none of which went his way.

Wanting attribution or payment for an April fools satirical post?

That may be the biggest sense of humour failure possible.

Wanting attribution or payment for an April fools satirical post?

That may be the biggest sense of humour failure possible.

I looked, and wondered the same. I think the latter though. Pretty tragic really, the original writing looks to be a pissy comment on a forum, and now he’s looking for recognition.
By those standards, there are a choice few big hitters on here who could claim to be among the most prolific authors in recent history. 🙂

I really hope whoever came up with ‘skeleton ****ing in a biscuit tin’ demands payment if Orange use it in forthcoming April fools copy.

I don’t think that’s entirely fair- he writes a lot of detailed reviews for NSMB and puts a lot into, for example, making sure he actually sees how easy things are to service, live with long term etc.

He has opinions but that makes it more interesting than a bland ‘climbs like an xc bike descends like a dh bike’ piece. It doesn’t feel like it would be right to rip a chunk of a review from a website without attribution so does a simple hat tip to someone who has effectively written some of your advertising material seem that hard to do? Even your average influencer at least claims to be doing it to give you exposure.

I like starling but I think they probably called it wrong on this one.

Copyright issues can be waived for the purpose of satire.

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright

Also, unless that was a dismal attempt at his own “meta” April Fool’s post, he’s only confirmed my assessment of NSMB as humourless, self-important bellends. Anybody else would be delighted to have inspired such a fun and inventive bit of content.

the original writing looks to be a pissy comment on a forum

Indeed. It wasn’t even an article. What a fanny.

Technically correct- the best kind of correct. To be sure, I think the starling book is a cracking thing to have done, I just think this is a bit of a rule one violation not to have asked first/rewritten your own words/ hat tipped after. Neither side comes out of this looking excellent to me but Starling called it wrong, Andrew Major is perhaps just overreacting.

People who don’t get paid for writing (or taking photos) always seem to think people are over-reacting when their stuff gets used without credit.

Max Dubler gives a pretty good explanation of why that’s a pretty shitty attitude to have here:

https://www.maxdubler.com/bitchy-rant-about-holesom/2017/7/10/a-bitchy-rant-about-skateboard-companies-trying-to-use-photos-for-free

Whoever is in charge of social media at Starling managed to get some decent exposure from this. And yeah, it was a comment on an article already written rather than in the main article itself:

https://nsmb.com/articles/dreaming-crate-suspension/

Still doesn’t sit right with me.

People who don’t get paid for writing (or taking photos) always seem to think people are over-reacting when their stuff gets used without credit.

Erm, I worked as a freelance journalist for more than 10 years and would never have dreamed of reacting like this.

In my experience, it’s a handful of wannabe writers (and especially photographers) who get incredibly pissy over borderline cases, or non-cases like this.

Whoever is in charge of social media at Starling managed to get some decent exposure from this.

On the flipside, I reckon the guys blog has probably had more hits in the past few days than in the past few years…

In my experience, it’s a handful of wannabe writers (and especially photographers) who get incredibly pissy over borderline cases, or non-cases like this.

So real writers just let this kind of thing fly whereas amateurs complain?

Like it or not, it is plagiarism. Unless you want to argue that it somehow falls outside the scope because it was in a comment on the article rather than the article itself.

And yeah, it’s not plagiarism from one article to another, it’s plagiarism from writing to advertising.

Lots of technicalities to avoid the issue. Probably why they did it. They get some good advertising and get to piss off someone who said mean things about their bikes. Win/win for Starling.

So real writers just let this kind of thing fly whereas amateurs complain?

Exactly. Well said.

Though obviously most internet commenters wouldn’t be embarrassing themselves like he is either.

Exactly. Well said.

Are you sure you’re a writer?

If you google plagiarism most writers do seem to get quite upset about it. Maybe you got it wrong. Amateurs don’t worry whereas pros actually do want something done about it.

I mean, if my writing was plagerised, first off I would be impressed that anyone managed to find it. Then I’d be proud that at least one person had read it. Then I’d probably say, ‘Hey, you used my stuff! Want to be friends?’

But then I’m definitely an amateur writer. It’s not how I put food on the table and pay the mortgage.

But yeah, maybe it’s as simple as, Starling got pissy because someone said mean things about their bikes. Then the writer got pissy because Starling said mean things about him saying mean things about their bikes.

Maybe everyone involved is just taking things a bit too seriously.

I think it was fairly obvious that the whole thing was a comment on mean stuff the internet said about their bikes and this was just their way of laughing it off.

If you can’t take it, don’t dish it out. Certainly don’t moan when someone you’ve criticised comes back at you. Even if they do just repeat the mean words you’ve said.

I’ll admit I’m biased as I’ve never knowingly read NSMB, never heard to this guy and I ride a Starling but I’d be p!$$ed if I were Joe and I’d read all that **** written about the bikes I made.

To be fair, i didn’t know it was an April’s Fool thing until reading through this, i just thought they’d owned up to the reasoning behind releasing a single pivot, full suspension steel frame!