Do you know what a shoat is? It’s a suckling pig; less than a year old, and still weaning.

It’s also a sheep-goat. A governing body. A corrupt board. An inside joke that either went too far, or just far enough. Doesn’t really matter why it shares a name with so mundane an animal, nor why it’s such an important idea. It’s a sample of culture that I get to share.

A friend showed me the Cube Rule a while back. It was easily the most ridiculous thing I’d ever read, and I held to that assessment for a full minute. We argued for far longer than we should have about whether a steak is a kind of salad, or an apple pie a calzone. This taxonomical excursion led us down a path of increasing madness and I tried to indoctrinate anyone that would listen. We would have the same arguments over and over. Every onboarding would start with the same complaint: this is stupid.

But that is so clearly the best part.

Every game is either menus or parkour. This is perhaps the most egregious example of taxonomical reduction I’ve encountered. Two (2) options! How could you reduce all of gaming down to 2 categories? Evidently, the simplicity of the argument and the absurdity of its structure are what make it at once abhorrent and alluring.

So I asked: does this also apply to sports?

Why not?

I made a document. We listed out all the sports we could think of and then put them into neat little categories. It sucked. I reviewed the list and was just…uninspired. The taxonomical work was clean, and I think that was the problem. Everything looked correct and orderly, and that made it boring.

So we asked ‘what if all sports are just trying to BE another sport?’ What if rather than sports being the descendants of ancients, they are instead reaching toward something? What if archery is just trying to be golf?

It all came together quickly. Eight parent sports from which all others are derived, and yet all strive to be. Handball, hockey, golf, ping pong, jumping, beyblades, boogie boarding, and hot wheels. It really is that simple. It was elegant, and it was preposterous. Perfect.

Ship It

There was talk of canonisation. A leatherbound edition. Something you could cite. We bought the shoats.org domain and it felt like it was about to go global. But then, like most good ideas borne of a joke where you just had to be there, it threatened to peter out.

I still felt like I wanted to do the idea justice, so I built it. No committee meeting, no citation format. Just the domain, a Claude Code instance, and pure conviction that the bit deserved to exist. Shout out to CloudFlare Pages for the hosting; it would have been much more annoying to incorporate it into my homelab.

You can check out the full Taxonomy of Sport at SHOATS.

The Point

You really can just do things.

Played out. This saying is so played out we’ve come full circle and now it’s powerful.

I really thought that making things was fun. Showing people was another thing. I’d convinced myself that I had nothing worth saying unless I already knew everything. Someone would call me out, find the gap, and that would be that. This is a paralysing way to think. Nobody knows everything, every post misses something. The people that write anyway aren’t even more qualified, they’re just less precious about it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, it doesn’t even need to be real. Shoats.org is a website about a taxonomy of sport that includes beyblades. It has no business existing, and yet here we are. Turns out you really can just do things.