I’m a writer living in Calgary. I like making mixtapes, watching baseball and playing old video games. I have three kids and one wife. I wrote a novel. Sometimes I write other things.
📺 Fisk (S2)
Pod Loser. / Rumors Willis, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: NOFX, Distants, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Stillhouse Junkies, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Smooth Hound Smith, The Bon Bon Club, Gimson, Hole, and Dagny.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
My favourite feature of Sodastream bottles is how they are designed to fall over with the slightest bump.
Analyze miss. Fun fact: the first few posts of the original Pop Loser blog were powered by TypePad before I quickly moved over to WordPress. Now no posts will be powered by TypePad ever again. This story made me nostalgic about that era of the internet when people did things for the sake of doing them, but also were getting started on their personal brands before we called them “personal brands” and we talked way too much about marketing. Good times. Can’t believe they led to our current collective cultural crisis of connectivity. (Or our current connective crisis of culture collection?)
Anyway, blogging is back! Or at least this blog is back after a wonderful summer spent mostly in Vancouver and Victoria. (Not so fun fact: I’ve still never seen a fucking whale.) While I was away, Tinylytics said this site saw 700 hits on a random Thursday, which is odd because normally double digits is a pretty banger day around here. (Seriously you — literally you — are the only person who reads this. I love you for it, but surely you have better things to do?) Because I only track bare hits and don’t cookie anyone, there was no way to figure out what the fuck happened, but that the next day saw only 4 hits I suspect it was some kind of scraping situation. Honestly, it doesn’t matter because I am neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company, so analytics are completely unnecessary.
Welcome to Pop Loser Volume 5.
Confusions. / 🎨 A really interesting story about an incredible collection of fake art. ❝She genuinely believed that she had in her possession objects that would change her life and even contribute to art history in some way. However, for years she had been dismissed as a crackpot. It didn’t help that she was a self-professed high priestess of a religion that worshipped the ancient Greek gods.❞ / A kinda dull story about an incredible collection of real art. / Restoring a Banksy. / 🗞️ Minifeed, a curated blog reader. / Kill the Newsletter, convert email newsletters into atom feeds. / Folio, a Pocket replacement. / 📁 Send big files with SwissTransfer. / 📻 VTV, the weirdest & worst novelty songs ever created. / Ldial, the best independent and community radio stations in the US. / IINA, a Mac media player. / AI DJs because why even have people do anything at all anymore. / The end of the late-night band. / Professional wrestling, a multi-era musical analysis. / 🧠 The Wikipedia Test. ❝Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.❞ / 📚 The greatest books of all time. / 🧙 Build your own 5e spell book. (Big hit at my table.) / VOID 1680 AM, a game that is pretty impossible to explain before you play it. / 🦈 Jaws, a text adventure. / 🌒 ASCIIMoon. / 📺 A Halt and Catch Fire syllabus. / 🗿 Nice rocks. / 📽️ Cassette, a home video player. / ⚒️ Tooooools. / 🌈ColorMoods. / 🤘 The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath.
No Loitering / Banksy / 2008
Explorations. / 📻 Who Is the Sky? by David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra. David Byrne remains sorta the best and I’ve been in love with GTO since their album of Moondog covers. Really fun record. 🍿 Superman. First you need to understand something — I spent my childhood obsessing over Superman. I cannot overstate just how much. I would wear my costume in the bathtub to recreate the scene where he’s drowning with the kryptonite necklace on (and also Miss Teschmacher’s kiss in that scene has somehow embedded itself in the part of my brain that think about sex). Being a Superman fan has been a fucking struggle without a decent movie since 1980 while every other comic book hero got theirs. So this movie was a goddamned delight. 📚 I read the complete James Bond. They aren’t good but they were enjoyable. Do with that what you will. / ✌️
Fun fact: the number one risk factor of a rotator cuff tear is being over 40.
📺 Fisk (S1)
📚 Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel
Betteridge’s law of ugh.
🍿 Superman
🕹️ Ms. Pac-Man 39,080 (Arcade1Up cabinet)
📸 Rolling.
📚 Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut
📚 Shoot! by George Bowering
📚 James Bond 007 by Ian Fleming