Tyler Hellard

VOL 4, NO 9

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Private properly. / Some mornings if I wake up an hour or two early, I drink coffee and surf YouTube. This is about 90% of my YouTube time. If you’re the same, I recommend Andy Anderson skateboarding videos. I don’t even watch that many skate videos, but that kid is a fucking poet on wheels.

Speaking of YouTube, I’ve been on a privacy kick lately (which is annoying because I’m also on an anti-algorithm kick and the “Canada rules” kick that’s going around (which is more of a “USA sucks” kick for me because I deplore patriotism)… it’s a lot of kicks — too many, really — is my point) and have started playing with FreeTube, which is a standalone YouTube player — effectively YouTube without the prostate exam (or, if you don’t care about privacy but do want to remove minor annoyances from your life, without ads). It’s cool so far and gave me an excuse to clean up my subscriptions and playlists.

I’ve also been trying StartPage for search and as a browser on my phone. The search is nice enough, though because it pulls results from other search engines it suffers from the same declining usefulness of results that all search engines have right now. The app is neat, but is taking some getting used to and has some annoying missing features, like a reading list that syncs back to my laptop, and a lot of missing gestures I’m used to from using mobile Safari forever.

Remember when we could use the internet and just watch some cool kickflips without jumping through all these hoops? We didn’t know how good we had it.

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Santa Cruz Skateboards / Robert Williams

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Confusions. / 📰 The wizard of vinyl is in Kansas. Who knew. / 🤖 AI and the new aesthetics of fascism. ❝Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.❞ / 🎸 There are no bands anymore. / ⌨️ Blood Typers, finally horror comes for typing tutors. / 🎨 Hue.tools. / Dali’s VD posters. / 📸 Owls in towels. / What did Hubble see on your birthday? / Brock Davis Insta. / 🎞️ The thing that I hate (“new literalism”) about a lot of movies right now. ❝It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically. This strikes me as a blatant redefinition of art itself.❞ / I’m Not a Robot. / I am trapped in the Criterion closet. / 💾 Save things in Markdown. / 📱 It is as if you are on your phone. / ✌️

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VOL 4, NO 8

★

Pod Loser. / I Assure You I’m Not Having Any Fun At All, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Featuring: Queens Of the Stone Age, Viagra Boys, Young Fathers, Lyrics Born, Santigold, Anamanaguchi, Problem Patterns, The Caezars, The Smiths, shower curtain, Eric's Trip, Fugazi, The Vaselines, Laura Jane Grace, Hot Hot Heat, HotWax, The Wombats. Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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VOL 4, NO 7

★

Phoney baloney. / This week, I had to teach my 12yo how to make a phone call. Not the functional aspect, but the etiquette of calling someone on a shared landline in their home. “Probably his mother or father will answer. After they say ‘Hello,’ you say ‘Hello, may I please speak to Adam.’” Because you just don’t run into many people with landlines anymore, it’s entirely possible, even likely, this was the first real phone call of his life. Even when I hand him or my daughter the phone to talk to a grandparent, they look awkward as fuck holding it against their faces. They just have no clue. He did okay. Not great, but okay.

It’s funny because I can tell you that David Proude’s phone number was 436–8912 (this was before we had to also dial the area code) and Steven Murchison’s was 888–2826 and Adam Bassett’s was 436–9713. I made so many phone calls by junior high — probably thousands of them — that those numbers are still seared into my brain 35 years later.

The march of time and all that.

(Not really related, but worth mentioning: I also know that the code to get to Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is 0073735963.)

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Vandalised Phone Box / Banksy / 2005

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Confusions. / 📰 538 is shutting down and Digg is coming back, so finally we can get back to the old days (well, middle days) of internetting, I guess. / 💻 TabBoo, add jumpscares to shitty time-sucking websites. Almost enough to make me switch to Chrome. / Notepadjs. / 🎥 The importance of preserving home movies. ❝We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence.❞ / 🎧 Heavyweight is coming back. (Sadly, WireTap is not.) / Walkman.land. / 👀 The Uncomfortable, a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects. / How baseball cards are made. (Fun fact: my dream job is writing the copy on the back of baseball cards.) / The golden age of Japanese pencils. / ⌨️ Micro Journal Rev.7. / 🎞️ Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. / Binocular Shots. / 📚 DRM-free bookshops. / 📱 Sober Ringtones. / Touch Grass. / ⚱️ Gene Hackman and Roberta Flack died. / 🍩 Twin Peaks donut supercut.

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Explorations. / 📺 Bad Sisters. The most fun I’ve had watching TV in a long time. I already miss the. Garvey sisters a tremendous amount. / 📚 Michael Crummey. Gotta be the best working novelist in Canada these days. I’m in the middle of The Adversary right now, but there’s no bad book in the bunch. / 🎧 Cliff Martinez soundtracks. I use him mainly as the soundtrack for my D&D sessions, but have also started just listening around the house, despite the weird looks from my family. / ✌️

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VOL 4, NO 6

★

Comfortably dumb. / The problem is always people. Always. We are good at a lot of things, but somehow also bad at everything. We are stupid. We repeat our mistakes again and again. We never learn, mostly because we don’t especially want to. Learning is hard. Ignorance is bliss. I is tired.

Dumping a gogabazillion dollars into AI remains an obviously dumb idea. Adding quote-tweets to Mastodon is probably a dumb idea. Electing pretty much anyone to anything is never a good idea. See? Terrible things are everywhere and they are because people, generally, fucking suck. We are always, always, always the problem.

Not you, though. You’re great. Enjoy some links!

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”The Girl with a Pearl Earring bleeding from her eyes and ears” / AI Generated / 2025

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Confusions. / ☄️ Are we doomed yet?, asteroid impact probability. Related: So about that asteroid. / 👾 RetroFab, a collection of playable old-school handheld games. / Mike Tyson finally beaten in under 2 minutes. / Dragonsweeper. / Little Sisyphus. / ♟️ Blunder Chess. / “The Pinball Philosophy”. / ⚱️ Tom Robbins and David Edward Byrd died. / 🎨 Floor796. / Monospace, an ASCII art generator. / Essential Vermeer. / ✌️

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