Tyler Hellard

VOL 3, NO 9

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Confusions. / 🔗 The banality of Pop Loser. ❝Recommendations online are ubiquitous—we have posted our likes on the Internet since the earliest days of Facebook profiles—but “taste,” with its suggestion of deeper knowledge, perhaps, of why or how something is good, transforms the act of recommending into something specialized, with an aura of irreplaceability.❞ / 🍿 I have been saying this for years: the future of movies is just old movies. / 🤖 When does the robot decide your nipple is female? / 🪐 Manifesto of the committee to abolish outer space. ❝For unimaginable eons there will only be a few scattered particles sailing across a total void. If two happen to meet, a single positronium atom might form, float briefly, and decay again, and this single atom might be the first thing to happen in the entire universe for millions of years.❞ / 🧠 When does your brain decide to be afraid? ❝Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. […] The concerned scientist leaned in close, shot a glance toward Honnold, and said, “That kid’s amygdala isn’t firing.”❞ / 📺 David Lynch Presents Interview Project. / 📸 The frightening familiarity of late-nineties office photos. / 📱 Homescreen Confessions. / NextDoor after the rapture. ❝Very suspicious man with wings seen on North Elm yelling about end of the world. Hate that mental patients are just free to harass whomever and the police can’t do anything about it.❞ / Lynx.boo is a simple free linktree. / BulletJournal.click is a simple free task manager. / 💻 Haunted domains. / ArchiveBox, self-hosted internet archiving. / Fav.farm turns emojis into favicons. / 📖 The Met has over 1,000 art books you can download for free. / Chicago turns 18. (I’m still rocking a 15.)/ 👾 PacCam (prepare to feel silly). / Video games and libraries. / 🙈 Math: still humourless. / ⚱️ Murray McCory and Paul Morrissey died. / 🎧 The new not-Pitchfork is called Hearing Things. (Story.) / Future Music is no more. I was a subscriber for a few years just for all the free software samples. / 🌪️ Redbox and the Twister bug.

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VOL 3, NO 8

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Pod Loser. / Marshall On the Beach, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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VOL 3, NO 7

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Two things I strongly believe in: public media and portable content. Which is why I'm more than a little dismayed that the RSS feeds from CBC News stopped working over a month ago. I figured it was a known issue and they'd get to it, but then three weeks went by and I started to get an uneasy feeling. Eventually, I submitted a support ticket, but I kind of knew what the answer was going to be and I was right:

❝Unfortunately accessing our content via RSS feed is not popular with many users and so resources are generally being allocated to other areas and fixes for glitches with current RSS feeds are not being prioritized. I'm sorry I don't have better news.❞

Fucking hell, the internet is a goddamned disaster right now.

Related: For so many reasons, you should be using an RSS reader. ❝It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference. But using RSS will!❞

Also related: the new Reeder app is really nice.

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Confusions. / 📺 Lost in Netflix. ❝What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.❞ / The cartoon that still haunts me. ❝The demise of Bambi’s mother, the bear fight from The Fox and The Hound, and Mufasa plummeting into a stampede in The Lion King are among some of the most traumatizing moments in the history of kids’ animated feature films. Yet, none of those moments hold a candle to Watership Down, a movie about murder bunnies that has scarred an entire generation.❞ / Take home your own Redbox kiosk. / Frank Fritz died. / 💻 A good and fun conspiracy theory. / Trends in AI: The archival look. ❝Flat and slick is being replaced with archival graininess. Photorealism is being modulated with the illustrative. The Archival Look is exceptional artifice, an attempt to rescue aura from techno-sterility. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of digging through your flatscreen’s options menu to turn off ‘auto-smoothing’—that annoying preset that makes everything you watch look like Masterpiece Theatre.❞ / 📓 Control is controlled by its need to control. ❝Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing.❞ / ♟️ Kurt Vonnegut's board game. / 🎧 The Divorce Tapes. / 🗄️ The 88x31 Archive. / A collection of active internet forums. / 📻 Bop Spotter. I really hope people start setting these things up in public spaces all over the world. / Dookie, now available for GameBoy. / Keep radio in cars. / There is no news tonight. (About.) / 🏀 Every outdoor basketball court in the USA. / Sports photos used to look a lot cooler. / 🎨 The case against Roy Lichtenstein. / When destroying art is the art (or, the art of being an asshole).

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VOL 3, NO 6

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Current internet trend: escaping the algorithm. From "the collapse of self-worth in the digital age:"

❝We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. When we scroll, what are we looking for?❞

I have sworn off being one of those smug assholes who tells you how to lifehack your media consumption, but I am now going to be one of those smug assholes who tells you how to lifehack your media consumption.

I have a sure-fire, never-fails trick for enjoying hand-picked ("curated," if you will, though normally I would not) music — new and old — instead of being a slave to the algorithmic tyranny of the Spotibrain, and it doesn't require resorting to silly extremes because this is a problem we actually solved a long-ass time ago: listen to the fucking radio.

BBC Sounds (primarily BBC 6, where I need to once again mention Iggy Pop has his own Sunday afternoon show) is the default music in my home. CBC Music (you'll always be "Radio 2" to me) feels like it's offering less programming than ever, but the programs they do have are quite good. Radio Garden is a great way to spend an evening at home with or without drugs. Now that iPhones can play music and Shazam at the same time, you can build spectacular playlists.

You're welcome.

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Confusions. / 💻 A theory of how people navigate the web. / Related: Stop drinking from the toilet! / How to monetize a blog. / 🍽️ How the web changed the language of recipes. ❝Perhaps at some future date we’ll declare that on that day in April, the trend of naming recipes with conversational adjectives officially died.❞ / 🗄️ Another reason why redundant and widespread archiving is important: All of the music industry hard drives are starting to die. ❝Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.❞ / 🍿RareFilmm. / 📻 1.4Tb of BBC Essential Mixes. / 📱The desperation of the Instagram photo dump. ❝Nonchalance achieved chalantly is nothing new, but the way it is being encouraged on social media today reflects increasing structural limitations to life online.❞ / ⚱️Fredric Jameson died. / 📰 Vice returns to print (joining SPIN and Playboy). / 🚀 The Most Accurate Online Ruler. / Lottery Simulator. (Using my family's birthdays as numbers, I ran it through ~10-million PowerBall simulations and won $4 twice.) / For the my Wordle peeps: Eightile. / Pay Once Alternatives to popular subscription apps. / Free font: Comic Mono. / Radio Static.

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VOL 3, NO 5

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Pod Loser. / Blue Sighs & Sunny Baes, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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VOL 3, NO 4

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At some point we all agreed that open access to all human knowledge was a good thing and accordingly made libraries a staple of every city, every town and every school. It was one of the rare areas we managed to mostly avoid fucking up for a really, really long time. Open Library is, in every sense and by every definition, a library. The only real difference is that it operates at the scale of the web, which is more or less the vision of the Library of Alexandria fully realized. Woo hoo, we did it! Nice work, everybody!

Enter capitalism; the big book publishers want it all stopped because Open Library presents "a fundamental devaluation of authors’ and publishers’ intellectual and creative investments," which U.S. courts are so far agreeing with despite it being a very stupid point. Even worse, the ruling implies that all libraries are, in fact, bad.

I love my publisher (small publishers are great and do a lot operating in a system that constantly punishes them), but books are absolutely broken, both as a functional business model and as a means of creating and distributing art and ideas. Libraries are the last institution putting value on them at all.

We really had our shit together there for a bit, didn't we?

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Confusions. / 📰 The death of Red Lobster. / How Moleskine won in the digital era. / This Žižek profile veers into sex way more than you'd think or necessarily want. ❝He has brought me an umbrella; he also has his own – he pats his top pocket – which in Žižek language is “of anal [pronounced annal] character”, meaning compact and easy to hide.❞ / 🗄️ ROMhacking.net is shutting down (Archive). / Citizen DJ. / 📺 Girls rewatch as existential crisis. ❝Whatever’s happening isn’t time, it’s just duration, and its only measure is decay.❞ / 🎨 Street Ghosts. / 💻 Merklemap, a subdomain search engine. / Free font: Departure Mono. / ChatGPT sucks at summarizing. / 📱InPress is a news app that is also a dating app and the only legit Twitter replacement. /🌜I'm going to start operating on Moon Time.

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VOL 3, NO 3

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Pod Loser. / Today, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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VOL 3, NO 2

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Pod Loser. / Facts & Matters, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

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VOL 3, NO 1

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I used to know how computers work. If something broke, either inside my laptop or on my website, I could usually figure it out and fix it. It was a thing I enjoyed doing. Somewhere along the way, I stopped knowing how things work and stopped wanting to figure it out. Part of that is that I bought a bunch of products and started using websites that "just work." Part of it was just me getting older and devoting more of that time to things like learning to make bread, reading books and having a few time-sucking kids. It happens.

Last winter, the arcade cabinet I built a couple years ago crapped out. Screen went black and it wouldn't turn on. I poked at it for about 10 minutes and then walked away, because trying to relearn how I made it work in the first place was too daunting, never mind troubleshooting software and hardware in a rigorous way. Too hard! Too much!

One of the time-sucking children finally complained — he had been waiting months to work on his Pac-Man score. Fair enough. The easiest solution, I figured, would be to buy the same model Raspberry Pi and just swap in the SD card and plug it in, but I didn't know if that was possible. I found a forum, signed up and asked, getting a few pretty quick answers that amounted more or less to "Maybe... but it's probably not that simple." Then one guy suggested I replace the power supply — an $8 plug — because reasons (the specifics don't matter here, but I assure you every response I got was fucking thorough. Sure enough, that's all it was and boy did I feel stupid and lazy. Don't tell my kids.

I hope you enjoyed your summer. Welcome to Pop Loser Vol. 3.

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Confusions. / 💻 Info-determinism and the ruin of society. (I added the "ruin" bit.) ❝Until very recently, the cultural cocoon we lived in was woven by other humans. Going forward, it will be increasingly designed by computers.❞ / One Million Screenshots. / Twitter '95. / Is Ben scrolling TikTok right now? / The internet's fridge. / 🗄️ Radio Shack Catalogs (dot com). / MTV News is now preserved and searchable. / Public Work, a search engine for public domain content. / The People's Graphic Design Archive. / A complete visual guide to Sony MiniDisc Blank Media (1992-2004). / 🎨 Did Duchamp steal his urinal? / 📰 SPIN and Playboy are returning to print. Music and pornography on the internet will plod along mostly not noticing. / 👾 What beats rock?

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VOL 0, NO 0

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A Journal of Innumerable Confusions. / Pop Loser Vol. 3 (in progress).
Vol. 1, 2. / RSS feed. / Podcast feed.

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Previously. / Newsletter #001–78, #79–97, #98-113 (2014–2018). / Original blog (2007–2014) and Tumblr clone (2010–2014).

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Related. / Vinylslut.FM / PopLoser.TV / 52 Mixtapes

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VOL 2, NO 10

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This is officially a wrap on Volume 2. Sorry it went out with a whimper and not a roar, but summer happens. Enjoy your vacay, kids!

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Food fight for thought (and other confusions). / 📰 Two decades of MTV News was just memory holed. (Archive) / 🎨 On the PhD in (and general hollowing of) "creativity." ❝The desire was not to elevate the already nonconformist or arty, but to convince the normies to conceptualize themselves as unconventional, creative, quirky – in the hopes that they could be encouraged to “think outside the box” of what a pesticide is supposed to be or what a weapon of war could accomplish.❞ / Banksy without Banksy. / 🍽️ The people who fight at dinner parties. ❝I am pleased to see the dinner party as an occasion to intensify dissent rather than merely react to it.❞ / 🎸 Queen Songs. / The Exotica Project (and other collections). / Dance Like David Byrne, a zine. / ⚱️ Françoise Hardy and Sika died. / 📻 Free sound effects from the BBC. / Also: 5 hours of the Shipping Forecast. / 👾 Moondrop Isle. / Level Devil. / 🍿 Search and play phrases from movies. / 🧮 Calculator words.

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VOL 2, NO 9

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I tamagotchu babe... / I recently cut my phone back to the bone, deleting any and every app that I found myself using to mindlessly fill time. All social media gone, Slack can stay, all news apps out, Kindle and Instapaper kept, games gone except chess and the New York Times Games app, and so on. I installed Dumbify. I had an honest — brutal, frankly — conversation with my notifications. And it's been nice. I am not telling you any of this because I want to promote some kind of opinion on doomscrolling and distractions and squeezing the juice out of every minute of your life. You do you. I am mentioning it only because I thought of my relationship with my phone a lot while reading about the terror of Tamagotchi.

❝It was the year 2010, and I had been given a Tamagotchi. I was surprised by this, because I was under the impression that Meredith really didn’t care for me. But oh, how wrong I was. Meredith fucking hated me. Her gift was not a cute piece of nerd nostalgia, but a brutal PsyOp designed to drive me to the brink of despair. And it worked.❞

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...and other confusions. / 👾 Utopia Must Fall is Missile Command meets Galaga meets Asteroids. / Pnogstrom. / 💻 Does Google know how Google works? Signs point to no. / But also: Dear G-Diary. / The Backrooms have been located. / What is Medium? / A decade of China's internet content no longer exists. / 🚶What was "normcore"? ❝Normcore was dad jeans, New Balances, Patagonia fleeces, tube socks in Birkenstocks, Jerry Seinfeld, a regular degular baseball cap, a romantic hybrid of real and imagined suburban Americana.❞ Also: the oral history. / 🖕 Spotify bricks their own device because fuck you. / Rolling Stone cancels lifetime subscriptions because fuck you. / 🎨 The blackmarket for Taco Bell art. / 🍿 Trailer for BRATS. (FTR, my crush on Ally Sheedy is entering its fifth decade.) / Starring the Computer. / Planet Of the Apes goes to the mall. / 🗄️ The Hydrant Directory.

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VOL 2, NO 8

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Pod Loser. / Call Me, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

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VOL 2, NO 7

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Apologies for the posting gap. I had better things to do, none of which were particularly interesting. I've had a new mixtape roughed out for two weeks... maybe tomorrow.

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Robot rot (and other confusions). / ♟️ Chess on the internet is mostly like everything else on the internet: predictably awful. ❝Chess' problems aren't unique. But it is uniquely positioned to act as an accelerant for the internet's worst impulses: sexism, abuse, cheating, elitism, and toxic nerdery.❞ / Related: Everybody hates Hans. / Less related: Scrabble, Anonymous. ❝The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble. This is ultimately what the game is about: memorizing words with no concern for their meaning.❞ / 🍿 3,000 free movies on YouTube. / Roger Corman's Fantastic Four. / Filmgrab, collected stills from films. / 💻 Dead internet, zombie internet and vampire internet, oh my. / Related: Rotting internet. / Also related: The ruin of DeviantArt. / Google fixed. / The Communal Plot, a daily visualization we all build together. / 🛻 Have you seen a Cybertruck yet? ❝If there is anything to take away from this, it is that I once had an attribute that might have allowed me to make it extremely big in the contemporary automotive industry, which is "acting like a precocious doofus child while saying possibly-false car-related stuff in a way that favorably inclined observers found compelling." That can get you pretty far in the industry. I know this in a way that I didn't just a few days ago, because, finally, I have seen a Tesla Cybertruck with my own eyes.❞ / ⚾ Hero. / 📺 Harmony Korine on Letterman. / 📱 Point your phone at your Lego and Brickit will design stuff to build.

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