I finally did the Mac update and I see that after 25 years of the iTunes player being at the top, they have decided “Nah.” I’ve lost at least six minutes this week in .5 second increments moving my mouse in the wrong direction.
Hi. I’m Tyler.
I’m a writer in Calgary. I like making mixtapes, watching baseball and playing old video games. I have three kids and one wife. I wrote a novel that eventually became a best seller. Pop Loser is the name I use for my blog, social accounts and other occasional projects. Learn more here.
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I am away from my desk until the end of August.
Firehose
Posts, photos, toots and more.
Having some perfectly normal conversations with mostly C-student robots.
I think that’s called “working the problem.”
Got the toots working on my website. Have also committed to calling them toots from now on regardless of network. It’s addictive. Toots.
Finished porting the website to a custom theme and have tracked down at least 80% of the things I broke in the process, which will have to do until Sept.
📸 July 2026.
Everything is going to be OKayfabe.
Vol. 6, No. 9
Happy G1 Climax season to all who celebrate. Japanese wrestling remains excellent, even if their premier annual tournament sounds more like where DFW did his finest work than a place where sweaty naked dudes roll around together. Or something. It’s the first year in a long time that nobody is working in a Bullet Club t-shirt, and the field seems a little bit thin, but it’s one of those things I have a lot of fun with every year, even if it is a ridiculous amount of wrestling to watch (17 shows over 31 days for the block matches, plus the semi finals and final after that).
I haven’t locked in my rooting interest this year, but my love for Zack Sabre Jr. remains pure and true. Sports note: Sure, the World Cup has been a lot of fun (when it’s not awful and gross), but wrestling would never allow the top four to be the final four — everything is always better with underdogs.
Housekeeping.
The mess of code displaying in the RSS feed is hopefully fixed with this post. Or not. The fuck do I know.
Television Set, from The Plain of Smokes / Ken Price / 1981
Confusions.
📚 I tried to understand ‘BookTok’ during Canada Reads, but was never able to quite crack it: ❝Personal testimony is paramount on BookTok; a book is deemed successful if it “breaks” or “destroys” a reader. The most common book-review content on the app understands books as pleasure-spiking torment factories, arenas for an almost masochistic level of personal involvement. This means users film themselves literally crying and holding a tear-stained page up to the camera, captioning the post with a quip like “brb gonna cry more” or “I just feel too much 😭.” The excess of emotion often scans as winkingly facetious, a dramatization to demonstrate just how deeply a person loves books. […] Whether a given book is well written, structurally ambitious, or intellectually dense does not seem to matter much on BookTok.❞ / 🎻 Alex Ross is retiring / ⚱️ Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman died. / 🖊️ My new favourite blog is unstory. (Warning: it might be poetry.) / 🗞️ The future Google Reader almost gave us. ❝When Google Reader went away, the only thing that truly vanished was the curation layer, Reader’s accidental social network, and that we’d have to rebuild, one link blog and newsletter at a time, on our own.❞
Extensions.
🗺️ Pastmaps, historical maps overlaid on the modern world. / Jerry’s Map. / Gerrymandle, a game of gerrymandering. / 👾 The exhaustive and scientific ranking of every NES game (that gets everything wrong). / Pac-Hunt, Pac-Man but you’re the ghost. / 🥁 Sgt. Pepper’s death list. / 📀 The (virtual) Criterion Closet. / 🪶 Feather, a single-file wiki. / 👨🎨 Current Rothko. / InkField. / ✌️
Explorations.
🍿 A Man Called Otto. / 🍿 Coraline. / 📚 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, read to the kids. / 🍿 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, watched with the kids and still disappointing. / 📚 Nine Stories by JD Salinger.
Ra.i.dio Ga Ga.
Vol. 6, No. 8
While this brave new world of AI is also a hellscape of rapacious capitalism, the ability to bang out tiny pieces of hyper-specific software is pretty sweet. I dropped Marktwain last week on GitHub. It is not some earth-shattering thing, it’s a simple markdown editor that does things that suit my specific idiosyncrasies. It’s neat and probably not terribly useful to many people (though if you’re writing a novel, it’s worth a shot).
But my new favourite thing is called “Pop Loser FM.” It’s a personal radio station (really just a playlist manager) and I’ve been running it nearly 24/7 for almost a month. Here’s the logic:
‣ The player defaults to shuffling a large folder of music I love.
‣ I have other folders for different moods or themes, including a Mornings folder that shuffles between 5 and 10 AM, an hour of 90s’ alt-rock nostalgia every night, etc.
‣ At the top of each hour, it plays the most recent five-minute CBC news update.
‣ Podcasts I like play at specific times on specific days as though they were live radio programs — Passan on baseball every Wednesday at 5 PM, Bookends on Thursdays, This American Life on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and so on.
‣ Plays a random episode from my 10-year collection of Iggy Confidential episodes every Saturday and Sunday morning at 10 AM, plays from an archive of old Art Bell Coast to Coast episodes from midnight until 4 AM, and so on.
‣ You get the point…
It runs all the time — I just turn speakers on and off as I need them, and I can update the playlists over my network. (Instead of adding pod catching to it, I use Downcast and point PLFM to those folders and customize the handling for each podcast in Downcast and point to its folders.) The current build has been running non-stop since last Friday on an old iMac, and I cannot overstate how much I love it. Currently it streams around my home using AirFoil, letting me send to multiple Bluetooth receivers at the same time, as well as any computer or iOS device running the AirFoil client (it’s a very nice utility, though it doesn’t send everything quite in sync, so if you’re standing somewhere where you can hear two of the speakers at the same time it sends your brain into a minor fit), but my long-term plan is to connect it to a micro FM transmitter that covers my house and maybe bleeds a little so I can pick it up out in the garage (though I live on a flight path, so probably I need to be careful there).
I have no larger point on AI. These are just simple tools built quickly (and poorly) to plug into my life. They are neat party tricks, which is what this tech seems to do best on the consumer side.
A “grotesque” from Bon-Mots of the Nineteenth Century / Alice B. Woodward / 1897
Confusions.
Subway Takes and the tyranny of web video shows: ❝If the show is the medium, the clip is the message: an entire video shoot reduced to its catchiest few seconds, reaping the maximum amount of attention with the minimum of content.❞ / ⚱️ James Burrows, David Hockney and Om Malik died. / 📰 When one 4Columns shuts, another Starlog (re)opens, or something. / 🎥 David Thompson and AO Scott reckon with being film critics: ❝Of course, interesting movies continue to be made, and now and then crowds of people still leave the house to see them […] But the longstanding habit, among critics and other devotees, of holding movies apart from and superior to all the other screened content may involve a crucial category error. Could it be that, instead of being distinct from television, streaming, TikTok, A.I. slop and all the other screen forms, movies are actually their common ancestor, their home planet, the H.R. Giger alien xenomorph that has replicated itself across the universe of human consciousness?❞
Extensions.
📺 The official Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood YouTube channel. / 🛠️ brevio, free browser tools. / TownSquare, so people can hang out on your website. / ⚾ Ribbie, 8-bit baseball. / 📚 BannedBookLibrary, banned books hidden inside light bulbs. / Faded Page, free public domain books. / 🎹 MCP 2000, browser-based sampler. / stemdeck, wish this existed in my club days. / Minedrums.
Explorations.
📺 Stanger Things, now into S4 with the 14yo. / 🍿 Nothing, so good. / 🍿 Moonfall, so stupid and I’m starting to work on a unified theory of Roland Emmerich movies. / 📺 Doctor Who, down to our last handful of Jodie Whitaker episodes. / A lot of Star(s) Trek(s) on shuffle.
Marktwain.
A markdown editor for novels.
I love markdown and use IA Writer for pretty much everything, but it kind of stinks when I’m working on a novel and all the workarounds are a pain in the ass. I found Cheese Paper and it solved 90% of my problems, but didn’t let me do things like change fonts. I wanted to play with vibe coding to understand what it was capable of and the Kagi Starter account I bought for search came with access to Kagi Assistant, so one thing led to another and now there’s Marktwain.
It lets you edit text in markdown and supports just the basic markdown functions (i.e., bold, italics, headers). It keeps your chapters/scenes in order by renaming the files on the fly. It lets you add a summary, notes and tasks for each file and stores the metadata directly in each scene’s markdown file. It exports both your full manuscript (just the text) or your outline (titles and summaries) to a fresh markdown file that you can then style how you want using whatever you want.
All of this feels terribly dirty. And also pretty sweet.
Haute Fuzz.
Vol. 6, No. 7
Featuring: Telehealth, Billy Nomates, The Smile, Charles Moothart, Plastic Pinks, DBA!, Caroline Rose, Awreeoh, Soft Bait, ADULT., Mike D, Bratakus, Booji Boys, The Cowboys, CRABE, Mvll Crimes, Zoo Amba, The Poppy Family and Massive Attack & Tom Waits.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.