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.
Pod Loser. / Look At Me (Now), a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: Young Fathers, Homeboy Sandman, Chuck E. Weiss, Blossom Dearie, Tune-Yards, The Limiñanas, Benjamin Booker, Laura Jane Grace, Bad Brains, Danny Brown, Bikini Body, Lambrini Girls, Father Of Peace, Smerz, Chicks On Speed, Lena Deluxe, Grateful Dead, and The Miracles.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
🍿 Incoming
🍿 Clueless
🍿 Life
The divine (situational) comedy. / I love sitcoms. True story. I like the format, the simple sets, the patter of the dialogue and that the episodes are more or less contained. I find them comforting. Most sitcoms are bad, a few are good and occasionally we get a great one. (The last “good” sitcom was That ‘90s Show. The last great one was The Good Place.) If we’re ranking the all-timers, my personal top spots go to M\A*S*H* and Cheers, which is not a wildly controversial take.
George Wendt died. Norm was the heart of Cheers — a nice guy who didn’t really want his buddies knowing he was a nice guy (and also a raging alcoholic whose friends did nothing to help him as his health, career and marriage all fell apart). And as sitcom bits go, Norm walking into the bar is probably the greatest ever.
Loretta Swit died. Margaret Houlihan was a total pro and possibly the only character on M\A*S*H* who grew and evolved naturally over the course of the show (don’t give me your Klinger shit, it’s not the same). She started as one of the show’s villains and earned the best kiss on television with her goodbye.
Legends.
Also: Sorry for the lack of updates as we peter out of spring. I’ve been playing an unholy amount of Minecraft and am now behind on pretty much everything.
Confusions. / 👨💻 How the internet left 4chan behind. / CBC has a new podcast from Cory Doctorow: Who broke the internet? / url.town, (another) directory of (real) websites. / 📖 Close reading is for everyone. / They say that when god closes a Pocket she opens a Readeck. / The am dash. ❝A typographic intervention and a philosophical middle finger.❞ / 🎥 Once lost and now found: The Day the Clown Cried. / 📀 The history of album art. ❝The individual discs were bound together in packages resembling photo albums, partly to protect the delicate shellac that the records were made of, partly to increase their sales. They resembled photo albums, so Columbia called them ‘record albums.’❞ / Man interviews mom about her 8-tracks. / Steve Albini’s closet. / Rick Derringer died. / "[Psycho Killer](https://www.youtube.com/watch)" finally got a music video. / 🪑 The chairs of Doctor Who. / 🗄️ Department store catalogues. / ✌️
New Television Antenna / Norman Rockwell / 1949
📺 Lost in Space S2
📺 Doctor Who (S11)
📺 Schitt’s Creek S1
🍿 Sahara
Pod Loser. / What’s Up Doc Holliday, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: Ennio Morricone, De La Soul, Pan Amsterdam, Ringo Starr, The Beatles, Muddy Waters, Booga Sugar, Mel Tormé, The Pleasure Seekers, Fiona Apple, New Orthodox, Nirvana, Fine Young Cannibals, Leron Thomas, Fcukers, and Skeewiff.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
⚾️ Wifflin’.
🕹️ Ms. Pac-Man 60,720 (Burn Block cabinet)
Cool as nice. / We spent last weekend at the Calgary Comic Expo, starting with the parade on Friday and then all day on Saturday with the kids. It was delightful and I got a cool mug that is also a dice tower because I am, if nothing else, a goddamned child. What I like about the Expo is that everyone is in a great mood. Seriously — it’s only happy people everywhere and a lot of them are dressed like cartoon characters. The interactions are exclusively positive. I’ve been going to that Expo, off and on, for 17 years and I’ve never seen people even mad at each other. The last three sporting events I went to all had fights in the crowd during the game. Really gets me amped for when the meek finally inherit the earth.
Confusions. / 💋 What porn taught a generation of women.(Archive) ❝At the beginning of the decade, the provocative, expressive experimentation of artists like Madonna and Jackson had foregrounded women’s desires. By the end, the cultural dominance of porn was pushing a much more regressive set of sexual standards. And the technological mechanisms that helped bolster this dominance would come to underscore—and exacerbate—a potent idea: that women existed only for men’s pleasure.❞ / 🦫 50 years of the beaver. / 📷 New York protests 1980–2000. / Passport photos. / 108 gigapixel Vermeer. / 📻 The episode that changed This American Life forever (or: on the importance of fact-checking). / The Nightly, sad old radio. / Super secret hidden public radio. / 📺 The story of Doctor Who (and a very important note on the Tommy Westphall Universe). ❝The TARDIS was inside the snow globe, yet the snow globe was also inside the TARDIS. That uncanny blue box exists inside television, yet it contains the entirety of television storytelling. This is not rational thinking. It is mysticism. The within is without. As above, so below. The logic of this situation may not satisfy the materially minded – but rationality is not what powers Doctor Who.❞ / TV.garden. (Previously: Radio.garden.) / Hypertext TV. / 🚗 The end of roadside attractions. ❝Few people travel the back roads anymore, and highways are speckled with fast food and chain motels. Postcards and souvenirs are things of the past—no one wants a decorative spoon from every state. We feel like we’ve already seen national monuments in photographs. People get excited by Niagara Falls or the Grand Canyon only when someone falls in.❞ / 🤖 An AI-generated article on how to tell if the article you’re reading is AI-generated. ❝Such so is it with the artificially intelligent author, who draws on all clarity ever written to make sure clear is what its writing is the most. If clear is what you’re reading, do not panic: William Shakespeare has not risen from the dead. Nor has the A.I. that wrote what you are reading. It was never alive and it can never die.❞ / 🖥️ Classic computer replicas. / ♟️ One million chess boards. / 📜 Ye Olde Blogroll. / 🪑 Magazine stool. / ✌️
📺 Lost In Space (S1)
📸 Neeeeeeerds.
Pod Loser. / Let Us Go, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: Full Flower Moon Band, Nick Waterhouse, Ebba Åsman, Foxwarren, Tropical Fuck Storm, Galaxie 500, The Submarines, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Young Fathers, Joshua Idehen, Okay Kaya, niina, Bob Vylan, Anyl and the Sniffers, Sharp Pins, Ghost Train Orchestra, and Michael Hurley. Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
📚 Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson