VOL 1, NO 1
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I used to blog and then I newslettered [FILE NOT FOUND!] and now I mostly sit around scratching my cat. I miss the internet.
I’m blogging again, I think. I kind of want to play with it, taking cues from the old versions of Pop Loser, the sites I stole from then, and a few sites that have kept on keeping on and I’d like to steal from now. I want it to be weird and esoteric. I want it to be fun and funny.
The best part: there’s no audience. Zero. Nobody knows this is here and it isn’t plugged into any kind of external social network. I have no tracking or site analytics installed.
Doesn’t that sound… nice?
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And now, the internet! / 🖼️ The Disappointed Tourist is a collection of paintings of places that no longer exist. / 🍪 The curious case of the disappearing Hydrox cookies. ❝According to company lore, the name stemmed from the elements of water — hydrogen and oxygen — chosen to symbolize the cookie’s cleanliness at a time when materials like chalk and plaster of Paris routinely appeared in baked goods.❞ Nailed it. / 📻 Annie Nightingale died. / The British Record Shop Archive. / I know some people who are real assholes about audio fidelity, but this guy pointlessly ruining his life building a stereo is the saddest thing ever. / 🎞️ The novelization of E.T. sounds great. ❝The movie treats E.T. as something like the children who befriend him, but in the novel we come to know that he is a creature beyond age and has been fulfilling his mission for eons.❞ / Galerie is a movie club with monthly guest curators. / 🐋 An escaped Russian spy whale really highlights how seriously we take whales. / 🖥️ Oodbye.
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Susan Sontag, 20 years ago: ❝There is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror. Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it, or those who could learn from it. The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.❞ / Sarah Aziza, last week: ❝Bear witness, we tell ourselves as helplessness threatens to engulf us on our far end of the telescope. Bear witness, we say, yet three months into a livestreamed genocide, we must ask—what does all this looking do?❞
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Recent and uninteresting media diet. / 📚 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens (Finished). Hadn’t read it before, but gave it a go after reading A Christmas Carol over the holidays. The cultural memory of this book is hilariously off — everything people talk about happens in the first 50 pages. / The Shakespeare Thefts by Eric Rasmussen (Abandoned.) / Albert Camus: A Life by Oliver Todd (Abandoned). Not sure why I tried—I never finish biographies. / Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Robert C. O’Brien (Started). Reading with the kids. / Post Captain by Patrick O’Brian (Started). I’ve been meaning to get back to these books since Pandy Summer. / 📺 Night Court seasons 6–9. Any show that runs long enough becomes a caricature of its former self. / Doctor Who season 4 + the David Tennant season 4.5 specials. / Only Murders In the Building season 3. I think this is my favourite current show, but I don’t watch a lot of current shows. / The Wonder Years season 3. I started this before I learned Kevin Arnold is an IRL dick but now I’m committed. / 🍿 The Thing. The 11yo asked to watch this and I’ve never been so happy. / She Came to Me.
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A very nice thing you should read and buy. / An excerpt from Beauty and the Beat: ❝When the Go-Go’s heard Beauty and the Beat for the first time they cried, but they weren’t exactly tears of joy. They thought they were making a punk record.❞ Buy Friend Lisa’s new book about the Go-Go’s (or her other new book about the failures of pop culture).
