VOL 4, NO 7
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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. / ✌️
