VOL 5, NO 9
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All for raught. / I’m locked into TimeHop, an app that surfaces “On This Day” content from your phone and social media accounts. As I’ve killed more and more of those accounts, the app was left doing what the Photos app already does on its own — “Here’s pictures from this day.” Normally I’d delete an app that’s become superfluous to my phone’s default functions, but I’m on a nine-year streak with TimeHop. That’s 3,306 consecutive days popping it open, according to the final screen after I swipe through all the photos. No way I’m stopping now!
Last week, I remembered that older versions of Pop Loser cross-posted to a set-it-and-forget-it Tumblr clone. I plugged that into TimeHop and now I get to see my old near-daily posts.
The result has been both embarrassing and infuriating.
At no point in my life have I particularly enjoyed the me from 10–15 years ago. 27 year old me hated 17 year old me. 37 year old me would have a lot of things to say to 27 year old me. 47 year old me doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. Embarrassing ideas, bad writing and an annoying enthusiasm for the things that have wrought the ruin of, you know, society and the world and everything.
Even more frustrating is the fact that most of the links don’t work. It’s just a collection of 404s and broken redirects. Some of that isn’t my fault; linkrot is everywhere as our collective history gets bought, sold, re-filed, sunsetted and ultimately deleted. I regret my own stupid decision to rely on third-party link shorteners and click trackers. More so, I hate my own complicity in creating this tangled mess of entropy and decay.
Every younger version of me remains a fucking idiot.
Related things: The subversive hyperlink. ❝Links form the whole. Without links, there is no whole. No links means no web, only silos. Isolation. The absence of connection.❞ / The Internet Archive has now saved over 1-trillion webpages. / More about the pressure to reveal the owner(s) of Archive.today. / ✌️
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Erased de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, 1953
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Confusions. / 🏬 Shopping malls are the Roman ruins of our civilization. ❝I have never ached for a store before — yet the enormous corporate shopping mall, in dying, has become something moving. Melancholic yet mundane, it now functions as a safe space to go and get lost in my own thoughts. Is it the freedom that I like or the 1980s big-box kitsch of the place, which now feels like some liminal waiting room? Maybe I like the mall simply for the rare and singular holiness of a space — any space — that is right on the verge of emptiness.❞ / 🧠 Welcome to the golden age of stupidity. / 🔪 How private equity killed media. ❝Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like.❞ / 🗄️ The Byte magazine visual archive. / 💾 DocType, a magazine with code for 10 web apps. / 🤫 A world without Spotify? / 👾 Play Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 in your browser. (Saving this for the holidays.) / Microsoft has open sourced the Zork games. / 🍁 AI can’t be CanCon. / 📻 College radio is still cool. / 🎼 Stars Of the Lid forever. / 📖 Parasocial is Cambridge’s word of the year. / 🚧 public.monster, an homage to 90s ~/PUBLIC_HTML hosting. / 🛠️ Koolyz, free online tools for everyone. / 🎨 Color Palette Pro, a colour palette… for pros. / 📊 How pop music fell in love with socialist infographics. / 🔠 The return of the skinny serif. / 🐅 Calvin & Hobbes is 40! / 🍽️ Who was the foodie? ❝Preparing, serving, and eating food is now too often only a prelude to posting. Being a foodie is no longer about experience and knowledge. Documentation is in; expertise is out.❞
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Explorations. / Sometime last year I encountered Jamie Branch’s album, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)). It’s jazz and it’s folk. It’s sometimes weird and often beautiful. But mostly it was just one of those albums that came along at exactly the right time to hit me straight in my feels. I played the shit out of it and was really sad to learn she’s died two years earlier at the age of 39. There is a new re-release of her second album, FLY OR DIE II: bird dogs of paradise, now available. That’s mostly only interesting in you want the slick vinyl version, but it’s also a really great album and it seemed like a good time to link to both.
