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.
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. / ✌️
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.
Harry times. / Every few years since the internet came along Marshall McLuhan has moment and guys like me name little parts of our website after things he said because we are all so very clever. Harold Innis, the other great Canadian thinker on communications, has almost no moments at all, but probably should.
❝What Innis doesn’t offer is much hope that we’ll be able to change course. His writing on communication is melancholic in tone and pessimistic in thrust. He saw present-mindedness as a comfortable trap. By foreclosing the long view, it blinds us to what we’ve lost. It breeds an arrogant belief in the present’s superiority to the benighted past. Fashionable orthodoxies take hold of the public mind, as thought begins to run in the ‘grooves’ carved out by the dominant media channels. Though Innis devoted his career to exploring the culture of the West, he also sensed its demise. ‘Concern with the position of Western civilization in the year 2000 is unthinkable,’ he wrote in 1951. ‘Each civilization has its own methods of suicide.‘❞
Oh. Bummer.
Related: Some good Innis bias of communication examples:
Space bias: The memes will continue
Time bias: Graffiti limbo. ❝The graffiti in the library carrels ‘reveals conversations playing out in slow motion between otherwise isolated crammers. It voices the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary college students striving to leave their mark on a large and sometimes impersonal institution.‘❞
Suicide / Andy Warhol / 1964
Confusions. / ⚱️ Val Kilmer, Richard Chamberlain and George Foreman died. More: ❝Ali, the alleged punch-taker, was actually up on every card by multiple points after seven rounds; one judge didn’t give Foreman a single round that night. The real story is that the fight lasted into the 8th only because Foreman withstood several fistic barrages from Ali that would have floored anybody without his tungsten chin.❞ / 👾 The complete Infocom archive. / WikiAsteroids, Asteroids powered by real-time Wikipedia edits. / ♟️ Real-time chess. / 🪟 The 50 best things Microsoft has made. (I fucking hate hate hate that fucking keyboard.) / 🔗 Linkding, self-hosted bookmarks (or: How is it possible I still miss and long for Ma.gnolia after all these years?). / 📝 Bored of it. / Poetical, poetry only readable through your calendar. / 🤘 Trailer for Pavements, the Pavement movie. / Musical DNA. / 📺 They started on soap operas. / ✌️
Private properly. / Some mornings if I wake up an hour or two early, I drink coffee and surf YouTube. This is about 90% of my YouTube time. If you’re the same, I recommend Andy Anderson skateboarding videos. I don’t even watch that many skate videos, but that kid is a fucking poet on wheels.
Speaking of YouTube, I’ve been on a privacy kick lately (which is annoying because I’m also on an anti-algorithm kick and the “Canada rules” kick that’s going around (which is more of a “USA sucks” kick for me because I deplore patriotism)… it’s a lot of kicks — too many, really — is my point) and have started playing with FreeTube, which is a standalone YouTube player — effectively YouTube without the prostate exam (or, if you don’t care about privacy but do want to remove minor annoyances from your life, without ads). It’s cool so far and gave me an excuse to clean up my subscriptions and playlists.
I’ve also been trying StartPage for search and as a browser on my phone. The search is nice enough, though because it pulls results from other search engines it suffers from the same declining usefulness of results that all search engines have right now. The app is neat, but is taking some getting used to and has some annoying missing features, like a reading list that syncs back to my laptop, and a lot of missing gestures I’m used to from using mobile Safari forever.
Remember when we could use the internet and just watch some cool kickflips without jumping through all these hoops? We didn’t know how good we had it.
Santa Cruz Skateboards / Robert Williams
Confusions. / 📰 The wizard of vinyl is in Kansas. Who knew. / 🤖 AI and the new aesthetics of fascism. ❝Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.❞ / 🎸 There are no bands anymore. / ⌨️ Blood Typers, finally horror comes for typing tutors. / 🎨 Hue.tools. / Dali’s VD posters. / 📸 Owls in towels. / What did Hubble see on your birthday? / Brock Davis Insta. / 🎞️ The thing that I hate (“new literalism”) about a lot of movies right now. ❝It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically. This strikes me as a blatant redefinition of art itself.❞ / I’m Not a Robot. / I am trapped in the Criterion closet. / 💾 Save things in Markdown. / 📱 It is as if you are on your phone. / ✌️
Pod Loser. / I Assure You I’m Not Having Any Fun At All, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: Queens Of the Stone Age, Viagra Boys, Young Fathers, Lyrics Born, Santigold, Anamanaguchi, Problem Patterns, The Caezars, The Smiths, shower curtain, Eric's Trip, Fugazi, The Vaselines, Laura Jane Grace, Hot Hot Heat, HotWax, The Wombats. Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
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.)
Vandalised Phone Box / Banksy / 2005
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.
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. / ✌️
Comfortably dumb. / The problem is always people. Always. We are good at a lot of things, but somehow also bad at everything. We are stupid. We repeat our mistakes again and again. We never learn, mostly because we don’t especially want to. Learning is hard. Ignorance is bliss. I is tired.
Dumping a gogabazillion dollars into AI remains an obviously dumb idea. Adding quote-tweets to Mastodon is probably a dumb idea. Electing pretty much anyone to anything is never a good idea. See? Terrible things are everywhere and they are because people, generally, fucking suck. We are always, always, always the problem.
Not you, though. You’re great. Enjoy some links!
”The Girl with a Pearl Earring bleeding from her eyes and ears” / AI Generated / 2025
Confusions. / ☄️ Are we doomed yet?, asteroid impact probability. Related: So about that asteroid. / 👾 RetroFab, a collection of playable old-school handheld games. / Mike Tyson finally beaten in under 2 minutes. / Dragonsweeper. / Little Sisyphus. / ♟️ Blunder Chess. / “The Pinball Philosophy”. / ⚱️ Tom Robbins and David Edward Byrd died. / 🎨 Floor796. / Monospace, an ASCII art generator. / Essential Vermeer. / ✌️
Thievery corporation. / As has been well established here, I am pro-piracy. This is for all sorts of reasons, though mainly it’s an anti-capitalist stance. My general belief is that companies have ceded the right to control access to things by being profiteering assholes who care little about protecting the things they sell or paying the people who create them. (Exceptions, obviously, abound here. If you can pay a person who made a thing directly for the thing they made, do that. Small publishers/producers/distributors? Sure. But as you move up the chain, it gets more and more convoluted and pointless. Where you draw that line is really up to you.)
But also, you know, Facebook can fuck right off. (If you don’t want to click through, the TL;DR is Meta fucking torrented terabytes and terabytes of books to train their AI, which is about as grotesquely ironic a use of content piracy as I can imagine.)
As usual, I don’t really have a point to make here, but I’m watching the growing resentment against companies like Meta and Google and Amazon and Twitter — the people who not only kind of ruined the internet but also hollowed out real-world media/content/art/criticism/whatever in the process — with a perverse interest. I have regrets (as many of us should) for the small role I played championing these technologies way back when, and certainly times seem bleak in the digital (and, certainly more depressingly, actual) world, but I’m wishing on distant stars for a bit of wide-spread shit eating, and perhaps a move back toward a web that we can feel at least a little good about, and maybe even enjoy.
Also: The social web is the web. ❝Support for links is the basic requirement of the web. If you don’t support links not only aren’t you the web, you’re anti-web.❞. ✊
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith / The Vanishing American / 1994
Confusions. / 📰 Failure is not a binary state. / 📱 WikiTok, a TikTok-style interface for exploring random Wikipedia articles. / Paper Apps. / 🛹 On skateboarding and Prufrock. ❝Like a SoCal skater used to the everyday sunshine and convenience of their local park, Prufrock is a professional-level procrastinator. His actions are all in the imagination, putting off decisions to play out possibilities in his head instead. In indecision he finds a limbo where nothing gets done because nothing is done, there is always time ‘for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.’❞ / 🍿 Warner Bros. has started dropping free movies onto YouTube. / 📺 Concrete TV. / An Attack On Titan reading list. / I’ll Save It Myself. / 🎧 Artisanal Japanese record needles. / “Crazy” by Gnarles Barkley, a dramatic reading. / ⚱️ Fay Vincent and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died. / 🔥 The Project Gutenberg eBook of Simple Sabotage Field Manual. / 👾 The Video Game History Foundation library and archive. / A new Donkey Kong thing. / ☠️ Kill Sticky Headers. / Kill book blurbs. / 🥚 How to boil an egg. / ✌️
Pod Loser. / Before, During and (Quite Possibly) After the Fall , a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Reality Pee-Ve. / “I went and hung out with weirdos at a thing” has been my favourite kind of feature since “Big Red Son.” There is a rich history of cruise ship writing, most recently from Gary Shteyngart. Just last week I linked to a fantastic n+1 essay from a ventriloquists’ convention. And now Defector goes to CES (or, I suppose, Zombie CES as it’s not quite what it used to be):
❝Consider the problems that, taken altogether, add up to our shameful and unworkable political moment. It’s the abandonment of not just any sense of a common cause but a workable consensus reality; it’s the swamping of any collective effort or any nascent social consciousness in favor of individuals assiduously optimizing and competing and refining and selling themselves, not so much alongside the rest of humanity as in constant competition with all of it; it’s the rich buffing all human friction from every aspect of their days so that they can more cleanly and passively move through them, a circuit of Teslas circling silently underground forever; it’s everyone else, somewhere offscreen, leaving whatever those restless protagonists have ordered on the doorstep and getting tipped 10 percent for it; it’s an efflorescence of dead-eyed scams and ever taller fences.❞
About six years ago I went to a weed conference, which was an odd mix of money-dudes, marketing losers (this was the group I was in), hippies and obvious charlatans, and it is now the great regret of my life that at the time I was a copywriter for a weed company (i.e., a marketing loser) and not someone looking to spin off 7,000 words of depressing-but-amusing observations. So it goes or something.
Fine realities / Rene Magritte / 1964
Confusions. / 🎞️ More Defector: When did movies stop moving? ❝They seem to lack any sense of cognitive completion by the artist themselves, which translates to the screen. They read instead as sketches, as elevator pitches, as high concepts an executive got excited about without much concern for the follow through—Nosferatu in color! Hunter Schafer in the Alps! Nicolas Cage doing whatever the fuck! You could stick shots from these films into a View-Master and I imagine it would be an improvement.❞ / 💸 The rise and fall of Canadian Tire money. / 💻 Marginalia Search for non-commercial content (and, frankly, better search results than I’m getting from DDG and Google right now). / IndieBlog, random blog posts from the indieweb. / 🎨 Uncut.wtf, a catalogue of free type. / 📸 Who took the “Napalm Girl” photo? / I kinda want this Instax camera. / 🗺️ A Better World, change the past and fuck shit up. / 👾 Duck Hunt(er). / A cozy video game to explain cozy video games. / 📺 Watch Something Wonderful. / 50 years of SNL music.
Pod Loser. / Kinky Willy, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
★
Four the fecal, by the fecal. / I’m not interested in telling you how to live your life. You wanna keep scrolling Twitter, dunking on halfwits and sharing every thought rattling around in your head, fill your boots. But I’m (finally) out. (And this is not to slag on the thoughts rattling around in your head, the only thing I’m more tired of than other people’s opinions on everything is my own.) My tweets are closed, my Facebook shuttered (with the exception of Messages and WhatsApp because I haven’t figured out how to peel myself away from things being organized for my children (never mind the Meta Horizons account necessary for my son’s Quest headset, which I enjoy “fishing” on… I know, hypocrisy abounds, but I’m working on it)), my Instagram nuked, and Threads was boring af anyway (unless you have a really strong (and possibly unhealthy) opinion on The Last Jedi or were traumatized by Superman III). I enjoy Mastodon, but I really need to find more people to follow. Bluesky feels like Twitter and the screen-cap-dunk people are getting through my many filters, so I don’t actually read it very much. (Okay, maybe I’m telling those people how to live their lives — stop it, motherfuckers, stop stop stop, you’re just making everyone else miserable.) That’s probably enough parentheticals for now.
So what do we all do with this new time we have been gifted by ignoring rapid-fire news and even-rapid-firer takes and replies and quips and dopamine hits? I don’t know, get a hobby. Buy a radio. Go outside or take a nap or learn to bake. I don’t care. Be free and happy. Take some of your fucks and give them somewhere else. Like I said, I don’t want to tell you how to do you, but it’s going to be a long four years and we could all use a little insulation from, you know, all that shit. Call it self-care, if that’s your kink.
Related: Is social media more like cigarettes or junk food? ❝History suggests that our collective approach to social media may be approaching a fork in the road. […] These laws are more like junk-food regulations than cigarette bans. They aim to make the product in question safer and give families more tools to manage their harms, but ultimately keep them available to all ages.❞ I’m starting to think it’s more like punching yourself in the face for fun, but milage clearly varies.
Welcome to Volume 4 (technically untitled, but "4" is what the heads call it). It’s earlier than I thought, and that’ll either go good or bad.
☆
The Social Model / Dr Alesha Sivartha / 1898
☆
Confusions. / 📰 Portrait of the artist as an Amazon reviewer. / A weekend at the ventriloquist convention. ❝Dicky’s daddy’s hand was shoved somewhere near Dicky’s brain stem. My throat was in my stomach. Their hearts were in vaudeville. But we were all in Kentucky.❞ / I am an Apple News+ article. ❝You find a link and think you’ve done it—that you’ve successfully pierced my skin—but no. This website has a paywall too. I relish your devilish smirk falling. If this were a chess match, I’d say, “Check,” but this is so much more. This is lust.❞ / Paywall Reader, a “legal” way to bypass paywalls. / 📚 Standard Ebooks has added some new titles entering the public domain this year, including Brown On Resolution by CS Forester (I love boat shit and CSF is the king). / HyperEssays, a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne. / 🗄️ The Public Domain Image Archive. / Nokia Design Archive. / Every Color Ever. / Old Maps Online. / 👾 Online Classic Games, including the OG Civilization. / Atari 2600 Pitfall. / The Visible Zorker, Zork but also inside Zork. / Enochian Chess, chess for 4 players. / Simulation Clicker, I don’t get it, but I watched my 12yo play it for nearly 3 hours. / 📺 MyRetroTVs. / Full episodes of Pop Up Video. / 🎧 Black Candy, a self-hosted music server. / ⚱️ Bob Uecker and David Lynch died (which you almost certainly already know, but I didn’t want it to pass without mention).
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Explorations. / 🍿 Sasquatch Sunset. When I watched this, I was alone and pretty high and spent a good chunk of the movie cackling at the absurdity of it. But it’s been a month and I can’t stop thinking about it, so I think it might actually be a work of genius. / 🎧 Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’. A found 1966 recording finally released. It blew my tits off. Here’s an article with some added context on Slugs’. / 📚 Whale Music. I read this about once per decade and love it more each time. Possibly my favourite ever, certainly in the conversation. (I also read The Plot Against America in December and of course it’s brilliant because Roth, but might be worth revisiting right now specifically.)
✖
A Journal of Innumerable Confusions. / Pop Loser Vol. 1, 2, 3 / Mixtapes / RSS / Podcast
Previously. / Newsletter #001–78, #79–97, #98–113 (2014–2018). / Original blog (2007–2014) and Tumblr clone (2010–2014).
Related. / Vinylslut.FM / PopLoser.TV / 52 Mixtapes
Pod Loser. / 2024: Worst One Yet, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Wrapper’s delight. / I’ve got one more mixtape coming and then I’m wrapping this thing for the year (see what I did there?). I told myself when I kicked off this latest version of Pop Loser back in January that I’d give it a year and see how it felt. It was pretty good. From what I can tell by getting only stats from “hits” (so retro), tens of you have found your way back. I appreciate that. I’ve sorta set this and my social media presence up in a way that cannot and will not ever “do numbers,” so it’s nice that anyone is following along. I should finish the year-end mixtape later this week, and then I’m going dark until at least February and maybe I’ll just wait until spring. And then probably two volumes next year instead of three. Otherwise, I’ll just keep on more or less as I have been.
If you’re reading this, thanks. Sincerely.
Confusions. / 📱Every digital thing you touch probably sucks. ❝Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.❞ / 📰 Classic: Who goes Nazi? / 🌎 Ban TikTok. / ⛓️💥 Public domain 2025 kicks off with Popeye the Slayer Man. / 🍿 Night Flight Plus. (Story.) / Star Wars Grindhouse. / Movie or film? / ⚱️ The Amazing Kreskin died. / ♟️ I’ve been training for Open the Microwave my whole life. / Every board game rulebook sucks. / 🎛️ Feelin’ knobs for content. / 🖥️Mac Pet is cute. / Infinite Stroll is soothing.
Art of bore. / I’ve been thinking about art a lot lately. Mostly it has been in a separating-art-from-artist context, which is stupid idea that I think devalues both, but it leads to a lot of existential “What even is art?” ideas. My initial response to the suggestion people can’t really tell the difference between human- and AI-made art, and, in fact, kind of prefer the AI stuff, was “Jesus fucking Christ what the fuck has happened to people’s fucking brains.” Reading the actual “study” and its “results” and “conclusions” only forced me to jam a few more “fucks” in.
Max Read: ❝In fact, the dental-office “badness” of so much of the A.I. art is precisely why I don’t dispute Alexander’s assertion that people preferred it. Like any LLM output, A.I.-generated images are designed to please, not to provoke. I’ve argued before that these images are, by their nature, almost unavoidably kitsch–comforting, straightforward, accessible, flattering. And people love kitsch!❞
There’s that, but also the whole thing feels designed to trick people, which is infuriating enough, but it also shows a total lack of thinking about what art is, how art is made, and what art is for. There’s another version of this using poetry (further discussed in the Read link above) and fuck fucking fuck I don’t want to talk about it.
The discussion around AI bounces around between genuinely fascinating and wildly stupid, but I don’t think we can understand it in an artistic context because we’re constantly wrestling with our relationship with art, which is kind of the entire point of art. Or at least good art, which is a whole other discussion, but probably one you want to have before you start suggesting a computer can do it at all, never mind better.
As usual, I have no answers to suggest, just things to yell about. But I do keep coming back to this nugget.
I think there might really be something to this idea (though without the religious implications). There’s something people have that computers, at least for now and I think/hope forever, don’t. Shit is keeping me up at night.
Confusions. / 🎨 The Museum Of Bad Art. (Video.) / 🤖 Oops we did it again. / And again. / (But while Pokemon Go might be suspect, Porygon was innocent.) / 🖥️ Microsoft is 50. (The article is fine if you want to read it, but I’m mostly posting it because “Microsoft is 50” kind of stunned me.) / The Bluesky firehose in 3D. / 🍿 Hundreds of Beavers. / 📻 World’s Radio. / 📚 Literature Clock. / 📺 Failed TV pilots. / IMG_0001. ❝Between 2009 and 2012, iPhones had a built-in “Send to YouTube” button in the Photos app. Many of these uploads kept their default IMG_XXXX filenames, creating a time capsule of raw, unedited moments from random lives.❞ / 🧑🍳 25 most influential cookbooks. / 🏔️ Find the Net Elevation of famous dead people. / 🎞️ Sugar cube advertising.
Social needia. / Yes, I am on Bluesky. And Mastodon. And even Threads, although I mostly hate Threads. I’ve been watching the Bluesky cuddle puddle with fascination and I am enjoying everyone’s enthusiasm, but it feels like a lot of people are running headlong into the same issues we had with Twitter, which was a problematic, usually awful and occasionally dangerous place a long, long time before Elon showed up.
I don’t know, follow your heart, I guess.
But, at the very least, be cautious about the time you’re sinking into building an audience on another privately owned service with buckets of VC cash and no current revenue model, because on a long enough timeline they will probably fuck you. I only say this because they pretty much all have fucked us — Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Reddit, TikTok, etc., etc., etc. Cory Doctorow has thoughts that are worth reading before you’re in too deep.
And probably that moment you’re trying to recapture, that slice of time in internet history (which was really nice and I miss it too), is over forever and while we can mimic those vibes for a short period, the Bluesky push is just a relapse and not a cure for anything.
Confusions. / 📰 If Wikipedia is truth, then what’s happening in Gaza is genocide. ❝Editors supporting the inclusion argued that it met the page’s criteria of events “classified by significant scholarship” as genocide. They also pointed out that the Gaza situation had stronger scholarly consensus than some existing entries on the list, such as the Darfur and Rohingya genocides.❞. / Related: A rupture in time. ❝A year: a calendar, or weight, or knife. Each body an archive, dense and beautiful as life itself—and more of them crushed, starved, incinerated every day. For the perpetrators of the genocide, temporality is something to be mastered, bent.❞ / 🗒️ A nice story about technology. 🪑 Mid-century modern, I love you but you’re bringing me down. ❝It’s not the fault of a bunch of attractive designs that this proved to be a mirage, even a fraud. But mid-century modern was wrapped up in that delusion, even contributed to it. And the design industry enjoyed, and continues to enjoy, the ride just a little too much.❞ / 🍿 Cult Cinema Classics. / World War II, a supercut. / Yes, it is okay to pirate (some (but kinda most)) movies. ❝The work that survives, it turns out, is the work that is out there to be seen.❞ / An analysis of title drops in movies. / Movies that sound like Fortnite locations. / 💿 Tinfoil, early recorded sounds. / 🎧 I don’t have Spotify. / Quincy Jones tribute on BBC 6. / 🎹 Draw.audio. / 📻 RadioBrowser. / 🎨 Fakes news. / Do dogs know what art is? / ⚱️ Elwood Edwards died. / ⚾️ The science of baseball mud. / 🍄 The Mushroom Colour Atlas.
Confusions. / 🔗 The banality of Pop Loser. ❝Recommendations online are ubiquitous—we have posted our likes on the Internet since the earliest days of Facebook profiles—but “taste,” with its suggestion of deeper knowledge, perhaps, of why or how something is good, transforms the act of recommending into something specialized, with an aura of irreplaceability.❞ / 🍿 I have been saying this for years: the future of movies is just old movies. / 🤖 When does the robot decide your nipple is female? / 🪐 Manifesto of the committee to abolish outer space. ❝For unimaginable eons there will only be a few scattered particles sailing across a total void. If two happen to meet, a single positronium atom might form, float briefly, and decay again, and this single atom might be the first thing to happen in the entire universe for millions of years.❞ / 🧠 When does your brain decide to be afraid? ❝Honnold is history’s greatest ever climber in the free solo style, meaning he ascends without a rope or protective equipment of any kind. […] The concerned scientist leaned in close, shot a glance toward Honnold, and said, “That kid’s amygdala isn’t firing.”❞ / 📺 David Lynch Presents Interview Project. / 📸 The frightening familiarity of late-nineties office photos. / 📱 Homescreen Confessions. / NextDoor after the rapture. ❝Very suspicious man with wings seen on North Elm yelling about end of the world. Hate that mental patients are just free to harass whomever and the police can’t do anything about it.❞ / Lynx.boo is a simple free linktree. / BulletJournal.click is a simple free task manager. / 💻 Haunted domains. / ArchiveBox, self-hosted internet archiving. / Fav.farm turns emojis into favicons. / 📖 The Met has over 1,000 art books you can download for free. / Chicago turns 18. (I’m still rocking a 15.)/ 👾 PacCam (prepare to feel silly). / Video games and libraries. / 🙈 Math: still humourless. / ⚱️ Murray McCory and Paul Morrissey died. / 🎧 The new not-Pitchfork is called Hearing Things. (Story.) / Future Music is no more. I was a subscriber for a few years just for all the free software samples. / 🌪️ Redbox and the Twister bug.
Pod Loser. / Marshall On the Beach, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Two things I strongly believe in: public media and portable content. Which is why I'm more than a little dismayed that the RSS feeds from CBC News stopped working over a month ago. I figured it was a known issue and they'd get to it, but then three weeks went by and I started to get an uneasy feeling. Eventually, I submitted a support ticket, but I kind of knew what the answer was going to be and I was right:
❝Unfortunately accessing our content via RSS feed is not popular with many users and so resources are generally being allocated to other areas and fixes for glitches with current RSS feeds are not being prioritized. I'm sorry I don't have better news.❞
Fucking hell, the internet is a goddamned disaster right now.
Related: For so many reasons, you should be using an RSS reader. ❝It's still true that the new, good internet will require a movement to overcome the collective action problems and the legal barriers to disenshittifying things. Almost nothing you do as an individual is going to make a difference. But using RSS will!❞
Also related: the new Reeder app is really nice.
Confusions. / 📺 Lost in Netflix. ❝What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.❞ / The cartoon that still haunts me. ❝The demise of Bambi’s mother, the bear fight from The Fox and The Hound, and Mufasa plummeting into a stampede in The Lion King are among some of the most traumatizing moments in the history of kids’ animated feature films. Yet, none of those moments hold a candle to Watership Down, a movie about murder bunnies that has scarred an entire generation.❞ / Take home your own Redbox kiosk. / Frank Fritz died. / 💻 A good and fun conspiracy theory. / Trends in AI: The archival look. ❝Flat and slick is being replaced with archival graininess. Photorealism is being modulated with the illustrative. The Archival Look is exceptional artifice, an attempt to rescue aura from techno-sterility. It’s the aesthetic equivalent of digging through your flatscreen’s options menu to turn off ‘auto-smoothing’—that annoying preset that makes everything you watch look like Masterpiece Theatre.❞ / 📓 Control is controlled by its need to control. ❝Let me begin by insisting that I learned nothing.❞ / ♟️ Kurt Vonnegut's board game. / 🎧 The Divorce Tapes. / 🗄️ The 88x31 Archive. / A collection of active internet forums. / 📻 Bop Spotter. I really hope people start setting these things up in public spaces all over the world. / Dookie, now available for GameBoy. / Keep radio in cars. / There is no news tonight. (About.) / 🏀 Every outdoor basketball court in the USA. / Sports photos used to look a lot cooler. / 🎨 The case against Roy Lichtenstein. / When destroying art is the art (or, the art of being an asshole).
Current internet trend: escaping the algorithm. From "the collapse of self-worth in the digital age:"
❝We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. When we scroll, what are we looking for?❞
I have sworn off being one of those smug assholes who tells you how to lifehack your media consumption, but I am now going to be one of those smug assholes who tells you how to lifehack your media consumption.
I have a sure-fire, never-fails trick for enjoying hand-picked ("curated," if you will, though normally I would not) music — new and old — instead of being a slave to the algorithmic tyranny of the Spotibrain, and it doesn't require resorting to silly extremes because this is a problem we actually solved a long-ass time ago: listen to the fucking radio.
BBC Sounds (primarily BBC 6, where I need to once again mention Iggy Pop has his own Sunday afternoon show) is the default music in my home. CBC Music (you'll always be "Radio 2" to me) feels like it's offering less programming than ever, but the programs they do have are quite good. Radio Garden is a great way to spend an evening at home with or without drugs. Now that iPhones can play music and Shazam at the same time, you can build spectacular playlists.
You're welcome.
Confusions. / 💻 A theory of how people navigate the web. / Related: Stop drinking from the toilet! / How to monetize a blog. / 🍽️ How the web changed the language of recipes. ❝Perhaps at some future date we’ll declare that on that day in April, the trend of naming recipes with conversational adjectives officially died.❞ / 🗄️ Another reason why redundant and widespread archiving is important: All of the music industry hard drives are starting to die. ❝Entropy wins, sometimes much faster than you’d expect.❞ / 🍿RareFilmm. / 📻 1.4Tb of BBC Essential Mixes. / 📱The desperation of the Instagram photo dump. ❝Nonchalance achieved chalantly is nothing new, but the way it is being encouraged on social media today reflects increasing structural limitations to life online.❞ / ⚱️Fredric Jameson died. / 📰 Vice returns to print (joining SPIN and Playboy). / 🚀 The Most Accurate Online Ruler. / Lottery Simulator. (Using my family's birthdays as numbers, I ran it through ~10-million PowerBall simulations and won $4 twice.) / For the my Wordle peeps: Eightile. / Pay Once Alternatives to popular subscription apps. / Free font: Comic Mono. / Radio Static.
Pod Loser. / Blue Sighs & Sunny Baes, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
At some point we all agreed that open access to all human knowledge was a good thing and accordingly made libraries a staple of every city, every town and every school. It was one of the rare areas we managed to mostly avoid fucking up for a really, really long time. Open Library is, in every sense and by every definition, a library. The only real difference is that it operates at the scale of the web, which is more or less the vision of the Library of Alexandria fully realized. Woo hoo, we did it! Nice work, everybody!
Enter capitalism; the big book publishers want it all stopped because Open Library presents "a fundamental devaluation of authors’ and publishers’ intellectual and creative investments," which U.S. courts are so far agreeing with despite it being a very stupid point. Even worse, the ruling implies that all libraries are, in fact, bad.
I love my publisher (small publishers are great and do a lot operating in a system that constantly punishes them), but books are absolutely broken, both as a functional business model and as a means of creating and distributing art and ideas. Libraries are the last institution putting value on them at all.
We really had our shit together there for a bit, didn't we?
Confusions. / 📰 The death of Red Lobster. / How Moleskine won in the digital era. / This Žižek profile veers into sex way more than you'd think or necessarily want. ❝He has brought me an umbrella; he also has his own – he pats his top pocket – which in Žižek language is “of anal [pronounced annal] character”, meaning compact and easy to hide.❞ / 🗄️ ROMhacking.net is shutting down (Archive). / Citizen DJ. / 📺 Girls rewatch as existential crisis. ❝Whatever’s happening isn’t time, it’s just duration, and its only measure is decay.❞ / 🎨 Street Ghosts. / 💻 Merklemap, a subdomain search engine. / Free font: Departure Mono. / ChatGPT sucks at summarizing. / 📱InPress is a news app that is also a dating app and the only legit Twitter replacement. /🌜I'm going to start operating on Moon Time.
Pod Loser. / Today, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Pod Loser. / Facts & Matters, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
I used to know how computers work. If something broke, either inside my laptop or on my website, I could usually figure it out and fix it. It was a thing I enjoyed doing. Somewhere along the way, I stopped knowing how things work and stopped wanting to figure it out. Part of that is that I bought a bunch of products and started using websites that "just work." Part of it was just me getting older and devoting more of that time to things like learning to make bread, reading books and having a few time-sucking kids. It happens.
Last winter, the arcade cabinet I built a couple years ago crapped out. Screen went black and it wouldn't turn on. I poked at it for about 10 minutes and then walked away, because trying to relearn how I made it work in the first place was too daunting, never mind troubleshooting software and hardware in a rigorous way. Too hard! Too much!
One of the time-sucking children finally complained — he had been waiting months to work on his Pac-Man score. Fair enough. The easiest solution, I figured, would be to buy the same model Raspberry Pi and just swap in the SD card and plug it in, but I didn't know if that was possible. I found a forum, signed up and asked, getting a few pretty quick answers that amounted more or less to "Maybe... but it's probably not that simple." Then one guy suggested I replace the power supply — an $8 plug — because reasons (the specifics don't matter here, but I assure you every response I got was fucking thorough. Sure enough, that's all it was and boy did I feel stupid and lazy. Don't tell my kids.
I hope you enjoyed your summer. Welcome to Pop Loser Vol. 3.
Confusions. / 💻 Info-determinism and the ruin of society. (I added the "ruin" bit.) ❝Until very recently, the cultural cocoon we lived in was woven by other humans. Going forward, it will be increasingly designed by computers.❞ / One Million Screenshots. / Twitter '95. / Is Ben scrolling TikTok right now? / The internet's fridge. / 🗄️ Radio Shack Catalogs (dot com). / MTV News is now preserved and searchable. / Public Work, a search engine for public domain content. / The People's Graphic Design Archive. / A complete visual guide to Sony MiniDisc Blank Media (1992-2004). / 🎨 Did Duchamp steal his urinal? / 📰 SPIN and Playboy are returning to print. Music and pornography on the internet will plod along mostly not noticing. / 👾 What beats rock?
A Journal of Innumerable Confusions. / Pop Loser Vol. 3 (in progress).
Vol. 1, 2. / RSS feed. / Podcast feed.
Previously. / Newsletter #001–78, #79–97, #98-113 (2014–2018). / Original blog (2007–2014) and Tumblr clone (2010–2014).
Related. / Vinylslut.FM / PopLoser.TV / 52 Mixtapes
This is officially a wrap on Volume 2. Sorry it went out with a whimper and not a roar, but summer happens. Enjoy your vacay, kids!
Food fight for thought (and other confusions). / 📰 Two decades of MTV News was just memory holed. (Archive) / 🎨 On the PhD in (and general hollowing of) "creativity." ❝The desire was not to elevate the already nonconformist or arty, but to convince the normies to conceptualize themselves as unconventional, creative, quirky – in the hopes that they could be encouraged to “think outside the box” of what a pesticide is supposed to be or what a weapon of war could accomplish.❞ / Banksy without Banksy. / 🍽️ The people who fight at dinner parties. ❝I am pleased to see the dinner party as an occasion to intensify dissent rather than merely react to it.❞ / 🎸 Queen Songs. / The Exotica Project (and other collections). / Dance Like David Byrne, a zine. / ⚱️ Françoise Hardy and Sika died. / 📻 Free sound effects from the BBC. / Also: 5 hours of the Shipping Forecast. / 👾 Moondrop Isle. / Level Devil. / 🍿 Search and play phrases from movies. / 🧮 Calculator words.
I tamagotchu babe... / I recently cut my phone back to the bone, deleting any and every app that I found myself using to mindlessly fill time. All social media gone, Slack can stay, all news apps out, Kindle and Instapaper kept, games gone except chess and the New York Times Games app, and so on. I installed Dumbify. I had an honest — brutal, frankly — conversation with my notifications. And it's been nice. I am not telling you any of this because I want to promote some kind of opinion on doomscrolling and distractions and squeezing the juice out of every minute of your life. You do you. I am mentioning it only because I thought of my relationship with my phone a lot while reading about the terror of Tamagotchi.
❝It was the year 2010, and I had been given a Tamagotchi. I was surprised by this, because I was under the impression that Meredith really didn’t care for me. But oh, how wrong I was. Meredith fucking hated me. Her gift was not a cute piece of nerd nostalgia, but a brutal PsyOp designed to drive me to the brink of despair. And it worked.❞
...and other confusions. / 👾 Utopia Must Fall is Missile Command meets Galaga meets Asteroids. / Pnogstrom. / 💻 Does Google know how Google works? Signs point to no. / But also: Dear G-Diary. / The Backrooms have been located. / What is Medium? / A decade of China's internet content no longer exists. / 🚶What was "normcore"? ❝Normcore was dad jeans, New Balances, Patagonia fleeces, tube socks in Birkenstocks, Jerry Seinfeld, a regular degular baseball cap, a romantic hybrid of real and imagined suburban Americana.❞ Also: the oral history. / 🖕 Spotify bricks their own device because fuck you. / Rolling Stone cancels lifetime subscriptions because fuck you. / 🎨 The blackmarket for Taco Bell art. / 🍿 Trailer for BRATS. (FTR, my crush on Ally Sheedy is entering its fifth decade.) / Starring the Computer. / Planet Of the Apes goes to the mall. / 🗄️ The Hydrant Directory.
Pod Loser. / Call Me, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Apologies for the posting gap. I had better things to do, none of which were particularly interesting. I've had a new mixtape roughed out for two weeks... maybe tomorrow.
Robot rot (and other confusions). / ♟️ Chess on the internet is mostly like everything else on the internet: predictably awful. ❝Chess' problems aren't unique. But it is uniquely positioned to act as an accelerant for the internet's worst impulses: sexism, abuse, cheating, elitism, and toxic nerdery.❞ / Related: Everybody hates Hans. / Less related: Scrabble, Anonymous. ❝The unwilling, unconscious anagramming of words is the primary side effect of a life devoted to Scrabble. This is ultimately what the game is about: memorizing words with no concern for their meaning.❞ / 🍿 3,000 free movies on YouTube. / Roger Corman's Fantastic Four. / Filmgrab, collected stills from films. / 💻 Dead internet, zombie internet and vampire internet, oh my. / Related: Rotting internet. / Also related: The ruin of DeviantArt. / Google fixed. / The Communal Plot, a daily visualization we all build together. / 🛻 Have you seen a Cybertruck yet? ❝If there is anything to take away from this, it is that I once had an attribute that might have allowed me to make it extremely big in the contemporary automotive industry, which is "acting like a precocious doofus child while saying possibly-false car-related stuff in a way that favorably inclined observers found compelling." That can get you pretty far in the industry. I know this in a way that I didn't just a few days ago, because, finally, I have seen a Tesla Cybertruck with my own eyes.❞ / ⚾ Hero. / 📺 Harmony Korine on Letterman. / 📱 Point your phone at your Lego and Brickit will design stuff to build.
Quoth the penguin (and other confusions). / 🍿 Streaming media in prison is like streaming media outside of prison, it just has more layers of people gouging their fair share. ❝Each prisoner is assigned a tablet free of charge, but to watch films, we must buy a bundle of minutes. I can buy only 500 minutes of the Premium App Bundle for $10, which hosts three film apps. We must use all 500 minutes or forfeit them. New releases are available on the Premium Access Pass, which allows us to buy only 200 minutes for $8. The Premium Pass Bundle expires in 96 hours.❞ But also... / ...the comfortable problem of Mid TV. / Locally: The NFB is running out of money and soon we will have no nice Canadian things. / 📻 Normal music reviews don't make sense for Taylor Swift. ❝The Swiftverse is thousands of comments under Instagram posts, an additional three hundred and thirty-two million dollars for the NFL, a worldwide run on bracelet beads, and the Fed wondering why inflation persists.❞ / Fall asleep to the dulcet tones of the Northwoods Baseball Radio Network. / Some mixtapes. / 📰 Five Dials is done, but the entire archive is online. (Or skip to the Camus issue.) / ✍️ Poe's "The Pingu." ❝While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping, as of flippers briskly slapping, slapping on my igloo floor.❞ / Wes Anderson's Montblanc ad. / 🖥️ The internet may be in ruin, but I’m always a sucker for interesting ideas wrapped in tortured metaphor. ❝Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.❞ / Copy the shrug emoji. / User Inyerface. / ⚱️ Alice Munro, Frank Stella, Steve Albini, Rex Murphy and Roger Corman died. / 💼 The story of 427 suitcases from A New York State Mental Hospital. / 👾 The Delta emulator is the new best app on my phone.
There is a type of dystopian fiction where garish advertising is embedded in the landscape—a necessary part of the fabric of an ironic shitty future world where poor people risk some combination of dignity and life for money. In these fictions—Minority Report or Idiocracy or a Black Mirror—the ads are pervasive, obnoxious and occasionally legally required. It's satire! A cynical look at where we are headed. A warning to turn back before it's too late. Don't build the Torment Nexus, dummies!
Sure glad I don't live in a society capable of creating great things only to hollow them out in the name of slogans and jingles and clicks and money. And if I did, wouldn't it be nice to have someone to blame?
❝After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.❞
Buy the book (and other confusions) / 📰 The Onion is saved! / 📚 The most depressing thing you'll read today: Nobody buys books. ❝The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).❞ / 🌿 Weed strain name generator. Fun fact: I used to get paid to name weed strains and I should really examine every choice I made that took me away from that. / 🎶 When do we stop finding new music? ❝Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences.❞ / They found the unfindable song. (Spoiler: it was porn.) / Beatbox with Henry Kissinger. / 📺 All of Freakazoid is now on the Internet Archive. / 👾 As the Crow Flies is a simple browser game that looks like my beloved Vectrex. / The entire universe in Minecraft.
Pod Loser. / Alone Together, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
I put these posts together using a running text file on my phone, which I then publish when it feels full enough. After a few months of playing with form, the text file’s structure includes this space up top. An opener! A place for my thoughts and writing that’s separate from what’s below and clearly more important because it’s first. In the last post, its said “Happy Rex Manning Day” and then referenced the deleted and re-inserted blue-cheese-salad-dressing-on-the-dick scene. My thoughts! My writing! They can’t all be bangers, I guess.
Anyway, here’s a pretty great takedown of columnists and columns, so, at least for today, I can fill this space with a related and amusing pull quote.
❝Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. […] The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions.❞
Read Swish, boo Swish (and other confusions) / 🛳️ Time is a flat circle (though, as my wife says, all circles are flat) and we’ve come all the way back around to cruise ships are a metaphor for the end of society. (Again!) / 📸 Jamie Livingston’s daily Polaroids are back. / 📰 Kara Swisher’s attempt at retconning tech journalism and her rather significant role in its many failures continues to go poorly. ❝The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price.❞ / ⚱️ Peter Higgs and Pat Walsh died. (You don’t know Pat, but he was a friends and the best teacher I ever had.) / 🎥 An unintentionally (I think) amusing (or mean) pair of New Yorker movies pieces: John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk and Can a Film Star (who presumably isn’t John Cazale) Be Too Good-Looking? / 🎸 Udio lets you “make” AI music and it’s simultaneously deeply satisfying and deeply concerning. / 📝 Love Song, with Removed Cyst. / 🎹 15-note poly tempo pendulum. / 💩 Dog Poo Golf. / 🏞️ One Minute Park. (Summer goal: contribute a few of these.) / 🗄️ The Fictional Brands Archive. / ⛹️♀️ Sports teams named after technologies. / 👆 QWANJI. / 📺 I also hated Succession and now I have a champion. ❝More people need to admit that this is the central viewing experience of Succession: you were either waiting for a good moment to screen grab and turn into a meme, or you are now watching to understand the deeper meme lore. No one actually talks to each other in this show, every sentence is delivered like a bitter slap in the face. Oh, we’re not supposed to like any of these people? Yeah, I think I got that.❞ / 🚀 Space Trash Signs.
Happy Rex Manning Day to all who celebrate. I hope you like blue cheese.
Pod Loser. / Baseball, a mixtape.
Wieners and losers (and other confusions). / 🤑 It always ends in ads, even for Discord. / 🤡 How Vice fell to pieces. (Spoiler: there are no surprises here. It was dumb people making bad decisions guided entirely by a Silicon Valley capitalist ethos.) ❝One executive described Dubuc’s hires as “a fucking clown show”; another called them “comical”; a third called them “cartoonish”; a fourth called them a “screwball cast of suits”; a fifth told me he’d learned valuable lessons from them about what never to do with a company.❞ / 🤩 An oral history of that Madonna appearance on Letterman. / 🎸 A new Prince track dropped. / 🌭 You had me at “Big Hot Dog.” ❝Now I know that a billion of anything is so many that it’s impossible to really comprehend, so let’s examine some other stats Big Hot Dog provides.❞ / 🐟 Phil A. O’Fish. / ⚱️ Joe Flaherty died. / 🎨 Trench art. / 🤖 The robots are archiving the work of the robots and I’m hopeful pretty soon we won’t need people at all.
Et two? / There is no rhyme or reason to the volume structure here other than I like counting things and it builds in breaks I can take basically whenever. Baseball was starting, thus ending Vol. 1 so I could do some fantasy drafting and watch a lot of games. But that’s all done, and after yesterday I may never watch another baseball game again anyway, so let’s get on with number two.
Let them eat snake (and other confusions). / 🎸 Digging into the Rolling Stone 500. The nobleness of this project is matched only by its scientificicity. ❝Beyond accounting for new releases, there must be other factors influencing Rolling Stone’s choices. This project uses Rolling Stone album rankings – twenty years apart in time – to determine what influences ‘greatness’.❞ / 🗿 The future will be weird af. (More on CoreCore.) / 🐍 I hope you like the taste of python. / 🎨 There’s a new Keith Haring biography. / 🤑 Too late capitalism. ❝The odd thing about the undying attachment to the term “late capitalism,” of which Kornbluh’s book is but the latest manifestation, is that it refers to an epoch that ended, by all serious accounts, in the 1970s.❞ (The best line of the review comes late: ❝’The masses of people must implement transformative solutions like decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism with democratic internationalism.’ OK. Does roasting Maggie Nelson bring us closer to this desideratum?❞) / 🥃 Why is the Angostura bitters label bigger than the bottle? / 🗄️ UbuWeb, a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. / 👁️ Ways Of Seeing, always worth revisiting. / 🎞️ Movie Posters Perfected. / 🧑🚀 NASA made a TTRPG and it looks kinda fun.
End notes. / That’s a wrap on Vol. 1—I have fantasy baseball to think about. I think I’ve got this more or less figured out now. Back soon.
Pirates are in this year. / Many, many years ago while visiting my then-girlfriend/now-wife in Toronto, I bought a book about a pirate radio station in Los Angeles. It was delightful and stuck with me to the extent that my next novel, should I ever finish it, is set in a very appropriated version of KBLT. I just learned they are making a documentary version and are currently Kickstarting funds mainly for music licensing, which is obviously essential to a story about pirate radio in the 1990s.
Meat the rich. / 🏎️ The deleted Road & Track piece everyone is loving is very good. ❝If you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race.❞ / Previously: Polo is my life. 📬 TinyLetter was neat and small and therefore had to die. / 🎥 What exactly makes a movie a Criterion film? ❝There was one producer who wrote this 10-page internal memo about why we should not do Ghostbusters.❞ / 🗄️ MAD Magazine issue 01–550. / 📻 NYE Underground, another place for old Art Bell episodes. / 🐊 The Godzilla Meditation Series. / 🖨️ I miss the internet, a zine. / 💿 I’m gonna make you a mix CD with 60,000,000 or so songs.
What was Vice? / If a tree falls in the woods and someone pulps it into a 90s’ magazine, is that a DOs or a DON’Ts?
Vice is, for all intents and purposes, dead.
For much of its history, Vice (the royal Vice—an ever-evolving magazine thing and website thing and news thing and video thing and brand thing and aesthetic thing) seemed both outside and ahead and irreverent, but also reckless and gross and, well, douchebaggy. I loved Vice, even if they did seem singularly dedicated to never quite being the adult in the room.
I went to university in a small town in eastern Nova Scotia. We did not get Vice. If you were lucky (and happened to be in Halifax), you could get one at Blowers Street before they sold out. Occasionally I’d get some back issues sent to me via an informal network on a Canadian University Press listserv.
Here’s a screenshot of my first ever Amazon order:
That book was in the bathroom of me and my wife’s first apartment for five years, so I read it a lot of times, at least until iPhones got really good. A few years ago, I met Mack at a thing and told him I thought his dives into the right-wing extremes of Canada was the most important journalism happening. Vice was really cool!
But also: ❝Vice died the way it lived: being suckered in by smarter predators, even as it trained its own predatory instincts on those more credulous than its own supremely gullible leadership.❞ Well, yeah. There’s that. And that, too. This is a pretty a comprehensive accounting. It ain’t great. History is messy or something.
Everything remains terrible. / 📰 When websites die, their content disappears. ❝Journalists spent the day downloading their articles as PDFs and saving links on public archive websites like the Wayback Machine.❞ / It’s getting pretty bad. ❝There are signs that the whole concept of ‘news’ is fading.❞ / It’ll probably get worse but also maybe better. Who knows. / Save newspapers: publish poetry. / 💽 Reddit and Tumblr and Wordpress, oh my. ❝The New York Times is currently suing OpenAI for allegedly using its expansive archives without permission to train chatbots. […] Other companies have decided to make deals.❞ / 🍔 Surge-pricing your Baconator.
Pod Loser. / Love, a mixtape. (I’m gonna make more of these. Here’s the podcast feed.)
The continuing march of something or other. / 📖 The fight over OpenLibrary. ❝This was the dream of the internet I believed in. The internet as a global brain. A universal encyclopedia.❞ / Sorta related: 🎞️ There’s a copy of Swayze’s secret shame, Skatetown, USA, on the Internet Archive. / 🧑🎤 Looking back at “We Are the World”—the weirdest night in pop—through the new doc. ❝Listening to its mild wash of melody and sentiment can produce an odd mix of grudging respect and self-flagellation; it feels bad to disdain a charity single.❞ / From the New Yorker archive: Susan Orlean’s 1991 profile of Fab Five Freddy. ❝Summing up what he does for a living, Freddy said recently, ‘I’m the king of synthesis.’ There is no such job listed with the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Freddy nonetheless synthesizes full time.❞ / 🤖 The luddites are coming. ❝Eliezer Yudkowsky explains with real patience that every single person we know and love will soon be dead. They will be murdered by rebellious self-aware machines.❞ / 🏖️ The Dune font.
Art fool confidential. / The story of the very real and authenticated Basquiats found in a locker and sold for bundles. ❝The new owners gradually amassed evidence to suggest that the works were authentic: a forensic analysis by a handwriting expert, an in-depth report by a Basquiat scholar, and a statement of authenticity signed by a founding member of a committee that the Basquiat estate had established to vet potential forgeries.❞ Reader, they were not real. / 🎨 Great headline: Monet changes everything. / All the Vermeers. / Canada. (via) / AI-generated pixel art.
Hyperlinkactivity disorder. / 📻 I was looking for something else on the Internet Archive (aka The Best Website), but got sidetracked by old Art Bell episodes. Lost a whole goddamned Saturday. / 🎸 A group of people on the internet who wanted to find a bass guitar stolen from Paul McCartney 50 years ago went and fucking found it. / Band logos. / 🧢 Shitty baseball uniforms is the consensus Best Story In Baseball 2024. / 🌶️ Why is there a shortage of proper, OG Sriracha? Because people. ❝Both businesses lost millions. The two men became bitter enemies—and they offer sharply contrasting accounts of what went wrong.❞ / ☕ Tarantino opened a coffee shop shrine to Pam Grier. / 🖖 Star Trek: Borg Remastered. (Trailer and history.)
Apopalyptic. / 📚 That scathing Elon Musk review everyone is sharing. ❝What is a book, exactly? What are people doing when they read? Might banning a few books actually be a good idea?❞ / But seriously. What even are books for anymore? / 📰 Kara Swisher told you so. And you. And also you. / 🌐 Deep YouTube has become infrastructure. ❝YouTube is now less an opportunity than a requirement—something you have to use, because basic elements of society have organized around it.❞ / The internet used to be fun.
Media diet (Pt. 2). / 🎵 Problem Patterns - Blouse Club. / Chilly Gonzalez - Solo Piano and Z. New to me, Chilly has a pretty interesting Wikipedia. / Jaimie Branch - Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) / 📚 Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby (fin). Good book. / Dickens & Prince: A Particular Kind of Genius by Nick Hornby. / The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem (started). / 🍿 Wonder Boys. / Juliet, Naked. Bad movie. / The Fog. I always want Carpenter movies to be as good as The Thing, but they never are. / The Karate Kid. A first viewing for the 11yo, who recently started taking lessons. He is now very interested in how to pull a no can defense move. / The Karate Kid II. I love this one a lot. / The Karate Kid III. Fantastically stupid movie, but at least the kid is now prepared for Cobra Kai. / 📺 The Wonder Years seasons 4–6. I’m still reeling that they rebooted this show but kept it in the time period instead of pushing back 20 years again… which would be the early 2000s. I’ll shut up. / Scott Pilgrim Takes Off season 1. / Masters Of the Air (started). The airplane shit rules, but wow is the writing and acting rough in this one. / The Artful Dodger season 1 (started). / Cobra Kai season 1 (start). Literally the greatest TV show ever made.
Play things. / ♟️ Guess the Pin. / Infinite Craft. / 👾 Restoring lost F-Zero tracks. / Pong Wars. / 🎵 Instagram: Searching for Gap In-Store Playlists from 1992 to 2006. / A seamless 3-hour DJ set from WKRP’s Dr. Johnny Fever. / Mixtape Garden.
📰 The only way to save journalism is public funding. ❝‘Creative destruction,’ so beloved by economic theorists, can be scary but beneficial in the long term. This is not that. This is just destruction. The reporters being laid off now are not going to go get jobs at an intriguing news startup in a few months. They are going to get jobs outside of journalism, because the journalism jobs have simply been eradicated.❞
Sausage links. / 🌭 I trust you because you have a dick. / 🚽 Stop sharing selfies with toilets in them, you sickos. / 🏄 The point of Point Break. ❝The year of Nevermind and Desert Storm, though you could also think of it as the era when everyone in Hollywood movies looked slightly wet.❞ / 🤯 Literally my wildest dream. / 🖍️ The origins of Comic Sans. / 🦠 Double dipping in the post-pandy era.
Artificial inelegance. / Do androids dream of a sociology final about to begin even though you haven’t been to class all year (and, in fact, graduated nearly 25 years ago)?
Will Sasso and Chad Kultgen host a podcast called “Dudesy” with an “AI” also called “Dudesy” because branding is important. That’s about all I know about that (although I was a big Mad TV fan back in the day). The Dudesy dudes then pointed the Dudesy dudebot at George Carlin, creating an hour-long special [Link comes and goes.] in his style and voice, and thus a fresh can of worms was opened upon this world.
I did not listen to the whole thing, but just enough to be made uncomfortable in the uncanny valley of humour, where you innocently look at the ethereal shape of a familiar(ish) joke and only lifeless doll-eyes stare back.
And that was the general consensus: this is a bad imitation of a comedy legend. So the lawsuit claiming damage to the Carlin’s legacy seems a little specious. ❝It is a piece of computer-generated click-bait which detracts from the value of Carlin’s comedic works and harms his reputation.❞ If anything, Dudesy has highlighted intangible qualities, some unique to humans, some specific to George Carlin. Call it consciousness, call it genius, call it the soul, there is a void in Dudesy’s impression that is simultaneously difficult to define, but also generally agreed upon. Neat trick, but we listened to George Carlin and you, sir, are no George Carlin.
Legally, this lives in the same grey copyright area as everything else in AI right now. These things are trained on human-created content — dare I say it, “Art” — and then they regurgitate the average of what they learned. As an atheist, I guess I believe every person is the sum total of the things put into them and a person’s ideas are just a manifestation of that, and AI is doing more or less the same thing. I’m not sure I’m quite there yet, though. But still, interesting stuff. All this existential dread over machines that can’t quite understand context or fingers makes for good discourse.
Unfortunately, it’s mostly moot. Under the bright lights of The Legal Process©️, Dudesy the show has conceded that Dudesy the bot is actually just Dudesy the fictional character and the Carlin routine was entirely written by one of the Dudesy dudes. Weirdly, writing a bunch of jokes that sound like a robot doing an impression of George Carlin is a more artistic endeavour than making a robot do an impression of George Carlin, and they totally nailed it!
All of that said, I would probably not be okay if someone I loved was brought back from the dead in the most Black Mirror of ways. Kind of a dick move.
More adventures in AI. / Someone finished Keith Haring’s finished unfinished work, Unfinished Painting, which also raises fun questions about humanity and art, but mostly people just got really mad about it. / A profile of Lucian Grainge, which looks at the music industry’s approach to AI. ❝Universal’s stock fell by roughly twenty per cent between February and mid-May, over concerns about generative A.I. eroding the value of its copyrights. (The stock has since recovered, and is near an all-time high.)❞ So everyone is clearly being reasonable. / The Taylor Swift Machine is mobilizing.
Social Needia. / 📱 Daft Social, the anti-social social network for minimalists. / Perfectly Imperfect, which I’m using to try and understand the youngs. / Swipe right to add me to your professional network on LinkedIn. ❝The common thread for love-hijacked social-media sites is a single feature: DMs.❞
Ed Zitron goes off. ❝There is no reason to be a “ techno-optimist ” because the tech industry has outright abused consumers to the point that existing online is a continual war against the internet itself.❞
Play things. / 🧑🎨 An interview with Art But Make It Sports, the last good Twitter account. ❝If I were to find a similar scene but the person has their clothes on, it’s not going to hit.❞ Amen, mon frère. Amen. / 👾 The King Of Kong 2: Electric Peer Review. / Sarien.net, the authorized portal for reliving classic Sierra On-Line adventure games, and Web-Adventures.org for playing classic text games (via Things). / Inside the New York Times big bet on games. / 📻 DATPIFF has relaunched 50 TB of hip-hop mixtapes on the Internet Archive.
Addendum to the previous. / Why music journalism is collapsing:
❝If people don’t listen to new music, they don’t need music reviews. And they don’t need interviews with rising stars. Or best of year lists. Or any of the other things music writers do for their readers.❞
The call came from inside the algorithm. / The tyranny of the algo (or: why does every coffee shop look the same?) ❝They were authentic to the internet, particularly the 2010s internet of algorithmic feeds.❞ / Life in the algo (or: of course every coffee shop looks the same.) ❝That the Myspace model has won this war will come to many as a surprise, since the company lost its own battle against Facebook in the mid-aughts.❞
Scenes from the web. / 👨🎤 Pitchfork identifies the age of shitpost modernism. ❝The greatest shitpost modernism seems to halt time.❞ / Platformer identifies Pitchfork’s killers. ❝Contemporary music culture is much more invested in fandoms than it is in criticism.❞ Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. / 🎞️ Free documentaries, free film noir and free public domain films. / Norman Jewison died. 📓 You are all singing, all dancing vibrations in the environment generating sensations in the body. ❝The idea struck Coleridge powerfully, prompting him to write a poem called “The Eolian Harp,” which is structured like the galaxy-brain meme, escalating in philosophical profundity with each stanza until it reaches its crescendo.❞ / A different poem I liked. / 👏 Remembering the Clapper and the genius who perfected selling crap on television. ❝The device did not work. Indeed, when people used it to control their TVs, it tended to short-circuit the set.❞ / 🎳 The greatest bowler in the world (possibly ever) throws with two hands, which a lot of people really, really hate and it’s sorta weird I’ve never heard of him before. ❝Kids who want to hook it like Belmo, who want to send the pins into concussion protocol.❞ / 🥘 Everyone is talking about Cooked.wiki. / 🌐 An internet map. / OldaVista, the most powerful guide to the old internet. (Related: Science proves Google kinda sucks now. / 🧑🎓 High School High, graphic design from vintage yearbooks.
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?
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.
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?❞
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.
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).
Pop Loser is a journal of innumerable confusions — an online collection of links, photos and field notes from Tyler Hellard beginning in January 2024. It’s like a log on the web—a weblog or “blog,” if you will. I’m still figuring it out.