I’m a writer in Calgary. I like making mixtapes, watching baseball and playing old video games. I have three kids and one wife. I wrote a novel that eventually became a best seller. Pop Loser is the name I use for my blog, social accounts and other occasional projects. Learn more here.
Posts, photos, toots and more.
Vol. 6, No. 4
Featuring: Brian Wilson, The Lemon Twigs, U.S. Girls, Modern Woman, Sloan, The Frights, Iguana Death Cult, Soulwax, Emily Allan, Wax Tailor, Jeb Loy Nichols, Tyler Ballgame, Jenny Lewis, Madi Diaz, Frog and Amy Winehouse.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Vol. 6, No. 3
The “indieweb” (define as you like) is having a bit of a “moment” (also define as you like) as many of us are suddenly nostalgic for the internet of 2005 (back when we were all a bunch of delightfully connected strangers and not this morass of addicted TMI-addled assholes with OPINION!S) and have found that there are still people just doing things on the web. Like, for fun and stuff.
Previously there was Ye Olde Blogroll (does what it says on the tin) and Ooh.Directory (like a Yahoo before search) and IndieBlog (a new StumbleUpon). But my new favourite homepage is Bubbles.town, which is a sorta Technorati meets Digg, but also RSS with Fediverse. Simple category filtering and custom follows are nice. I don’t love “Upvoting” as a mechanic, but the user base right now is small and dedicated, so it works in the short term. (Long term, maybe only seeing upvotes from Fediverse follows or similar solves that. Human-curated lists would also be cool.) Blogs are back, baby! Not unrelated: RIP, Jeeves. Hilariously very related: The new new new version of Digg actually bills itself as “What AI Twitter is paying attention to,” which is funny for at least six distinct reasons.
Pool of Silence, Margaret Macdonald, 1913
☠️ The shame of Rotten.com: ❝It felt like discovering an older sibling’s porn stash, except more raw, more despicable, less human. It felt illegal. Like the childhood certainty, fed by the inevitability of horror lurking at the edge of fairy-tale pages, that you’d be struck by lightning or get bitten by a shark or end up in jail. Who knew? Maybe in life I could end up killing a man or stealing a car. Rotten was a key you turned that locked a door behind you.❞ / 🎭 Shakespeare ranked. I remain a Hamlet guy. I know, I’m very basic. / 🕵️ In search of Banksy. (Spoiler: Do not read if you prefer to keep kayfabe where Banksy is concerned.) / ⚱️ Roger Sweet, creator of the OG He-Man toys. / 🍕 Used to be a Pizza Hut: the movie. / 📺 The banal horror of Jimmy Fallon. / 📕 On gray literature: ❝Gray literature isn’t made with libraries or bookshops in mind. It strides out into the world to do an honest day’s work. None of this hanging around on hushed shelves waiting to impart knowledge in the abstract. It’s got sperm to tout, babies to birth, aircraft to maintain, a policed public to mollify.❞
🗄️ Usenet Archives. / Japanese Woodblock Print Search. / 👀 Milwaukee bus tickets from the 1950’s, when everything looked cooler. / 👾 noclip, a digital museum of video game levels. / Title Scream. / Gaming Couch, local multiplayer party games. / ♟️ Ed’s Stratego Site. / 1D-Chess. / Chess Peace. / 🛰️ Live satellite map.
📚 I’m Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid. / 🍿 Speed Racer.
Vol. 6, No. 2
Featuring: Tegan & Sara, The Hardship Post, Odds, Eric’s Trip, The Flashing Lights, Sloan, Doughboys, Joel Plaskett, Night Committee, Sam Roberts, SNFU, Rheostatics, The Pursuit of Happiness, Julie Doiron, Headstones, and The New Pornographers.
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
Vol. 6, No. 1
I’ve had a very strange three months where a little novel I wrote nearly a decade ago suddenly became a Canadian best seller, sending me onto radio programs, TV and live events around the country, and it was all thanks to a beautiful man called “Dangle.” An unexpected and incredible thing. (Spoiler: we didn’t win.)
I’m a CBC junkie, so I was already a fan of Canada Reads. If you aren’t, now is as good a time as any. Someone over at Open Library just put together a collection of all the show’s books from the last decade, with plans to keep going. Dig in.
But I guess we’re back to this now. Much as I am grateful for the experience of the last few months, sending things out into the ether from here is a scale I’m more comfortable with.
Speaking of comfort levels, after spending a few years pulling myself off of online platforms and social media, having swaths of the country talking about my book got me back on and I (re-)developed a pretty unhealthy relationship with vanity searches and Goodreads reviews and something called BookTok. Now I have to detox my bad habits (and my ego) all over again. The internet remains a relentless motherfucker and I hope we just decide to turn the whole thing off one day. Except email. Email is cool.
Welcome to Pop Loser Volume 6. ✌️
Untitled (Cockpit), Tim Pitsiulak, 2008
🤖 On AI and thinking and what we’re giving away. “The underlying intelligence of a large language model isn’t a function of its architecture, its parameter count, or the volume of compute thrown at its training. It is not even about the training data. It is a function of the social complexity of the civilization whose language it digested." 🗄️ All 8 issues of Fawcett’s America’s Greatest Comics. / Extrapolated Futures Archive, connecting real-world things to the science fiction stories that thought of them first. / Worse On Purpose, corporate autopsies on the brands you trust. / Melomaniac, a documentary about Aadam Jacobs, who surreptitiously (but not really) recorded over 10,000 Chicago area concerts. / Archivist Browser, a mobile browser for viewing media files on the Internet Archive, such as over 10,000 Chicago area concerts. / ✉️ We need fewer influencers and more bullshit e-mail jobs. “There’s still time to build a healthy pipeline and train the future leaders of bullshit e-mail jobs to join the existing group of rock stars. It starts at home. Parents, when your child is on their phone at the dinner table, ignoring you, make sure that they’re scrolling Outlook, not Reddit."
📺 MTV Rewind. / VHS slipcover maker. / Channel Surfer. / 🧑💻 delphitools, a collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools. / Tangible Media, a historical collection of information storage technology. / WikiCity. / Freak Pages, esoteric articles from Wikipedia and other places. / Friendster is back and less useful than ever.
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