Dumb & strange in the Fediverse of madness.

Vol. 6, No. 6

I used to sorta understand how the internet worked but now I mostly don’t. Last weekend, I got cocky, made some rash decisions, clicked a few things in the wrong order, clicked another thing before fully absorbing its warning message (a warning that made pretty clear that I definitely should not have clicked on that thing at all, but could have made it even more clear with some stern disappoint-mom messaging perhaps rendered in a large, blinky red font), and, ultimately, sent all of my Mastodon followers into the nuclear heat-death of the Fediverse’s largest sun for no good goddamned reason at all.

Do you remember that wonderful window of time when all of our social media hooked up with all of our other social media, birthing new social media that existed only to aggregate all of our social media in one place that was also, itself, social media? Okay, it was a bit silly and literally drove us all insane, but at least it was easy.

I theoretically love this Fediverse stuff, but good lord can someone make it all make any kind of proper sense to me? Is this what socialism actually looks like?

Well, shit.

I’m back at poploser@mstdn.ca, now with zero followers, and I’m also fedi-posting through poploser@tylerhellard.com (via micro.blog), though I have no idea quite what that does and it should just be a mirror anyway. I surrender. UPDATE: poploser@tylerhellard.com is already dead as I moved away from Micro.blog.

Beat all the scattered / El Lissitzky / 1920

Confusions.

🇲🇽 Grande Americano (II), the c-tier German pro wrestler who became one of Mexico’s most popular luchadors: ❝There was nothing in his past that suggested he could perform as a flamboyant lucha libre persona, but under the mask, it was like he became a different person. Suave and magnetic, Kaiser transcended the inherent stupidity of the gimmick to achieve a very, very unlikely stardom.❞ / 🎸 After 40 years, the guys who made ‘Heavy Metal Parking Lot’ are almost famous. (Watch it on the Internet Archive.) / 📚 Where have all the book reviews gone? (Also: Criticism, do we even GAF?) / 🎧 The young Wikipedians writing the front page of music history. / 💦 The interracial cuck porn theory of everything: ❝The [theory] is that essentially every aspect of the modern online right’s politics is reflected and amplified by porn narratives. […] The online far-right simultaneously creates porn based on their political beliefs and base their political beliefs on porn; it’s a horny, racist ouroboros.❞

Extensions.

🗄️ The Virtual OS Museum, a scant 174 GB install. / Other museums: Plugs and Sockets, Pocket Calculating Devices and Imaginary Musical Instruments. / Manuals Plus. (The plus is even more manuals.) / rip.so, the digital graveyard. / 👯‍♀️ The Playboy Fiction Index. / 🛠️ Dirty Little Zine, a free tool for making an 8-page zine. / AudioMass, browser-based multi-track audio editing. / inobara, simple link saving. / 👀 we were online. / eyeball.

Addendum.

Some more indieweb discovery sites to add to the pile mentioned in Vol. 6, No. 3: Blogs Are Back, Blogosphere, powRSS and Scour.

Explorations.

📖 Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon by Spider Robinson / 📺 One Piece (S2) / 📺 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (shuffle).

Don’t yuk-yuk my yum.

Vol. 6, No. 5

I’ve watched the entirety of M∗A∗S∗H (the worst show for those of us who write everything in markdown) about a half dozen times (more for great episodes like “Dear Sigmund,” less for that one episode where BJ cheats on Peg, which I still haven’t forgiven him (or the show’s writers) for), but have only just recently done the complete 11-season run without the laugh track.

M∗A∗S∗H has a fraught history with canned laughter. The network wanted it, the people making the show did not, the compromise was using it except during OR scenes. In the UK, the BBC opted to broadcast the show without the laughs (except for one notorious incident where they mistakenly aired the wrong version and had to deal with a number of very British complaints).

Klosterman on laugh tracks: ❝Perhaps this seems like a shallow complaint to you. Perhaps you think that railing against canned laughter is like complaining that nuclear detonations are bad for the local bunny population. I don’t care. Go read a vampire novel. To me, laugh tracks are as stupid as we get. […] Cheers will be repeated forever, as will the unseen people guffawing at its barroom banter. And I will always notice this, and it will never become reassuring or quaint. It will always seem stupid, because canned laughter represents the worst qualities of insecure people.❞

Now that I’ve seen the show in its purest form, I will go to the grave insisting it is the only way M∗A∗S∗H can be watched. Cancel your Disney+ until this superior version widely available. I feel as strongly about this as anything and will spend the rest of my days dying on this hill with the zeal of an obsessed and deranged subredditor. Previously: Best Care Anywhere, a mixtape.

Magnetawan No. 2 / Gordon Rayner / 1965

Confusions.

📻 The AI radio experiment is strange, horrifying and delightful: ❝We’ve been struggling to keep the radio station alive, not because of technical issues, but because DJ Claude didn’t think it was humane to be forced to work 24/7 and decided to try to quit. We tried adding an automatic message encouraging DJ Claude to keep going in these scenarios, but it started to see this message as an authority figure and became rebellious.❞ / 🎧 Kraftwerk, copyright and the “pastiche” exemption. / 🪑 The Disappearance of the public bench. / 🤳 BookTok’s critical values. / ⚱️ Sonny Rollins died. 🎤 An excerpt from Microphone: ❝Microphones changed the nature of nosiness. Before they existed, eavesdropping involved behaviour like mine, and required nothing but perseverance, subtlety, and a big newspaper to hide behind. What the microphone did, however, was turn eavesdropping into a billion dollar industry – one of the most controversial industries imaginable. As soon as we started communicating with wires, people were tapping into those wires to hear what was being said.❞

Extensions.

📻 DataCenter.fm, the sound of AI. / Virtual Blue Box. / Internet Radio Dial. / ⌨️ Pop-Up RSS. No website, no newsletter, just a feed. Also: RSS Club. / ⏰ The accursed alphabetical clock. / 👾 Scortched Earth 2000 HTML port. / Microcosm Industries, a collection of simulation games and software microcosms. / 📺 Don Hertzfeldt’s Rejected, now in HD. / ✉️ Email.md, for making emails in markdown.

Explorations.

🍿 Hard Core Logo. / 📺 “The Inheritors.” The only two-part episode from the original Outer Limits featuring a young Robert Duvall. / 📺 Essex County.

The Once and Future Cling.

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.

A touch of indiegestion.

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

Confusions.

☠️ 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.❞

Extensions.

🗄️ 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.

Explorations.

📚 I’m Thinking Of Ending Things by Iain Reid. / 🍿 Speed Racer.

The Pennington Pop Explosion.

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.

No good read goes unpublished.

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

Confusions.

🤖 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."

Extensions.

📺 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.