Pop Loser Vol. 4 (Omnibus)

a journal of innumerable confusions

JANUARY 24, 2025 – XXX

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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.

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<p style=“text-size: 0.6em;”>The Social Model / Dr Alesha Sivartha / 1898

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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.)

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Pod Loser. / Kinky Willy, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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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.

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<span style=“font-size: 10px;”>Fine realities / Rene Magritte / 1964

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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.

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Pod Loser. / Before, During and (Quite Possibly) After the Fall , a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

Cassette via TapeDeck.org.

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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.❞. ✊

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Jaune Quick-to-See Smith / The Vanishing American / 1994

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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.

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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!

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”The Girl with a Pearl Earring bleeding from her eyes and ears” / AI Generated / 2025

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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.

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Phoney baloney. / This week, I had to teach my 12yo how to make a phone call. Not the functional aspect, but the etiquette of calling someone on a shared landline in their home. “Probably his mother or father will answer. After they say ‘Hello,’ you say ‘Hello, may I please speak to Adam.’” Because you just don’t run into many people with landlines anymore, it’s entirely possible, even likely, this was the first real phone call of his life. Even when I hand him or my daughter the phone to talk to a grandparent, they look awkward as fuck holding it against their faces. They just have no clue. He did okay. Not great, but okay.

It’s funny because I can tell you that David Proude’s phone number was 436–8912 (this was before we had to also dial the area code) and Steven Murchison’s was 888–2826 and Adam Bassett’s was 436–9713. I made so many phone calls by junior high — probably thousands of them — that those numbers are still seared into my brain 35 years later.

The march of time and all that.

(Not really related, but worth mentioning: I also know that the code to get to Mike Tyson in Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! is 0073735963.)

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Vandalised Phone Box / Banksy / 2005

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Confusions. / 📰 538 is shutting down and Digg is coming back, so finally we can get back to the old days (well, middle days) of internetting, I guess. / 💻 TabBoo, add jumpscares to shitty time-sucking websites. Almost enough to make me switch to Chrome. / Notepadjs. / 🎥 The importance of preserving home movies. ❝We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence.❞ / 🎧 Heavyweight is coming back. (Sadly, WireTap is not.) / Walkman.land. / 👀 The Uncomfortable, a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects. / How baseball cards are made. (Fun fact: my dream job is writing the copy on the back of baseball cards.) / The golden age of Japanese pencils. / ⌨️ Micro Journal Rev.7. / 🎞️ Trailer for Art Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. / Binocular Shots. / 📚 DRM-free bookshops. / 📱 Sober Ringtones. / Touch Grass. / ⚱️ Gene Hackman and Roberta Flack died. / 🍩 Twin Peaks donut supercut.

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Explorations. / 📺 Bad Sisters. The most fun I’ve had watching TV in a long time. I already miss the. Garvey sisters a tremendous amount. / 📚 Michael Crummey. Gotta be the best working novelist in Canada these days. I’m in the middle of The Adversary right now, but there’s no bad book in the bunch. / 🎧 Cliff Martinez soundtracks. I use him mainly as the soundtrack for my D&D sessions, but have also started just listening around the house, despite the weird looks from my family.

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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.

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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.

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Santa Cruz Skateboards / Robert Williams

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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.

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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.’❞

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Suicide / Andy Warhol / 1964

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The divine (situational) comedy. / I love sitcoms. True story. I like the format, the simple sets, the patter of the dialogue and that the episodes are more or less contained. I find them comforting. Most sitcoms are bad, a few are good and occasionally we get a great one. (The last “good” sitcom was That ‘90s Show. The last great one was The Good Place.) If we’re ranking the all-timers, my personal top spots go to M</em>ASH* and Cheers, which is not a wildly controversial take.