a journal of innumerable confusions
AUGUST 29, 2024 – DECEMBER 21, 2024
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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.
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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?
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Pod Loser. / Facts & Matters, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
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Pod Loser. / Today, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
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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?
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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.
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Pod Loser. / Blue Sighs & Sunny Baes, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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Pod Loser. / Marshall On the Beach, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Pod Loser. / 2024: Worst One Yet, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Cassette via TapeDeck.org.
