a journal of innumerable confusions
JANUARY 1, 2024 – MARCH 11, 2024
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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?
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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.
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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?❞
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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.
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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).
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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.❞
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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.
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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.❞
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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.❞
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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.❞
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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.
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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)?
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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.
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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.
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📰 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.❞
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.)
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Pod Loser. / Love, a mixtape. (I’m gonna make more of these. Here’s the podcast feed.)
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
