Pop Loser Vol. 5

September 8, 2025 – January 1, 2026

Note: Some of the formatting might have been lost when migrating this page.

Analyze miss.

Fun fact: the first few posts of the original Pop Loser blog were powered by TypePad before I quickly moved over to WordPress. Now no posts will be powered by TypePad ever again. This story made me nostalgic about that era of the internet when people did things for the sake of doing them, but also were getting started on their personal brands before we called them “personal brands” and we talked way too much about marketing. Good times. Can’t believe they led to our current collective cultural crisis of connectivity. (Or our current connective crisis of culture collection?)

Anyway, blogging is back! Or at least this blog is back after a wonderful summer spent mostly in Vancouver and Victoria. (Not so fun fact: I’ve still never seen a fucking whale.) While I was away, Tinylytics said this site saw 700 hits on a random Thursday, which is odd because normally double digits is a pretty banger day around here. (Seriously you — literally you — are the only person who reads this. I love you for it, but surely you have better things to do?) Because I only track bare hits and don’t cookie anyone, there was no way to figure out what the fuck happened, but that the next day saw only 4 hits I suspect it was some kind of scraping situation. Honestly, it doesn’t matter because I am neither a military surveillance unit nor a commodity trading company, so analytics are completely unnecessary.

Welcome to Pop Loser Volume 5.

Confusions.

🎨 A really interesting story about an incredible collection of fake art. ❝She genuinely believed that she had in her possession objects that would change her life and even contribute to art history in some way. However, for years she had been dismissed as a crackpot. It didn’t help that she was a self-professed high priestess of a religion that worshipped the ancient Greek gods.❞ / A kinda dull story about an incredible collection of real art. / Restoring a Banksy. / 🗞️ Minifeed, a curated blog reader. / Kill the Newsletter, convert email newsletters into atom feeds. / Folio, a Pocket replacement. / 📁 Send big files with SwissTransfer. / 📻 VTV, the weirdest & worst novelty songs ever created. / Ldial, the best independent and community radio stations in the US. / IINA, a Mac media player. / AI DJs because why even have people do anything at all anymore. / The end of the late-night band. / Professional wrestling, a multi-era musical analysis. / 🧠 The Wikipedia Test. ❝Before passing regulations, legislators should ask themselves whether their proposed laws would make it easier or harder for people to read, contribute to, and/or trust a project like Wikipedia.❞ / 📚 The greatest books of all time. / 🧙 Build your own 5e spell book. (Big hit at my table.) / VOID 1680 AM, a game that is pretty impossible to explain before you play it. / 🦈 Jaws, a text adventure. / 🌒 ASCIIMoon. / 📺 A Halt and Catch Fire syllabus. / 🗿 Nice rocks. / 📽️ Cassette, a home video player. / ⚒️ Tooooools. / 🌈ColorMoods. / 🤘 The arcane alphabets of Black Sabbath.

No Loitering / Banksy / 2008

Explorations.

📻 Who Is the Sky? by David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra. David Byrne remains sorta the best and I’ve been in love with GTO since their album of Moondog covers. Really fun record. 🍿 Superman. First you need to understand something — I spent my childhood obsessing over Superman. I cannot overstate just how much. I would wear my costume in the bathtub to recreate the scene where he’s drowning with the kryptonite necklace on (and also Miss Teschmacher’s kiss in that scene has somehow embedded itself in the part of my brain that think about sex). Being a Superman fan has been a fucking struggle without a decent movie since 1980 while every other comic book hero got theirs. So this movie was a goddamned delight. 📚 I read the complete James Bond. They aren’t good but they were enjoyable. Do with that what you will.

Pod Loser.

Rumors Willis, a mixtape.

Featuring: NOFX, Distants, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, Stillhouse Junkies, Scott Bradlee’s Postmodern Jukebox, Smooth Hound Smith, The Bon Bon Club, Gimson, Hole, and Dagny.

Let’s go OK-holing (and other confusions).

Things happened and as I am trying desperately not to post about happening things, it was best to sit tight for a couple weeks. You know, let it all blow over. Which of course it never will.

I’ve been substantially less online these last few years. First I dialled back a little and then a lot. And then I started killing accounts. In the aftermath of the things that happened, I added TikTok to the kill pile after one or two of my searches were interpreted by the algo as permission to funnel me into a world of wild conspiracy theories. Like crazy, batshit stuff, and I couldn’t make it stop. (Previously my feed was mainly Ted Lasso clips, just the James Spader bits of Boston Legal, guys cracking open packs of baseball cards, recipes, and, yes, the dances. Love the dances.) While I probably could have retrained it in a couple weeks, the whole thing felt pretty gross. (And the app was a bit of a time sink anyway, which is often my motivator for deleting anything. I take my weekly iPhone screen-time report very seriously, though I won’t tell you what the total hours ever says and if I ever do, assume that number is a lie).

I guess my point is we should all log off because certain doom has never felt more, uh, certain.

❝Our curse these days is that because of mass literacy, mass education, mass communications, we are subjected to every stupid thing that these people do, and we’re all highly aware of all the stupid things that they are doing to dismantle the perfectly, basically, perfectly functional society that we had going on.❞

Related (since we’re here anyway): the new aesthetics of fascism.

I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t click on either of those and instead just scrolled down to the fun link about things people stick in their holes.

The Rise of Fascism / R. B. Kitaj / 1975–1979

Confusions.

💻 The Mac app flea market. / Stacher7, a good Mac app for downloading videos. / 📺 TV Time Machine. (I might have to do this for my collection of holiday TV episodes.) / TV Simulator. / 🎙️ AI is about to ruin podcasting. / Podcasting kind of sucks now anyway. ❝More people than ever are listening to podcasts and talking about podcasts and thinking about starting their own podcasts. But the podcasts that are thriving are talk shows — increasingly celebrity-driven talk shows — that are cheap to make, can easily be turned into streaming YouTube videos, and command big ad dollars. Narrative podcasts — the multi-episode, investigative journalism-fueled shows that boomed after the release of Serial in October 2014 — have followed an inverse trajectory.❞ / ⚾ Baseball also kind of sucks now. / 👾 DOOMscroll. / Video game marquees. / All of the iPod clickwheel games have been saved. Bless. / 🕳️ Out of Orifice, a collection of 36 objects designed to enter our orifices. / 📻 The Panama Playlists, collecting Spotify accounts of celebrities, politicians, and journalists. / Electroclash still fucks. / 🚬 How many cigarettes? (The answer is “Never enough.”) / 🎨 CARTA, archiving online art. / Go to museums, look at screens. / 🔗 URLtoAny, convert URLs to Markdown, PDF, Text, images and more. / 🎾 The pickleball takeover. / 🤘 Rock skipping (which some people apparently call “stone skimming” for some stupid reason) scandal! Best scandal since the weights in the fish thing.

Pod Loser.

Capitalism for Losers , a mixtape.

Featuring: Mekons, Queen of Japan, John Cale, Superorganism, shame, Stereophonics, Golomb, media puzzle, Elton Motello, Wanda Jackson, Those Naughty Lumps, Jerskin Fendrix, The Last Dinner Party, A-F-R-O, KEG, Fiona Apple, girl in red, and Underworld w/ Iggy Pop.

Unskinny slop.

Re-read Player Piano for the first time in a long time:

❝A fully automatic setup like that makes culture very cheap. Matter of fact, culture’s so cheap, a man figured he could insulate his house cheaper with books and prints than he could with rockwool. Don’t think it’s true, but it’s a cute story with a good point. The way they keep culture so cheap is by knowing in advance what and how much of it people want. They get it right, right down to the color of the jacket. Gutenberg would be amazed.❞

Several of the less-talked-about Vonnegut books — Player Piano, Jailbird, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater — are pretty on point these days. Brahouna, Takaru, indeed. Kurt don’t miss.

The Entertainment Machine, Peter Phillips, 1961

Confusions.

🌐 The last days of social media. ❝These are the last days of social media, not because we lack content, but because the attention economy has neared its outer limit — we have exhausted the capacity to care. There is more to watch, read, click and react to than ever before — an endless buffet of stimulation. But novelty has become indistinguishable from noise. Every scroll brings more, and each addition subtracts meaning. We are indeed drowning.❞ / A long profile on Tim Berners-Lee. / Create a phishy URL. / 🎨 The found art and identity of Michaelina Wautier. / Auctioning Bob Ross paintings to raise money for public television. / Interlude Docs, a digital archive committed to “archiving the impermanent.” / Marina Minis. / Monodraw, ASCII art editor. / 🌎 The scale of life. / ✍️ What the fuck happened to designers and design? ❝That social purpose which accompanied the birth of design as a profession quickly dissipated, hijacked by capitalism as a sales schtick, a way of selling newer, more fashionable, more expensive products. Modernism became marketing.❞ / 📷 The 25 most influential magazine covers of all time. / 🎸 Trailer for Ozzy: No Escape From Now. / The night Fear got banned from SNL. / Every televised Joy Division performance. / Soulwax have a new album. / Peaches, too! / Bill’s Beatles collection. / 📰 The enduring value of student newspapers. / 👾 Vectrex Mini. / Retrocide, a very cool monospaced font with no descenders.

Picture miss.

Somewhere between quitting Instagram and trying very hard to spend less time fingerbanging my phone, taking pictures got a bit lost. Last week, while digging around my basement for a very specific cable stored in a box filled exclusively with very specific cables, I found my trusty old Ricoh GX100; a great camera that you can also just stick in your pocket. Ansel Adams said something about how photographs are made, not taken. That’s not me. I have no real natural aptitude for photography, but I do have a natural impulse to take pictures. Snapshots. Moments. Candids. Whatever.

I set up a Pixelfed (which I do not fully understand how to use — this federated stuff is conceptually cool, but practically it remains super fucking awkward), because nobody looks at the photos page of this website except my mom (the real victim in my Instagram exit). I am enjoying it a lot, but nobody I know uses it (or at least I haven’t figured out how to find and follow them), which raises some questions about my social media use: if I find peace in a social network because it is slow and mostly unpopulated, is it still social? Or am I really hoping for an anti-social network, where I have other people — I even need other people — but I don’t necessarily want other people. Or maybe my Platonic ideal of a social network is one filled with people that offers zero interaction.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

Reseaux des stoppages, Marcel Duchamp, 1914

Confusions.

💬 What made blogging different. ❝I think of this now as the difference between living in a house you built that requires some effort to visit and going into a town square where there are not particularly rigorous laws about whether or not someone can punch you in the face.❞ / 🍪 Cookie laws should target browsers, not websites. / 🖨️ The Sherwood Forest Virtual Zine Library. / 🦋 The great butterfly heist. / 🥫 Looking back at The Philosophy of Andy Warhol by Andy Warhol. / 🎤 Slipping away from myself at the KPop Demon Hunters sing-along. ❝But that night, in the Regal Alhambra Renaissance theater—a multiplex chain location that has nothing to do with regality, thirteenth-century Islamic architecture, or the Renaissance—we weren’t so sure about the value of authenticity. We were, after all, wearing costumes.❞ / 📐 Open-source blueprints for civilization. / 🤐 New zipper dropped! / 🔴 Here’s how they clean the balls in a ball pit. / 🚀 The Space Exploration Logo Archive. / Exoplanet Travel Bureau. / ⚱️ People who died: Diane Keaton, Daniel Naroditsky, Ace Frehley, D’Angelo, Soo Catwoman and Gilles Larrain. / Also dead: robots.txt. / ☎️ POP Phone. I guess? / 🚧 GifCities, a GeoCities animated gif search engine.

Pod Loser.

Best Care Anywhere , a mixtape.

Featuring: Pixies, Dehd, Waylon Jennings, Cab Calloway, Rob Base, The Streets, Mamalarky, Parlor Greens, David Byrne & Ghost Train Orchestra, Madi Diaz, Honeyglaze, Liam Lynch, Hot Hot Heat, Viagra Boys, Bleeding Through, Lady & Bird, and Gene Austin.

The hollowed men.

My wife and I go for a walk almost every morning. This is our time to complain about things to and with each other. She complains about practical things, like work and meetings and some oddly difficult people she meets in her day. My complaints are both more specific and more general — more existential — like how the world will end not with a bang, but with the motionless gesture of a thousand men whimpering away on their own prickly pears: ❝What they apparently hadn’t considered was that the porn alone might be enough, that at sufficient speed and in sufficient quantity it could function as a workable substitute for life itself.❞ Good lord, that’s some grim shit. My wife has rightly threatened not to walk with me anymore.

Not unrelated: There’s now a casino in everyone’s pocket. It’s going poorly.

Untitled (Looking at The Great Masturbator) / Salvador Dali / 1981

Confusions.

🤖 Hi, it’s me, Wikipedia, and I am ready for your apology. ❝Listen, in some ways, I get it. When I came on the scene in 2001, I probably seemed pretty unsavory compared to the competitors. But that was when academic research happened in libraries and George W. Bush was considered the stupidest president. Tell me, how have you guardians of facts been doing recently? (See also: Techno-Feudalist Infocide.)❞ / Also: Grokipedia is the antithesis of everything that makes Wikipedia good, useful and human. / Frank Chimero’s treatise on AI and creating. ❝I wouldn’t want an irregular AI in my bank app, but in a creative workflow, hallucinating feels like the point of it all.❞ / AI is a false god. / 🧑‍💻 alive internet theory. / Why does new technology feel like it was inspired by dystopian sci-fi? / 📰 The FBI is looking for the person(s) behind one of our greatest resources, Archive.today. / 📔 The Farmer’s Almanac is shutting down (but not the one you’re thinking of). / The (near-complete) Whole Earth Catalog archive still exists. / Digging up Gendertrash From Hell. / 🖼️ Semantic.art. / ⌚ 52 weeks of obsessions. (Example: Soviet watches.) / 👾 Want: The Art of Atari. / 📓 Already Have (but you should Want and, like, Get): Scott Boms’ Context Window (buy link). / 📺 Sitcoms that primetime forgot (I watched all 2 hours of this and not once did it get old). / 🔤 Space Type Generator. / 🫥 Durves. / 🧤 The Canadian Glove Museum. / ⌨️ The Interim Computer Museum.

Extensions.

As has been mentioned repeatedly in recent weeks, I was a victim of The Great Ma.gnolia Crash of aught-nine. Since, my bookmarks have been a mess moved through a dizzying array of online tools, including Pinboard, Evernote, Pocket, Instapaper, Delicious, Raindrop, Notion and so many others. I’ve declared link bankruptcy no fewer than five times. It’s a fucking wreck, and I decided it was time to get my shit together and find something that actually works for me instead of this hodgepodge of sites that either look like that are one ill-timed bus accident from total collapse, or use that shady subscription model that’s become the hallmark of our time (or at least the hallmark that isn’t all of the icky chronic masturbation, but also I might not know what a hallmark is).

Enter GoodLinks.

✅ Offline with (iCloud) syncing between phone and laptop.
✅ One-time price gets you “forever” access with a year of updates.
✅ Tagging system for saving links.
✅ Reading system for, uh, reading links, but also highlights and notes, also saved locally.
✅ Import/export in all your favourite flavours.
✅ THAT’S IT. WHY WAS THAT SO HARD?

Anyway, great piece of software. Hard recommend.

All for raught.

I’m locked into TimeHop, an app that surfaces “On This Day” content from your phone and social media accounts. As I’ve killed more and more of those accounts, the app was left doing what the Photos app already does on its own — “Here’s pictures from this day.” Normally I’d delete an app that’s become superfluous to my phone’s default functions, but I’m on a nine-year streak with TimeHop. That’s 3,306 consecutive days popping it open, according to the final screen after I swipe through all the photos. No way I’m stopping now!

Last week, I remembered that older versions of Pop Loser cross-posted to a set-it-and-forget-it Tumblr clone. I plugged that into TimeHop and now I get to see my old near-daily posts.

The result has been both embarrassing and infuriating.

At no point in my life have I particularly enjoyed the me from 10–15 years ago. 27 year old me hated 17 year old me. 37 year old me would have a lot of things to say to 27 year old me. 47 year old me doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. Embarrassing ideas, bad writing and an annoying enthusiasm for the things that have wrought the ruin of, you know, society and the world and everything.

Even more frustrating is the fact that most of the links don’t work. It’s just a collection of 404s and broken redirects. Some of that isn’t my fault; linkrot is everywhere as our collective history gets bought, sold, re-filed, sunsetted and ultimately deleted. I regret my own stupid decision to rely on third-party link shorteners and click trackers. More so, I hate my own complicity in creating this tangled mess of entropy and decay.

Every younger version of me remains a fucking idiot.

Related things: The subversive hyperlink. ❝Links form the whole. Without links, there is no whole. No links means no web, only silos. Isolation. The absence of connection.❞ / The Internet Archive has now saved over 1-trillion webpages. / More about the pressure to reveal the owner(s) of Archive.today.

Erased de Kooning / Robert Rauschenberg / 1953

Confusions.

🏬 Shopping malls are the Roman ruins of our civilization: ❝I have never ached for a store before — yet the enormous corporate shopping mall, in dying, has become something moving. Melancholic yet mundane, it now functions as a safe space to go and get lost in my own thoughts. Is it the freedom that I like or the 1980s big-box kitsch of the place, which now feels like some liminal waiting room? Maybe I like the mall simply for the rare and singular holiness of a space — any space — that is right on the verge of emptiness.❞ / 🧠 Welcome to the golden age of stupidity. / 🔪 How private equity killed media: ❝Only chumps make money by selling goods or services these days; the real geniuses rely on management fees, deal fees, dividend recapitalizations, real estate deals, and the like.❞ / 🗄️ The Byte magazine visual archive. / 💾 DocType, a magazine with code for 10 web apps. / 🤫 A world without Spotify? / 👾 Play Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 in your browser. (Saving this for the holidays.) / Microsoft has open sourced the Zork games. / 🍁 AI can’t be CanCon. / 📻 College radio is still cool. / 🎼 Stars Of the Lid forever. / 📖 Parasocial is Cambridge’s word of the year. / 🚧 public.monster, an homage to 90s ~/PUBLIC_HTML hosting. / 🛠️ Koolyz, free online tools for everyone. / 🎨 Color Palette Pro, a colour palette… for pros. / 📊 How pop music fell in love with socialist infographics. / 🔠 The return of the skinny serif. / 🐅 Calvin & Hobbes is 40! / 🍽️ Who was the foodie? ❝Preparing, serving, and eating food is now too often only a prelude to posting. Being a foodie is no longer about experience and knowledge. Documentation is in; expertise is out.❞

Explorations.

Sometime last year I encountered Jamie Branch’s album, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)). It’s jazz and it’s folk. It’s sometimes weird and often beautiful. But mostly it was just one of those albums that came along at exactly the right time to hit me straight in my feels. I played the shit out of it and was really sad to learn she’s died two years earlier at the age of 39. There is a new re-release of her second album, FLY OR DIE II: bird dogs of paradise, now available. That’s mostly only interesting in you want the slick vinyl version, but it’s also a really great album and it seemed like a good time to link to both.

Pod Loser.

Beatle Your Meatle, a mixtape.

Featuring: Bill Withers, Roy Redmond, Sonic Youth, Pat Benatar, The Replacements, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Cash, Rosanne Cash, Stevie Wonder, Arthur Conley, Aimee Mann, Fiona Apple, Regina Spektor, Yellow Magic Orchestra, Dolly Parton, The Carpenters, Aretha Franklin, The Supremes, and Junior Parker.

Shingle bells.

I have come down with shingles. On my face. It sucks. One more mixtape to come, but otherwise Pop Loser is officially entering torpor until March. Have a wonderful holiday season. Rest up. Next year is going to be a big one.

Crucifixion, George Stefanescu, 1991

Confusions.

🚽 Rusty Foster’s extremely good Piss Factory metaphor. ❝Pretty quickly someone invents the Generative Piss Transformer, or “GPT,” which can pump out unbelievable quantities of extremely realistic piss. Can it do this cheaply? No, not at all. Is the piss being generated by this new technology in demand? Also not really.❞ / An illuminating conversation with the man who was Willem Dafoe’s stunt penis. ❝What this means is that somewhere out there lives a humble man whose penis stood in for Willem Dafoe’s. Who is he? I tracked him down. His name is Horst Stramka.❞ / 👾 Vacation goal: Master Top Gun for the NES. / DOS.Zone, there goes the holidays. / 🎧 Retrospekt, refurbished retro tech. / Modern Walkmans. / Intertapes, a collection of found cassettes. / Pulse, music streaming rooms (a concept I’ve always loved but never seems to take off). / 🏀 Kurtis Blow, still blowing. / 👨‍💻 Street Pass, a plugin to help you overcome Mastodon’s greatest challenge: finding people. 📺 On “gong show.” ❝By this point, gong show was a two-way Canadian player, on the ice and off. Later that year, a Conservative party politician complained about the Liberal party government. “What a gong show. They rip the country off and we give them more money.”❞ / 📚 Standard Ebooks’ public domain additions for 2026. / In praise of bibliomania. / The Globe 100 book archive. / Places to read. / Stamps of Canadian comic book makers. (I stuck a Scott Pilgrim/Bryan Lee O’Malley to this very laptop. And a Ducks/Kate Beaton to my water bottle.) / 📰 Real-time streaming news from 40 years ago. / 📅 Flummox Industries’ 2026 calendar. / The one-year page. / 🗄️ An archive of illustration from c.1950–1975. / Perfect Sentences, a newsletter. / Bubblegum machines. / Locksmith stickers. / 🧑‍🎨 Motif, pixel grids. / ⚾ Sports writers remember Grantland. ❝Early articles skewed long and personal, to occasional mockery. But everybody wanted to write for Grantland.❞

Pod Loser.

2025: Muse/Ick, a mixtape.

Featuring: Sloan, Golomb, Sunday Cruise, Home Counties, Jolie Laide, Neko Case, Tyler Ballgame, Stereolab, Soulwax, Tune-Yards, Smerz, Joy Crookes, Viagra Boys, HotWax, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, BIG SPECIAL, Upchuck, Soft Bait, Lambrini Girls, MADMADMAD, Melody’s Echo Chamber, Girl Group, Young Fathers, Foxwarren, David Byrne, and Saya Gray.