No good read goes unpublished.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.