Pop Loser Vol. 2, No. 6

VOL 2, NO 6

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Quoth the penguin (and other confusions). / 🍿 Streaming media in prison is like streaming media outside of prison, it just has more layers of people gouging their fair share. ❝Each prisoner is assigned a tablet free of charge, but to watch films, we must buy a bundle of minutes. I can buy only 500 minutes of the Premium App Bundle for $10, which hosts three film apps. We must use all 500 minutes or forfeit them. New releases are available on the Premium Access Pass, which allows us to buy only 200 minutes for $8. The Premium Pass Bundle expires in 96 hours.❞ But also... / ...the comfortable problem of Mid TV. / Locally: The NFB is running out of money and soon we will have no nice Canadian things. / 📻 Normal music reviews don't make sense for Taylor Swift. ❝The Swiftverse is thousands of comments under Instagram posts, an additional three hundred and thirty-two million dollars for the NFL, a worldwide run on bracelet beads, and the Fed wondering why inflation persists.❞ / Fall asleep to the dulcet tones of the Northwoods Baseball Radio Network. / Some mixtapes. / 📰 Five Dials is done, but the entire archive is online. (Or skip to the Camus issue.) / ✍️ Poe's "The Pingu." ❝While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a clapping, as of flippers briskly slapping, slapping on my igloo floor.❞ / Wes Anderson's Montblanc ad. / 🖥️ The internet may be in ruin, but I’m always a sucker for interesting ideas wrapped in tortured metaphor. ❝Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope? We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it.❞ / Copy the shrug emoji. / User Inyerface. / ⚱️ Alice Munro, Frank Stella, Steve Albini, Rex Murphy and Roger Corman died. / 💼 The story of 427 suitcases from A New York State Mental Hospital. / 👾 The Delta emulator is the new best app on my phone.

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Pop Loser Vol. 2, No. 4

VOL 2, NO 4

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There is a type of dystopian fiction where garish advertising is embedded in the landscape—a necessary part of the fabric of an ironic shitty future world where poor people risk some combination of dignity and life for money. In these fictions—Minority Report or Idiocracy or a Black Mirror—the ads are pervasive, obnoxious and occasionally legally required. It's satire! A cynical look at where we are headed. A warning to turn back before it's too late. Don't build the Torment Nexus, dummies!

Sure glad I don't live in a society capable of creating great things only to hollow them out in the name of slogans and jingles and clicks and money. And if I did, wouldn't it be nice to have someone to blame?

❝After nearly 20 years of building Google Search, Gomes would be relegated to SVP of Education at Google. Gomes, who was a critical part of the original team that made Google Search work, who has been credited with establishing the culture of the world’s largest and most important search engine, was chased out by a growth-hungry managerial types led by Prabhakar Raghavan, a management consultant wearing an engineer costume.❞

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📰 The Onion is saved! / 📚 The most depressing thing you'll read today: Nobody buys books. ❝The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).❞ / 🌿 Weed strain name generator. Fun fact: I used to get paid to name weed strains and I should really examine every choice I made that took me away from that. / 🎶 When do we stop finding new music? ❝Ultimately, cultural preferences are subject to generational relativism, heavily rooted in the media of our adolescence. It's strange how much your 13-year-old self defines your lifelong artistic tastes. At this age, we're unable to drive, vote, drink alcohol, or pay taxes, yet we're old enough to cultivate enduring musical preferences.❞ / They found the unfindable song. (Spoiler: it was porn.) / Beatbox with Henry Kissinger. / 📺 All of Freakazoid is now on the Internet Archive. / 👾 As the Crow Flies is a simple browser game that looks like my beloved Vectrex. / The entire universe in Minecraft.

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Pop Loser Vol. 2, No. 4

VOL 2, NO 4

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Pod Loser. / Alone Together, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

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Pop Loser Vol. 2, No. 3

VOL 2, NO 3

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I put these posts together using a running text file on my phone, which I then publish when it feels full enough. After a few months of playing with form, the text file’s structure includes this space up top. An opener! A place for my thoughts and writing that’s separate from what’s below and clearly more important because it’s first. In the last post, its said “Happy Rex Manning Day” and then referenced the deleted and re-inserted blue-cheese-salad-dressing-on-the-dick scene. My thoughts! My writing! They can’t all be bangers, I guess.

Anyway, here’s a pretty great takedown of columnists and columns, so, at least for today, I can fill this space with a related and amusing pull quote.

❝Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. […] The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions.❞

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Read Swish, boo Swish (and other confusions) / 🛳️ Time is a flat circle (though, as my wife says, all circles are flat) and we’ve come all the way back around to cruise ships are a metaphor for the end of society. (Again!) / 📸 Jamie Livingston’s daily Polaroids are back. / 📰 Kara Swisher’s attempt at retconning tech journalism and her rather significant role in its many failures continues to go poorly. ❝The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price.❞ / ⚱️ Peter Higgs and Pat Walsh died. (You don’t know Pat, but he was a friends and the best teacher I ever had.) / 🎥 An unintentionally (I think) amusing (or mean) pair of New Yorker movies pieces: John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk and Can a Film Star (who presumably isn’t John Cazale) Be Too Good-Looking? / 🎸 Udio lets you “make” AI music and it’s simultaneously deeply satisfying and deeply concerning. / 📝 Love Song, with Removed Cyst. / 🎹 15-note poly tempo pendulum. / 💩 Dog Poo Golf. / 🏞️ One Minute Park. (Summer goal: contribute a few of these.) / 🗄️ The Fictional Brands Archive. / ⛹️‍♀️ Sports teams named after technologies. / 👆 QWANJI. / 📺 I also hated Succession and now I have a champion. ❝More people need to admit that this is the central viewing experience of Succession: you were either waiting for a good moment to screen grab and turn into a meme, or you are now watching to understand the deeper meme lore. No one actually talks to each other in this show, every sentence is delivered like a bitter slap in the face. Oh, we’re not supposed to like any of these people? Yeah, I think I got that.❞ / 🚀 Space Trash Signs.

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COLLECTION

VOL 2, NO 2

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I put these posts together using a running text file on my phone, which I then publish when it feels full enough. After a few months of playing with form, the text file’s structure includes this space up top. An opener! A place for my thoughts and writing that’s separate from what’s below and clearly more important because it’s first. In the last post, its said “Happy Rex Manning Day” and then referenced the deleted and re-inserted blue-cheese-salad-dressing-on-the-dick scene. My thoughts! My writing! They can’t all be bangers, I guess.

Anyway, here’s a pretty great takedown of columnists and columns, so, at least for today, I can fill this space with a related and amusing pull quote.

❝Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. Even the sharpest thinkers on matters of politics and policy and global news can have, at best, one or two good ideas a month, and by definition most of the population of columnists are not the sharpest thinkers in that same population. […] The world is full of overconfident but not smart people, and they must have their champions.❞

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Read Swish, boo Swish (and other confusions) / 🛳️ Time is a flat circle (though, as my wife says, all circles are flat) and we’ve come all the way back around to cruise ships are a metaphor for the end of society. (Again!) / 📸 Jamie Livingston’s daily Polaroids are back. / 📰 Kara Swisher’s attempt at retconning tech journalism and her rather significant role in its many failures continues to go poorly. ❝The long and short of it is that Swisher is not a good journalist—or, framed more generously, that she thrived in an industry with remarkably low standards for which we are still paying the price.❞ / ⚱️ Peter Higgs and Pat Walsh died. (You don’t know Pat, but he was a friends and the best teacher I ever had.) / 🎥 An unintentionally (I think) amusing (or mean) pair of New Yorker movies pieces: John Cazale’s Barbaric Squawk and Can a Film Star (who presumably isn’t John Cazale) Be Too Good-Looking? / 🎸 Udio lets you “make” AI music and it’s simultaneously deeply satisfying and deeply concerning. / 📝 Love Song, with Removed Cyst. / 🎹 15-note poly tempo pendulum. / 💩 Dog Poo Golf. / 🏞️ One Minute Park. (Summer goal: contribute a few of these.) / 🗄️ The Fictional Brands Archive. / ⛹️‍♀️ Sports teams named after technologies. / 👆 QWANJI. / 📺 I also hated Succession and now I have a champion. ❝More people need to admit that this is the central viewing experience of Succession: you were either waiting for a good moment to screen grab and turn into a meme, or you are now watching to understand the deeper meme lore. No one actually talks to each other in this show, every sentence is delivered like a bitter slap in the face. Oh, we’re not supposed to like any of these people? Yeah, I think I got that.❞ / 🚀 Space Trash Signs.

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Pop Loser Vol 2., No. 2

VOL 2, NO 2

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Happy Rex Manning Day to all who celebrate. I hope you like blue cheese.

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Pod Loser. / Baseball, a mixtape.

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Wieners and losers (and other confusions). / 🤑 It always ends in ads, even for Discord. / 🤡 How Vice fell to pieces. (Spoiler: there are no surprises here. It was dumb people making bad decisions guided entirely by a Silicon Valley capitalist ethos.) ❝One executive described Dubuc’s hires as “a fucking clown show”; another called them “comical”; a third called them “cartoonish”; a fourth called them a “screwball cast of suits”; a fifth told me he’d learned valuable lessons from them about what never to do with a company.❞ / 🤩 An oral history of that Madonna appearance on Letterman. / 🎸 A new Prince track dropped. / 🌭 You had me at “Big Hot Dog.” ❝‌Now I know that a billion of anything is so many that it’s impossible to really comprehend, so let’s examine some other stats Big Hot Dog provides.❞ / 🐟 Phil A. O’Fish. / ⚱️ Joe Flaherty died. / 🎨 Trench art. / 🤖 The robots are archiving the work of the robots and I’m hopeful pretty soon we won’t need people at all.

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Pop Loser Vol. 2, No. 1

VOL 2, NO 1

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Et two? / There is no rhyme or reason to the volume structure here other than I like counting things and it builds in breaks I can take basically whenever. Baseball was starting, thus ending Vol. 1 so I could do some fantasy drafting and watch a lot of games. But that’s all done, and after yesterday I may never watch another baseball game again anyway, so let’s get on with number two.

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Let them eat snake (and other confusions). / 🎸 Digging into the Rolling Stone 500. The nobleness of this project is matched only by its scientificicity. ❝Beyond accounting for new releases, there must be other factors influencing Rolling Stone’s choices. This project uses Rolling Stone album rankings – twenty years apart in time – to determine what influences ‘greatness’.❞ / 🗿 The future will be weird af. (More on CoreCore.) / 🐍 I hope you like the taste of python. / 🎨 There’s a new Keith Haring biography. / 🤑 Too late capitalism. ❝The odd thing about the undying attachment to the term “late capitalism,” of which Kornbluh’s book is but the latest manifestation, is that it refers to an epoch that ended, by all serious accounts, in the 1970s.❞ (The best line of the review comes late: ❝’The masses of people must implement transformative solutions like decarbonization, universal care, and vibrant cities that prioritize people over profit, liberate sexuality, and combat racist imperialism with democratic internationalism.’ OK. Does roasting Maggie Nelson bring us closer to this desideratum?❞) / 🥃 Why is the Angostura bitters label bigger than the bottle? / 🗄️ UbuWeb, a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. / 👁️ Ways Of Seeing, always worth revisiting. / 🎞️ Movie Posters Perfected. / 🧑‍🚀 NASA made a TTRPG and it looks kinda fun.

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Someone didn’t get the note from licensing.

Pop Loser Vol. 1, No. 12

VOL 1, NO 12

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Pod Loser. / Slacker, a mixtape.

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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.

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When someonee dies, is there a race among Wikipedia editors to rewrite the entry in past tense? Or is that just one guy’s (volunteer) job? What’s the etiquette?

Pop Loser Vol 1 No 11

VOL 1, NO 11

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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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We need to talk about how bad reading websites is on phones.

Pop Loser Vol. 1, No. 10

VOL 1, NO 10

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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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Pod Loser. / Space, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)

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Great moments in 2024 media.

We finally closed the loop.

Pod Loser Ep. 2, Space

Space, a mixtape.

Pop Loser Vol. 1 No. 9

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Pod Loser. / Love, a mixtape. (I’m gonna make more of these. Here’s the podcast feed.)

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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