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VOL 4, NO 10 
★Harry times./ Every few years since the internet came along Marshall McLuhan has and guys like me name little parts of our website after things he said because we are all so very clever.
Harold Innis, the other great Canadian thinker on communications, has almost no moments at all, but probably should.
❝What Innis doesn’t offer is much hope that we’ll be able to change course. His writing on communication is melancholic in tone and pessimistic in thrust. He saw present-mindedness as a comfortable trap. By foreclosing the long view, it blinds us to what we’ve lost. It breeds an arrogant belief in the present’s superiority to the benighted past. Fashionable orthodoxies take hold of the public mind, as thought begins to run in the ‘grooves’ carved out by the dominant media channels. Though Innis devoted his career to exploring the culture of the West, he also sensed its demise. ‘Concern with the position of Western civilization in the year 2000 is unthinkable,’ he wrote in 1951. ‘Each civilization has its own methods of suicide.‘❞
Oh. Bummer.
Related: Some good Innis bias of communication examples:
Space bias: Thememes will continue
Time bias:Graffiti limbo.
❝The graffiti in the library carrels ‘reveals conversations playing out in slow motion between otherwise isolated crammers. It voices the anxieties and aspirations of contemporary college students striving to leave their mark on a large and sometimes impersonal institution.‘❞
☆Suicide/ Andy Warhol / 1964☆
Confusions./ 
⚱️Val Kilmer,Richard ChamberlainandGeorge Foremandied.
More:
❝Ali, the alleged punch-taker, was actually up on every card by multiple points after seven rounds; one judge didn’t give Foreman a single round that night. The real story is that the fight lasted into the 8th only because Foreman withstood several fistic barrages from Ali that would have floored anybody without his tungsten chin.❞
/ 
👾 The completeInfocom archive. /WikiAsteroids, Asteroids powered by real-time Wikipedia edits. / ♟️Real-time chess. / 
🪟 The 50 best thingsMicrosofthas made. (I fucking hate hate hate that fucking keyboard.) / 🔗Linkding, self-hosted bookmarks (or: How is it possible I still miss and long forMa.gnoliaafter all these years?). / 📝Bored of it. /Poetical, poetry only readable through your calendar. / 🤘 Trailer forPavements, the Pavement movie. /Musical DNA. / 📺 They started onsoap operas. / ✌️✖→ 11:17 AM, Apr 3
🍿The Usual Suspects→ 11:18 AM, Mar 28
📸 We went out and had fun.→ 3:55 PM, Mar 26
📸 Bird seeing.→ 5:17 PM, Mar 22
★Private properly. Some mornings if I wake up an hour or two early, I drink coffee and surf YouTube. This is about 90% of my YouTube time. If you’re the same, I recommend
Andy Anderson skateboarding videos. I don’t even watch that many skate videos, but that kid is a fucking poet on wheels.
Speaking of YouTube, I’ve been on a privacy kick lately (which is annoying because I’m also on an anti-algorithm kickandthe “Canada rules” kick that’s going around (which is more of a “USA sucks” kick for me because I deplore patriotism)… it’s a lot of kicks — too many, really — is my point) and have started playing withFreeTube, which is a standalone YouTube player — effectively YouTube without the prostate exam (or, if you don’t care about privacy but do want to remove minor annoyances from your life, without ads). It’s cool so far and gave me an excuse to clean up my subscriptions and playlists.
I’ve also been tryingStartPagefor search and as abrowseron my phone. The search is nice enough, though because it pulls results from other search engines it suffers from the same declining usefulness of results that all search engines have right now. The app is neat, but is taking some getting used to and has some annoying missing features, like a reading list that syncs back to my laptop, and a lot of missing gestures I’m used to from using mobile Safari forever.
Remember when we could use the internet and just watch some cool kickflips without jumping through all these hoops? We didn’t know how good we had it.
☆Santa Cruz Skateboards/Robert Williams☆
Confusions./ 📰 Thewizard of vinylis in Kansas. Who knew. / 🤖 AI and thenew aesthetics of fascism.
❝Andy Warhol’s mass-produced art did not create enjoyment by enabling its viewers to imagine their class enemies being made unemployed. Those are the goals of AI art, and that is why it resonates with the right.❞
/ 🎸 There areno bandsanymore. / ⌨️Blood Typers, finally horror comes for typing tutors. / 🎨Hue.tools. /Dali’s VD posters. / 📸Owls in towels. / What didHubblesee on your birthday? /Brock DavisInsta. / 🎞️ The thing that I hate (“new literalism”) about a lot of movies right now.
❝It’s hard to say which came first: our so-called media illiteracy or the dumbing down of the media. Complaints about our inability to read, interpret, or discern irony, subtlety, and nuance are as old as art. What feels new is the expectation, on the part of both makers and audiences, that there is such a thing as knowing definitively what a work of art means or stands for, aesthetically and politically. This strikes me as a blatant redefinition of art itself.❞
/I’m Not a Robot. / I am trapped in theCriterion closet. / 💾 Save things inMarkdown. / 📱 It is as if you areon your phone. / ✌️✖→ 11:38 AM, Mar 18
📺Doctor Who(S10)→ 8:28 PM, Mar 16
🍿Captain Fantastic→ 3:55 PM, Mar 16
🕹️ Asteroids Deluxe 27,040→ 10:27 AM, Mar 16
Just noticed I put the same song on back-to-back mixtapes and, sure it’s a banger, but my playlist game is getting sloppy.→ 8:32 AM, Mar 16
📸 Noodle queen, a series→ 7:34 AM, Mar 9
★Pod Loser.I Assure You I’m Not Having Any Fun At All, a mixtape. (Podcast feed.)
Featuring: Queens Of the Stone Age, Viagra Boys, Young Fathers, Lyrics Born, Santigold, Anamanaguchi, Problem Patterns, The Caezars, The Smiths, shower curtain, Eric's Trip, Fugazi, The Vaselines, Laura Jane Grace, Hot Hot Heat, HotWax, The Wombats. Cassette viaTapeDeck.org.
✖→ 7:27 AM, Mar 9
📸 Cannot overstate how much these two hate me every morning on my walk.→ 9:24 AM, Mar 8
📺Monarch/ I liked it more than I probably should have.→ 6:44 PM, Mar 6
After some brief and very unscientific playing around this morning… is Yahoo the best search engine now?→ 11:56 AM, Mar 6
★Phoney baloney.This week, I had to teach my 12yo how to make a phone call. Not the functional aspect, but the etiquette of calling someone on a shared landline in their home. “Probably his mother or father will answer. After they say ‘Hello,’ you say ‘Hello, may I please speak to Adam.’” Because you just don’t run into many people with landlines anymore, it’s entirely possible, even likely, this was the firstrealphone call of his life. Even when I hand him or my daughter the phone to talk to a grandparent, they look awkward as fuck holding it against their faces. They just have no clue. He did okay. Not great, but okay.
It’s funny because I can tell you that David Proude’s phone number was 436–8912 (this was before we had to also dial the area code) and Steven Murchison’s was 888–2826 and Adam Bassett’s was 436–9713. I made so many phone calls by junior high — probably thousands of them — that those numbers are still seared into my brain 35 years later.
The march of time and all that.
(Not really related, but worth mentioning: I also know that the code to get to Mike Tyson inMike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!is 0073735963.)
☆Vandalised Phone Box/ Banksy / 2005☆
Confusions./ 📰 538is shutting down andDiggis coming back, so finally we can get back to the old days (well, middle days) of internetting, I guess. / 💻TabBoo, add jumpscares to shitty time-sucking websites. Almost enough to make me switch to Chrome. /Notepadjs. / 🎥 The importance of preservinghome movies.
❝We might think of each home movie as a pixel in a giant collective documentary spanning a hundred years, endless films picturing family, friends, travels, rituals and celebrations. Home movies picture our own experience of daily life, work and leisure, rather than narratives cooked up by commercial studios. And every home movie is evidence: a gesture of permanence.❞
/ 🎧Heavyweightis coming back. (Sadly,WireTapis not.) /Walkman.land. / 👀The Uncomfortable, a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects. / Howbaseball cardsare made. (Fun fact: my dream job is writing the copy on the back of baseball cards.) / The golden age ofJapanese pencils. / ⌨️Micro Journal Rev.7. / 🎞️ Trailer forArt Spiegelman: Disaster Is My Muse. /Binocular Shots. / 📚 DRM-freebookshops. / 📱Sober Ringtones. /Touch Grass. / ⚱️Gene HackmanandRoberta Flackdied. / 🍩Twin Peaksdonut supercut.
☆Explorations./ 📺Bad Sisters. The most fun I’ve had watching TV in a long time. I already miss the. Garvey sisters a tremendous amount. / 📚Michael Crummey. Gotta be the best working novelist in Canada these days. I’m in the middle ofThe Adversaryright now, but there’s no bad book in the bunch. / 🎧Cliff Martinezsoundtracks. I use him mainly as the soundtrack for my D&D sessions, but have also started just listening around the house, despite the weird looks from my family. / ✌️✖→ 4:49 PM, Mar 5
📚The Adversaryby Michael Crummey→ 12:42 PM, Mar 5
It’s all just so fucking relentless.→ 12:10 PM, Mar 4
🍿Terminator 2/ First viewing for the 12yo.→ 10:44 PM, Mar 1
🍿Crimson Tide/The Royal Tenenbaums/ Solid double feature.→ 5:45 PM, Feb 28
📚Fahrenheit 451by Ray Bradbury→ 2:48 PM, Feb 26
📺Bad Sisters(fin) / Loved this show. Will miss the Garvey sisters very much.→ 9:20 PM, Feb 22
🍿The Gorge→ 3:21 PM, Feb 20
★Comfortably dumb.The problem is always people. Always. We are good at a lot of things, but somehow also bad at everything. We are stupid. We repeat our mistakes again and again. We never learn, mostly because we don’t especially want to. Learningishard. Ignoranceisbliss. Iistired.Dumping a gogabazillion dollars into AIremains an obviously dumb idea. Addingquote-tweets to Mastodonis probably a dumb idea. Electing pretty muchanyone to anythingis never a good idea. See? Terrible things are everywhere and they are because people, generally, fucking suck. We are always, always, always the problem.
Not you, though. You’re great. Enjoy some links!
☆”The Girl with a Pearl Earring bleeding from her eyes and ears” / AI Generated / 2025☆
Confusions./ ☄️Are we doomed yet?, asteroid impact probability. Related:So about that asteroid. / 👾RetroFab, a collection of playable old-school handheld games. /Mike Tysonfinally beaten in under 2 minutes. /Dragonsweeper. /Little Sisyphus. / ♟️Blunder Chess. / “The Pinball Philosophy”. / ⚱️Tom RobbinsandDavid Edward Byrddied. / 🎨Floor796. /Monospace, an ASCII art generator. /Essential Vermeer. / ✌️✖→ 3:00 PM, Feb 19
More like Toronto Poo Jays, amirite?→ 1:53 PM, Feb 18
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