Pop Loser

This Tumblr used to mirror poploser.org.

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I’ve been posting links here for about eight years. Some things that aren’t eight years old: the iPhone. My marriage. My youngest son.

Awhile ago I posted something about killing all the analytics on this site, which I did. I hate analytics and attracting clicks was never the point to this site. But then Google decided to pull the plug on Reader and I got curious, so I turned the analytics back on. In the last year, I’ve watched the RSS traffic here drop dramatically, then hold steady. One thing is hasn’t done is grow. But Pop Loser has always been designed to be read via RSS first. I’ve said before that RSS is the best technology with the worst PR. The way I’m linking to things is no longer jibing with how people are reading things.

So, effectively immediately, this blog is on hiatus. It may come back in a few months if this experiment fails, but for now, consider it toast.

Moving on: have you noticed how popular email newsletters have become?

I am nothing if not a blatant follower of trends, so starting next week, Pop Loser will be a weekly email newsletter, sent out every Thursday afternoon with the occasional supplemental issue. The content will be mostly the same, but more focused and organized around weekly happenings. I’m still working out the formatting and specifics, but I’m sure it’ll all be wonderful.

#mc<em>embedsignup{background:#fff; clear:left; font:14px Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif; } /* Add your own MailChimp form style overrides in your site stylesheet or in this style block. We recommend moving this block and the preceding CSS link to the HEAD of your HTML file. */

Subscribe to Pop Loser

(Subscribe here if that form isn’t working.)

That’s kind of it for now. Add your email address above to keep getting the links I find interesting, or not. I expect readership to drop, again, but as my wife is always yelling at me: “Is there to be no progress?”

To those who have been RSSing this site for awhile, thanks so much. It’s been a huge part of my daily routine for nearly a decade, and I’m sure I’d have scrapped it awhile ago if someone didn’t occasionally say a nice thing to me about it.

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Tiii.me calculates how long it takes to binge watch a show. So now I know I spent 247 hours watching The West Wing last summer.

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Knowlton Nash died.

When the CBC cuts down in 1996, he said “These cuts are really into the bone … it’s fundamentally hurting the whole concept of public broadcasting.” Peter Mansbridge also notes:

He wasn’t an anchor who wanted to be separated, locked away from the people he worked with or worked for. And to be clear on that last point, he believed he worked for YOU. Not for the CBC. For you. That was his understanding of public broadcasting.

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NPR has created an archive that links to over 300 great commencement speeches.

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This is a list of articles favourited in Instapaper over the last week. You can view my reading list at any time here, or subscribe to the RSS feed here.

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Arcade story: a must-read for everyone who grew up in the Dragon’s Lair/Space Ace era.

I’m not especially proud of this story, but I post it because I think you will find it amusing, and also because it captures a little bit of the essence of the arcade era which has been somewhat lost to time.

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The endless t-shirt trend.

Further keyboard conjecture: Could the endless T-shirt be the latest bro trend, arriving just ahead of the bro-iest of seasons, summer, when bros assemble to act out performances of affection for one another? Is it an update of 2010’s Bros Icing Bros, a homoerotic exuberance kept at a safe, manly distance? Bros Wearing Bros—the ultimate love letter. Women will certainly wear endless T-shirts, too—Madonna via Gaga? But, when they do, they will be acting like bros.

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From an evolutionary perspective, our brains aren’t really set up for logic, reason and thinking about things scientifically. Fascinating stuff.

Options for problem solving are limited to the tools available. The arrival of logic was a major tool. So, too, was the arrival of the scientific method, clinical trials, and statistical analyses. Yet for the first 99.98% of our existence on this planet as humans—literally—we had to rely on other options—other tools, if you will—for solving problems and making decisions.

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The life and times of ¯_(ツ)_/¯.

After seeing the light of ¯_(ツ)/¯, it’s hard to not notice it everywhere. Han Solo makes the gesture in Star Wars, as Reddit noticed in 2012. Daily Dot writer Miles Klee caught the Spider-Man super villain Mysterio doing it. In 2013, it appeared in a Reddit post that commanded users “lol idk just upvote.” “Lol idk” seems like a fairly apt description of the shruggie’s meaning, but it also doesn’t begin to describe the nihilism that ¯_(ツ)/¯ embodies today.

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Not unrelated to the last post, Nieman Journalism Lab has the leaked New York Times innovation report.

The value of the homepage is decreasing. “Only a third of our readers ever visit it. And those who do visit are spending less time: page views and minutes spent per reader dropped by double-digit percentages last year.” The Times must do a better job encouraging sharing of content: “But at The Times, discovery, promotion and engagement have been pushed to the margins, typically left to our business-side colleagues or handed to small teams in the newsroom. The business side still has a major role to play, but the newsroom needs to claim its seat at the table because packaging, promoting and sharing our journalism requires editorial oversight.”

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The Ottawa Citizen is radically changing the way they deliver content with their new redesign. I hope they release analytics in the future.

From the Editor:

The new newspaper provides more context and analysis, full of insights for an informed audience. From City Hall to Parliament Hill, from the new football team to the latest restaurant, there will be a deeper focus on stories that matter locally, with a new colour-coded section design.

The relaunched website will be the go-to place for everything the Citizen offers, on a platform that delivers superior performance, navigation, and search. All of this will be packaged in a new responsive design that delivers an optimal viewing experience, regardless of which device or platform you use.

Our new smartphone app concentrates on storytelling delivered in small bites, for people who are constantly on the move but need to be always up to date. It will be resolutely local in focus, full of personality, and updated all day.

Finally, our tablet app has been reimagined as an eye-catching local news and current affairs magazine that will be delivered at 6 p.m. every weekday. It illuminates, illustrates and expands on the news of the day through the interactive and tactile sound-and-vision experience that only a tablet can deliver.

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Posted without comment: Poolside.fm.

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About I Am Curious (Yellow) the “scandalous” and “dirty” film referenced on last week’s Mad Men.

The sex in the film is explicit, but not particularly outrageous. Nor was it really meant to be. Sjoman has said he was looking more for intimacy and realism; the actors look ordinary, and there’s nothing titillating about their coupling. “[I]f we were going to break away from the old clichés, we had to say: this is what people look like; now put the camera on them and don’t use tricks,” the director says in an interview available at the Criterion Collection’s site.

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About I Am Curious (Yellow) the “scandalous” and “dirty” film referenced on last week’s Mad Men.

The sex in the film is explicit, but not particularly outrageous. Nor was it really meant to be. Sjoman has said he was looking more for intimacy and realism; the actors look ordinary, and there’s nothing titillating about their coupling. “[I]f we were going to break away from the old clichés, we had to say: this is what people look like; now put the camera on them and don’t use tricks,” the director says in an interview available at the Criterion Collection’s site.

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Computer performance and the infinite space between words. [via]

If the CPU registers are how long it takes you to fetch data from your brain, then going to disk is the equivalent of fetching data from Pluto.

[...]

So instead of travelling to Pluto to get our data from disk in 1999, today we only need to travel to … Jupiter.

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The 90s are disappearing from history.

The total dollar figure of vinyl sales in the U.S. in 2013 was only $177 million; which, in the context of the entire music industry, represents little more than hipster affectation. But here’s something to ponder: Will compact disks ever see a similar resurgence? I’m guessing no. There’s no point to it. CDs, as objects, have no cultural heft, no analog quirks to savor. They were merely the cheapest way, at the time, to deliver a package of ones and zeroes. Once you’ve ripped your old CDs, or switched to a streaming music service, there’s zero reason to keep them around.

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The open-office trap.

The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

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