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Porting Pop Loser back over to WordPress. More to come. Please be patient.

(NOTE: I wrote this months ago, then completely forgot about it. As such, some of the references are a bit dated, but considering I haven’t posted anything here since the spring, it seemed better to put this up as is versus waiting to see how long until I updated it.)

My wife and I currently subscribe to six magazines and two newspapers, which is kind of insane. Content is everywhere. We have computers and laptops and iPhones and iPads, yet a steady stream of paper keeps coming into our home. And we pay for it. Ridiculous! (Mea culpa: My wife is a magazine editor and I frequently write for her magazine. So part of this can be attributed to occupational hazard.)

Of our subscriptions, Wired is the oddest. (Actually, the newspapers are more bizarre, especially given how many of them end up in the recycling bin still bound in their elastic, but let’s just call that a deficiency of character on my part.) Wired is great. I read every issue nearly cover-to-cover. In that respect, being a subscriber makes total sense. Except their content is available online. And it’s not like I’m a luddite — I don’t mind reading online. I’m a heavy Instapaper user as well — more so since the iPad arrived. I could read Wired without subscribing, yet I just renewed for another year. It’s crazy!

Wired recently entered the world of iPad publishing. In a move that completely proves how absurd my media purchasing habits are, I bought the first iPad issue as well. Let me say that again: I paid $4.99 for an iPad issue of a magazine that I had already purchased in paper form and that I could just read online for free. Clown. Shit. Insane. And kind of a waste of money.

I’m not going to do a detailed review of Wired’s app, because the internet is littered with them and mine would be mostly the same. It’s kind of cool, grossly overpriced and generally underwhelming. But what is it we were all expecting?

For lack of a better description, Wired on the iPad is pictures of text. (And pictures of pictures, but let’s focus on the text.) This is the thing that put off a lot of people. As interactive as the app may seem, really it’s not very interactive at all. And when it comes to the text, you can’t interact at all beyond swiping pages. This is viewed as a deficiency. Initially I thought that was a bit strange since that mimics the magazine reading experience almost exactly.

When you pick up a magazine, you can’t do anything with the text, except, of course, read it. This is a formula that’s worked for decades. But on the iPad, it’s a serious problem. And while at first I found irony in that being a serious problem for people it didn’t take long for me to realize that of course it’s a serious problem.

Interacting with text is kind of what the internet is all about. This is the digital age. We don’t just read anymore. We cut, we paste, we blog, we quote, we comment, we reblog, we editorialize, etc. So reading a magazine on a magical, forward-thinking device like the iPad shouldn’t mimic the paper experience at all.

As happy as I am with magazines and will continue to subscribe to several, once the medium changes, so do my expectations. Reading online has set a baseline for what these expectations are.

Here’s my process for long content online:

1. See interesting article in my RSS reader.
2. Click headline to visit article page.
3. Find link to view content as a single page.
4. Click “Add to Instapaper” in my bookmark bar.
5. Forget about article until I get home from work.
6. Spend 1-2 hours on my couch reading collected articles in Instapaper on my iPad.
7. Send quotes from relevant articles (with added pith) to my Tumblr from within Instapaper.

Here’s my process for long content in a magazine:

1. Sit on toilet.
2. Open magazine.
3. Read article.
4. Finish article and put magazine back in magazine bin.
5. Wipe.
6. Flush.

The platform completely changes the way I interact with content, so when your digital content only meets my paper expectations, well, that’s kind of a fail. (Plus, while I’m not saying my iPad has never been near my toilet, it’s certainly not something people like to think about. Ew, poo germs.)

Some are wondering if the iPad is the great savior of the publishing industry. If you do it like Wired, I’m going to have to say no, it isn’t. Though I don’t expect Wired’s current iPad format to be the standard for very long. Especially at that price.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with this app. (Actually, I think it’s everyone’s biggest problem.) Charging $4.99 for an issue of a magazine on an iPad is crazier than subscribing to multiple magazines in 2010. Sure, they a bazillion people downloaded it, but I’m looking forward to seeing how fast that number declines if they keep that price point.

Word on the street is that the New Yorker (another of the magazines I subscribe to) is working on a subscription plan that combines formats, so once I subscribe to their paper version, I can also access the iPad version. This makes sense, right? This is something I can get behind. Let me pay for your content once and be able to access it everywhere. (This could also be called the “Anti-MLB Model,” but that’s another post. Fuckers.)

(Side note: We also subscribe to Esquire. We love Esquire. Esquire tries to do all kinds of crazy digital shit. Sadly, most of it is irritating. I haven’t even tried their app yet.)

Baseball is a game with a rich, lush history. And, more so than any other sport, it’s remained virtually unchanged over time. (The exception is, of course, soccer. But soccer is stupid and despite the massive global audience, I’m not convinced anyone actually cares about it?) At least it’s unchanged from the perspective of a fan watching a game. Behind the scenes computers have vastly altered nearly every aspect of baseball. (Well, computers and steroids. But for the purpose of this post, we’ll just assume Barry Bonds ate his Wheaties and Roger Clemens is somehow exempt from the laws of biology and physics.)

It’s really only over the last three or four years that I’ve started to give a shit about baseball, and now I prefer watching it to hockey. (Part of this might be attributed to the laughably horrendous management of the Calgary Flames, which has all but ruined being a hockey fan for me. And yet, no one has been fired. What the fuck is that all about?) More than a small portion of my new-found love of baseball has to do with statistics. I’m a bit OCD when it comes to stats. I love them. I was always aware that they count everything in baseball, but it wasn’t until I read Moneyball that I understood just what most of that counting really meant. In case you’re unaware, baseball has this thing called sabermetrics. Sabermetrics is defined by its inventor, Bill James, as “the search for objective knowledge about baseball.” It is essentially a lot of math. Some of it is simple, some of it is complex and all of it is fascinating to big nerds like me.

But it wasn’t the invention of new statistics that fundamentally changed baseball. It was computers. Bill James published his first Baseball Abstract in 1977. It went mostly unread and it wasn’t even the first book to look at the sport from a purely statistical perspective. But in 1995 Sean Lahman made a massive database of baseball statistics available for free. This level of detail in electronic form made data manipulation easy for everyone and statistical analysis slowly took off. (Slowly because baseball is still steeped in tradition and not everyone was immediately receptive to new ideas about what defined a winning strategy.)

When computers were conceived, I think it’s safe to say changing the face of professional baseball was not one of the objectives. This is sort of what McLuhan meant when he coined the term “rearview mirrorism.” We can only frame the future in the context of the past. Baseball statistics weren’t compiled with the use of a computer until the late sixties. And even then people didn’t really know what to do with them. Nobody looked at a machine designed to crunch numbers and thought “Hey, now we can track on-base percentage.” At least not initially, but somehow Microsoft Excel has probably made more of a contribution to the sport than any player since Jackie Robinson.

This is one of those unexpected results of technology. But, I suppose nearly every result of technology is somewhat unexpected. Or at least the best results are. Until parsing data was easy, it never occurred to anyone working in baseball to do it. Even if it had, the pencil and paper calculations (even with a rudimentary calculator) made the task impossible for anyone that isn’t wired like Rain Man.

This sort of thing is happening all the time. Baseball is hardly the most notable thing computers have changed. Technology is changing our fundamental understanding of nearly everything. Unfortunately, it’s going to be awhile before we really understand what that means.

(Some notes: There are few books I recommend to people more frequently than Moneyball. If you have even a passing interest in sports, you should definitely pick it up. Also, if baseball and data give you a hard on, Flip Flop Fly Ball is your new favorite website.)

There are literally hundreds of note taking apps for the iPhone currently available. A few of them are really good, too. They offer an array of features, including voice notes, photo notes, wireless syncing, to-do lists, calendar integration and a million other things somebody somewhere has a need for. I’ve tried six of them, unsuccessfully, preferring instead to stick with an old fashioned paper and pen approach.

About five years ago, technology created a very modern problem for men — too many gadgets, not enough pockets. If you ever question how horribly unstylish fanny packs are, consider this: The rise of the mobile phone, iPod and other objects of convenience created the greatest need in history for such an accessory, but they never managed to re-popularize. At all. Not even close. We live in a world where not even complete and total practicality and convenience can revive the fanny pack. Realizing that has made me feel infinitely better about humanity. But I digress.

The iPhone was a true triumph in this battle of the bulge. (See what I did there?) With a single, unified device, I only had to carry one thing and it could do everything (and someday, it may well eliminate the need for a wallet, which would rock). Except I could never get the hang of it as something I could use to jot things down — ideas, appointments, lists, snippets of poetry as inspiration hits (I haven’t actually done this yet, but you never know). No note taking app could ever be faster or easier than just writing the shit down.

This is my hipster PDA:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Stationery is pathologically important. I have tested no fewer than a dozen different types of notebooks and even more pens to come to this particular combination. (I also have started collecting vintage notebooks, but I’ll save that for another post.)

The Fisher Bullet Space Pen
This pen rocks for two simple reasons: 1. It’s small and easy to pocket, but also extendable and easy to write with, and 2. It writes in fucking space (I haven’t actually done this yet, but you never know).

Field Notes Brand Notebooks
After field testing a lot of different notebooks, I briefly settled on the Moleskine cahier pocket size, but then shifted to Field Notes when they launched a couple years ago because, well, they are much cooler. (I’ve since started subscribing to their colors series, so they just ship me a bunch of new notebooks quarterly. It’s very handy. Also, I like having their clicky Bic pens around my desk, though they can never replace the Bullet Space Pen as a pocket pen for obvious reasons.)

I’ve never been what you would describe as “an organized person.” And I’m painfully forgetful. (At least it’s painful for my wife. For me, ignorance is truly bliss.) So I started carrying a notebook and pen. But now notebooks have taken over. In addition to the everything pocket notebook, I keep three more in my man-bag (a post on man-bags is scheduled to come as well). These are for freelance sketches and project notes, ideas and notes for this blog and lists of things to do around the house my wife and I just bought.

The iPhone should have eliminated all of this. When I was trying notetaking apps, I became a big fan of Evernote’s cross-platform syncing. Theoretically this is a superior way of doing things. Except it really isn’t. At least not for me.

Technology has certainly made life more convenient in a lot of ways. And I find it interesting the way new technology tries to capture the brilliant simplicity of lo-fi tools. (This is a very tangible manifestation of McLuhan’s rearview mirrorism. I have a whole series of posts planned on that.) But while I’m perfectly willing to destroy my entire record collection as a declaration of its obsolescence, you can’t have my Space Pen. Yet.

I am about to give nearly my entire record collection away to a friend. So he can melt it down and make furniture out of it. I’m not even kidding.

Six or so years ago, I was at the peak of what someone once referred to as my DJ “career.” (I laughed hysterically when they called it that.) At the time I was playing every Thursday and Friday night, and would occasionally tour, records in tow. During this period I was spending around $200 on new records every week. Heady days, those.

I estimate the closet in my home office currently contains over 3,000 pieces of vinyl. The bulk of these are 12” dance singles. Most of the best house music from 2002-2006 is present. There was a time these records meant the world to me. I knew every beat of every track just by glancing at the color of the label. (Actually, I’ve always been terrible at remember song and artist names, so a lot of that music I remember as “the one with the yellow label and pink writing” or “the one with the cherry logo on it.” I used stickers to mark the white labels, including, one time, some hockey stickers. To this day, there is a song I love as much as any I’ve ever heard, and I know it only as “The Dominik Hasek Song.”)

And now I’m about to give away the entire collection. For free. To be melted down. And I’m okay with that. (I’ll note here that there are about 100-150 records in the collection — including some Daft Punk and Gorillaz LPs, a few rare pressings and, oddly, Abbey Road — that I intend to keep.)

What happened to make this sort of behavior acceptable to me? The me from a few years ago would kick present me’s ass. Hard.

I started this blog to write about my love of old-school things in a new-school world, yet here I am declaring that I’m going to allow literally tens-of-thousands-of-dollars worth of records to be destroyed. Records I painstakingly collected and once valued more than anything else I owned. And this is the first fucking post! That feels like a bit of a failure.

But the truth is, music has changed. I don’t mean that in the sense that contemporary pop music isn’t as good as pop music from ten years ago (it never is), but rather in the sense that how we interact with music and what music physically is has radically changed. Quite frankly, music has become mostly worthless.

When I played my last regular show in December of last year, I was DJing entirely from a MacBook, and had been for nearly four years. I was spending substantially less money on music, but getting substantially more of it. I challenged myself to play 50% brand new music every week, and never play any track (with the occasional really fucking rocking exception) for more than four weeks.

My music at home isn’t much different. I boxed up my CD collection (approximately 1,500 discs) long ago. They are sitting in my basement. Instead, the music I listen to is stored on a laptop and an iPod (and is backed up on an external hard drive). I get new music all the time. So much, it’s hard to keep up and there are probably dozens of albums sitting in my iTunes library that I’ve never even listened to.

One thing I can say about music today is that it’s beyond cheap. Sometimes I pay for it. A lot of times I don’t. This isn’t because of some deep-seeded desire to fuck the music industry or anything, it’s just the way it is. (The ethics of that is a discussion for another time. That is, if you’re still into having discussions on the ethics of music piracy in all its various shades of grey, which, I think it’s safe to say, most people really aren’t anymore.)

As Patton Oswalt said (about iPods and not music in general, but I think it still relates), “It’s a miracle and no one cares.” And he’s right. Music has become worthless. Beautiful and I can’t imagine my life without it, but worthless.

I fought the good fight to keep vinyl relevant. I did. But in the end, the cost of digital simply made it impossible not to transition. And this doesn’t even account for the storage and portability problems presented by vinyl, itself a format that originally beat out Edison’s cylinder not because it offered better sound quality (it didn’t) but because it was cheaper and easier. This has always been the direction music was headed in and we’ve simply reached the logical conclusion.

Keeping 3,000 records (dance singles at that) just isn’t practical. My wife and I just bought a house and before we move in those fucking things had to go. (That directive was actually hers, but I fully support it.)

I love the idea of vinyl, and as I said, I’m keeping some of these records. And I’ll probably even grow the collection a bit. I mean, I have Abbey Road, why not get the rest of the Beatles discography? But the reality is vinyl just doesn’t have a place in the world anymore beyond nostalgia. (And, to be perfectly honest, I have more love in my heart for the cassette tape format. Does that date me?)

I suppose that’s the point to this blog. I’m a technology writer and self-identifying early adopter, but I also cling to objects that seem out of sync with modern times for as long as I can. I love Polaroid film and paperback novels and clicky pens. I subscribe to five magazines, which is completely fucking ridiculous. And, once I let a friend melt down the other 2,850, I’ll own 150 pieces of vinyl.

Surely all of this is going to give me some kind of complex.

UPDATE: Mason, the friend who was scheduled to melt my vinyl, won’t actually be melting it. I underestimated his respect for the medium it seems. Still, I’m curious what kind of contraption he will build from it. (And I’m still holding out hope he’ll melt at least one, so as not to make a liar out of me.)