I’m hosting two delightfully nerdy events in San Francisco this week:

The Cartoonist Conspiracy of San Francisco (@CartoonistSF)

Tuesday, June 9 • 7–9pm • Finjan Qahwa Cafe

Bring drawing supplies (pen, eraser, etc), make comics, and meet fellow cartoonists.

San Francisco Yo-Yo Club

Saturday, June 13 • 2–5pm • 826 Valencia St

Learn tricks, show off your skills, or just come throw a yo-yo with us.

Both of these events are free, all ages, and beginner-friendly. Come make something, learn something, and hang out with some wonderfully nerdy people.

And please support the awesome businesses that host us!

The post Upcoming Events in San Francisco appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

I think this is the fifth home where I’ve hung these two paintings over the past twenty years. Every time I unpack them, I end up thinking about Peet and that era of San Francisco all over again.

Peet was a fixture of the San Francisco art scene in the mid-2000s. He played drums with the Human Beans, painted graffiti as “Goonies”, and could regularly be found selling his paintings on sidewalks around the Mission District. His paintings often featured cassette tapes, clouds, telephone poles, and whimsical phrases like “The city is my sweetheart” or “We never sleep”. He frequently used found objects, like 2x4s and chunks of wood from construction sites, and kept his palette limited to 3 colors at a time.

His pieces were incredibly cheap, probably ranging from $5-$50, which was perfect for broke-ass artists like myself who loved his work but didn’t have much to offer for it. Peet Lum wasn’t necessarily a famous artist, but if you lived in the Mission around 2005–2006, there’s a very good chance you have one of his paintings hanging somewhere in your home.

When he wasn’t selling paintings, Peet was tagging the city with two recurring characters: a Pac-Man-style ghost with spiraled eyes and a melancholy little bear with a fang hanging out and a heart on its chest. His graffiti name was “Goonies,” though he rarely needed to write it. The characters, along with short phrases lifted from his paintings, were recognizable enough on their own.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve described Peet’s work to friends only to hear, “Oh yeah, I had one of his paintings. Whatever happened to that guy?” Sadly, Peet passed away on May 25th, 2006.

Peet’s art had a huge influence on me, but I didn’t know him personally. Our bands played a few shows together, and I’d chat with him whenever I ran into him on the street, but we never really hung out beyond that. I loved his characters, his phrases, and the clean, crisp lines in his work, but mostly I loved how much Peet cared about this city.

San Francisco’s art scene in the 2000s felt so full of energy and possibility. There was amazing art and music everywhere, and the city still felt affordable enough for weird little scenes like this to thrive.

Whenever I see Peet’s work, I’m immediately transported back to my early days in this city and how exciting it all was.

If you have a story about Peet, or photos you think I should include in this post, you can leave a comment below or email me at doc@docpop.org. And if you have any of Peet’s old work laying around, I’d love to add it to my collection. I’m still broke, but maybe we could trade stories or yo-yos

The post “The City Is My Sweetheart”: Remembering the Art of Peet Lum appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

The whole episode is charming, chaotic, and incredibly fun to watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJTXB5uT_C4

I’m excited to see whatever Stephen does next, especially if it involves a tour of public access TV shows across the country.

And since I couldn’t find a more graceful place to put this: fuck Brendan Carr and Trump for pushing Colbert off the air because their fragile egos couldn’t take a joke. The right loves to pretend they are defenders of free speech… up until someone criticizes them. Then they use the full power of the state to censor their opponents, while bragging about it.

The post Stephen Colbert’s Best Post-Cancellation Stunt Yet appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

Exploring the world of Rapid Serial Visual Presentation via the RSVP Nano app on an ESP32 microcontroller.
Currently testing it out with @charliejane's "All The Birds In The Sky". #RSVP

— Doctor M. Popular (@docpop)2026-05-17T01:36:07.443Z

RSVP is a method of presenting eBooks that doesn’t require the reader to move their eyes much. Text is displayed one word at a time, and you can control how fast it appears. Some people use this method to improve their reading speed, but I just thought it sounded fun to try.

It’s like a teleprompter for ebooks!

There are several free RSVP apps for mobile and the web that you can use to try this method out. I don’t have any specific recommendations yet, but you could copy the text from this post and try reading it in something like ReadRSVP to get a feel for the technique.

If you want to give RSVP Nano a try on your ESP32-S3 device, here’s what you’ll need:

Supported file types: EPUB, TXT, Markdown, HTML
Hardware: ESP32-S3 device + SD card (32GB or smaller)
Software: Chrome or Edge (for the web flasher)

Installing RSVP Nano was surprisingly easy thanks to John’s web flasher (Chrome or Edge required). I hooked my microcontroller up to Wi-Fi for over-the-air updates, and this thing is already packed with features.

I’m currently testing it out with Charlie Jane Anders’s All the Birds in the Sky. If you try it out, let me know your thoughts below.

If you’re interested in buying one of these ESP32-32 microcontrollers, consider using John’s affiliate link to help support his work-> https://www.waveshare.com/esp32-s3-touch-lcd-3.49.htm?&aff_id=153227

I’d also recommend giving John a follow on Instagram to see what cool new features he’s working on now.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by John Decebal (@johndecebal)

The post Reading eBooks with RSVP Nano appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

This is partly because we are mid-move and all of my other books are in boxes, but it’s mostly because I enjoy Mike’s writing so much. I honestly don’t read as many books as I’d like to these days, but this one is such a fun read that I can’t put it down.

How To Die is a collection of beautiful, sarcastic, and funny essays about everyday life. Each chapter starts with a simple question like “How to wash the dishes” or “How to read a book”, but the answers always are far more thoughtful and interesting than you’d expect. It’s less like an advice book, and more like sharing stories over coffee (or donuts).

Mike has been answering reader-submitted questions like these in his weekly newsletter for years, and this book collects many of those, but I highly recommend it book form even if you’ve already subscribed to his weekly rambling.

You can grab How to Die (And Other Stories) as either a hardcover or an ebook.

I can’t recommend it enough.

If you happen to be in San Francisco on May 11th, you should check out Mike’s event at Booksmith with special guest Annalee Newitz.

The post “How To Die (and Other Stories)” by Mike Monteiro appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

As a jazzy guitar riff plays, this time loop repeats over and over as the man desperately tries to escape his fate. Watch the video here:

It’s perfect, absolutely perfect.

The best part of “Bubble” is that it reminds me of a choose-your-own-adventure-style comic by Jason Shiga. In “Knock Knock,” you find yourself in a similar time loop. Waking up in a bedroom with a few seconds to evade being murdered by a stranger for some unknown reason. You can try to hide under the bed, escape through a window, or fight back. There are hundreds of ways to die in “Knock Knock,” and about half of them show up in “Bubble,” too.

The post One of the Coolest Music Videos I’ve Ever Seen: A Brutal Time Loop Done Right appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

Like this jazzy bench at the corner of Mission and Valencia.

Or this cosmic bench on Telegraph in Oakland.

Or my favorite new bench at the corner of 18th and Mission.

That last piece was created by Noah Peacock. He did the mural on the smoke shop there, and when the bench was added in front, Noah must have decided to work it into the final piece. It looks great.

As a note, I didn’t want to bother folks who were waiting for the bus, so I waited until the benches were empty before taking my photos. So imagine these same benches, but with your friends and neighbors using them.

The post The Art of Bus Stop Benches in San Francisco appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

Then I walked down Erie St, which was filled with awesome new pieces.

I headed back to 18th and Mission, a popular graffiti spot that is frequently covered with new pieces.

And I wrapped up my walk with a stroll through Clarion Alley.

The post Fresh new Art In New Hood appeared first on Doc Pop's Weblog.

The Artist’s Television Access is an art space on Valencia and 21st st in San Francisco. On Saturday evenings, they’ve been doing a series of short films, live electronic music, talks, and more. This week’s set featured some rare footage of Clara Rockmore performing theremin in Bob Moog’s house, vintage ads for IBM, and Joshua Ellingson demonstrating the Pepper’s Ghost illusion along with his modular synthesizer.

From the ATA’s description of the night:

Fine-tuning through the ultra-rich ether, we have discovered some, uh, “special” frequencies that ‘charm’, and re-animate concepts of contemporary A/V installation/performance, with jolts of juice both natural and ‘super’. Mission whiz Josh Ellingson marvels all with demos of his current works – thee eye-popping Pepper’s Ghost, as well as his re-wiring of cult director Sid Davis‘ Age 13. Anchoring the second half is a co-hit that threatens to crack through the ‘Quantum Consensus’: the US premiere of Riar Rizaldi‘s Tellurian Drama, a 20-min anomaly that asks way more that it answers, on the uses and possible abuses of an obscure Malabar Radio Antenna, on the island of Java in the Indonesian archipelago during the Dutch colonial period. Berlin skeptic Thorsten Fleisch contributes Astrogolem, his digital hypothesis on a time-traveling Nikolai Tesla, while Craig Baldwin shares his own revelations from his speculative history Spectres of the Spectrum (exc). PLUS Piercing the Unknown, Hippies High on Alpha, Clara Rockmore’s Theremin, and other inquiries into novel pop-music forms flowing from those magickal waves of electricity! $13

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