Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: nostalgia

  • New/Old Camera

    So, in the “buying old crap I had twenty-five years ago and threw out at some point,” I found another Vivitar camera that is (almost) the same as the one I had from 1993 to about 2000. I talked a bit about my history with analog film a few years ago, when I last fell…

  • Death of the Concord Mall, Redux

    Almost two years ago, I wrote a long eulogy for the mall of my childhood: Death of the Concord Mall. This was after I heard of plans of the de-malling of the forty-something shopping center. Well, plans have changed. Here’s an update. First, since I last wrote about this, more stores obviously closed. The christian book store…

  • Sears

    Yeah, so that Sears in Marin I posted about? It’s on the new closing list. I think it has until April. I should probably go take more pictures, but the last trip was so depressing, it’s probably not worth it. One of the other Sears store on the new closing list is the one in…

  • The Other Northgate

    Had the day off yesterday, and I’m still trying to keep this walking thing going, but the weather’s a bit off here. (Not as bad as it is in the Midwest, but still.) I’m getting bored of the usual malls, so I decided to head to a new one out in Marin, which is oddly…

  • pre-digital observations

    A bunch of thoughts, no particular order: Try going in your kitchen or bathroom and finding a product with a printed package that doesn’t have a URL on it. Pick up food boxes, condiments, pet food, candy bars, canned drinks, toothpaste… anything. Everything has a web address on it. It’s like an address having a…

  • KONCAST Episode 7: Andrea Donderi

    http://koncast.libsyn.com/episode-7-andrea-donderi In this episode, I talk to long-time friend Andrea Donderi, a recent graduate of The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. We discuss: the IU support center; the early web; knowledge bases and creating content; Jorn Barger and the invention of the blog; Gopher versus the WWW; the ChiNet BBS and other…

  • Donald Cried (2016)

    Donald Cried is a film in the “you can never go back” camp, but it’s also more about the estranged relationship between two friends who were inseparable as teenagers, but took completely different paths into adulthood. Originally a short by independent filmmaker Kris Avedisian, this was expanded to a feature-length affair with the help of a…

  • This site is now twenty years old.

    What were you doing twenty years ago? I was living in Seattle. Working on the west shore of Lake Union. Working on two different books, but years from finishing either. I’d done a paper zine that had petered out after a half-dozen issues, and had a personal web site I’d been running for three or…

  • Death of an office

    I found out about this a bit ago, but my old Samsung office was bulldozed and replaced recently, which is strangely nostalgic. I took an electronics class last year with a guy who worked at the architecture firm that did the new building, and heard all about the grand scrape and replacement. I started working…

  • Surge Redux

    They relaunched Surge! I guess I wrote about this years ago (see Surge, Vault) when they half-ass relaunched Surge as Vault about ten years ago. I used to be extremely obsessed with different sodas. I also used to weigh 250 pounds and need thousands of dollars of dental work a year. Surge was like the apex…