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 ZIP code now, or a two-letter state abbreviation. If you find some old-timey sign for ethyl gasoline from the 1930s, it might say “Oakland, Calif.” instead of “Oakland, CA 94607.” Now it seems like the URL is the way to date if a package is from the mid-90s or earlier.

I remember about the time when Coke cans started putting their URL on the cans. I started a Coca-Cola fan web site in 1994, and was getting more traffic than their site for a brief period. It really pissed me off when they started a site, started putting it on every can or bottle. Pissed me off more that it was “Netscape enhanced” and didn’t work for shit on a text browser. It wasn’t a site for information; it was for pretty pictures and layout that took forever to load on a slow modem. Now, cocacola dot com redirects to coca-cola dot com, and that is a site picker with a big world map and all the regional sites. All the information there is either for shareholders, or trying to convince you that you can be healthy and drink 6000 calories a day.

My site was something at bronze.ucs.indiana.edu/~jkonrath I think. It’s long gone. Bronze was a VAX machine. The machine is long gone; VAX machines themselves are long gone, for the most part, unless you work at some insane bank that could not transition away from them. Hell, UCS is gone now, part of some crazy merger/renaming thing twenty years ago.

I don’t think a civilian could register a hostname back then. I don’t remember how it was done before the late nineties, but I registered rumored with Network Solutions on 11/16/98. I remember it not being cheap, something like a hundred bucks a year. This was when they pretty much had a monopoly on it. There’s no way I could have paid that back in college.

Speaking of putting hostnames on things, I knew a guy who had his email address on the back of his car. This was in like 1990, way before that made any sense. I worked with him, and he was this funny Malaysian grad student who I’ll call K for plausible deniability. He drove some old beast of a seventies car, like a Monte Carlo or something, and had “k___@copper.ucs.indiana.edu” across the back of his trunk, in stick-on letters, the kind you would use to put your name on a mailbox. I have no idea why. He wasn’t running a business, in a band, anything like that. He just thought it looked cool, I guess.

I had to get checks printed in 1992 or 1993 - this was back when people still used paper checks, and to get new ones printed, you looked through a Parade magazine in a Saturday newspaper, and there would be an ad for a place that would print your checks on a design with an American flag or some kittens or Peanuts characters or whatever else. I picked this design that was a bunch of colorful geometric shapes - do a google image search of ”90s graphics” and that’s basically what I got printed.

Anyway, I remember I called the 800 number to place the order over the phone. (No internet order form, no web site.) My name and address were three lines, the phone number was the fourth, but the check had five lines, so you could put a business name or something on it. I told the lady on the phone I wanted my email address. She had no idea what that meant. I then told her, my email address was jkonrath@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu, and I wanted that on my check. It was like I was speaking Klingon. I had to slowly spell out  jkonrath@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu over and over, jkonrath@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu, jkonrath@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu, jkonrath  at symbol bronze period ucs period indiana period edu. The whole transaction took twenty, thirty minutes.

I got the checks a month later, and the printer completely butchered it. Like I think they left out the @ and put two spaces after each period, so it was just a jumble of incoherent words with no meaning. And only 4% of the population knew what an email address was. I should have thrown the checks in the garbage and ordered new ones, but that would have taken another month, and more importantly, another twenty dollars. So I used the checks, until I moved to Seattle and got new accounts. And every time I wrote a check, which was often back then, the cashier would ask “what the hell is that?”

Also, I think those new checks I got in 1995? Had the bank’s URL on them.

I marathon-ed out Mindhunter over the last few days on Netflix. I couldn’t remember the damn name, and for the first few episodes, kept calling it Brainminder, which sounds like a Tupperware product for zombies. Anyway.

It’s a David Fincher-produced thing - he also directed four episodes. Set in 1977, early days of FBI profiling, a couple of agents are both working active cases and going to prisons to interview notorious “sequence killers” to find out what makes them tick. The big selling point is the spot-on portrayal of Ed Kemper, which has already been discussed to death in every other article about the series. Agreed, but I won’t bore you with the story that he now narrates audio books for the blind in prison.

I liked that this was set in 1977, but it doesn’t burn insane cycles saying “hey look, it’s 1977!” That was one of my criticisms of the one-and-done Scorsese-produced Vinyl, which spent way too much time and money depicting a gritty, punk, New York. Mindhunter has the old cars and the rotary phones and reel-to-reel tape recorders, but they aren’t the main character of the series. This reminded me a bit of Fincher’s work with Zodiac, which I ultimately didn’t love, but I appreciated that the focus wasn’t to make the background the character.

I did like Mindhunter’s character development, which was sort of atypical. There’s the “new guy” Holden Ford, and the “old guy” Bill Tench, a common trope for crime fiction. But it’s not a “the old guy is dumb and the new guy tells him how modern life now works” or “the kid is a newbie, and the old guy lays it all out for him.” It’s very non-binary in that both of the characters have some advanced insights and key knowledge, but also have their own shortcomings. It does both of the tropes, but mixes them together in a more realistic way, with the two characters playing off of each other. There’s also the two sides of the institution, the new, groundbreaking professor, and the FBI old guard, and those are a little less nuanced, especially the FBI, but they do feed in little bits of development, especially with Wendy Carr, the psych professor.

The finale — I won’t go into details, but I read from multiple people that it threw them, and it didn’t bother me. It was no Twin Peaks on the WTF scale of the finale, and it didn’t bother me. But I’m not everyone, so who knows.

It will be interesting to see where the show goes in a Season 2. They were vaguely following the antics of a killer more or less modeled after Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer. They were mostly just setting it up, though. Maybe the next season will get into that more.

Standard disclaimer applies to any of these VOD shows: it’s great, I watch it in two or three sittings, and then I have to wait six months or a year to get my next fix. I sometimes wish they could crank out five seasons at once, but obviously that’s not an option. (Unless I find out about it three or four years after it happens.)