Author: jkonrath

Rain. It’s one of those days. I’ll spend the afternoon watching drops fall on the pavement six stories below my office, watching the funky clouds drift over the condominiums across the street from the Puget Sound and over to Lake Union. I never turn on the lights in my office because I have two windows,…

My zine is done. I did my traditional thing for zine good luck, kiting a check, and printed everything last night. I thought it would only take a few minutes, and I went before eating supper. I wanted to wait there until they were done, and I spent over an hour in Office Depot, looking…

If someone would’ve explained the futures market to me when I was 18 years old, I’d be a fucking billionaire by now. If I had the money to do it, I mean. I’ve been trying to figure out my money situation lately, especially since my average daily balance in savings in 1996 was 4 cents,…

My zine is at this crucial stage where 99% of the text is pristine, and I am now just screwing around with graphics and margins and fonts and all of that stuff. It’s easy at this point to rush it to press and throw everything together fast, and then get it back from the printer…

I finished reading Red Mars last night. Things get pretty weird and intense at the end of the book, and I really liked how it went. It made me think a lot more about capitalism and historic themes. Mars was a neutral place like Antartica, and then when big companies found out they could mine…

I went home sick yesterday, with something stomach-related that felt like the flu or something. I don’t know. I’m here today, and I feel a little better. I spent the afternoon in bed, reading Red Mars and/or taking a nap. It’s a very cool book, and it covers a lot of details about Mars colonization…

I’ve been reading about the Artemis Project, which is this effort to launch people to the moon in the next 10 years or so. (You can read about it here) It’s a pretty cool plan, really, and involves a lot of commercialism and a lot of volunteers. I guess if you are a rocket scientist…

I spent all afternoon on a boat. It was a work thing, they took the whole team out on a little chartered cruise with some food and beer and stuff. We were out for about 3 hours, and it was pretty decent. The weather’s been pretty shitty all week, so I wasn’t sure if we…

It’s one of those days where you wish you could wander the streets aimlessly, with no purpose or goal. It’s cold enough outside to make it prohibitive yet seductive. Not like a hot and sunny summer day, where you biologically feel a need to escape and have fun. It’s more like a day when you…

I’ve been thinking about Turing machines a lot, and doing some reading about them. The basic explanation, if I can remember it: there’s a machine that can read this paper tape (probably mylar if it was invented now). The tape looks sort of like a piece of movie film or something, and each square can…