Author: jkonrath
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iPhone grenade; Sundays; the life and death of long reads, etc
This week’s excitement was that my iPhone 8 blew up after about a year and a half of service. I’d noticed a bit ago that the 3D touch feature wasn’t consistently working, especially on the left side of the screen, but chalked it off to the fact that iOS has far too many tricky gestures…
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Various Long Reads 7/19
Been a few months since I did one of these, so let’s empty out the backlog: The Story Behind The Song: Slow Ride by Foghat – (Fun fact: Foghat’s first two albums were both self-titled. This was long before Peter Gabriel pulled that shit for three albums, so I think it’s unrelated.) Chicago’s World Fair…
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Tornado, even-number nostalgia, Commodore, etc.
That tornado last week hit the south side of South Bend. I think it was an F-2, and touched down right across the street from Ray’s old apartment at Irish Hills, which is just a touch east of where Scottsdale Mall used to be. It hit a daycare center dead-on, completely destroyed it. Luckily it…
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New Coke Failed for a Reason
Apropos of nothing… I can’t believe they rebooted New Coke because of a TV show. They’re rebooting everything, but owning the biggest marketing disaster of the century proves we now have the collective memory of a goldfish. Ford will be bringing back the Pinto next year, I’m guessing. If you really want New Coke, open…
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i am releasing all of my books on 180g vinyl so you have to re-buy them
I don’t have anything new going on, because I’ve been swamped at work since I’ve been home, and probably will be for the next month. Thank godzilla the baseball season already ended for me a month ago. I fell down an insufferable k-hole last week and ended up reading a conspiracy theory page about how…
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Vegas 2019
I’m back from a week in Vegas. My allergies have gone full tilt since I returned yesterday afternoon, and I really should rail about ten Benadryl tablets and go to bed for another week, but I should probably write a dumb bulleted list of everything before I forget it. As I mentioned in my last…
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Ten things
I have this horrible urge to switch this site from WordPress to a static site generator. I’m most familiar with Jekyll, but I also know it would be slow as hell on a site with 1200 long posts. Maybe Hugo. Maybe this is a stupid idea, because it would involve typing metadata by hand and…
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Teeth, SSF, etc.
For whatever reason, I recently went back and read Air in the Paragraph #5. (I need a better place for these to live, especially since Scribd has turned into a paid-service scam. I’ve temporarily put it here.) A lot of my writing from 1996 is pretty cringe-inducing, but I always liked this particular issue of…
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Various Long Reads 2/19
Haven’t done one of these in a bit, so here’s more: The Bloomberg Keyboard – back before PCs and the internet, Bloomberg used physical terminals to connect traders to stock market information. These terminals all had weird keyboards. A fun look back if you’re a mechanical keyboard nerd. You Are Now Entering the Demented Kingdom…
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Holes
I’ve been back from Indiana for a while, but I’ve been thinking about something I can’t exactly shake, something I saw during my drives around old stomping grounds. This was further drilled into my head when my pal John Sheppard came out to Michiana for a day-long Konrath Reality Tour leading all through Elkhart, Mishawaka,…