The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • Death of the Astor Place Kmart

    So the Kmart at Astor Place in Manhattan finally closed. I honestly did not know it was still open. I think Kmart only has a couple dozen locations still remaining in the US, and none of them are anywhere near me. I haven’t been back to New York since 2013, and probably won’t be returning any time soon, since I switched jobs. But I still have a lot of random memories of the place from the years I lived there.

    Like I mentioned in Death of a Kmart, I was a Kmart kid. (Or K-Mart, rather, before they dumbed up the name for Y2K.) By the time I was in high school, Kmart was a joke, the place where poor rednecks shopped for school clothes and electronics that would break in a month. And by college, it was an ironic place to go. You actually shopped at Target, but you went to Kmart late at night to make fun of the muzak and the bad clothes.

    So when I got to New York, Kmart was a strange callback to childhood in a city that was a completely alien landscape to me. There wasn’t a Target or a Best Buy or any big-box store in Manhattan at the time.  It was almost comforting to go back to a store with big aisles and cheap housewares and prices that ended in a .97. I spent most of my time in haphazard bodegas and crowded mini-groceries, where I couldn’t find anything. Kmart was filled with giant-size everything.

    The store itself was giant. The only big stores in Manhattan then were places like Bloomingdale’s or Saks. The main floor that opened up from the Lafayette street entrance seemed cavernous, like the ceiling was two stories high, held up with giant pillars, a giant Valhalla filled with Kathy Ireland clothes and the Martha Stewart collection. An insanely long escalator took you up to the second (really third) floor, where there were more home goods and a cafe. Or you could go to the basement, which had electronics, toys, seasonal goods, and as much junk food as you could possibly imagine. And the basement was even directly connected to the 6 train.

    I arrived in New York in 1999, a few years after the place opened. I remember first hearing about it because the band U2 played a live show there. At the time, I hated the band U2, largely because I had an ex a few years ago who worshipped them, and I probably wasn’t over her at the time, so I found the whole ironic Bono stunt a bit silly. There are videos of it on YouTube, which are so incredibly 90s, they give me horrible flashbacks, but would be a big hit with the vaporwave folks.

    Anyway, here’s a bulleted list of a bunch of random memories of the place:

    • My first celebrity sighting in New York was seeing Gilbert Gottfried there in 1999, trying to buy an oscillating fan.
    • The store had a Big K Cafe on the third floor. Despite the bad food, it had a very nice view of Astor Square from the giant windows on the front of the building, and was a great place to sit and relax, until everyone realized it was a great place to sit and relax.
    • Everyone seems to mention that there was a public restroom by that cafe. Nobody seems to remember how dirty it got after a few years. Every Kmart has horrific restrooms. I think it’s because of the merger with Sears, because every Sears bathroom anywhere in the United States smells like it was painted with a thick coat of raw sewage.
    • When I lived in Seattle, I got addicted to Slurpees. Every night, after I hit my daily writing quota, I would drive to 7-Eleven and get a Coke Slurpee. Then I moved to New York, and there were no 7-Elevens. The Kmart Icee was an imitation Slurpee, and I could never figure out why they were inferior – maybe not enough syrup – but it was almost an acceptable substitute. Also, corn dogs were for some reason rare or hard to find in Manhattan, but they had them at the cafe.
    • In 2000, I met someone online and we had a long-distance thing going for a bit. When she came down to Manhattan to meet me for the first time, the public rendezvous point was at that Big K Cafe.
    • Kmart had holiday stuff disturbingly early, or what seemed disturbingly early then. (Target probably has Christmas trees out already now.) When I was at Juno, they told us we could decorate our cubes for the holidays, so I went to Kmart and bought an unnatural amount of Christmas lights, like a Clark Griswold amount of strands, including ones that played carols and holiday music through a cheap little speaker. They probably stayed up until May.
    • This was the era when Kmart was trying to be a “hypermart” and had an almost full line of groceries in the basement. You typically had to go to the outer burbs and rent a car to get any giant multi-pack staples like this. I could never hack grocery shopping there and dragging everything home on the train. But it was always awesome to buy snacks in bulk and bring them to the office. Either you could buy a candy bar for a dollar at a bodega, or you could buy 96 candy bars at Kmart for like five dollars.
    • I bought a lot of cheap home goods at Kmart, because I could never find them at other places. Like any time I needed a dish drainer or a bathroom plunger or whatever, I normally stopped there first. I had a fluorescent light fixture in my kitchen, and the only place where I could find the special circular bulb was at Kmart. I also remember buying a new toilet seat for my Astoria apartment, and ten years after I left, I saw some realtor photos for the place, and it’s still on there.
    • I also loved wandering around the basement level, looking at all the weird stuff you could only find at Kmart in Manhattan. Like they had a full aisle of fishing gear, in case you wanted to fish for dead bodies and toxic trout in the Hudson river.
    • I talked about this in The Replay but that Kmart was a pivotal memory in my 9/11 experience. When I walked home that day, I stopped at that Kmart to develop my pictures (remember analog film?) and buy a pair of sneakers so I didn’t have to wear my messed up dress shoes home. I ate corn dogs at the Big K Cafe and watched the destruction on CNN while a large armada of office workers all bought new shoes to walk home in.
    • After not going there for years, I stopped in to use the restroom and was dismayed that the Big K Cafe was gone, converted into a makeshift furniture overflow area.
    • My last memory: in 2007, we had packed up everything for our move to Denver. All I had left in the apartment was a week of clothes, and I didn’t have a bag to put them in, because the movers had packed and shipped my luggage. While I was taking a shower on the last day there, one of us who may not have been me (trying not to blame anyone here) turned on the automatic oven cleaner and almost burned down the house. The entire apartment filled with a dense smoke and the fire department showed up. My week of clothes now smelled like they’d been in a house fire, which they had been. So on my last day in New York, I went to K-Mart, bought a large gym bag. a couple of pairs of Wranglers, some generic t-shirts, and a bunch of multi-pack Hanes socks and underwear, plus some junk food and extra toiletries. That was my luggage on the flight to Colorado, and all I had to wear until our house showed up on a moving truck ten days later.

    No big surprise on the store going away. Aside from the greater death of everything Fast Eddie Lampert got his dirty hands on in the Sears/Kmart empire, pretty much everything in New York changes every year or two. Within a stone’s throw of that store, there’s been a complete turnover of damn near everything, except Starbucks. And that Chase bank is doing okay. (So’s the six other locations within a thousand feet of there. too.) Anyway.

  • Cat, Back, Seattle, Dream

    First things first, Squeak seems back to normal. She spent a week in cat jail, this playpen thing with a mesh roof on top, something we had from when she broke her leg back in 2009. We’d let her out here and there for supervised play time, but there are metal stairs and too many ledges and things for her to jump on. She was also on a heavy dose of gabapentin, which kept her pretty sedate. But by about day four or five, she was getting restless, and we were lowering the dosage. She seems fine now, and the jail has been taken down, so that’s all good. If the idiots in my neighborhood would cut the shit with the fireworks, things would be perfect in cat-land.

    * * *

    I guess I didn’t mention it, but my back has been out for about two weeks. It started on a Sunday, and of course there’s no great story behind it, like that I was jumping from a helicopter or fighting sharks or whatever. I think I was putting away a tube of toothpaste after brushing my teeth in the morning.

    I have the occasional thrown back, a pulled muscle or whatever, but this is probably the worst one in memory. Maybe back in 2015, I had a situation that lasted about a week, but this one is considerably worse. Sitting, standing, walking, laying down: all were bad. So I iced it every hour, and kept on the TENS thing constantly. (If you have back or muscle pain and you don’t know about these, it’s the best $40 you’ll ever spend. Go to Amazon and pick one up immediately.) I’ve also got the chiro doing some work on it, and it’s getting there, but I haven’t shaken it yet.

    My conspiracy theory on this is that the sudden weight loss over the last few months (I’m just shy of 25 pounds since April) is pulling everything out of alignment. Great news that my gut is going away, but my back muscles are used to a certain amount of tension there, and it’s all shifting. So the back tenses up, the pelvis tilts, the front of my thighs are overworked and hurt, etc. It’s getting there, but it’s been brutal. Hopefully in another couple of weeks, I can get it fully under control.

    * * *

    I figured out the vacation stuff, after a big struggle with travel sites and destinations and stuff. Anyway, I will be in Seattle from the 7th to the 14th of next month, which will be interesting. Aside from a plane change at SeaTac, I haven’t been back to Seattle since I left in the spring of 1999. And things have 100% changed, from what I hear.

    Example: I will be staying in Northgate. As I mentioned in The Death of Northgate, the mall in Northgate is completely dead, and currently getting torn down. The Denny’s is long gone, as is the pancake house where I ate brunch every Saturday for years. Northgate is an okay-ish place for me to stay, because it’s by the highway and I didn’t have to pay another sixty bucks a day to park. But it will be weird.

    I was also thinking about driving versus public transit, and I think all of the systems other than the busses happened after I lived there. Sound Transit was nothing more than an ongoing political argument when I left, and had a major scandal after that, but seems to now have a light rail system going everywhere, plus a streetcar system that goes very close to my old digs in First Hill. I’ll probably try it out, but I have a feeling I’ll spend a lot of the trip driving giant circles on the Jon Konrath Reality Tour when I get there.

    I have no real plans yet, and need to work on that. I might try to go to a Mariners game, and tick that ballpark off my list. The MoPop is something I definitely want to check out. I will also probably do all the usual shit, Pike Place and Pioneer Square (which I hear is a bit dodgy now) and whatever else. Plus all the remaining malls, I guess.

    If you are in Seattle, ping me and we can hang out, too.

    * * *

    Last night’s dream was this technical failure loop where I was trying to buy a Queen album to listen to out of curiosity or whatever, and I could not find one. I was scrolling through three devices: a phone, an ipad, and some kind of music review/player tablet thing. I’d find a hit on one device and it would redirect to the other; the search button would vanish on the tablet thing; the band’s entire discography would be missing from Apple Music; google searches would either go to articles about the queen of England or would just redirect to ads. I wondered if Universal was in a fight with Apple and pulled everything, or if I was just having a senior moment with the technology. And I started to almost see the edges of the dream, caught myself thinking “Is this really happening?”

  • Car, Trip, Cat, Work, Food

    Another dumb car update – the maintenance stuff is about done. I had the 30K service, but I looked it up, and the only thing Toyota recommends is to see if anything has fallen off, rotate the tires (but I have new tires), check the floor mat (sudden acceleration lawsuit cover-your-ass inspection), and change the oil and air filter. You only change the oil every 10,000 miles in this car, which is bizarre to me, because I drive that much in two years, and I used to always be told it was every three months back in 1747 when I had a big V-8 (that leaked most of its oil, anyway). So I went to Oil Changers, then bought the air filter on Amazon, and the car maintenance saga has concluded.

    * * *

    I am taking vacation in August, but have no idea where. It is insanely cheap to fly to Iceland right now, but I don’t want to deal with the jet lag, and it’s a pain getting back into the US. I think the current guidance is you need a C19 test three days before you return, and then it’s advised you get it again three days after you come home. The after one is fine, but I don’t want to deal with the stress of finding the testing place and then getting the wrong one, or not getting it with the right seal or stamp on the piece of paper, or whatever. I’d like to assume they have a simple little thing at the airport where they do it right there for a few bucks, done. But I could also see wandering from agency to agency to hospital to clinic downtown for days on end, only seeing signs that say “þú ert hálfviti og finnur ekki baðherbergið!” or whatever the hell. I think having to find an emergency dentist in a town where nobody spoke English back in 2009 was enough trauma to throw me for a while.

    I have more thoughts and ideas on the vacation thing, but I’ll shut up until I book anything. Pricing is getting weird, and there are a lot of places I won’t go because either the weather will be hell at that time of year, the general C-19/vax numbers are too out of control, or I’ve been there too many times recently. (Vegas is all three, BTW.)

    * * *

    Had the day off on Friday, and here’s the fun I had. We’re eating dinner, and Squeak, the little cat, is nowhere to be found. I look around, and she’s hiding in a corner under their little kitty condo thing, which is where she retreats when there is a vacuum or she’s sick. She’s holding back her front paw, not walking on it. She’s the one who broke her rear leg in 2009 and had to have surgery, so of course we freak out that it’s a repeat performance. I look at the leg, and there’s no obvious broken bones, no swelling, perfect symmetry with the opposite leg, no blood, no obvious toe/claw issue, no injury on the pads. But we thought maybe it’s serious, so off to the emergency vet we go.

    I’m not going to name this vet, but it’s the only one in Oakland that’s open 24/7, and I think it’s a bit of a sham operation. We went at maybe 9PM and checked in, and they had us fill out the forms and then check her in and take her inside. We’re told to wait, not leave, and they’ll call us, but it’s like a 3-4 hour wait. So… we waited. She was not considered a priority, so a bunch of other cases line-jumped in front of us. We’d call every few hours, and they’d say “oh, you’re next.” And I didn’t think this through — I should have brought an iPad, a dozen movies, some books, a battery charger, two meals, a cooler of drinks, etc etc etc. All I had was my phone, and I think I read the entire internet twice while waiting. I got so bored, I logged in at work and started reviewing GitHub pull requests on my phone.

    Anyway, eight hours later, they examined her, said the same thing I said above, and it was probably a muscle strain. They gave us liquid gabapentin, and said to limit her movement for a week. Also, I was expecting this to cost us two or three grand, and the bill was something like $103. We got home as the sun rose, set up her little tent-playpen thing she had when she broke her leg, and she’s now sitting around stoned out of her gourd, and forbidden from using the stairs. Crisis averted, I hope.

    * * *

    Interesting thing happened yesterday: I actually met two people from my job. One of the managers in another group said he was going over to a brewpub in Alameda, and asked who in the East Bay wanted to meet up. So I drove over and met up with him and another guy I work with. It’s such an odd situation that I’ve worked at this place for three months and have “met” with people and talked to them every day on zoom, Slack, and through GitHub and Jira issues and whatnot, but I have not met anyone, even an HR person or my own manager. So we hung out, and I don’t drink, but Smish Smash burger had a pop-up, so I got a burger and some fries, and we shot the shit about what’s going on at work. That’s another thing I’ve missed: when I’m only in official meetings, I never find out what’s really going on, so this was my first experience of hearing what other people thought. So that was great.

    I just typed a much longer thing about the fact that this was also the first time I’ve eaten in a restaurant in a year and a half, but it’s hard to get into that without getting political and stupid, so I’ll skip over that for now.

    * * *

    I don’t think I’ve mentioned it yet, but I’ve been back in food jail since April. And that’s going well, yesterday’s burger notwithstanding. Since April 5, I’m down just over 20 pounds. I still have probably 20 more to go, maybe more like 25, but it’s getting there. I’m doing the same thing I did in 2008, which I won’t mention by name but includes the letters W and W. Online only now, of course. Not a lot of exercise involved, just sensible eating choices. No magic diet. I know for my body, eating any fat (even “good” fat) results in weight gain. Eating too many carbs, same thing. So it’s a balance, but the points system works well for me. The other big thing that works for me is not listening to anyone else’s idiotic advice about how fasting or keto or magic vitamins from someone’s podcast will work. I’ve lost weight before this way, and I’m losing weight now, so the comment box is closed on that one.

    There’s a certain amount of shame and negativity on how I gained back what I lost after like six years, and I haven’t been at a healthy weight since maybe 2014. And the pandemic caused me to go above my not-healthy weight by another dozen pounds. (My shrink’s joke was that instead of the freshman five, people were gaining the covid nineteen.) Anyway, I’ve gotten rid of the quarantine weight, and I’m slowly progressing downward, and I’ve gone from obese to overweight. By current projections, I’ll be “normal” by the end of summer. We’ll see.

  • Tired, the nolo dumpster

    index cards

    Spent an obscene amount of money yesterday on new car tires. That’s the exciting point of my month. I got the factory-stock Michelin tires and a full alignment job at a place in West Berkeley. The car had a horribly shimmy, the steering wheel vibrating and always pulling a bit. The whole thing took about two hours, and it now drives like new.

    I think this was the first time I’d ever paid full price for an entire set of new tires with all the fixins. On my Yaris, I did get a set of four tires from this semi-shady place in West Oakland I used to go to every time I needed a tire patched. They were some oddball name of tires, and probably cost half as much. I think I traded in the car a year or so later, and the shop got arsoned for insurance money. Way back in Seattle, I had two blowouts in my old Escort, and bought one-off tires, but not a new set. And when I was a kid, I would go to Discount Tire or a gas station and buy used tires, try to find something with decent tread for five bucks each.

    Actually I take that back, I did get new tires on my VW Rabbit back in 1997 or 1998. I went to a Sears auto center in West Seattle, which I’m sure is long gone. I remember this clearly because I pulled an all-nighter the night before and then left work early, in a near-hallucinatory state where nothing was real, but everything was forever burned in my brain.

    So when I bought this Rabbit, the person before me had cut the springs to lower it (as if a Rabbit is not low enough), then put giant rims on it, maybe sixteen-inch and way too wide. The tires, some low-profile racing thing, were nearly bald, and getting the car above fifty on the highway was absolutely harrowing. I decided the car needed to go back to stock, and I had a bonus check hot in my pocket, so that’s what I did.

    There was a junk yard in West Seattle that was nothing but VW and Audi parts. I always had lots of fun wandering around that place, looking at turbo motors cut out of Quattros. I’m sure it’s also gone, built up into condos. Anyway, I got a set of the steel thirteen-inch rims for ten bucks each, brought them to Sears, and got them to throw a set of stock-ish tires on for maybe forty bucks a tire. They mounted and balanced everything, then found out I didn’t have the right lug nuts (VW steel wheels use those tapered or flared-end ones) so I had to drive back to the junk yard. The dude at the counter reached in a bucket, pulled out about two dozen of the lugs, and said no problem, on the house. With the new tires, the car drove 100% better. I got back to Pill Hill, ate some lunch, and slept until dinner, when I got a quart of sweet and sour chicken in a plastic container from the Chinese restaurant on the roof of the giant new QFC in Cap Hill, and worked on my writing for the night.

    * * *

    Been trying to get some big writing underway, running into the usual problems. I don’t like to get into this stuff, but I’ve got a book that’s probably 100,000 words, and I’m very unhappy with it, and not sure how to land it. I had a big idea to shift around things a bit, and that kept me busy for about a week, but it’s fizzled out since then.

    I keep thinking about Rumored, and the struggle to finish that one. I thought I finished the first draft of that thing in maybe 1996, and struggled to get it really swinging for the next six years. The photo in this post is a failed attempt in maybe 2001 to print summaries of each section, so I could rearrange them… or something. (This didn’t work.) This was when I wrote the whole thing as one giant text file in Emacs. Now in Scrivener, I’d just drag and drop the various pieces, but back then, it was an arduous task. The problem still remains though: the definition of done. I never know when the story makes enough sense to ship it. This current book is something I thought would be done in 2014 or 2015, and every year, I wasn’t sure if I was 80% done or 20%. I’m still not sure.

    * * *

    Took a long walk, maybe an hour and change, while they had the car up in the air yesterday. This was West Berkeley, and I decided to do the walk without headphones. It’s a very quiet area on the weekends, lots of pharma companies and art studios, with a few old houses that remind me of many of the off-campus houses in Bloomington, like the sixth street house where I finished up my last year in town. There’s always a nostalgia about those places, but many are vanishing, being replaced by a ten-unit condo crammed onto the same size lot.

    One building that I didn’t know was a thing until it closed in 2018 is the old Fantasy Studios. This was “the house that Credence built,” a record studio where a ton of famous records were recorded. Journey’s albums Escape and Frontiers were both made there, as well as key releases from Green Day to Primus to Europe (yes, The Final Countdown was done there) and even Santana’s “Smooth” featuring Rob Thomas. It’s a fairly nondescript building, and is now mostly offices, although I guess a few floors of it still do film production.

    An odd bit of reverberation here – although he didn’t record there, when Joe Satriani used to live in Berkeley back in the early 80s, he was in a pop trio band called The Squares, and they rehearsed at a building a block over from Fantasy. One time after practice, he was looking at a pile of remaindered books by a dumpster. Nolo books was in the building — they still are, actually — and in the pile of legal how-to books was one on how to start your own business. This was a period when he couldn’t get a record label to even answer his mails, so he decided screw it, paid the twelve bucks at the courthouse to register a business, and Rubina Records was born.

    Anyway, it’s weird to me to think about how in 1987 or so, I was listening to a tape of his first album in my car a million miles away, and I imagined Berkeley as this mystical, mythical place that I didn’t even think was on the same plane of existence as my small Indiana town. And thirty-some years later, I’m walking around his old stomping ground, looking at the same gritty warehouse buildings he used to practice in when he was probably making less money than I used to pull in at Taco Bell back then.

    * * *

    Anyway. Day off today. I should probably leave the house and find something to do.

  • I would rather read my old LiveJournal than look at code I wrote in 1999

    I’ve been digging around my machine trying to find any fun old projects I could throw on my GitHub page. What I’m mostly finding is how I get grandiose ideas for programming projects and then abandon them in a week. Some of the programming I did in college is absolutely laughable, but it’s also amazing how many things I’ve started that I’ve completely forgotten about.

    I wrote a while ago about Nuke ‘Em, which is a dumb idea for a turn-based strategy game that I’ve chased every time I’ve moved to a new language or platform. I think the closest I’ve gotten to something running is a Ruby on Rails attempt I played with in 2008. But last night, I was digging through some C source code I wrote in 1999, trying to get a web based version of this going, and it was… interesting reading.

    Looking at the code, it’s amazing how many ways I was reinventing the wheel, or painting myself into a corner. A few observations:

    • The project was a bunch of C source that would compile into a half-dozen CGI files that would then go onto a web server. When a user went to /user/login or whatever, that would run the login CGI binary. Why didn’t I just write a bunch of Perl scripts or some PHP for this? Well, I guess I already knew C, no use in learning something new and relevant.
    • Actually, some of the pages were generated by shell scripts which had forms where the action was to hit one of the binaries.
    • I doubt anyone would try to do something like use cURL to download the actual login binary, open it in a binary editor, and mess with it, right?
    • There was no templating system for generating web pages in 1999  (that I knew of; there probably was) so I had a routine to glue a head.html and tail.html template at the start and end of each generated page.
    • Part of the decision to do things this way was based on the limitations of my hosting provider, and part of it was price. I’m sure MS FrontPage would have made this all easier, but I think I was unemployed when I was doing this.
    • There is what I think is my first attempt ever at writing a Makefile from scratch. It shows.
    • The whole thing used a series of ndbm databases to store everything, including users, passwords, the map, and pending user turns. This databases were created in the /tmp directory and were world-writeable files. Nobody would think of looking around the /tmp directory of a public web server, so this was totally secure.
    • ndbm (or its predecessor NDBM) was basically like the first NoSQL database ever, sort of. (I would think a garage full of punchcards in random order would be the actual first NoSQL database, but whatever.) Anyway, it wasn’t relational, and didn’t have tables, so each “table” was just another file in the /tmp directory.
    • When you set up the world by creating initial users and making a terrain map and such, you would just run another binary which spat out the configured db files. Only an administrator could do this, because the files were different executables not installed in the hosted web directory. It didn’t check in any way if an admin was running the scripts, but it’s not like someone other than the admin would compile and run the source themselves and overwrite the world-writable files in the /tmp directory, would they?
    • There is a whole science to map-building, how to algorithmically scallop out water and land edges and mountains in some pseudo-random way to make a cool map of a world on the fly. This randomly generated a single-digit number for every square on the map and put that terrain in place.
    • For everything, and especially in the login, parameters like username and password are passed in the URL, because nobody would screw around and pass a bunch of garbage in URL parameters. And there probably weren’t search engines crawling and permanently storing parameterized URLs to do things like delete all users.
    • Oh, that password parameter is sent plaintext. It’s got to match the password in the publicly-readable database in the /tmp directory, which is also plaintext.
    • Players each have money they spend to build armies and buy missiles and stuff. Guess where that number is stored.
    • There is a separate library file (a .c and .h) that is chock full of dumb stuff that isn’t in the standard library, but I’m sure there are 863 different public libraries that do it, and if this was NodeJS or Ruby or Python, it would either be a built-in or it would be an npm/gem/library away. Like why did I write a routine to convert encoded URL parameters into arrays? Why did I write my own routine to convert ASCII strings into integers? Why didn’t I write something to encapsulate database calls, instead of pasting the same dozen lines across multiple files?
    • I don’t know why I did this, but the maximum length of a URL is malloc’ed to a size determined by reading an environment label, and I have no idea where that was set. (!?)
    • Not sure what C unit testing framework existed in 1999, but mine consisted of a file called test.c that ran a bunch of code and printf’ed the results to the console.
    • I never got to the point of putting in the turn-based logic, but my loose notes showed that I wanted to have a cron job that would fire every ten minutes (or whatever) and run a program that evaluated all of the turn moves and calculated out the combat losses and money spent and all that stuff.
    • No source control, of course. Lots of ~ and # emacs files, and lots of files copied with a .backup extension.

    Sigh. Okay, a few bits of advice to myself twenty-some years ago:

    • The first is to learn PHP (ugh) or wait a few years and do it all in Ruby on Rails. I know Rails isn’t cool anymore, but it would have been so much easier to build models for all of the basic data types, then scaffold the whole thing, implement controllers for the bits of logic, and take the scaffold views and make them pretty. Of course I still can’t deploy Rails apps on my hosting provider, so that’s another issue.
    • Find public libraries to do the nasty stuff. It wasn’t as much of an option then, but it is now. The rub here is it never feels like I’m building things anymore; I’m just connecting together things that other people have built, and then trying to keep up with when libraries change or break. Having a solid ORM library, a templating engine, and something to deal with session persistence would have saved me a ton of time. (See also using Rails for this.)
    • Break things up into smaller tasks, like as MVPs for each piece. I sort of did this, looking at my notes, but I probably would have went deeper if I had really planned this a bit. I usually do it all seat-of-the-pants, and then get overwhelmed when I have nine different problems going on at once.
    • Think about security first. I know my thought was to have it all use no passwords or plaintext, and I’d lock it down after I got it running. I should have thought about that earlier, so I didn’t paint myself into a corner.
    • Source control, dummy. RCS was a thing then, and I was already using it for my writing. Check in often. It’s free.

    (PS, I’ll probably start writing this same dumb game as an Electron app the next time I get bored.)

  • Bass work

    Fender Jass BassI have this bass – a 2014 Fender Jazz Road Worn, which I got in 2014. The road worn/relic basses get a bad rap because “it’s like buying jeans with holes in them already,” but they’re also the cheapest way to get a lacquer finish bass from Fender. That and the fact that they kiln-dry the wood before assembly means the wood is dense and low-moisture, which gives you a deeper sound and a lighter weight. Anyway, I like the bass. But I haven’t played it lately because the neck went all psycho on me, and it had a ton of action. From the side, it looked more like a bow and arrow. And I couldn’t fix it with truss rod adjustments. So much like my retirement planning and general health, I ignored it and hoped someday I’d have a chance to figure it all out, but not now.

    So then this music repair shop opens up about a block or two from my house. They are called Wood Street Guitar Repair. I brought the bass in to get a verdict on if the neck was completely destroyed or not. That’s when I saw what instantly sold me on the place: they had a brand new Plek machine, straight from Germany. I was in like flint.

    A Plek machine is crazy. Basically, you strap a guitar into this thing that looks like a phone booth-sized 3-D printer. It scans the entire neck and loads the scan into a computer, which can then determine what frets are out of whack. The computer can then futz with this virtual model and simulate exactly what can be done to fix things. Once the operator picks a set of adjustments, a robot arm with a 50,000-RPM cutting tool buzzes away and files down high frets and does whatever other minor cutting and deburring and polishing needs to be done.

    This whole process used to be done by hand, by sight. Now it’s done within a thousandth of an inch by a machine. Here’s a good video on how Gibson uses Plek now. I got a Lakland bass a few years ago, and they Plek every instrument they sell. That Lakland (a Skyline 44-01) has one of the best necks I have ever played, and it is their cheapest budget model. It’s truly revolutionary stuff.

    When I checked in the bass, they asked me all the questions on how I like to play, what strings I wanted to use, etc. They also popped the neck and checked the truss rod, and it was still adjusting, so that looked okay. Unfortunately, when they got into it a couple of weeks later, they could not get the neck close to level, even with the truss rod bottomed out. So they heat-pressed the neck first. Basically, they put the neck in some clamps and use heat blankets to heat up the wood and slightly melt the glue. The neck is held straight and then dries overnight. They did this, then ran it through the Plek, and hand-filed the fret edges, which were a little too sharp.

    Anyway, the verdict is that the bass now plays like butter. Super-low action, and it feels great. No high spots, just an incredible feel to it. I now have two great basses for slightly different purposes. The Lakland has active soapbar pickups and a very “fast” neck, a good combination for more modern metal or prog-rock. The Fender has passive 60s-style Fender pickups and a slightly chunkier neck, which feels great for old seventies rock. The guys at Wood Street Guitar did a great job – if you’re in the Bay Area, check them out.

  • A Tale of Two Keyboards

    About ten years ago, I had this keyboard obsession going on (see The Cult of Keyboards) mostly because everything started falling apart health-wise when I hit 40, especially all things chiropractic. After a few false starts, I decided to go whole hog and upgrade to a Kinesis split keyboard. Because it’s about time, I went ahead and upgraded to the newest iteration, the Kinesis Advantage 2.

    The original Kinesis has been pretty decent, after a brief learning curve. Typing with my fingers in the two “bowls” and using my thumbs for a bunch of the modifier keys was an interesting transition, but it means I can type away without ever lifting my hands from the home row. There are some issues, though. In the top row of the thumb keys, there are only two switches, when there really should be three, for cmd/alt/ctrl (or whatever your OS calls them.) It’s also a bit more confusing, because I used to switch between a work PC running Windows, and my home computer, which is a Mac.

    I mapped things so that in Windows, the modifier keys were Ctrl/Alt and Win/Ctrl. And then on the Mac, they were Cmd/Opt and Ctrl/Cmd. That means that on the Mac, Ctrl loses, and since I type modifiers with my left hand more, it makes emacs almost impossible to use. I also had to train myself to remember that when I switched to the Mac, my Ctrl key was really the Win key. Luckily, things like copy and paste would use the same key in both places. Also, when I switched jobs, the work computer switched to Mac, so this problem gets a bit more simple.

    Another complaint about the original Advantage is that it had function keys that were those little rubber chicklet keys like the Mattel Aquarius or a bad 80s calculator. They’re also very narrow. And the Esc key is one of those, which really makes emacs bad. When I was heavy into FrameMaker at the job, I remapped the Home key in the left thumb cluster as a modifier so a Home-5 was F8, and a Home-6 was F9. (5 is right under F8, and 6 under F9.) I also mapped the End key to Esc, because FrameMaker had a ton of frequently-used shortcuts that nobody knows about anymore that begin with Esc, a leftover from its days on unix systems. I would map those only on the Windows system with AutoHotKey. I gave up on that a few work laptops ago, when Frame fell by the wayside.

    Also, I had minor occasional problems with the USB firmware. It was designed probably right when USB 2.0 came out, and would sometimes freak out and require a reset. Also if you typed too fast with a modifier, the modifier would get stuck. (Hint: tap the shift key three or four times, and it unsticks.) I also had the usual wear and tear, a few keys losing their printing, and ten years of food and cat hair in the crevices.

    The new Advantage 2 fixes a few things. First, the function keys are actual Cherry mechanical switches. They are, unfortunately, the same small size. The circuitry has also changed, and is allegedly better than the old controller. It now has two ways to remap keys: the old way, or you can mount the keyboard as a hard drive with a special key combo, and there will be an app to do complicated remappings, or a text file you can edit. You lose the two built-in USB jacks on the underside of the keyboard, but I never used those.

    I wasn’t entirely happy with the upgrade. Although the keyboard uses the same key switches (MX Cherry Brown), typing on it feels very… cheap. The keys are not as glossy and seem to be made of a slightly different plastic. And the case feels a lot more hollow. There’s more of an echo-ey plastic feeling when typing. It feels like the unit was “cost-engineered” with cheaper materials or a more efficient mold to save a few pennies. It’s possible I’m imagining all of this, or the keyboard needs to break in or age a bit. But I’ve also seen a few people on the internet that felt the same, and have messed with putting DynaMat inside their keyboard to deaden it a bit. Maybe I should try that.

    I also had a giant exercise to get the modifiers to work. You can swap them around at multiple levels: the keyboard has a Mac/Win setting; there’s an OS setting; and I think my KVM might be flipping the mapping, too. Plus you can physically swap the keycaps to get the labels right. I ended up putting the keycaps on as Cmd/Option and Ctrl/Cmd, swapping Cmd and Ctrl in the Mac system preferences, and setting the keyboard to Windows mode. That seems to mostly work. I also mapped the Home key to Ctrl. Maybe I’ll map End to Esc later.

    So, we’ll see if I can put a few million more keystrokes through this one. I also need to avoid reading anything else about modifications, because there are people who burn serious time swapping out controllers, doing complex remapping, and changing keycaps and whatnot. I don’t have that much skill or energy, so I’ll stick to typing.

     

  • KQED Article, other photo appearances

    I had some pictures used in an article on KQED on Hilltop Mall. Check it out here. It’s a great overview of the mall, from someone who was actually around for the mall’s heyday, which I unfortunately missed. (See my last post on that.)

    The reason these pictures got used is because I have everything on my Flickr account under a Creative Commons license. That means anyone can use my photos, as long as they give me credit. (It’s nice, but not required, for them to drop me a line, because then I’ll gladly link to their stuff, like I am here.)

    I’ve mentioned this before, but if you ever need an image for a book cover, feel free to dig through my Flickr account. If you find something and ping me, I’ll even give you a high-res original if you need one. All I ask is that you credit me. (I did this for Ben Ditmars and his book Haiku in the Night. Who knew that me playing on my phone while waiting on my breakfast order in a Berlin hotel would be immortalized on the cover of a book.)

    One weird result of this is that my photography pops up in weird places and I never find out about it unless I google my name, which I never like to do. Here’s a short list of some other oddball places where I have a photo credit:

    Anyway, there’s more, but I’m bored of searching.

  • Death of the Hilltop Mall

    Hilltop mallNot a shocker by any means, but it appears that Hilltop Mall in Richmond has finally met its fate. It was just announced that logistics giant Prologis purchased the mall, which has been more or less closed since last year (although anchors Walmart and Macy’s were mostly open during the pandemic.)

    Hilltop’s a weird one for me. I wrote about my first visit there in 2017, and covered the basics: built by Taubman in 1976; four anchors; a million square feet. Bought by Mills, it ended up in Simon’s hands in 2007, who completely ignored the property, and defaulted on their loans in 2012. It had a Walmart as an anchor, which is bizarre because it used to be a Macy’s, and it looks like Walmart spent fifteen minutes remodeling this mid-70s Macy’s into a Walmart by slapping on a set of signs they printed at Kinko’s and painting various trim blue.

    Since I wrote that last post, the mall was purchased by a group that was going to do a full renovation and go with an Asian theme: stark white and chrome interiors, a Ranch 99 grocery store, a food court with various sushi restaurants and boba tea places and poke bowl vendors, etc etc. There were lots of fancy renderings with stock art pictures of white people walking around shopping, and lots of pretty landscaping and this futuristic space village look to it. They put up a ton of white-painted plywood with stickers and banners of the big planned reopening in 2018 2019 2020 late 2020. There were no signs of progress, except a constant hemorrhaging of stores. JCP closed, then almost every national chain (except Foot Locker) closed, and then the mom and pop places started quickly vanishing. I think when the pandemic hit, they were at something like 16% occupancy. I don’t know if they ever got money for this big remodel, and I think every store they said was going in never materialized. And then the pandemic hit.

    I never knew Hilltop when it was alive and thriving, in the 80s/90s. It once had all the big national stores, and two movie theaters inside the mall, an ice skating rink, three toy stores, and lots of places to eat. All the various posts I’ve been seeing this week are filled with memories about this era, and I’m a bit jealous to never have seen this place in its full splendor.

    I went to Hilltop maybe a couple times a month in the last few years. It was the closest indoor mall to my house, and I’m an old man mallwalker, so that’s what drew me. I had a fond relationship with the place because I love empty malls, love going walking in them in the middle of the day when nobody is around, and Hilltop was perfect for that. It also had that weird Taubman Logan’s Run-looking architecture I love, futurist-in-1976. It was like my secret spot, the place I could retreat when it was rainy out or the December weather went south and I wanted to hear loud holiday Muzak echo through a large, empty building.

    There’s a nostalgia reverberation point for me with Hilltop that I can’t fully explain. It is a Taubman mall and has the same look as old Taubman malls like Woodfield in Schaumberg, Illinois, so it reminds me of the few times I visited in the late 80s and saw that astounding place. I remember going there with my friend Larry in 1989 and walking a lap around that place, which is double the size of Hilltop, and I think the biggest mall in the world back in that pre-Mall of America timeframe, and wondering when it would ever end. Hilltop looks exactly like Woodfield’s baby sibling, minus the stores and remodel.

    But the thing Hilltop really reminds me of is Scottsdale Mall in South Bend, Indiana, the pre-remodel Scottsdale of the 80s. First, it’s a two-story mall, which was rare in Indiana, and had a second story with a balcony walkway that overlooked the courtyard on the ground floor. And before they redid Scottsdale in 1993 with bright whites and garish neon vaporwave colors, it still had this 1972 color scheme of brick and wood and hexagonal burnt umber floor tiles and a general dreariness, like a bad regional campus of a commuter college or an office park complex you went to make a car insurance payment or take a urinalysis test.

    The 1990-1991 school year is a bad nostalgia point for me, because I attended and worked at a commuter college (IUSB) and only had a couple of friends there and really missed the main campus I went to the year before in Bloomington. Every payday, I would pick up my check at 9 AM, not have to be to work until noon, and would shuffle off to the largely empty Scottsdale to walk around, buy stuff I didn’t need at Target, and play Tetris at the Aladdin’s Castle. (I had a Tetris problem back then. Still do.) It had the same vapid, bleak feeling that Hilltop had, and I loved it, because it perfectly matched my emotional state. I had a lot of problems that school year, with money and dating and where I was going in life, and of course my brain goes back to those points in life more than those boring years when I didn’t have struggle. Since Hilltop was never changed, and still had that time machine back to 1990, that’s what I took from it.

    (Scottsdale is long gone, demalled in 2004. I recently did some research on it, and I probably need to do a much longer article on it. Someday. These write-ups are getting more frequent and more redundant as the retail world implode. Maybe I need to stop writing this stuff.)

    So, Prologis. They redeveloped the old Oakland Army Base a few thousand feet to my west, making it into logistics warehouses for the Port of Oakland. It was sort of amazing, because they tore down these old World War II-looking barracks buildings, and almost instantly, these large white and green warehouse buildings suddenly appeared. They would truck in giant concrete panels and put them together like Lego bricks. Seriously, it looked like a million square feet of brand new, modern warehouse would be teleported into place in like a week.

    I know there’s a lot of talk about them redeveloping Hilltop with all the latest buzzwords people want to hear, and that they’ll have low-income vegan housing and live-work space and dog parks and a farmer’s market and whatever the hell else they can put in their fake renderings. I fully expect them to either completely demolish the mall and put in two million feet of generic warehouse space that looks exactly like every other Prologis warehouse. (Go do a google image search on “Prologis warehouse” and you’ll see hundreds of absolutely identical white buildings with green trim. It’s almost creepy.) If the building is structurally sound (it probably isn’t) maybe they will just paint the outside white, shut the entrances, gut the interior, and use that for storage. Or they’ll spend years in arguments with the Richmond city government, and end up bowing out in three years with nothing done.

    Anyway. Fun while it lasted. I should probably buy a treadmill so I can walk during the rainy season. Here’s a Flickr album with a dump of my 2017-2020 photos: https://flic.kr/s/aHskQsQ4P1

  • Fight club, family trees, newspapers, bass

    Christ, it’s been a month since I updated. So much for the “blog more” thing. I started the new job, but first rule of fight club. Things have been much more sane, but the pessimist in me is always waiting for the other shoe to drop. And I still have these weird bureaucratic nightmares (usually when I take Benadryl, which is too much this allergy season) where I’m like endlessly trying to sort a giant spreadsheet or I have some problem where I ask person A what to do and they say “ask B” and B says “ask C” and C says “ask A or B” and repeat. This was much worse when this was my actual work environment for twelve hours. After I was free and clear from the last job, I thought about starting a thread about all of the stupid stuff that went down over the last ten years, and then I (coincidentally) got a boilerplate letter from their legal that they send to all former employees, reminding me of the employee agreement I signed in 2010 and how I can’t disclose trade secrets. So, next topic.

    I’ve fallen down the genealogy k-hole again, which is largely John’s fault, but it’s also something I do every few years. It’s ironic because it is something that obsesses me, even though I pretty much don’t talk to most of my family anymore. I debated using Ancestry versus MyHeritage and heard the latter was better for European records, so I signed up and then found out that it isn’t. I found out some rudimentary things that were wrong, like incorrect years and an incorrect last name that was throwing off all previous attempts to go back more than three generations. So it’s interesting, but it’s gotten boring, and like I said, it’s not like I’m going to suddenly find long-lost seventh cousins fourteen times removed that I’m really interested in talking to.

    The other thing I did which I am obsessed with but probably need to quit is I got a full-on subscription to Newspapers dot com. (They have a variety of tiers: useless, mostly useless, and expensive.) I know I’ve bitched constantly about the bait-and-switch with newspaper archives: you used to be able to hit everything on Google, and then in the media landscape consolidation/race-to-the-bottom, everything went paywall. Well, I didn’t know this, but if you get the full-blown Newspapers account, there is a ton of old information on there.

    What’s problematic with my family research is that the Elkhart Truth (sic) does not participate in this program. But the South Bend Tribune does. When I grew up, the SBT was a “real” newspaper, and the Truth was sort of half-ass, but way more local information. Anyway, most obituaries and so on are covered there. My dad’s side of the family lived in Edwardsburg, which is covered well under the Herald-Palladium paper (and its four pre-merger papers) so there’s a lot there. The other side of the family is in Chicago, and the Tribune has an extensive archive, but that family has an extremely common last name, and apparently some genetic predisposition for not even knowing how to spell their own kids’ names, according to census papers I found. Anyway.

    The family stuff – I won’t go into it, but I found a lot there. And then I started plugging in various dead malls, and holy shit.

    I wrote this big thing about Pierre Moran Mall recently, and really had to scrape to find even the most basic dates. I plugged this into the search for the South Bend Tribune, and found a ton of stuff, including pictures, store open and close dates, articles about events at the mall, the expansion and enclosing of the mall, the failed attempt to turn the old Target into a Christian event hall… way too much to process.

    I want to someday write an article on the Scottsdale Mall in South Bend like the one I wrote on PMM. I didn’t spend as much time there as a kid, but I spent a lot of time there in 1990-1991 when I went to IUSB. Anyway, I started searching, and the South Bend Tribune did an entire section on the grand opening of the mall, with an article per store, and in most cases an ad from the same store (probably why they did this, to gin up future ad sales) and of course a ton of pictures. When I mean every store, they even did a piece on the local pretzel stand in the mall.

    On to Concord Mall: I found articles going back to years before the mall opened, when they planned on plowing up the farmland in Dunlap and putting some bridges across the Yellow River to get things started. They also did a similar send-up with plenty of articles about the stores moving from downtown to the new shopping center. It looked like the article about Wards was largely boilerplate – I think corporate sent the same copy to the paper for both the South Bend and Elkhart stores, which both opened the same year.

    Other interesting things I found out: one is that the original plan for Concord was to include 200 apartments on the property. That would have been a fun little futuristic utopia, living and working in the same building, eating Karmelkorn for dinner every night, going on dates in the JC Penney.

    Another weird one was there was a study and a plan done on building yet another mall in Goshen. That area was over-malled with four malls in the seventies already. Goshen was decimated by Concord going in, because almost all of their downtown shops fled, and that place was a ghost town for decades. Building a fifth mall in a city of maybe 15,000 back then was a real hail mary to try to keep shopping dollars in the city, and someone probably ran the numbers and decided it wasn’t worth giving the developer a fat tax break on it. So nothing happened, and then of course Wal-Mart came in and built two super-stores and completely finished off the downtown. (The good news is that it’s become somewhat hipster-gentrified, which is good to see, actually.)

    The newspaper thing was a real problem, scraping up the serotonin and eating up my time. It was like when Google first came out and I spent weeks searching on everything I could think of, wasting way too much time reading dumb articles about abandoned military bases or ghost towns in Colorado or whatever I was into at that point. It is amazing, and totally hit the nostalgia nerve, and I should probably cancel my subscription soon. Luckily, there aren’t any Bloomington newspapers on there.

    The Panera by my house closed. Like I think I ate there a week ago, and on Friday, it was completely stripped down, all the signs and lights and awnings gone. I’m currently in food jail, so that’s probably a good thing; I got into a bad habit of ordering from there every week or so. You can probably eat healthy there, but the bread part kills me. Anyway, it’s become this dumb inside joke/meme, and like all of my dumb inside joke/memes, I’m hopelessly sick of it, but the same three people that make the same dumb jokes on every single thing I post on Facebook won’t let it go. I really need to delete my Facebook.

    No progress whatsoever on writing these days. After the overwhelming non-success of the last book, I think maybe I should buy the next PlayStation and just work on that for the next ten years, like I did from 2001-2010. Good thing I can’t actually find one. I’m trying to get back into playing bass again, so that’s good. I bought a Palmer Bass Pocket Amp which is a great piece of kit for practicing with headphones. Now I just need to get back up to speed on it.