The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

Tag: k-holes

  • 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…

  • Death of a Mall Intersection

    This is an oddly specific bit of nostalgia, and I’m not sure it matters that much unless you lived right by the Concord Mall in Elkhart, Indiana. But I’m going to babble about it anyway. [Note: I wrote this post a year and a half ago and never finished it. So, this is even more…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Hello from the former 219

    Exactly thirty years ago, to the day, I was here. It was Christmas Eve. We closed at five. I was telling people we had no Nintendos. I probably worked forty hours that week. I’d listened to the same four-hour loop of taped holiday Muzak at least ten times. Mariah Carey was still waiting tables, so…

  • More Various Long Reads 9/18

    I should probably find a better way to organize these link dumps (see previous), but I’m lazy. Anyway, here’s some more stuff I’ve been reading: Lisp Machinery – A Lisp Machine resurrection blog – Lisp machines are a weird artifact of the Eighties race for AI, purpose-built big computers made just to run lisp programs.…

  • Various Long Reads 9/2018

    I love long reads. I remember a time when the web was nothing but long articles, and I wasted a lot of time reading them. I’m finding now that this wasn’t really time wasted, and I’m forcing myself to find more long articles that interest me, which is harder than it sounds. Anyway, here’s ten…

  • 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…

  • Latest Distraction: Astronaut.io

    I found something recently that has been an entirely too hypnotic waste of time. Go here: astronaut.io This site will find videos on YouTube that have no views, then drop into a random location and play about five seconds. It continues to do this in a never-ending stream, and the effect is bizarre. First of…

  • Stoneridge

    I had yesterday and today off, and I was bored of walking in my neighborhood, so I drove to the nearest mall, like an honest-to-satan mall mall, and not a bunch of stores next to each other with a fake city square in the middle of it. The closest mall to me is in Pleasanton,…