1. I’ve been kicking tires and shifting things and getting the new Astro installation for this site fully operational. I think it’s pretty close now. I had to fix a million broken links and then knock around a bunch of build stuff, but that works now. I also have a bunch of static pages for books and stuff that are in the process of being moved, so stuff like Atmospheres mostly works now. If you find broken things, let me know, but I’m not investing a ton of time in chasing down broken external links from 2002.

2. Atmospheres rerelease: already posted about that, but check it out if you haven’t already.

3. I talk about the book cover a bit in the Editor’s Notes, but that text got locked down before I actually finished the cover. I’d started the layout with the same graphic from the 2014 edition, which is some clouds and smoke from Maui in 2013. When I started messing with the cover, the art looked way too noisy and weird, and hitting that fictional enhance button in Photoshop wasn’t doing anything. I swapped out a different picture, but totally forgot to mention that in the text. So, addendum to the addendum.

4. The new picture is from my 2022 trip to Denver. I was on a walk before dinner in the abandoned industrial park area of Centennial, and the sky suddenly filled with dark, intricate clouds, the precursor to a massive thunderstorm. I turned around and headed back, but shot away with my Canon 5DS and the 24–70 f/2.8L I’d bought that very day. I only had that 5DS for two trips (this and Sweden), and I was fighting it constantly to get okay shots. So, I’m glad I got a book cover (spoiler alert: or two) out of it.

5. I’m back on editing Atmospheres 2, and I’m maybe 25% through what might be the last draft. I’ve been struggling to get this book out basically since 2014, and I really need to get it done. Going through it right after editing the first one is pretty interesting. I think it has the same feel or spirit to it, but it’s much longer (140,000 words versus 60,000), and probably has more of a structured plot, although it’s still not plotted like a murder mystery or a Pixar movie. Hoping to land this thing by the end of summer.

6. Still riding my bike every day. I also just finished some work on my Cannondale Topstone 4, the gravel bike. I switched the drop handlebars for a carbon fiber straight bar, which might be considered sacrilege to many, but my neck and shoulders could not deal with drop bars. This required changing the gearshift and brake levers, and I ran into cable trouble, but I think everything’s fine now. The bike is now ridiculously light compared to my daily, and will be a lot of fun off-road.

7. The cats had their first vet visit. I thought Zuzu would be trouble, because I can’t even get within ten feet of her most of the time. Four of us were able to get her wrapped, inspected, and injected. Diego was 100% noncompliant and we had to skip him. He also gashed my pretty good in the hand, and it looked like I slashed my palm to take a blood oath with someone. The doctor gave us drugs (for him, not me) and we’ll try again later. We did a dry run last night, giving him Gabapentin in a treat. He ate it, but wasn’t entire into being knocked out. I did at least weigh him, and he’s now 14.5 pounds. So I’m expecting the same diet-and-exercise lecture every single doctor ever gives me, even though my current BMI is probably below normal now.

8. I try not to go to the mall that much anymore, but I went to Stoneridge today and the JC Penney there has closed. This really throws me off, not because I needed to buy some Arizona jeans, but because by default I always park in front of that store. Now I park there but have to walk over to the next entrance, and the whole thing throws me. I think far too much about this, and how I always park at the same exact place at every mall I’ve ever regularly visited. Like at Concord, it was at the Wards by the door closest to the Automotive entrance. At University Park in Bloomington, I always parked by the Sears on the west side. That mall is still there, but the Sears is long gone, razed and replaced with a Fresh Thyme grocery store and a little row of outward-facing shops. University Park Mall in Mishawaka, I always park north of the JC Penney. I don’t know why I always have to park in the same exact spot, and if other more sane people just park at the first place they can find a spot or what. Anyway.

9. I’m now at the part of the trip cycle where I’m clamoring to take another vacation in a few months, but don’t know where. This is a long and multi-dimensional decision. Whatever you were about to suggest, probably not there.

10. There were only nine things. There were three posts this month, though. That’s progress. The last time I had four posts in a month was 2024. August 2023 had seven posts in a month, which is unusual. I remember various times I thought about posting every single day, and I have no idea how I’d ever do that, short of quitting my job and making this my main project.

I’m happy to announce that I’ve re-released my 2014 book Atmospheres on Rumored Books.

TL;DR:

• Print: Amazon.com
• Kindle: Amazon.com

This was an interesting one. I am approaching the end of writing Atmospheres 2 and figured I should probably have the original one in print too. I dusted off the old Scrivener file from twelve years ago and gave it a quick editing pass. (I didn’t change content, and mostly fixed dumb comma usage and a few typos.) I also finally ditched that stupid CreateSpace-generated cover.

In doing this, I dug around for old drafts and tried to research the genesis of this book. The original was published on March 2, 2014. Because I write in Scrivener and constantly refine a single document, I don’t really generate discrete versions or drafts. I knew I did have working drafts I sent to someone in PDF format from October 2013 and January 2014. But when looking through old email, I was astonished to find a May 2013 draft I sent to Ray Miller, when the book had just been named and was only 5,000 words long. It amazes me to read those early snippets, really just bursts of ideas with absolutely no structure or routine.

I combed through the six drafts I found, and wrote a bit about the development of the book, my process, and how the drafts mutated into what I ended up publishing. I’ve also included some never-seen-before outtakes from the early drafts, including a bunch of that email to Ray, plus a few segments that were dropped from the first edition. It’s about 40 pages of new material.

Atmospheres is one of my favorite books, along with Rumored to Exist. I think it’s one of my most “Konrath” books, and I can still turn to a random page, read a few lines, and find something hilarious I completely forgot about. I’m glad to have it back in print on Rumored Books. And I can’t wait to finish the sequel.

If you’re new here, maybe I should back up and explain this. Here’s the post I originally made back in 2014.

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About a year ago, I started writing this experiment, which was a collection of almost ambient scenes, brief snippets of no story, just outbursts of emotion or scene. I wanted to eventually link them together in some way, but it became more important to simply generate the pieces each day. When I worked on finishing Thunderbird and doing all of the steps of publishing it, I needed to continue writing something, and that’s where the beginning of Atmospheres started.

I’ve always had a minor obsession with Jim Jarmusch, and I often listen to the soundtrack to Broken Flowers when I’m writing.  One of the songs on there is an edited clip of the Sleep song “Dopesmoker.” I’d been vaguely familiar with them from a million years ago when I used to write about death metal, but wasn’t fully aware of that particular album. I’d read an interview with Jarmusch where he talked about being preoccupied with that song, so I got a copy, and then I became locked into it.

If you haven’t heard it, the album is one song, a 63-minute stoner metal number that’s essentially a single heavy riff played over and over, while talking about a caravan of weed-priests crossing the desert to Jerusalem with their magical hashish. The lyrics are corny, but the song itself is an hour of pure hypnotic sludge, and puts you in a trance mode. And while I did not imbibe in the titular substance discussed in the song, I made it part of my process. I’d sit down every day, put the song on repeat, and completely lose myself in it, writing about whatever escaped from my subconscious thought onto the page.

Within a few months, this brought out an incredible pile of 500 word chunks, some perfect stories, some absolute junk.  But it amazingly brought out some common threads through the manuscript when I pushed them all together.  There’s a scene in the Naked Lunch movie where Ginsberg and Kerouac (or facsimiles thereof) go to Interzone to visit Bill, and  find an apartment filled with scattered random notes (and heroin), and that’s what the book read like before I started editing.

This is by far the most challenging read of any of my books.  It has a story arc in three acts, but it doesn’t have a conventional plot, which will throw a lot of people.  But it contains a lot of brutally honest writing that cuts deep, and it was a lot of fun to write. If I had to compare it to anything I’ve done, it’s a lot like Rumored to Exist in ways, but I think the pieces are darker with a lot more thickness to them.

This is my tenth book, which is a strange milestone to reach.  And every time I finish one of these, I fall into a deep depression and a brief panic, first as I wade through all of the production steps of releasing one of these things, and then as I try to start the next project.  And I have no idea how to sell this book or what’s next, so I’m not prepared for this. But, I need to keep working, so I will.

Anyway, check out the book, and let me know what you think.

After switching to WordPress almost 17 years ago, I’m done. Out. Finished.

In 2009, WordPress was The Thing. Prior to that, I had a homebrewed static site generator, more or less. It generated the index pages and slapped a header/footer on each generated page. Although I used various iterations of this for a dozen years, it had major shortcoming. I had to mostly edit posts by hand; images were a major pain; and the look and feel of the thing was not great. I also had to be in front of my laptop at home to edit a post.

I think I’d already been using WordPress for my music review blog (which died quickly, don’t ask) and after a big painful import process that involved too much use of the sed program and the ugliest shell script imaginable, I got everything into a self-hosted WordPress install.

WordPress had its advantages. Themes were great. It looked modern. I could easily log in from work or my phone or anywhere else and peck out a post. Things like comments were already included. And when I had a multi-person blog for the old publishing company, it wasn’t too terrible to set up other people to also edit things.

WordPress also had many fatal flaws. First of all, it was basically a vector for every possible Russian hacker imaginable, who were constantly on a global hunt to crack every WordPress site they could and turn it into a boner pill ad. This happened a few times on the old PL site, and luckily not at Rumored. You were also at the whim of the WP developers for updates and changes. When they switched to a more WYSIWYG editor with “blocks” in it, I almost jumped ship, until I found a way to turn back on the legacy editor.

I think the biggest pain in the ass was the perception that you could do anything with WordPress and it had a rich ecosystem. But any time I wanted to switch themes, I found most free themes were garbage, years old and unmaintained. Paid themes, sure. But I’m not paying thousands of dollars for a personal blog only three people read. Also there was this plugin architecture, and you’re supposed to be able to totally customize your site, but once again the freemium mode was a curse, and if you added more than a couple plugins, your site would slow to a crawl.

Another big thing was that I had all my posts in a screwy database format, and any thoughts about exporting them to another format to make a book or another site involved a graduate-level computer science project, or a plugin from someone in Yugoslavia that simply did not work.

So, done.

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I’ve been doing the Markdown thing for a decade at work, writing with little symbols for italics and bold and headings, then using a static site generator to convert all of that into HTML and pour in templates and indexes and such. So I’ve thought about switching to a SSG for a long time. But the longer I waited, the worse this proposition got. I think there are about 1500 posts here, and 1.25 million words. So it’s not an easy lift.

I originally started using Jekyll at work in 2015, which suffers from the same WordPress freemium problem for themes and such, and definitely does not work well at that scale. Hugo is a bit better, but I never got it to look great. I use Gatsby for my other blog and that’s okay, but I kept sleeping on this for a while.

Anyway, I eventually thought about Astro, and that seemed to tick most of the boxes. I got a download of the WordPress export of this site, then broke it up into Markdown with a script that actually worked. After a quick setup and maybe two days of messing around, I got everything pretty much running here.

Another change is that I moved my hosting from AWS Lightsail to Vercel. And the actual files here live in GitHub. So Vercel watches the branches there and automatically does the builds and deployment. Easy stuff, and it wasn’t hard to get that running at all.

There are probably a lot of little things I need to fix here, broken links and style problems and such. There aren’t comments, and maybe I will add them back. (Or maybe not.) I need to spend some time on this, but I also need to say “done” and leave it alone.

The one disadvantage to this whole system: I’m now editing and publishing in the same tools I use at work: writing in VSC, testing in the command line, pushing changes with GitHub. Leaving work and then trying to be mindful and write, but sitting in the same exact programs is going to take some getting used to. Maybe I’ll write in something else, then paste it in here.

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Other news is that I got another draft of Atmospheres 2 done, and I hope this is the second-to-last one. After I left it ferment for a week or so, I’ll start a heavy edit pass and hopefully get that done soon.

I’ve been commuting to the office on the BART train for a few years now. This is pretty painless except I drive a mile to the station, then pay $16 a day to park. Recently, they stopped selling reserved parking at the station by my house. They’re apparently tearing up the whole parking lot and building 750 units of housing and 50,000 square feet of commercial property. This roughly coincided with me going back to the office five days a week, so I suddenly need a new way to get to the train.

My first thought was to simply drive to another station. I tried this for a few days, going to the MacArthur station, which only costs $4 a day to park in the new garage. But that added 5-10 minutes of driving in each direction, and another 10-15 minutes of train time each way, which seemed silly. I also tried renting Lime scooters. They are all over the neighborhood, and cost maybe $4 a trip. They’re pretty quick, but after one or two trips, I knew it was when, not if. They’re pretty shaky, and I could easily see getting taken out by a pothole, of which there are many in West Oakland.

I bought a bike when RTO started in 2023, a very nice Cannondale Topstone, with thoughts that I’d ride to the Berkeley office a few days a week. I’ve honestly rode that bike exactly three times since I bought it, and none of them actual commutes. I rode it to the train a few times last month to see what my problem was, other than general laziness. I think the issue is that it’s a gravel bike with drop handlebars, and it’s entirely the wrong stance and geometry for a quick ride to work on the streets with a laptop backpack on.

I also still have the bike I bought in 2005, a Dahon Boardwalk folding bike. I think I’ve rode this bike maybe twice since I broke my arm on it in 2009. That bike has a more upright stance, but it’s also very wobbly and weird, top-heavy with tiny wheels, and it really needs a complete overhaul from sitting for 20 years. So I could pay $400 to redo a bike I don’t really like and bought for $300. Or I contemplated switching the handlebars on the Topstone, which would also require switching brakes and shifters, and I’m maybe $500 in on a project I might not like. Or I could just buy another bike.

So I did. I went to REI and picked up a Cannondale Quick CX 3. It’s a great hybrid bike, with a more upright stance and flat handlebars. It’s a very lightweight alloy frame, and pretty well equipped with the latest hardware. It has hydraulic disc brakes, which are new to me. There’s eight speeds, with a decent range for the city. The front fork has a suspension on it, but also has a quick-locking lever for when I don’t want it. Tires are grippy, but not too fat. There’s a phone mount on the stem, but otherwise the bike is all analog. And I love the color, which they call Rally Red. My Topstone is a matte stealth bomber black, which is cool. But the red is a nice contrast.

I’ve rode the new bike to the train every day last week, and it’s pretty much flawless. I had some fretting with the u-lock mount, how to keep it on the bike as I rode without making a ton of knocking noise. (I got a velcro holster thing that seems to work.) We have BikeLink lockers at the train station, which are secure enough for the day, and I u-lock it to the inside of the locker, too. It’s pretty ideal when it’s 70 and sunny out. What will it be like when it isn’t 70 and sunny? That’s a TBD.

I also went out a few times over the weekend. I’ve got 40-some miles on the bike already. I don’t know if I’m going to become a Bike Person. I can’t do spandex. I’m not anti-car enough. I’m definitely not in shape. I’ll have to work on that last one.

I also need to avoid any more gear acquisition. Work paid for the bike via our gym/fitness subsidy, which is nice. But I now spend too much time browsing forums, wondering if some new-fangled carbon fiber cargo rack will make my life complete. I need to cut that out, and just ride.

I don’t know why, but my jet lag after the Thailand trip was absolutely brutal. Maybe it was because I was gone longer than usual. Or maybe it was coming from a hot and sunny climate to the cold and cloudy and gray Bay Area spring. Or maybe spending a day in the germ tube gave me a little crud to get over. But I was pretty much knocked out for the week.

I don’t like to get into work stuff here, and I won’t go over my general feelings over this, but we’ve fully returned to office now, so I’m back in SF five days a week now. I know 87% of the country already works every day in the office, but this was a big, sudden shift for me, and it makes the week seem like 17 days long, now that it isn’t interleaved with WFH days. The other bummer with this is they’re closing the parking lot at my BART station, which means either I drive twice as long and then take a train also twice as long, or I figure out some way to ride a bike or scooter or something to the train. But, see above about constant pissing rain and cold here.

I’m back to working a few hours in the morning before I leave, back into the swing of things with Atmospheres 2, I think. I didn’t work on it at all during the trip, and lost a week or two when I was back. But I’m working it. I feel like it’s maybe two months away, if I can keep consistent with it every day. There are a few other distractions, but I’m trying to limit them as much as possible.

One thing that briefly popped up was this idea for a nostalgia-based book about various dead technologies or tools I was around for when they first broke. Like I was trying to install Linux at the end of 1992 when it was still more or less a Minix add-on. Around the same time, I created my first .hyplan file, which was basically a homepage on this thing called the World Wide Web. There are lots of other stories like this from the early 90s, and I spent a weekend trying to brain-dump some of this. But the writing is so wooden and redundant that it wasn’t helpful. And there needs to be some way to wrap these stories up in a gimmick, a hook, a format. I don’t know what that is. Maybe it’s a series of essays on a Substack, but those become boring journalistic things with no point and end up feeling like evergreen SEO garbage on a tech site full of affiliate links. There’s also the thought of using them as the bones of a Summer Rain-esque novel or set of stories. But I really don’t want to write another book like that. SR remains unpublished for a reason.

I think the biggest conflict with this nostalgia-based writing is it drags me back and makes me think about what I now realize is an incredibly painful era of my life, and I have no reason to wallow in that timeframe anymore. And the neuro-whatever part of my brain gets really locked into this stuff, and I find myself spending all day on newspapers dot com researching things that make me mentally ill. It’s really not worth it. I need to look forward and not back.

I’ve also mentioned this before, but so many of the communities around nostalgia - retrocomputer folks or old toy collectors or classic car hotrods - end up becoming dangerously adjacent to politics and this bitterness about how America was great and it isn’t anymore. I really can’t deal with that shit at all. And I can’t spend my time buying old electronics on eBay and setting up a VAX computer in my house that takes up free space I do not have, when I’ve got a pocket calculator in my desk drawer that has an order of magnitude more processing power. I get that some people love this stuff, but it’s dangerous for me to get into it. So, next topic.

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This is another waste of time maybe, but I decided to mess with writing a Scrivener replacement. It’s not really a replacement, per se. I use Visual Studio Code all day every day, writing documentation in Markdown. And there are aspects of this IDE that I like better than Scrivener, like that the docs aren’t in a proprietary format, and it’s easily extensible. I thought about just straight-up writing the next book in Markdown in VSC, but I knew there were some bits that were missing that I need.

So, I started throwing something together, tentatively called jkwrite. It’s far from functional, and it’s probably not going to be usable by anyone but me, if I even finish it. But it’s been fun noodling on this a bit. The biggest problem, aside from that the more I implement, the more I realize I have way more to implement, is that I’m sitting in the same exact tools I use at work when I’m not at work. So I’m slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs, then getting to work and spending all day slamming VSC stuff into GitHub PRs. It’s like if I cooked Taco Bell food as a hobby at home, even though I spent 80 hours a week managing a Taco Bell. It’s an interesting distraction, though.

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More dental drama, although this was sort of voluntary. I got another tooth crowned, a lower molar that’s been on the list for a while, and I wanted to burn the rest of this year’s insurance, so why not. This was a two-parter, with them cutting down the top of the tooth, doing some imprints, and putting on a temp crown that I was sure I was going to lose while eating. Went in yesterday and they actually couldn’t get the temp off, had to cut it in pieces to pry it loose. The new crown is on there and feels weird, very glossy and bigger than the old tooth, but the old one had too much metal filling and was lower than it should be, with a sharp edge on one side. It’s fine now, but the painful part was paying for it, on top of the other crown I got done in January.

I still go to my old dentist at Tanforan Mall. I’ve written about this already, but that mall is dire right now. They’re timing out the leases and getting ready to tear the whole thing down to build a biotech campus. I did a quick loop two weeks ago, and brought in a Canon 6D with no problem, since the inside of the mall is almost entirely vacant. It’s extremely depressing to be in there now. The Target is still going. And the Petco is still there. I went to Petco last night, and that’s also very sad to me. I remember going to that Petco on the way home from the vet with Loca in the carrier. We had to get some medicine or something, but I put her carrier up to the mouse cages and fish tanks so she could watch them. So it’s depressing to go there now, knowing the whole thing will be gone soon, replaced by a giant metal and glass tower housing the research team designing and patenting a competitor to Skyrizzi, treating moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis. Time waits for no man, I guess.

Working on a new book nook. This one is for Yaowarat, the Chinatown in Bangkok. Kinda weird to be building a model of the place I just visited, but that’s fun. Lots of neon signs.