Another old journal entry I found, this one circa ~June 2005, titled "Runaway train:" Victoria and I started our trip by slipping past the chain link into the West Oakland train yard, our shadows pooling under sodium lights burning orange against the brisk night sky. As luck would have it, there was a built train that looked ready to pull, so we stalked along the length of it through the yard until we found a ridable car. It wasn’t until the early hours of the morning that the slack action finally jolted us awake, and we smiled as the train lumbered out of the yard along the bay, taking us east towards Sacramento. Strangely, it didn’t stop in Roseville, which meant we were officially on a train going the wrong way. I didn’t want to re-acquaint myself with the Utah salt flats, so we jumped off in Oroville and decided to hitchhike to the next train yard in Dunsmuir rather than backtrack. Standing on the onramp to the 70 in the morning sun, we felt optimistic for such a false start. The sky was clear, the shoulder was wide, and the traffic was consistent. Soon enough, we were off--a series of short rides through rolling amber foothills; the California I'd always hoped to find. At one point we got a ride with a car full of kids our age that were going all the way to Portland. Our excitement at having gotten what promised to be the last ride of the day was greatly diminished when we realized that they were all heroin addicts. The thing about hitchhiking is that once the door is closed, you’re in someone else’s car, and that means rolling with however their life rolls. These kids were all really stoned and somewhat incoherent, would fight incessantly over seemingly trivial matters, and stopped at every single rest-stop along the way (and almost every exit!) so that they could get out and pan-handle. I was shocked by how successful they were, given that they were clearly high, were wearing short sleeves, and had really obvious track marks on their arms. Maybe that’s part of the strangeness of the road: sometimes when desperation is that visible, people will pay a small amount to make it go away. But mostly, I was just struck by how much of a lifestyle shooting heroin is. Almost all of their focus was dedicated to consideration of altered states. When we were still 400 miles away, one kid announced out of the blue "You know... when I get to Portland, I think I'm going to buy myself a pack of Newport Lights. Do you think that'd be alright Josh?" At first I didn't think anything of the announcement -- someone who's a smoker and thinking about smoking -- nothing new. But then I realized, we're 400 miles away from Portland and he's already thinking about what kind of cigarettes he's going to get when we arrive! Nothing else between here and there really mattered. This is all to say that it wasn’t the best ride, so Victoria and I extracted ourselves from the car in Dunsmuir with the intention of hopping a train north instead. We figured we’d probably beat them there anyway at their pace. In Dunsmuir, an intermodal train rolled into the yard just as we arrived, which was ultra-rare luck; the kind that makes you grin before you think. We didn't intend to waste it, and sprinted, lungs burning, down one side, checking for ridable cars: 53, 53, 48… no. 53, 53, empty… no. The next stop was Klamath Falls, which meant security, so we needed cover, not just anything ridable. Still running, legs heavy, we watched the train lurch forward, starting to leave without us. We checked a few more cars until it was moving too fast and it was undeniable we’d missed our chance. As the last car cleared, we were astounded to find ourselves face-to-face with our friend Maria on the opposite side of the track, chest heaving, face flushed. She'd been running down the other side of the train, doing the exact same thing at the exact same moment with no idea we were there, just the same desperate idea at the same time. "Hey, I know you guys!"

I found some old journal entries. This one is probably circa ~2006, just titled "Scrap:" I moved to Pittsburgh at the right time in my life, but at the wrong time of year. Coming from the west coast, I was actually naive enough to be excited about the prospect of winter. I imagined nothing but snowball fights, snow angles, icicles on the eves, and that muffled crunch of loose snow under your feet. I thought I'd be doing nothing but riding sleds and watching snowflakes drift down past the street lights at night. It turns out, however, that winter doesn't quite resemble this fantasy, and that it's also the kind of thing you really want to ease into. The house we moved into didn't have working utilities, much less effective heating, and January wasn't the best time to be standing in the basement with a pipe wrench, doing my best to install gas lines without being able to feel my fingers. There were days when I literally couldn't apply the thread sealant to the black iron, because it had frozen in the tube. So we had this house, and it was a wreck, and it was well below zero. But it was beautiful that we had anything at all. Just like a squat, the first order of business was to get something that approximated a flushing toilet. After that, we started tearing out walls, putting in plumbing, and trying to eek everything that we could out of forgotten pallets and scrap lumber. At one point we pulled a cast-iron bathtub out of a bathroom, and not having any immediate place to put it, temporarily set it outside -- right up against the back of the house. The next morning I stepped out back, and it was gone. Totally vanished. It hadn't even been 24 hours, and somehow a really heavy cast-iron bathtub had disappeared from our back yard. It seemed like such a random theft -- who in their right mind would spontaneously coordinate an operation to move something of that size? I didn't yet realize that where San Francisco has scroungers, Pittsburgh has scrappers. The hunt isn't for kitchy coffee mugs or spare furniture. It's for raw metals. So several months later when we pulled out another cast-iron bathtub, this one with a large hole rusted through the bottom of it, I knew just how to get rid of it. We simply put it in the back yard. The next day I was looking out the window when I saw an old pickup truck drive through the ally. It had all kinds of metal pipes and appliance parts jutting out the plywood sides which had been erected to try and contain as much metal in the bed of the truck as possible. Two guys hopped out, sized up the tub, and wrangled it into the truck. They continued around the block and pulled up next to a dumpster that we'd been steadily filling with moldy carpet out front. I waved. "ALRIGHT IF WE PULL THIS DUCTWORK OUT OF THIS DUMPSTER?!" "No problem at all." Upon closer inspection, these two were quite the team. One bulky, one scrappy, both getting old. They almost reminded you of something out of a Walter Matthou movie, where they'd both gone hard of hearing, so all communication between them was done by yelling -- even if they were standing only inches apart. I gathered that one was named Ron, the other Wade, and that their voices were continually horse. After they'd gotten the ductwork into the truck, one of them looked the house up and down. "SAY, YOU GOT ANYTHING ELSE IN THERE?" "Well," I said, "we do have an old broken gas furance in the basement." Wade looked at Ron. "YOU WANNA GO CHECK IT OUT RON?" "ALRIGHT I'LL GO CHECK IT OUT!" So Ron followed me down into the basement. He jerked the furnace around to get a feel for the weight, nodded to himself, and counted the steps up to the first floor. Back outside, Ron and Wade had a quick conference. "HOW'S IT LOOK RON?" "IT'S HEAVY WADE. REAL HEAVY. 17 STEPS." They mulled it over, before turning to where I was standing two feet away and yelling "ALRIGHT WE'LL DO IT." I went down with them, to supervise, but was quickly roped into the heavy lifting. The first thing I noticed was that moving scrap for a living doesn't make you a very good mover. They didn't even bother trying to tip the furnace down, and instead just knocked the thing straight over with a resounding crash. We sort of carry/dragged it over to the steps, where the real work began. The stairway from the basement back up to the first floor is just wide enough for the furnace. There are 13 steps up, then a small landing for a 180degree turn, then the remaining 4 steps to the first floor. Our original linup was with Wade (the big one) in front of the furnace, with me and Ron (the scrappy ones) below the furnace. These guys were not afraid to make noise. Every time they went to lift, they were moaning or yelling or cursing almost embarrasingly loudly. We tried moving it up a few steps before Wade finally shouted "RON! YOU KNOW I CAN'T DO THIS! I'VE ONLY GOT THREE TOES!" I wondered if I'd heard Wade correctly, and he responded "the sugars" when I looked at him somewhat quizzically. So Ron and Wade traded places, such that now Ron was in front and I was down below with the big guy. In fact, both him and I could barely fit in the stairwell at the same time. We'd lift a step at a time, and it took us a solid 45 minutes to make it up the first flight and into the landing. The furnace just barely fit through the doorway from the stairwell to the landing, but a pipe jutting out of it got stuck in a wall. So Wade and I were left standing on the basement side of the furnace, with the whole thing blocking the door, while Ron was out on the landing side of the furnace. Suddenly, Wade turned to me and asked "HEY, IS THERE ANOTHER WAY OUT OF THIS BASEMENT?" "Actually, no this is the only entrance." He started looking around frantically. "I... I... I GOTTA GET OUT OF HERE! I'M CLAUSTRAUPHOBIC! GET ME THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" He continued yelling, but also started trying to pull the furnace back down towards us, which would have crushed us for sure. I could barely fit in the starewall with Wade as it was, but now I was getting seriously squished up against the wall in all the hysterics. I tried to calm him down, told him to take a deep breath, but nothing was working. I couldn't decide whether I should continue trying to help work things out in the stairwell, or just bolt back down into the basement and take cover. Ron peered through, saw what was happening, and yelled "I'LL GO GET THE AXE!" "The what?" I thought. "RON! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME LIKE THIS! YOU CAN'T LEAVE ME!" While the furnace did fit squarely in the door frame, there was a small 2ft gap between the top of the furnace and the top of the door frame. "Wade!" I yelled, "Wade! Why don't you try going over it!" Without a microsecond of hesitation, this 250+lb guy immediately started scrambling up the furnace, trying to squeeze through the opening in the top. I sort of shrugged to myself, sighed, then started pushing on his ass, trying to help wedge him through the opening. Eventually the bulk of him was directly on top of the furnace, and when Ron came back he was able to help pull him through. He then went down face-first over the other side. But now I was stuck in the basement, with these two lunatics on the other side. The offending pipe that was preventing the furnace from moving any further needed to be resolved, and Ron was holding a full-sized axe. "Now Ron, I've got some wrenches in that room over there, you could-" WHAM! The axe came down on the pipe, ripping out a section of drywall along with it. They jerked it around the bend, shoved it up the remaining steps, and it was out the front door. "Say," I asked, "how much do you get for steel, anyway?" "FOUR CENTS A POUND." This is, basically, life in Pittsburgh.

construction-physics.com/p/t… Whenever I read history like this on a relatively obscure blog, it seems surprising to me that I don’t already know it by heart. Why aren’t there giant statues/monuments of people like Knipling and Bushland across the ranchlands of the southern USA? Many things we benefit from didn’t come easy, and it seems like we shouldn’t forget that.

I've never understood why American architecture is so ugly. Presumably people don't become architects without some dream of building something beautiful. Even repressed, shouldn't it leak out? Shouldn't every building compete to be the one an architect longs to be seen for? When I look at new construction, I don’t see even a glimmer of a repressed Frank Lloyd Wright anywhere. What happens between architecture school and… this?

When betrayal is so elegant it almost feels like a love letter

There were a lot of terrible things about “crypto,” but there was also some really hardcore nerdery in there. Every so often I stumble upon some random pile of very esoteric now semi-abandoned code from that period, and I think “wow, these people really nerded pretty hard here.”

I didn’t go to college, but I did once unexpectedly end up at Princeton University’s “reunions weekend.” The way they do it, every 5th year class has their reunion on campus at the same time. So every year, on one weekend, the Princeton campus will be filled with people celebrating their 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on class reunions— all the way up until there’s nobody alive anymore. The beginning of reunions weekend kicks off with a parade! It is a parade of the Princeton graduates: featuring themselves, in honor of themselves, for… themselves. It works like this: all the graduates pack the sidewalks of the parade route, but ordered by graduation year. The recent graduates are standing at the end of the route, and the oldest graduates are at the beginning. Then, the parade begins. The oldest living graduate steps off the sidewalk and leads the parade. When everyone older than you has gone by, you step into the street and become the parade. Until you become part of the parade, you’re cheering the parade. You cheer and witness everyone before you, and then you are cheered and witnessed by everyone after you. It is a bizarre ritual. To see it, though, is like seeing the entire fossil record of Princeton graduates. The person leading the parade — the oldest living graduate in that cohort — is a white guy. And then, for a reallllly lonnnnnng time, it’s just white guys! After 30 minutes… a woman! A white woman. With people in the parade maybe holding signs like “first coed graduating class!” And then another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more white women in the parade. And then… the first black man! Another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more black men. And so on. By the end — the most recent class — is the exact opposite of the beginning. A mix of everyone you can think of. For some reason that parade really stuck with me. It’s simultaneously a representation of how much the world has changed, but also a representation of how many “minutes of parade” are still walking around having lived and ended up where they are under very different circumstances.

Confer now supports images in chats, so you can add photos to your encrypted conversations: confer.to/

Confer's privacy technology is coming to Meta AI. We're integrating private AI and end-to-end encryption into Meta's products: confer.to/blog/2026/03/encry…

Burned a screen and printed some totes to send to the first few hundred Confer subscribers as a thank you :)