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Author: Marko Kloos

My morning brain fuel of choice

Posted on by Marko Kloos

A lot of my writer friends basically live on coffee. I like it every now and then, but it’s not a daily thing for me. It’s what I get when I am grabbing breakfast while out and about, not what I make every morning to get going.

At Castle Frostbite, we drink tea instead, and a lot of it.

This is our morning fuel. It’s Ostfriesentee, a German tea blend from East Frisia (where they drink more tea per capita than anyone else in the world.) It’s a pretty strong Assam/Ceylon blend.

This is what I drink when I am working. On a normal day, I probably have four or five cups of tea before lunch. The East Frisians drink theirs with cream and rock sugar, but ain’t nobody got time for East Frisian tea ceremonies around here, so I drink mine plain and black.

You can get it all over northern Germany, but it’s almost impossible to find in the US, so I bring back ten pounds or so whenever I visit the family, and my brother kindly ships me some whenever I can’t make it over in time before our stock runs low. But every time I do bring back a suitcase full of neatly packaged one-pound packs of black tea, I do feel a little bit like an international drug smuggler, even if it’s a legal drug.

A decidedly mixed-breed pedigree

Posted on by Marko Kloos

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I did one of those ancestry DNA tests a little while ago, and the results come as an absolute…lack of surprise.

German father (the green area), Croatian mother (the blue one), and my paternal grandmother was from East Prussia (the very top of the western part of the pink area.) No idea where or when the 2% Norwegian component came into the family tree, but I suspect that the 2% Baltic bit came from someone in my grandmother’s ancestry because East Prussia is adjacent to that area.

Interesting stuff, but I don’t read too much into it. Our family history is a part of our identity, but we choose our own paths in the end. 

Military time in the civilian world

Posted on by Marko Kloos

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Out of idle curiosity this morning, here’s a question for those of you who have served in the military:

How many of you are still using 24-hour and DDMMYYYY calendar format on your digital devices?

I turned in my kit 28 years ago this month and I still do it. My digital watches are all set to military time, and so are all my computers. Of course, it comes easier to someone who grew up in Europe because of the far more common use of 24-hour time over there, so everyone’s fluid in both notations. (In conversation, people in Germany tend to use 12-hour time, but all the timetables and airport status displays and such are in 24-hour time.)

When I got this Suunto Core, I was pleased to find that not only does it let you use 24-hour time (which is a common feature on digital watches) but also the DD.MM format for the date (which is far less common; watches sold in the US overwhelmingly feature the MM.DD notation.) Because even though I am fluent in imperial measurements and the AM/PM notation after 26 years here, my brain still wants to read the date the military way, day followed by month followed by year.

From the Castle Frostbite IT department

Posted on by Marko Kloos

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Robin’s iMac started giving her the Beachball of Death, hanging up on almost everything she tried to do with it. I used to be a hardware tech support guy and systems administrator, so I am the official Castle Frostbite IT department. In that function, I diagnosed the iMac and suspected that the hard drive was failing.

$90 for a repair kit and two hours later, the iMac has been rejuvenated with an SSD. I also gave it a thorough interior cleaning while I had the screen off. It’s not a terribly difficult repair with the right tools—the hardest part of the operation is to line up the strips for the new screen adhesive and then putting the screen glass back on perfectly aligned because once the glass touches the adhesive, it doesn’t want to move again.

I bought this iMac in mid-2014 and maxed out all the specs when I ordered it. It’s a Core i7 with 16GB of RAM and a GeForce GTX780, and now it’s faster than it was in its new state because it’s booting the operating system and running applications off an SSD and not the fusion drive it came with originally. For the stuff Robin does with a computer, it will probably last her for another two or three years, so I’d say I got my money’s worth out of that purchase. One of the nice things about Macs is that they stay useful far longer than their PC counterparts. That useful period is much extended when you future-proof the computer by buying the highest specs you can afford.

That goes doubly for iMacs because they are NOT designed for end-user upgradeability. They have a handy little trapdoor for replacing RAM, but that’s as far as Apple wants you to do things yourself. To get at any interior components, you have to cut the adhesive that holds the screen, pop the whole big glass panel off, and hope you don’t have to sneeze when it’s time to stick it back on.

Still, it’s satisfying to flex the old IT Guy muscles every now and then and Fix a Thing. So much of my day revolves around sitting at a desk and having conversations with imaginary people that it’s nice to be able to get out the special tool kit and engage in some manual tinkering that fixes a problem with a physical object.

The last days of winter

Posted on by Marko Kloos

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Yesterday, I took Girl Child out to the slopes here in town for what was probably the last good skiing day of the season. Later this week we’re supposed to get a few days of 60-degree weather, which is going to melt most of the remaining snow and kick-start my least favorite season in New Hampshire…mud season. (The four seasons here are Winter, Mud, Bugs, and Fall.)

The wife got her appointment invitation for the COVID vaccine because the 50+ age group is next in line. I’ll be 50 in October, and this is the first (and probably last) time I found myself wishing I was there already. But at this pace, everyone in the country who wants the vaccine will be able to have their shot by May, so maybe we can all start going back to a semblance of normal life in the second half of the year. Social isolation isn’t a natural state for humans, and even my hardcore introvert friends are all like, “I want to travel and hug my friends!”

The new normal will be a lot different from our pre-COVID lives. I think masks will be a part of our lives for a long time to come, at least in public settings. The virus will remain, and we’ll get updated shots for it every year just like we do with the flu. But we will return to getting together in person because that’s what humans are wired to do. I know I can’t wait to see my friends and family in real life again, not just in a Muppets Show/Brady Bunch arrangement of video tiles on a screen. 

Stay safe, wear your masks, get your shot, and then let’s cautiously plan for shenanigans again.

The Great Link has been upgraded

Posted on by Marko Kloos

The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of last night:

Not bad for a rural setting on a dirt road, right?

Ah, BUT.

The Internet connection at Castle Frostbite as of today:

Those are legit 2021-level Internet speeds. The kicker is that the new provider is supplying ten times the previous speed on the download, and forty times on the upload…at $20 less per month.

Gigabit fiber will keep this place swimming along for the next decade or so, I think.

 

More Tik-Toks

Posted on by Marko Kloos

Someone asked about the rest of the collection in comments, so here you go.

It’s a modest collection of nice-but-not-outrageous watches as far as price goes. The whole case is worth less than a single basic Omega or Rolex. Not that I would mind owning a Seamaster or a Submariner, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to bring myself to spend five or ten grand on a watch. (My answer may change if someone ever gives me a truck full of cash for movie rights or something.)

Top row, left to right: Mondaine Quartz Classic, Orient Defender, Island Watch Aviator, and a Borel that’s a high quality Swiss Datejust homage.

Bottom row, left to right: Orient Mako, Junkers G-38 GMT, Arctos/GPW Titanium Einsatzuhr, and a Phoibos Proteus with a meteorite dial.

The oldest watch in that case is the two-tone Borel on the top right, which I got as a Christmas gift from my mother-in-law about 15 years ago. The youngest one is the Phoibos on the bottom right, which I bought with some of the Netflix money from my Love Death + Robots contributions.

Not pictured are the half dozen Casios I keep in my nightstand drawer…several G-Shocks, two Edifices, and a few fun cheapies that are great as beater watches. Those don’t go into a watch case because that would be silly, and also because I don’t want to buy another watch case. I never thought I’d even fill that 8-slot one, but it turns out that once you get bitten by the horology bug, you tend to accumulate more.

Posting a TikTok

Posted on by Marko Kloos

Eight years ago, when Terms of Enlistment started selling a lot of copies, this $45 Casio Duro was the first “extravagant” purchase I made with some of the first windfall royalties.

Fast-forward to 2021, eight years and ten novels later, and I own a lot more watches, but I still wear this one a lot. It’s a reminder that I don’t need to spend a bunch of money to take pleasure in something, and that once upon a time, spending $45 on something I didn’t strictly need was a frivolous luxury.

(It’s also a damn good watch in its own right and easily the best sub-$100 dive watch on the market. It’s tough, unpretentious, accurate, and reliable, all properties worthy of emulation.)

 

ORDERS OF BATTLE is out on audio

Posted on by Marko Kloos

The delayed audiobook version of ORDERS OF BATTLE was released yesterday, and it’s now available via Amazon/Audible.

The new narrator is Eric G. Dove. As I have mentioned before, the delay in production was due to the unexpected passing of Angelo DiLoreto, who was scheduled to narrate the book originally. As most of you will probably understand, that sort of thing can’t be fixed on the spot.

Cellulose backups

Posted on by Marko Kloos

These are the original handwritten drafts for “On the Use of Shape-Shifters in Warfare” (which ended up in Love Death + Robots on Netflix as ‘Shapeshifters”), and “Ink and Blood”, which was my first published short story ever. It seems that the stories of mine I like best all started out on paper and came out of a fountain pen.

Funny thing: I went through one of my old notebooks today to search for notes and story ideas I had written down years ago, and came across an unfinished short story I can’t remember writing. It’s in my handwriting, so I obviously did, but I don’t have any memory of it at all. It’s called “Pirates of Shiraz”, and it starts with a group of friends doing a VR bombing run in a WWII multiplayer online game in their guild’s B-17 called Springfield Sally. The pilot has to bail on the group for a few minutes because the baby’s crying in real life in her crib. He puts the plane on autopilot right as German fighters come in, and the guild members tell him that they’ll make him pay the repair bill if the plane goes down. I don’t know where I was going with the story, but it started out pretty well.

If I finished that one now and put it out into the world, people would probably say that it’s a Ready Player One pastiche. (That old notebook is from 2010, so the story fragment was written long before RP1 came out.) This was definitely the weirdest moment I’ve had while going through old notes. That’s why I keep all the notebooks I fill…you never know what you’re going to forget in the future.