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I’m going to miss two things about Fry’s Electronics, which shut down this week:

  • Being able to walk in and grab random parts immediately.
  • The decor.

And yeah, there’s nostalgia for the old days, but they’re already gone.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s they really were a one-stop shop for computers, software, appliances, all kinds of electronics hardware, and the random snacks you might want to munch on while tinkering or upgrading. You could check out, or better yet try out – they had a huge number of computers available for demos – all kinds of cool tech.

I bought a lot of components for my desktop PC over the years, replacing pieces bit by bit. Sure, you could get complete systems at Micro Center or Best Buy or Circuit City, but none of them had the long tail of components that Fry’s did.

(There was also the generous return policy — I knew a lot of people who used the “Fry’s rental” when they needed something for a single project.)

Service was a mixed bag, though. Sometimes you’d get someone really knowledgeable who could help you pick out the best hardware combination for what you wanted. Sometimes you wouldn’t be able to find anyone. And a lot of the sales staff tended to be proto-techbros, so if you were shopping while female, or looking for Apple products — or worse, both — there was a good chance you’d get someone overly condescending.

Fading Away

They’ve been going downhill for a while. They dropped a lot of the middle range and focused on the high-end and low-end markets. All the articles talk about competition from online stores, and I suspect friendlier brick-and-mortar stores like Best Buy took over a lot of the mid-range consumer market.

When I built a gaming PC a few years ago, I tried Fry’s first, but I couldn’t find most of the parts I wanted. I only bought the case and power supply there, then ordered other parts from NewEgg, Amazon, or direct from the manufacturers. And I went back to Fry’s when I tried to put everything together and discovered I had the wrong mounting rails and needed another case fan.

They never really adapted to online shopping. Their website is still terrible (or was until Wednesday). Before 2019, big deal, I’d just walk into the store and browse anyway. But in 2020, after Covid-19 hit and in-person retail shut down, curbside pickup and shipping were the way to go. The search results were a pain to sort through, even for products that didn’t have nationwide shortages (like webcams). Even when I told it I wanted to look for shipping or local pickup, it kept trying to send me to San Jose, hundreds of miles away.

The Fry’s Experience

Ultimately, though, the most memorable thing about Fry’s couldn’t translate to a website. The locations I’ve been to were all converted warehouses or small office buildings. And each one was decorated with a theme.

Burbank’s store had a flying saucer crashed into the front, with statues of 50’s sci-fi aliens with ray guns scattered around as if they were invading the building. A giant squid’s tentacles supported the computer demo tables.

Anaheim had a giant mock-up of the Space Shuttle. If I remember right, the audio demo room was inside it.

Manhattan Beach had a Pacific Islands theme, with tropical plants, tiki statues, and murals based on Gauguin’s paintings from Tahiti.

Fountain Valley’s store was decked out in a classical Roman style, with columns, a mural of Roman gods, and a broken aqueduct that poured into a fountain in the center of the store. (I always thought that was a risky choice for an electronics store.)

Las Vegas had a giant slot machine for an entrance, but nothing special inside that I can recall.

Sad to say, I don’t seem to have taken photos inside any of these locations, though I do have a shot of the Vegas entryway, and of course now I can’t.

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The other day I grabbed a coffee and muffin while out walking, and found an out-of-the-way outdoor place where I could unmask and eat without being near anyone else.

It was weird! It felt like I was getting away with something. This sort of thing used to be normal, but now it isn’t… and that’s weird too!

I haven’t eaten at a restaurant in nearly a year. Not even outside on a patio when health orders have allowed it. (Though I have bought take-out.) This was only the second time since last March that I’ve eaten anything away from home except the occasional travel mug of coffee in the car. Not that I bother with that very often, since I rarely drive farther than the grocery store. I’ve even stopped carrying my Epi-Pen everywhere. I know I’m not going to eat until I get back.

I think the last time I ate at a restaurant was when I went out to lunch with some co-workers the first week of March, and we were talking about whether we wanted to switch to working remotely early, before the order came down. We knew it was coming sooner or later.

As it turned out, all of us who were there ended up spending just one more day onsite. The other two both started working remotely the next week, and I came down with the flu that weekend (at least I think it was the flu) and didn’t recover until the office closed.

I’m still at the same job, but that office? Gone. They’re moving to a new location for when onsite office work is a thing again. I haven’t been to the new office either, because it’s not ready yet, and everything’s in storage for now, presumably including the clutter I would have taken care of if I hadn’t been sick when the work-from-home order came down.

I hope I rinsed out my coffee mug.

And didn’t leave any food at my desk.

But hey, at least I know I didn’t need all of those hand-written notes!

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Surprising no-one, WonderCon will be online-only again this year. Last year’s event was canceled just as we all started to realize that Covid-19 was spreading in California. And while the winter surge in cases is finally slowing down, the coronavirus is still more prevalent out there now than it was last March.

They’re still hoping to do San Diego in July, but even with multiple vaccines, there are still too many variables (vaccine distribution, mutation speed, mask and distancing practice, etc.) to know whether it’ll be possible to hold a convention by then. I guess we’ll see.

Well, other people will see. Much as I miss going to comic cons, SDCC feels unsafely crowded in normal years. Even in the best-case scenario, my anxiety would go through the roof.

Besides, I’ve already read The Last Stand of the California Browncoats.

No Fair(e)

Anyway, the local Renaissance Faire canceled this season again, too. On one hand, it’s all outdoors, which helps a lot — and you know the Faire folk would be serious about safety — but on the other hand, it’s still a big gathering, and April isn’t that far off.

I could maaaaybe see doing a smaller convention in fall, if things improve by then. Long Beach Comic-Con’s and LA Comic Con still show their September dates. For now. (I was worried about LBCC for a bit since their website was offline when I checked a few days ago, but it’s back now.) But again, way too many variables in the war between public health and the virus to predict whether it’ll even be possible for them to hold it. Though I’m pretty sure LBCC will be more responsible than LA Comic-Con.

Of course, even if someone can hold a convention safely by then…would it actually be fun? Or would it be a day of white-knuckled agoraphobia as we plunge into a crowd after a year and a half of semi-isolation?

Maybe we’re probably better off not trying to hit a convention until next spring anyway. We’ll need time first to re-acclimate to being around people!

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National Geographic reports on a new(ish) theory on the Dyatlov Pass incident [edit: moved from archived original]: a small avalanche with a large chunk of snow could have caused the blunt-force injuries, leading to them evacuating the tent, without leaving the expected (but missing) signs of a full avalanche.

The bizarre deaths of hikers at Russia’s Dyatlov Pass have inspired countless conspiracy theories, but the answer may lie in an elegant computer model based on surprising sources.

An avalanche could explain why they cut their way out of their tent and were found scattered around the campsite, but there was no snowfall and no signs of an avalanche when the bodies were found, and it doesn’t explain the various injuries.

Car crash test data combined with snow simulations developed for Frozen — and the fact that some of the hikers put their bedrolls on top of their skis makes the injuries fit if a slab of snow landed on the tent.

And the team diary recorded strong winds, which most likely would have been blowing downslope, which could have moved enough snow around to trigger a small avalanche.

Not conclusive, of course, but within the realm of possibility.

Of course, a mini avalanche isn’t as exciting as, say, an attack by Yeti or running into an experimental Soviet weapons test!

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I like Minecraft Earth, but it didn’t quite hit its stride before the pandemic, and didn’t adapt as well as Pokémon Go has to the pandemic. I’ve mostly stopped playing since hitting the level cap because gameplay is still too awkward, and while it is fun, it’s not enough fun to overcome that when I don’t have a goal to work toward.

So while I’m sad that it’s shutting down in June, it’s more “what could have been” than wishing I could keep playing it.

Live the Adventure!

Adventuring in augmented reality is the clear highlight of the game. You use your phone as a window into a life-size 3D fragment of a Minecraft world where you can fight zombies, mine resources, activate redstone contraptions, and so on. Initially these would spawn out in public spaces, and you could spot them from a distance like Pokémon Go gyms. During the pandemic, they changed to a system with “Adventure Crystals” that you can find or earn through challenges and activate to spawn an adventure at home. Different levels of crystals will spawn different sizes of adventures from simple up through “Epic.” Friends can scan a QR code on your phone to join you and you can play together in the same AR environment.

The main problems are:

  • You need enough space, especially for the bigger adventures.
  • You can’t choose the type of adventure, only the complexity. So you’re never sure if you’re going to get a puzzle, a battle, or just a lot of blocks to mine.
  • You can’t invite anyone to join you until the adventure starts, so if you have an epic adventure with 15 skeletons shooting at you and a half-dozen creepers ready to explode, you can’t take the time to get help.

Building

Build plates let you take a fragment (8×8, 16×16 or 32×32) of a Minecraft world, view it at tabletop scale in AR, and build what you want with it. You can use resources you’ve collected or crafted in other parts of the game. You can populate it with animals or monsters, or a “Mob of Me” that represents you. And you can play a life-size instance of it like an adventure, though again you need enough space for that.

Space is a problem here, too, and the process of actually building something complex in AR is awkward. Sometimes I think it would’ve been nice to be able to build in standard Minecraft UI, then play them in AR. And the real promise of this was being able to share your build plates with other players, which again was ruined by the pandemic.

I ended up mainly using build plates to farm. It’s cool that you can, though! Crops and trees grow, you can milk cows, shear sheep, etc. All on your dining table!

Collecting

That leaves the location part of the game: going out and collecting resources. That part is only really fun if you can get out and walk somewhere, which may or may not be possible depending on how locked-down your area is at any given time. But it’s less like catching Pokémon and more like spinning mobile Pokéstops. You’re just tapping on them as you get close to them, not jumping into a mini-game with actual strategy and skill to it. Once I’d collected enough resources to do all the building and crafting I wanted to, I stopped firing this mode up on walks because catching Pokémon was more interesting.

Challenges

They have at least tried to keep giving players new things to do by running biweekly challenge seasons. You collect or craft items, or solve adventure puzzles, or kill five zombies with a golden shovel (yeah, they get oddly specific after a while) in order to get a reward and unlock the next challenge. Even those get frustrating after a while, though. I keep getting stuck on defeating five skeletons (or whatever specific monster), and then for ten adventures in a row I’ll only find zombies, or spiders, or no mobs at all. Or chickens.

Sunset

At least Microsoft is handling it well. They announced it today, along with an update that includes all the remaining finished-but-unreleased content, discounts to in-game purchases, and nearly six months for us to play through the new features before shutting it down. (I’ve already found one of the new cow variants.) And aside from character items, which are already shared with Minecraft Bedrock Edition, they’re transferring currency over to Minecraft proper. So they’re giving the game a decent send-off and making an effort to keep players happy.