Where can a middle aged guy get plain sneakers these days?
Nowhere, that's where.
Remember Payless ShoeSource? The last one I ever visited was in 2019. This was right before they closed up shop.
When I say "closed up shop", that doesn't mean out-of-business. Payless ShoeSource still exists as an online retailer, although they just go by Payless now.
I am a Gen-X, born in the 1970s. The sneakers we wore back in the day were plain, but good. They all looked decent, didn't have any wild styles and were made for sport. As a daily wearer shoe, these were great.
One of the few plain sneakers left that's still like this is the New Balance 608; this is what I wear currently.
The 608 is one of the very few sneakers you can get in plain white or plain black. In fact, New Balance even offers this model in 100% white or 100% black. It's also one of the few sneakers you can get in a proper plain style that is wide, and I have wide feet. Not clown-shoes big, but wide.
I used to go to Payless ShoeSource to get plain sneakers, but after their stores shuttered, finding something plain in my size required me to buy it online.
Oh, I've tried other stores. Cheap places, upscale and even a few high-end ones. All they had were just a scant few plain sneaker offerings, and when they did have them, they were never in my size.
Should I just go sandal?
I'm considering it.
A sandal type I like is the fisherman sandal with a closed toe. Most of these are brown and look traditional with very little goofy style stuff going on.
With sandals I actually have more choice than I do with sneakers, so that might be the way to go.
An HSS guitar I can actually recommend
This is something I never thought would happen.
Take an EART CP.1. This is one of the few lower priced guitars you can get which is in no-mods-required territory.
Let's get the specs out of the way first: Mahogany body, rosewood fingerboard, compound 9.5" to 14" fretboard radius, Canadian maple neck, 22 frets, "cheese wheel" truss rod adjustment location at the butt of the neck (very convenient), hex screws holding in the bridge instead of the stupid flathead style, full block saddles, deep cutaway cut on the rear for easy high fret access, sculpted heel also for very easy high fret access...
...yeah, this thing is loaded.
On its own, the guitar needs nothing. However, for those that absolutely want the best of the best for as cheap as possible, two things of note:
It appears that dropping in a set of locking tuners would be stupidly easy to do, and it doesn't look like any new holes would need to be drilled to do so.
As for the electronics, they might in fact be good enough on their own because the electronics do feature a 223J capacitor, which are known to be very reliable. People who build up their Ibanez guitars sometimes use these, so yes, it's a good cap. How do the pickups sound? I have no idea, but if dropping in a replacement set was needed, it would be a fairly easy process.
Yes, I can actually recommend this HSS guitar. The good stuff is there and the price is certainly right for what you get.
The 1,000 year disc, M-DISC
This disc will supposedly last 1,000 years.
For a long time I've been saying that optical media is awful. This one isn't.
Years ago before anybody was even thinking of archiving anything, I was backing things up. Emails, photos, videos, account info and such. The current way I do it is with 7-Zip archives supplemented by PAR recovery files just in case the archive gets corrupted. The reason I do this is because I've lost data before, and it hurts every time it happens, because I've lost stuff that I'll never get back. And once you lose data enough times, you learn to back up routinely, which I do.
M-DISC a.k.a. Millennial Disc is optical media that can basically withstand any punishment you can throw at it. Heat, moisture, dirt, whatever. This is the disc that will outlive anybody.
I only see one problem with this disc. It has nothing to do with the media itself but rather concerning this simple question: Will there be any hardware that can play an M-DISC in 100 years, never mind 1,000?
Before answering that question, the 50-year question has already been answered with a yes. There is 50-year-old data that has been recovered from the technology of the time back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And for slightly younger data, there have been tech hobbyists who have recovered data from 40-year-old media.
Tech hobbyists are a crazy bunch, because as of recent (as in the last 5 years or so) there have been more than a few who have recreated ancient antiquated hardware interfaces from scratch using 3-D printers just to get at that old data.
And that brings me to the hardware question. Yeah, you can get 1,000-year discs, but will there will be any new optical players at all even just 10 years from now? That's an unknown.
Sure, there will be giant piles of used optical players that can play the discs, but new ones? I doubt it.
Then again, given the fact insane tech hobbyists (repeat: hobbyists) have been able to save data over 40 years old, somebody will be able to read M-DISCs made today in another 40 years.
Verbatim is confident enough in the M-DISC they make that they offer a 10-year limited warranty on it even though the disc will survive far beyond that. When you see the price of these things, you'll get sticker shock for sure, but there is arguably nothing available that's tougher that will last longer than M-DISC.
The watch you buy when your smartwatch breaks
Anybody who wears a smartwatch eventually ends up wearing something like this instead.
On more than one occasion, I've seen people talking about watches like the Casio W218 where something is said along the lines of, "Yeah, well, I have a smartwatch and bought one of these cheap Casios as a backup. I liked it so much that I now wear it all the time."
I think what actually happened is a little different.
When somebody buys a smartwatch, they quickly grow to like having something on the wrist that tells the time and date at a glance. Very useful.
The decision is made at that point to buy a plain digital watch as a backup timepiece. It needs to be something square or rectangle because that's what the smartwatch shape is. They find the Casio W218. It's reasonably sized, lightweight, fits the wrist great and does the job just fine.
After that, the discovery is made that the smartwatch was never needed in the first place. What was needed was just a timepiece, and for anything else that requires mobile computing power, that's what the phone is for. This is when decision is made to just wear the Casio all the time.
Get a Casio wet and it will still work. It doesn't need charging and has a battery that lasts 5 to 7 years. Ding it up, scratch it up, whatever, it can handle it.
A plain digital Casio watch is just better at handling life, and that's why people buy these things.
This is the cheapest way to get guitar picks
I did the math, and now you'll know how cheap you can go.
For example, 300 assorted picks sells for under 15 bucks at the time of this writing.
The math says that 300 picks (with free shipping) at $14.95 means each pick is just under 5 cents per pick.
Is that the absolute cheapest? No, but darned close. It is possible to bulk order picks from China that go as low as 4 cents per pick (and you have to buy at least 600 to get a price that low), and that is the absolute rock bottom price. I could not find anything lower than that.
Who needs 300 picks?
Music teachers do. If teaching a class of students to play guitar, having many picks is necessary because kids lose them all the time.
If you want picks just for yourself, you obviously don't need 300 of them...
...but you may like the idea of a pick punch kit. A kit like that allows you to create your own custom picks. You can even buy the celluloid strips too to make things even easier.
I might get a pick punch for myself at some point. What was holding me back was that the celluloid material wasn't generally available, but now it is, so I might pick one up.