The “Troma Team Release” title card gives me a shudder. I had a college roommate who was really into Troma and Troma-adjacent horror. I’m not sure what all we watched, but it was enough to know even then the crucial difference between things that Troma made themselves and things that Troma distributed. I respect Lloyd Kaufman’s accomplishments as an independent producer but broad grossout splatter isn’t my bag.

Tonight, Amazon Prime suggested Blood Hook, which we hadn’t heard of before. It’s a slasher set around a lakeside community in Wisconsin’s north woods. It was directed by Jim Mallon, now best known for helping start Mystery Science Theater 3000. The production companies, Spider Lake Films and Golden Chargers, are both one-shots; the former is named for a community in Wisconsin near Hayward, Wisconsin, where the film was shot. Troma distributed the film. Vinegar Syndrome did a Blu-ray of the 111-minute cut in 2018, and I’m pretty sure that’s what we watched on Amazon.

This type of production hits a sweet spot for me. It’s low budget, but not bottom of the barrel. They shot on location, and by the look of it relied mostly on local talent. Most of the actors have no other film credits. I’m from Michigan, not northern Wisconsin, but the accents sound authentic to me. Arthur Marks did this with some of his films, like Detroit 9000 and Tbe Monkey Hustle. I enjoy watching a movie where I feel like a group of people got together for a month and created something. There’s Nothing Out There, another Troma distribution, is in the same space.

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I’ve ridden 117,534 miles on Amtrak, or almost five times around the globe. 111,519 of those miles are since January 4, 2009, when I took the Empire Builder from Chicago to Portland for a Moodle Hack/Doc Fest at Reed College. We encountered snow and ice and bad-ordered equipment. I took one of my favorite photographs of all time. We hit Spokane at least twelve hours late and had to be bussed to our final destinations. I had a blast and the rest is history.

This account is based on my contemporaneous notes in 2009; all the pictures were also taken in 2009 with my Canon PowerShot. See the 2009 Reed gallery for all of them.

Beginnings

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I use thumbsup to manage my gallery site. Since the site is entirely static, I use exiftool to store the description and tags as metadata in the images themselves. To simplify managing the metadata I wrote a small Symfony application that writes and updates the metadata from CSV files.

The workflow is straightforward enough, but the code deployment on my laptop looked like a messy bedroom. The Symfony application lived in one directory. My fork of thumbsup, supporting custom album covers, was hanging out within .nvm, tied to given versions of NodeJS. My customization of the cards theme lived in a separate directory, passed by argument to the Symfony application. This was messy and unsustainable.

I’ve used Nix for several other projects, and this felt like a good use case for getting everything in once place. In this case, I would centralize in the Symfony directory. First step: adding all the relevant packages:

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I’m back in Mt. Pleasant for Thanksgiving and after watching the Lions dispatch the Bears (not handily, but never mind that) I went out for a short bike ride through Mill Pond Park. The main bike trail comes out at Broadway opposite the old Ann Arbor Railroad station, now the Mountain Town Station brewery and restaurant. I’ve photographed it many times over the years, but tonight the fading light felt really special.

I grew up in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, a county seat and college town of about 20,000 people that hasn’t seen a passenger train in over 70 years (and counting). We had two railroads: the Ann Arbor Railroad main line, running northwest from Toledo, Ohio, up to Frankfort, Michigan, and a branch line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (originally Pere Marquette), running northeast from Mt. Pleasant up to Coleman.

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This past week Amtrak suspended travel between Albany and New York because of a deteriorating parking garage in Hell’s Kitchen. Service has resumed, but it’s a reminder of how fragile infrastructure can be in the United States. This is also the second time in about a year that a privately-owned building threatened the Empire Corridor, and the last time it happened it nearly wrecked my vacation plans.

Back in August 2022, I needed a break, and I drew up a plan to visit my sister up in northern New York and a friend in Boston. I’d take the first Burlington-bound Ethan Allen Express up to Middlebury, where my sister could pick me. After a few days, take the Essex-Charlotte ferry over to Vermont, and take the Ethan Allen Express back down to New York City. A day or two in Brooklyn, then an Acela round-trip to Boston.

The first portent of doom was waking up to see a missed call from Amtrak. Amtrak doesn’t call me unless there’s a problem with my train:

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Mark Hoolihan passed away on August 24, 2019, at the age of 49. I didn’t know him well. He was an adjunct at Kalamazoo College my senior year. I took one class, an evening seminar in Jewish History.

Winter terms at Kalamazoo were rough. I imagine they still are. The college was on quarters (trimesters); the winter term started the first week of January and ran ten weeks, plus exam week. Spring break came after, followed by the spring term. January and February in Michigan are cold and dark. I can remember a February where it snowed two days out of three and the sun never broke through the overcast.

The winter of 2005 I had to overload and take four classes instead of the usual three. I had a political science course (“Modern liberalism and its critics”), Advanced German, French Revolution, and the Jewish History seminar with Hoolihan, which met in the evenings.

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Following up on Nix flake with Node and PHP, I needed to enable an extension (in this case, MongoDB). The end result is simple enough, but getting there was a little tricky.

• A complete flake
  • Inputs
  • Outputs
  • Let…in
  • System
  • PHP
  • Shell

A complete flake

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I’ve written before about the various challenges I have reaching Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, from the East Coast. I never wrote it up, but back in January 2022 I went the long way round, taking Amtrak to Kalamazoo via Chicago, then Indian Trails buses to Grand Rapids, Lansing, and finally Mt. Pleasant. It worked, but looping through Chicago effectively adds a day to the itinerary.

Since then, Indian Trails has stopped interlining with Greyhound and started interlining with the Trailways system. Greyhound is in a real race-to-the-bottom ever since Flix bought it, but that’s another matter. I figured I’d give the Toledo connections another look. I’ve resisted mating up Amtrak’s Thruway Motorcoach with the Lansing-Mt. Pleasant bus because it meant a 4-5 hour layover in Lansing.

Good and bad news here. The good news is that there is Barons Bus/Indian Trails itinerary between Toledo and Mt. Pleasant. Eight hours and two transfers (Detroit and Lansing). The departure time from Toledo is 9:50 AM, which is a healthy buffer for a delayed Amtrak train. The bad/weird news is a bizarre pricing overage from the Trailways ticketing platform.

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We had interesting problem where the front page of a site in our multisite couldn’t load in the editing interface. The root cause was that the page had too many revisions and PHP ran out of memory. The presentation was a little unusual–no rich text editors displayed on the page. We used trepmal’s wp revisions WP-CLI plugin to resolve the immediate issue.

The problem

Our main multisite is built on Advanced Custom Fields with the Classic Editor. The individual site in question dates to 2016, and had over 400 revisions when we started having problems with it. We attach the rich text editor to the content areas toward the end of the rendering process. The reported issue (that we verified) is that the rich-text editors weren’t rendering on the visual pane and that the text pane wasn’t loading at all. The text was still in the textarea and selectable, although not visible (white on white).

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It’s the second weekend in November which means it was time for the Allentown Train Meet. These train shows are a mecca for train enthusiasts of all stripes. The lion’s share of the vendors are selling model railroading supplies, but there are plenty of dealers selling books, videos, or memorabilia. As always, there were several live model railroad setups going. I didn’t see an N scale one this year, which was a little disappointing. I didn’t buy any china this year, but I did find a good mix of stuff for my layout, books, and videos.

Media

The Lehigh Valley NRHS chapter had a table and I picked up two short histories, History of the Lehigh Valley Transit Company and Short Trolley Routes in the Lehigh Valley. They threw in a back number “Lehigh Lines”, their newsletter, for free. I’m not a member of the chapter though I probably should be. I have another book in this series, the history of the Lehigh & New England Railroad edited by Randolph Kulp, and I was impressed with the quality. It can be hard to find good information about the interurban era in the United States.

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