u/Dependent_Run_6410

The Condor Club on Broadway and Columbus — yeah, the "world's first topless club" one — has a historical marker out front. It talks about Carol Doda, the monokini, 1964, all of it. It says nothing about the piano.

The club's centerpiece for two decades was a white grand piano on a hydraulic lift that lowered a dancer from the ceiling. Worked fine for 19 years. Then in November 1983, after closing, a bouncer and a dancer decided to use the (motionless) piano platform for something the management hadn't thought to specifically prohibit. Someone hit the switch. It takes about 90 seconds for that thing to go from floor to ceiling. That was not enough time.

A busboy found them the next morning. The club reopened. It's still open today — Legacy Business status and everything, still calling itself "San Francisco's Original Gentlemen's Club."

Wrote up the whole story here, would love your thoughts: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-piano

KPH out on Sir Francis Drake in Inverness is one of those Bay Area things you drive past without knowing what it is. It was "the Wireless Giant of the Pacific," the station ships called from across the North Pacific for most of the 20th century. Sent its last commercial message in 1999 and a group of volunteers has kept it alive since.

I'm on the crew of the SS Jeremiah O'Brien in San Francisco, where I built the website, ticketing and point-of-sale systems and maintain their IT network. That's how I came to this story: Denice Stoops, the first woman to work at KPH as a commercial Morse operator, also was a heavy hitter in the O'Brien's radio room. She died May 1. I wrote about her and the station both.

I'm also trying to bring the ship's Radio Department back to life, so if there are any hams around here who'd want in on that, reach out. And there's a live event Saturday if anyone wants to actually hear KPH on the air. I wrote this as kind of a memorial piece for Denice. I'm dropping it here because I think you folks might appreciate it.

https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-night-of-nights

I've been liveaboard in San Francisco Bay for fourteen years. Started on a 30-footer, stayed on the 30-footer, learned everything there is to know about making a 30-footer work as a full-time home. It works. It's fine. I've never regretted it.

This week I found a 1989 Ericson 34 at Pier 39. Named Corto Maltese. Professionally surveyed in October 2025, found in solid condition — hull good, engine runs, rigging serviceable, Hood sails from 2005/2006 still usable. The surveyor put fair market value at $38,000. The owner has been letting her sit. He wants her to go to someone who'll actually sail her. Price: $5,000.

I know some of you will understand what four more feet means on a liveaboard without me explaining it. For anyone who doesn't: it's a separate aft cabin. It's standing headroom in the galley. It's the difference between a boat you live on and a boat you live in.

First voyage is Ephemerisle in the Sacramento Delta, July 20-26. Happy to answer questions about the boat, the survey, or fourteen years of liveaboard in SF Bay.

(A few people asked if there was a way to help — there is: https://gofund.me/18747798b)

I live at Pier 39 and I used the ATM at the Longshoremen's Hall on Beach and Mason for years before I noticed the memorial outside.

On July 5, 1934 — Bloody Thursday — the SFPD opened fire on striking longshoremen on the Embarcadero. Two men died: Howard Sperry, a longshoreman and veteran who was shot in the back while helping a wounded man, and Nick Bordoise, an IWW cook who was there running the strikers' soup kitchen.

They were killed for a hiring hall. The port was controlled by a cartel of shipping companies that made workers show up every morning and wait to be picked for work or not — designed to keep men desperate and non-union. The ILA wanted their own hiring hall. The companies said no. The governor called it an insurrection and sent in the National Guard.

They badly miscalculated what comes after you shoot people.

On July 9, the bodies were loaded onto flatbed trucks and driven down Market Street. 40,000 people lined the route. The city was completely silent. No one threw anything. No one shouted. 40,000 people stood at the curb and watched in total quiet.

Eleven days later, San Francisco held the only general strike an American city has ever seen. Everything stopped. Restaurants, retail, streetcars, gas stations. For four days the city didn't move.

There was no Communist revolution. There was a labor negotiation. The arbitrator ruled for the union. They got their hiring hall.

The hall at Beach and Mason was built in 1959 by the union that won. In 1965 the Family Dog started throwing dances there. The Grateful Dead played the Trips Festival in that building in January 1966.

The longshoremen who died for a hiring hall got a building. The building started the San Francisco acid rock scene.

The ATM still doesn't charge a fee. I wrote more about it here: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/bloody-thursday

A few months ago I fell down a rabbit hole reading about the DIY mRNA cancer treatment story — someone using personalized mRNA therapeutics to treat their dog's cancer. I didn't know much about the space, just enough to get obsessed with how the underlying technology actually worked.

That led to a conversation with Elliot Roth at Biopunk Labs in SF, which led to me reading the paper that became the foundation for this project: base editing as a therapeutic approach for inherited cardiac arrhythmias. The core idea — that you can correct a single pathogenic point mutation in SCN5A, KCNQ1, or MYH7 without making a double-strand break — struck me as one of the most elegant things I'd read in a long time.

The problem I kept running into while trying to understand the design space: there's no open, reproducible pipeline that takes you from ClinVar cardiac variant → guide RNA design → BE-DICT efficiency prediction → wet lab handoff. The tools exist (BE-Hive, CRISPRscan, Cas-OFFinder), but wiring them together reproducibly requires Python expertise and a lot of manual steps that introduce inconsistency. Every lab is re-deriving the same process independently.

So I built one. With significant help from an LLM, which I'll be upfront about — I'm not a trained bioinformatician, I'm a software engineer who got too interested in a problem.

What it is:

• End-to-end pipeline: variant prioritization → guide design → efficiency prediction → structured output for wet lab validation
• Integrates with ClinVar and BE-DICT
• Structured JSON/PDF output that maps directly to standard assay protocols
• GPL v3 — no proprietary forks, derivatives stay open
• GitHub: https://github.com/tjcrowley/cardiac-base-editor

What it isn't:

• Peer-reviewed or validated at scale. Elliot is doing wet lab validation at Biopunk Labs and that work is ongoing.
• A replacement for domain expertise. The pipeline automates the mechanical parts of the design process, not the biological judgment calls.

I'm posting here because I genuinely don't know what I don't know. If you work in base editing or cardiac genetics and something in this approach looks wrong or naïve, I'd rather hear it now than after anyone relies on it. GitHub issues are open and I'm responsive.

If you want to support continued development, I have a campaign running on Artizen Fund: https://artizen.fund/index/p/open-mrna-design-pipeline--cardiac--cancer?season=6 — but that's secondary to getting the tool right.

A few things I'm specifically uncertain about:

• Whether BE-DICT is still the right efficiency prediction model or if there's something better maintained
• How to handle variants where the editing window doesn't cleanly overlap the pathogenic base
• Whether the wet lab handoff format I've designed maps to how labs actually work or if I've made incorrect assumptions

Happy to answer questions or just take a beating in the comments. Either is useful.

Kelly ran a saloon and boarding house on the Barbary Coast — the six-block stretch on Pacific between Sansome and Kearny that was basically San Francisco's id made physical.

Ship captains needed crews. Kelly had the supply chain. When he got a particularly large order for three ships at once, he chartered a paddle steamer, advertised a free birthday party with unlimited whiskey, and invited every drunk and vagrant he could find. 90 men boarded the boat. None of them knew where they were going; the whiskey was free, but the ship was not.

He offloaded them mid-bay to the waiting captains and sailed back to shore. The whole operation was catered.

The tunnels they used to move bodies from the saloons to the docks still exist under parts of the city. Some are tourist attractions now. San Francisco has always been very good at turning the infrastructure of exploitation into something you can pay $18 to walk through.

Wrote up the full story here if you want the details: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-man-who-shanghaied-ninety-people

Was writing about SF history and fell down a rabbit hole on this one. The first anti-vagrancy law here was called the "Greaser Act" (1855) — if you were unemployed, a sex worker, or drunk in public, you got 90 days in jail. The second part specifically named Mexicans and Native Americans as threats to be disarmed. They used it to clear a sandlot at Stockton and Green in what was probably the first declared riot in SF history. State militia, people died.

Then it gets stranger. Emperor Norton wasn't just a local eccentric — he was part of a whole ecosystem of street characters (Oofty Goofty, the Money King, George Washington the 2nd) who figured out that San Francisco tourists would pay to see them. The Emperor and his crew were basically the first iteration of SF's tourist economy. Norton only stayed off the streets because his friend Joseph Eastland (who later co-founded PG&E) quietly paid his bills.

In 1867, two years after the Civil War, SF enacted the first "Ugly Law" in the country — it was literally illegal to be visibly disfigured in public. The ugly laws hit homeless veterans hardest.

There's a direct line from the Greaser Act in 1855 to the debates we're having right now. I wrote up the full history here if anyone wants to go deep: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/san-franciscos-homeless-history

V.C. Andrews died in 1986.

Since then, more than 100 novels have been published under her name by ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman. Most readers either never noticed or didn't care. The books still had the gothic families, dark secrets, and familiar atmosphere people expected from a V.C. Andrews novel.

It got me thinking about something we're starting to see with AI.

When people ask whether AI can continue the work of a deceased author, musician, or artist, they're treating it as a brand-new question. But publishing has already been running a real-world experiment for nearly 40 years.

A dead author's name remained on the cover. Someone else learned the style, themes, and formula. New works were produced for an audience that wanted more of the same. The franchise continued.

The obvious difference is that Neiderman was a human ghostwriter and an AI model isn't. But from the perspective of readers, what exactly is the meaningful distinction?

If a future "new" novel by a deceased author is good enough that readers enjoy it and can't tell the difference, should we care how it was produced? Or is there something fundamentally different about a human ghostwriter carrying on a literary legacy versus a model trained on the author's corpus?

I wrote a longer piece about the V.C. Andrews case and why it feels relevant to the future of AI-generated creative work:

https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-ghost-in-the-machine-has-been

Curious where people here draw the line.

You can visit this ship still! https://ssjeremiahobrien.org

1996 San Francisco. A guy from the DefCon scene decided to make our lives hell — started with threatening my roommate (who was on c|net), escalated to threatening to burn down the entire house. We had his photo on the kitchen bulletin board.

Then my girlfriend came home from work clutching an envelope. She worked at a fetish store. He'd come in that day and forgotten every instinct he supposedly had, and she'd saved his credit card imprint. This was the era of carbon paper.

I found his website, found photos of his car and custom license plate, and remembered that the SF parking ticket payment line only needed a plate number.

He owed over $3,000 in unpaid tickets.

I paid them all. With his own card. Threw away the carbon.

He stopped threatening to burn the house down. For the next decade he'd throw drinks on me at clubs and try to stomp my feet at trade shows. I wear steel-toed boots.

Full story with more context here: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/fuck-that-crazy-hacker-dude

It's set in San Francisco. The office is called Spade & Archer. The disk is from 2008 or 2009, and nobody will tell Sam Spade what's actually on it.

I wanted to write something that took the Satoshi mystery seriously as mythology — the same way Chandler or Hammett treated the city. The MacGuffin felt obvious once I had it.

Free to read: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-satoshi-disk

I interviewed him in 2006. The short version: they used his stunt double wearing a prosthetic mask of his face in Part 2 without his permission. He turned down $4 million rather than sign off on it. He won, and the SAG rules that came out of his lawsuit now protect every actor in Hollywood.

The long version — including why the films he makes now genuinely cannot exist inside the studio system — is here: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/interview-with-crispin-glover

I had so many wonderful responses to my last post that I found the images we had of the Titanic shoot in our engine room to post. Here they are - some photos were taken to show how they'd placed a 1/3 life-size cutout of a man to make the engine look bigger. Titanic's engine was identical to ours, but it was over three times larger.

For more info on the SS Jeremiah O'Brien go to ssjeremiahobrien.org

From 1895 to the 1920s, a neighborhood called Carville existed in the Outer Sunset — two thousand people living in repurposed streetcars arranged into homes, courtyards, churches, and cafés in the dunes behind Ocean Beach. Jack London lived there before he was famous. A Metropolitan Opera touring company visited and called it the best stop on the West Coast tour.

An all-female cycling club ran their own autonomous social space out of a single horsecar. In the 1890s. A horsecar cost $10. A lot in the dunes cost $7.50 a month.

Then the neighborhood became desirable. The Oceanside Improvement Club printed pamphlets titled From Carville to Real Homes. Their president personally torched the Falcon Bicycle Club's building on July 4, 1913, added fireworks, and announced a new motto: "Make clean today by sweeping and burning up the debris of yesterday."

The last surviving Carville building is at 1740 Great Highway. No landmark sign. No museum. The original streetcar benches are still bolted to the walls inside.

Full piece: https://open.substack.com/pub/tjcrowley/p/carville-by-the-sea?r=1dwjj8&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web

We had what seemed like a genuinely good idea. The Backyard Brains RoboRoach kit lets you implant electrodes into a cockroach's antennae and steer it via Bluetooth from your phone. It's a real product. People buy it. We decided to scale it up.

The plan: acquire lobsters, implant electrodes in the antennae, build a control stack that would let an AI issue steering commands, and run experiments testing whether machine intuition outperformed human intuition when navigating a crustacean through an obstacle course. We were going to publish the results. We had a name for it. We had a logo.

What we actually built was a complete Bluetooth remote control system. Full software stack, tested and functional, capable of issuing precise directional commands to a lobster we had not yet modified. We were very proud of it.

The lobsters had a different timeline.

Keeping cold-water Atlantic lobsters alive in a saltwater tank in a San Francisco high-rise office building is, it turns out, a specific and completely unforgiving problem. It requires expertise in water chemistry, temperature regulation, filtration, and the general patience of someone who has kept saltwater tanks before and learned from expensive mistakes. We had none of these things. We had enthusiasm and a Bluetooth stack.

The lobsters deteriorated. The water quality followed the lobsters. The smell followed the water quality. The entire floor of the building found out about our project not through a presentation or a demo but through their noses, approximately two weeks before we'd planned to tell anyone.

The project was shut down. Not for ethical reasons. Not because of concerns about lobster welfare or the scientific validity of our methodology. Because the building tenants filed complaints about the smell.

We ended up with a working remote control for a device we never built, attached to an animal we never modified, in a tank we probably should never have set up. The lobster did not consent to any of this. To be fair, neither did the people on the fourth floor.

TL;DR: Built a fully functional Bluetooth control system to steer a remote-controlled lobster. Couldn't keep the lobsters alive. Entire office building found out via smell. Project cancelled. The software still works great.

Full piece: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/the-lobster-did-not-consent-because

The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is one of two operational WWII Liberty ships left from the 2,710 built between 1941 and 1945. Her triple-expansion reciprocating steam engine produces 2,500 horsepower at 76 RPM.

You don't just turn this thing on. Day one is lighting the boilers — slowly, to avoid thermal shock on 80-year-old metal. Day two is building pressure and draining condensate from steam lines. Water hammer (fast-moving steam hitting water pockets) can destroy pipes that haven't been manufactured in decades. Day three, if everything has gone right, you rock the engine by hand to clear the cylinders and listen for the sound of liquid water before you touch the throttle.

She's berthed at Pier 35 in San Francisco. Cameron filmed the reverse-engine scene from Titanic in her engine room.

Full piece: https://tjcrowley.substack.com/p/three-days-to-light-a-fire