Random Ideas

I remember a couple years ago reading an article about how people were using unused malls and warehouses and turning them into race courses for first-person drone racing.

That still seems like a pretty rad idea to me.

Yeah, a lot of business that require physical space, and wouldn’t normally be viable, are happening in low rent dead malls. In the latest video I posted above he shows how the best performing store in the mall is a nerd game/comic store. Also the mall has an RC car race track that seems to be doing as well as that sort of thing can do.

I just think about how I go around our country, and others, and I see so much abandoned stuff. Lived in Beacon where they used to have an incline railway with a hotel casino at the top. Rochester used to have a subway. NYC used to have a lot of things. Malls are soon going to be one of those things, if they aren’t already. Just ruins. The Parthenons or the pyramids of the US.

We clearly aren’t going to prevent it, and I don’t even think we should. I just think it would be fun to send them off with one last hurrah.

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Paintball would be awesome in a dead mall.

For drone racing though, malls seem perfect because they tend to have very tall ceiling which lets the course designers add in a lot of vertical elements as well as just horizontal ones.

15 characters of I have no idea.

There were big plans in the 00s and even the 10s to turn a lot of old malls into community centers.

They all failed due to costs and lack of interest from the local communities IIRC.

I know quite a few malls that had community rooms. Like, one hidden-ish room in the mall had tables and chairs. Maybe a lectern and a projection screen of some kind. They didn’t convert the whole mall, but they did dedicate some spare square footage for community uses.

I absolutely would love to get an old mall and convert it to a paintball/airsoft/lasertag arena. Host zombie survival games in October and do other events such as drone racing and so on.

Having a few areas set aside for tabletop gaming and pop up vendors seems like a decent idea as well.

They were never much of a thing here, sadly. Some did have small mother’s rooms and similar, but I don’t recall ever seeing a community room anywhere.

Hear me out here: Go-Kart Track.

So Go-Karts sounds good except that you’d definitely need them to be zero emissions karts, and with some kind of tires that won’t leave tons of burnt rubber in the air. Or you’d have to install some serious HVAC I imagine. Also like, all the other safety issues. But still that does sound hella fun.

That said around here we already have two huge indoor kart tracks within a 10 minute drive of my house, and I’m not sure the attendance is stellar for either.

https://superchargedracing.com/

That said in areas where they don’t already have two warring casinos vying for attention an unused mall might be a great location for it.

A few years ago Juliane and I went karting, as we love watching racing and wanted a go ourselves. Also as a birthday present.

Indoor karting meant the hall was full of fumes, we only lasted 10 laps each, and I left the place and vomited. We’d paid for 45 minutes and were gone after 20.

I’m never doing any karting again unless they are electric. And also not as fast.

Oh, I know. And Malls usually do have serious HVAC systems - consider, you are talking about a space that’s occupied by hundreds of people, often for 12-18 hours every day, and yet, you never smell a trace of funk or smell, and the air always seems relatively clean and fresh. And that’s aside from the fact there’s also often places cooking and serving food, too, which you often can’t smell until you’re right on top of it.

That said, I think Zero emissions karts would be good regardless. Consider - a small two-stroke engine, like most of the smaller karts have, in just 30 minutes of runtime, puts out more emissions than a F-150 does over 3600 miles, plus needs fueling, other fluids, cooling, etc. It’s more practical, in terms of what you’d have to establish within the place, to just go electric. Plus, more easily adjusted speed limiters, easier maintenance, which are a plus.

Another mall idea.

Oh wait, not just an idea.

Huh. Honestly a pretty smart use for it - it’s already appointed with a lot of stuff, has Hvac, bathrooms, lots of parking, and open, easily modified floor plan. Smart work on their part.

What if we made a search engine along the lines of Google, with a lot of the modern conveniences.

However, this would not be an attempt to compete with Google and index the entire web. We would instead only index web sites that were “old school”. So that when you used the search engine you are still seeing current, live, maintained web page from 2020, but it feels like you’re using the web of '99.

e.g: A site like https://www.openssh.com/ would get indexed. A modern site that’s a single page app full of JS and ads would not be indexed.

Does this already exist?

Have you tried turning javascript and css off?

A lot of sites become unusable if you do that. Even if they work, they don’t look right.

What I’m suggesting is not just about the technology of the web. It’s about intentionally semi-forking the web. You search for something and you won’t find some garbage clickbait site. You’ll find an HTML document made by some nerd.

Just having a crawler that doesn’t execute js would probably get you most of the way there.

Now you only have to build the rest of the search engine.

No, it’s not that you don’t want to execute JS, that doesn’t matter. Nor do we want to necessarily exclude sites from the index simply for using JS. What if a site has a cute little game that draws to a canvas?

It’s that we want to only include the types of handcrafted individual sites to get us that Hypnospace Outlaw kind of feeling, only for real.

Sure, you’re not indexing the cute game though, are you?

I just meant you would lose all the garbo React atrocities.

Million Short is kinda sorta what you’re talking.

Oooh, million short is pretty clever. That’s almost thing of the day worthy.

I think we definitely want to remove the react monstrosities.

Maybe an easier way to go about it is to simply index the whole web except:

  1. No react monstrosities. Pages must have their actual content in the initially loaded HTML with changing URLs as you navigate.
  2. No ads. A site with even 1 ad is not indexed.
  3. No tracking. If there’s even one tracking pixel, not in the index.
  4. See what’s left?
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