X Phoenix, the 330 unit apartment community at 200 W. Monroe Street in Downtown Phoenix, is headed toward a trustee sale after its developer failed to repay a $128 million loan tied to the property.
According to Maricopa County documents, lender Mack Real Estate Group has scheduled the first phase of X Phoenix to be sold at auction on December 10 at Maricopa County Superior Court.
The property originally opened as a roughly $100 million development and marked Chicago based The X Company’s entry into the Phoenix market.
Ben and I were discussing this only a couple days ago; about how it seemed all progress had ground to a halt. To be honest, the entire concept and design of X Phoenix was odd from the beginning. Based on its description it sounded more like a high-tech dormitory for young adults (private bedrooms and baths, but shared living and kitchen facilities) than a traditional apartment building. Nevertheless it seemed to fill up quickly. Maybe I’m just old, but…no thanks!
The first phase of this building went up pretty quickly. It was directly north of City Hall so I saw it every day.
They started construction on Phase 2 in late 2023 or early 2024, and it seemed it was taking forever. When I retired from the City in January 2025, it still wasn’t finished, although it looked close enough that would probably be done by the end of the year.
Well, imagine my surprise when I was downtown a couple weeks ago and saw that it still wasn’t completed, and in fact, looked like precious little had been done since I last saw it 20 months ago. At least now I know why.
The other day I was dusting in the Living Room and after I moved my big Yamaha (as in main component) CD player to get underneath it I went to put on some music and the drawer wouldn’t open. I know it wasn’t the belt because I had successfully changed that with the proper size and thickness a couple weeks ago and it had been working without any problem ever since. No, this was something new. I was able to pry the drawer open with my fingernail and it worked just fine afterward, but the next time I moved it the problem returned.
I finally got tired of dealing with it, so I popped the cover yesterday to see if I could determine what was happening. I had the cover off 30 seconds and I immediately identified the problem.
There’s a wide copper grounding strap that makes contact with the metal tray when it slides into place. The raised nubbin that makes the actual contact with the strap was getting snagged on the strap when the tray attempted to slide out.
When I changed the belt, I pressed down on the copper strap a little too forcefully, and since tolerances are everything in this equipment, it made contact just fine, but was too tight to let the drawer slide back out. I gently bent the piece back upward a hair’s breadth, and everything worked normally again; something I need to keep in mind in case I ever have to swap the drawer belt on this unit again.
I don’t know why this just started acting up, or why it worked fine and then stopped once the unit had been moved (probably because I haven’t used it but a couple times since I changed the belt, preferring instead to concentrate on my portable players) but it’s fixed now, and that’s good enough for me.
When I was doing some research the other day, I learned that the DAC (Digital To Analog Converter) in this player was actually made by Panasonic. Panasonic, not Yamaha itself or even Sony. Panasonic.
Why is this significant? This deck dates from the period that Technics/Panasonic were pushing their own “MASH” (“Multistage Noise Shaping,” a 1-bit digital-to-analog conversion technology developed by Technics/Panasonic to improve sound quality and reduce distortion in CD playback) chips—yet there is no “MASH” branding anywhere on this player.
I finished up my last 7-week titrated dose of Prednisone this past Sunday. By Monday morning I was already sprouting new blisters on my thighs and upper arms. And by sprouting I don’t mean the usual one or two blisters that appeared overnight when I was on the Prednisone. I mean there were a dozen, and I swore as the morning drew on I could almost see them form in real time.
Fortunately I had a previously scheduled appointment with my dermatologist that day. She agreed that I obviously needed to stay on the medication while we wait for the Duplixent to take full effect (estimates range anywhere from five to eight months for the complete treatment of pemphigoid). So I’m back on another titrated regiment; this time only 3 weeks, to be reassessed when I see her at the end of the month. She also added 30 days of doxicycline and a B-vitamin suppliment to the mix.
And as far as the extremely stubborn areas on my neck, I mentioned to my physical therapist a couple weeks ago that no matter what I did they weren’t healing; they’d scab over, but would slough off at the slightest provocation in the shower the next day. She suggested putting xeroform under whatever bandages I was using. That made sense; the area on my wrist that they pulled for the to patch my tongue where the tumor was removed was covered with xeroform for weeks before it had healed enough to be exposed to the air.
So for the last two weeks I’ve been using the xeroform on my neck, wrapped in a gauze bandage and I’m seeing a definite improvement.
I hated going out wrapped in gauze like that because I was so concerned about what people would think, but then I said “Fuck it. I need to heal and what people may infer from my gauze (and the leprosy-like sores on my arms) isn’t important.”
Some days I feel like I’m a walking advertisement for the pharmaceutical industry, but you know what? Two days on the new regimen and the blisters stopped forming within 24 hours and we’re back on the healing path.
“President Trump alleged Tuesday that the July 13, 2024, attempt on his life in Butler, Pa. was part of a ‘Democratic plot’ against him.”
“Everybody knows the Crooked Joe Biden FBI didn’t do what they should have with respect to the Lunatic who shot me in Butler, PA.”
“By the time I got into Office, on January 20th, most of the information was missing, altered, corrupted, or gone. New info was just found! Why wasn’t it seen long ago? This was all a Democrat Plot, to get me out of the Election, that failed.’”
Show us the evidence, Biff.
I still don’t believe this attempt was a conspiracy (they are too incompetent to pull it off). It’s not that they have a moral core, just that they are buffoons who couldn’t arrange a one-car funeral procession in a town with one street.
The funny thing is about these Torturing Myself posts is that I soon realized that at some point in my life I had tasted nearly all of the things I posted. For the ones I hadn’t (very few, actually) I could easily imagine how they tasted based on the ingredients and similarities to other dishes I have eaten.
I don’t understand the bathroom arrangement on the second floor. Two of the bedrooms have their own, but also they’re also shared. And this his and hers bathrooms in the master suite?
At least there’s a guest bath on the first floor—even if it belongs to the Guest Bedroom…
The new iPhone is exactly what nobody needs or asked for right now.
I think I’m done with the future… And I know that is a slightly inconvenient position to take when everyone around me is very excited about the newest, smartest, fastest, most technologically advanced thing humanity has managed to produce this week. But honestly? I am fucking exhausted.
We don’t necessarily want a better smartphone We want less smartphone.
I am exhausted by my phone.
I am exhausted by notifications. I am exhausted by Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, emails, news alerts, screen time reports telling me I spent six hours looking at my phone and then apparently expecting me to congratulate myself for reducing it by twelve minutes. I am exhausted by opening my phone to check one thing and resurfacing forty-five minutes later having watched a stranger clean their fridge…
And after years of being told that technology was going to make our lives easier, more efficient, more connected, I think a growing number of us are quietly asking a very different question: Can you please just leave us the fuck alone? And then Apple announces the new iPhone Duo, its first foldable IPhone, with a 7.6-inch internal display designed to give us more room to multitask, work, watch, create and generally do more things on one device.
The culture is moving backwareds whle the technology companies keep sprinting forwards.
And I understand why it’s impressive. It is impressive, and I want it. Why wouldn’t I, right? A giant screen in my pocket. Two apps side by side. More room to work. More room to watch. More room to… presumably never look away from my phone ever again. But do we, ACTUALLY, really, REEEALLY, want this? Because culturally, I don’t think we do.
The strange thing is that the culture is moving backwards while the technology companies keep sprinting forwards. And I’m starting to wonder whether they have completely misunderstood what we’re asking for. We don’t necessarily want a better smartphone. We want less smartphone. There is a huuuge difference.
I’m not asking for less technology because I hate technology. I’m asking for less because I like my life.
Somehow along the way, our phones stopped being tools and became environments. They became our alarm clocks, calendars, cameras, banks, offices, televisions, dating lives, shopping centres, newspapers, social lives and tiny little portals into everyone else’s existence. They are in our bedrooms when we wake up. They’re in our hands while we eat. They’re beside us while we work. They’re with us when we walk. They’re in our pockets at dinner. They’re charging next to our beds.
Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple.
And apparently the solution to this deeply “healthy arrangement’ is to make the screen bigger. I’m sorry, but… What the fuck are we doing? I’m not asking for less technology because I hate technology. I’m asking for less because I like my life. I want to walk somewhere without documenting it. I want to have dinner without half my brain wondering what notifications I’ve missed.
I don’t want technology to remember my life for me. I want to remember my own life.
I want to have a conversation without a device sitting between us, quietly recording, tracking, pinging and predicting. I want to be bored, actually bored. The kind of bored where your brain has to entertain itself. And this is where I think the tech industry has completely missed the cultural mood.
I don’t want a smarter life. I want a life where I can occasionally be stupidly, gloriously offline.
They keep asking: What else can we add? What else can AI do? What else can our watches hear? What else can our phones remember? What else can we automate? What else can we optimise? What else can we put on a screen? How about instead we ask: What can we take away?
So no, Apple. I don’t want your biggest screen. I don’t want another device that remembers more, hears more, tracks more, predicts more, or gives me another reason to stare at a screen.
I, actually, really, really, want less… Less fucking everything. And if that sounds anti-tech, maybe that’s the point. What if the most revolutionary thing Apple could build right now is a reason to put the fucking thing down.
[source]
I didn’t write this, but it definitely resonated with me. Odd, considering tech has been my entire adult life…
Apologies for the sheer number of these tonight. And I know a some of them are a little stale at this point, but to paraphrase the famous quote from Ferris Bueller, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while,post promptly when you find something you could miss it.” In bloging—especially blogs with a political slant—this is SO true!
Yanni before he became YANNI and the caricature of all that was horrible about 80s New Age music. The second—and my first—of his albums holds a special place in my heart because it—along with Patrick O’Hearn’s Ancient Dreams were a gift from my ex the first Christmas we were in San Francisco. I hadn’t heard of either artist, but immediately fell in love with both.
I bought only two more of Yanni’s albums—Out of Silence and Chameleon Days—before he hooked up with Linda Evans and his music went to hell..
Apple released MacOS 27, aka Golden Gate, yesterday. I’ve been using it since one of the early betas, and I have to say it’s been a very pleasant experience.
Unlike Tahoe—which definitely wasn’t ready for prime time even on its general release date—Golden Gate has been surprisingly stable through all its beta iterations. To be honest there have been a few small glitches, but I can’t say for sure if it was the OS, the application, or just plain old user error that caused any of them because I could never reproduce them.
If you’re on Tahoe, definitely upgrade. If you’re still on Sequoia and you’re happy with it, stick with it. There are still many (mostly graphical) things I prefer about Sequoia, but the glaring inconsistencies and annoyances in the newer interface introduced in Tahoe have been addressed in Golden Gate. All the window corner radii match. Mostly. The “liquid glass” effect can be easily adjusted to your liking without having to resort to hitting the Accessibility panel to turn off window transparency completely. In general it feels snappier and more polished. A lot of the reviews I’ve read are saying it’s the Snow Leopard of the current generation of MacOS. If you catch that reference, congratulations—you’ve been at this as long (or longer) than I have.
As with any upgrade, make sure you have a full Time Machine (or whatever app* you use for backups—you do back up don’t you?) prior to upgrading in the unlikely event anything goes south.
Let me know what you think and how your upgrade goes.
*personally I use Carbon Copy Cloner, an app I’ve been trusting my data to for years.
You’ve caved to your billionaire buddy Robert Kraft, you’ve deferred to the pearl-clutching Pink, you’ve fallen in line behind your promoters, and you’ve kowtowed to a handful of football stadium owners and allowed rapper Macklemore to be bootedfrom your tour for saying the words “Free Palestine.”
I can imagine how traumatic that must have been for your audience, the emotional scars they must be carrying right now from being asked to see the Palestinian people as deserving of dignity and self-determination…. the horror.
My newsfeed is absolutely littered with news stories, think pieces, and video critiques lambasting you for what people are saying is your cowardice, your selfishness, your obvious racism, your thinly veiled Zionism.
And with the fierce media firestorm raging all around you right now, I wonder if anyone’s considered your feelings, what it’s like to walk a mile in your custom Air Jordans.
I mean, this couldn’t have been an easy decision for you. In this economy, a guy with a net worth of 400 million has to stay on the road to keep the lights on, right? We can’t have you missing any meals out here, can we?
Oh, sure, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been brutally murdered, once vibrant cities leveled to dust, and an ancient culture violently erased. Yes, generations of human beings have been assassinated, starved, tortured, and burned alive. And yeah, children are being raped and shot and ripped from their mutilated parents in these very moments, but the show must go on, right? Can’t let a little genocide stop the party.
So what if a few thousand miles away an entire country is being wiped off the map with the taxes of your fanbase, you got a gig to do, merch to move, a few more homes to add to the mere three dozen or so you’re being forced to make do with.
You’ve dismissed Macklemore for having the audacity to choose integrity over the paycheck, for giving a damn about thousands of brown-skinned people who can’t buy concert tickets or boost your streaming numbers, and you’re going to bravely carry on with business as usual, playing the part of the happy, humble white savior of soccer moms and suburban preteens everywhere.
You’ll continue packing out stadiums, basking in the breathless adoration of a mix of the uninformed, the lazy, and the heartless; people who either don’t know what’s going on in Palestine or who simply don’t care enough to be inconvenienced enough to opt out (though you could inform and inspire them).
And you’ll get up there awash in spotlights and the intoxicating roar of an army of the most privileged people on the planet. You’ll wear that grinning everyman facade you’ve perfected. You’ll joyfully churn out your loops and whirl around in the middle of a massive sea of humanity (the largely white kind, the kind whose worth and safety might actually matter enough to you for you to get “political,” as you did with Ukraine, btw).
I’m sure it’ll be a blast… but not the kid-killing IDF kind.
But I wonder if the crowds at the shows will sing loud enough to cover the screams erupting from the rubble of Palestine. I wonder if the stratospheric tour revenue will be worth the suffering you’ve ignored to get it.
Maybe I’m being too hard on you. Maybe you’re really struggling with this. Maybe you’re going to have a change of heart and show some courage and something resembling a spine, and allow your humanity to take the lead. Maybe I’ll end up apologizing to you for underestimating you. I would welcome that, because it would mean you decided to leverage your privilege to save the lives of people who are being treated like animals.
But right now, Ed, for a guy who’s made a fortune with words, it’s your silence is most telling. You are choosing to say nothing, and there is a cost to that, too. Unfortunately, you won’t be the one paying the highest price.
Maybe you are exactly what they say you are. Maybe you’re a coward, or worse. Maybe the people of Palestine aren’t worth the show guarantees you’d have to part with to stand up to the bullies and the Zionists. Maybe it isn’t that you’re not willing to take sides (because you have been), but that the Palestinian people don’t fall within the borders of your empathy or the comfort of your courage.
I suppose no matter how successful and powerful someone gets, every person has their price, and yours was a 10-city tour.
The Palestinian people deserve our discomfort, Ed. They deserve to be on our breath because the voices of white people can carry their cries to people in the world who need to hear them, despite how uneasy it makes them.
It’s just really sad that with the size of the stage and the reach of the microphone you’ve been handed, and with the voice you’ve been given that could resonate so loudly on behalf of imperiled human beings, you have such moral laryngitis now.
Enjoy the rest of the tour, Ed… knock ‘em dead out there.
