I moved to San Francisco for the Doom Loop

I moved to San Francisco in 1996. I quickly became part of a group of people led by my friend Desmond Crisis called the <a href="https://opg.org/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Otaku Patrol Group</a>. We were all radio enthusiasts and technology fetishists who also wore a lot of leather. Desmond had kind of spliced a lot of old police equipment into the dashboard of his black Pontiac Fiero and one day I was watching him tune a really old navigation system he’d salvaged. This was before GPS, and the nav system figured out how far you’d traveled by counting how many times a magnet glued to his drum brake went by a relay switch. As he played with it, the radio crackled to life and a police dispatcher called out a 10–55 in Laguna Honda Reservoir — a dead body. Desmond suggested we test the new nav system by driving to the artificial lake. That was my first experience with police scanners and it made an impression on me. Evidently, I made an impression on Desmond too because he still tells the story of how he felt like I was just not even noticing the stench as they pulled that poor person out of the water. <a href="https://darrenmckeeman.medium.com/i-moved-to-san-francisco-for-the-doom-loop-0107c511f5e5">Learn More</a>