Tag: Recent History

Snippet from Covid Days – In pandemic America’s tent cities, a grim future grows darker

To deal with an exploding homeless population and encourage social distancing during the pandemic, Marcipoa County officials turned this pair of asphalt-topped parking lots into the area’s newest homeless shelter. The county has more than 7,500 people on the streets, and nearly 5,000 dead from COVID-19.

Inside the crowded encampment, ringed by security fencing and barbed wire, each family has been allotted a 12-by-12-foot lot, marked by paint, to separate people as much as possible.

Phoenix is just one example of a slow-motion disaster unfolding in many large U.S. cities as homeless numbers, already growing in recent years, spike during the global pandemic.

The virus presents a compounding threat. Not only are these populations some of the most vulnerable to the coronavirus, but by destroying millions of jobs, the pandemic threatens a wave of evictions that experts warn could lead to a catastrophic housing displacement and even more people living on the streets.

In pandemic America’s tent cities, a grim future grows darker
Michelle Conlin, Reuters
December 23, 2020

The Slacker – Background and Philosophy of

The term achieved renewed popularity following its use in the 1985 film Back to the Future in which James Tolkan‘s character Mr. Strickland chronically refers to Marty McFly, his father George McFly, Biff Tannen, and a group of teenage delinquents as “slackers”.[11] It gained subsequent exposure from the 1989 Superchunk single “Slack Motherfucker”, and the 1990 film Slacker.[12] The television series Rox has been noted for its “depiction of the slacker lifestyle … of the early ’90s”.[13][14][15]

Slacker became widely used in the 1990s to refer to a type of apathetic youth who were cynical and uninterested in political or social causes and as a stereotype for members of Generation X.[16] Richard Linklater, director of the aforementioned 1990 film, commented on the term’s meaning in a 1995 interview, stating that “I think the cheapest definition [of a slacker] would be someone who’s just lazy, hangin’ out, doing nothing. I’d like to change that to somebody who’s not doing what’s expected of them. Somebody who’s trying to live an interesting life, doing what they want to do, and if that takes time to find, so be it.”[17]

The term has connotations of “apathy and aimlessness”.[18] It is also used to refer to an educated person who avoids work, possibly as an anti-materialist stance, who may be viewed as an underachiever.[12]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker

V: What are your parent’s occupations?
DP: My mom’s a teacher and my dad was a white collar clerk working in the customs field. We were pretty poor, and throughout childhood we watched our dad lament about coming to America filled with visions of wealth, and how everybody was becoming rich except him. He struggled and worked well beyond the age of retirement and still never really got ahead. I don’t know how young  I was – maybe around ten – when I realized that you can work all your life and still end up poor. I’d rather not go chasing those rainbows and just be happy with what I have.

Zines, Volume 2 – RE/Search
More self-expression obsession coming at you: in-depth interviews with 12 more unusual publishers. From a 15-year-old suburbanite former punk, to a filmmaker and “tracker” (8-track collector/expert); a French self-publisher of art books (in the original meaning of the word), to the dishwasher whose goal it is to wash dishes in every state of the U.S.A. Also, a history of proletarian novels, zine reviews and much, much more. Read all about it in Zines! Vol. 2!

Excerpt from the interview with Dishwasher Pete

Pioneering Computers, List of

Altair 8800. The pioneering microcomputer that galvanized hardware hackers. Building this kit made you learn hacking. Then you tried to figure out what to do with it.

Apple II. Steve Wozniak’s friendly, flaky, good-looking computer, wildly successful and the spark and soul of a thriving industry.

Atari 800. This home computer gave great graphics to game hackers like John Harris, though the company that made it was loath to tell you how it worked.

IBM PC. IBM’s entry into the personal computer market, which amazingly included a bit of the Hacker Ethic and took over.

IBM 704. IBM was The Enemy and this was its machine, the Hulking Giant computer in MIT’s Building 26. Later modified into the IBM 709, then the IBM 7090. Batch-processed and intolerable.

LISP Machine. The ultimate hacker computer, invented mostly by Greenblatt and subject of a bitter dispute at MIT.

PDP-1. Digital Equipment’s first minicomputer and in 1961 an interactive godsend to the MIT hackers and a slap in the face to IBM fascism.

PDP-6. Designed in part by Kotok, this mainframe computer was the cornerstone of the AI lab, with its gorgeous instruction set and sixteen sexy registers.

Sol Computer. Lee Felsenstein’s terminal-and-computer, built in two frantic months, almost the computer that turned things around. Almost wasn’t enough.

Tom Swift Terminal. Lee Felsenstein’s legendary, never-to-be-built computer terminal, which would give the user ultimate leave to get his hands on the world.

TX-0. Filled a small room, but in the late fifties, this $3 million machine was world’s first personal computer—for the community of MIT hackers that formed around it.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution – 25th Anniversary Edition
Steven Levy

Seattle – Mid 1990’s

I think these are from March 95. Taken on film, with a Pentax K1000. They are a bit faded.

Fun fact – While in Seattle I got a free espresso for knowing the answer to this:
Q: What was the real first name of Lolita, from the book Lolita?
A: Dolores

From the book:
“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.”

Jeb Bush: People Need to Work Longer Hours – Comment from long ago primary

During an interview that was live-streamed on the app Periscope, Bush made the comments to New Hampshire’s The Union Leader answering a question about his plans for tax reform.

“My aspiration for the country and I believe we can achieve it, is 4 percent growth as far as the eye can see. Which means we have to be a lot more productive, workforce participation has to rise from its all-time modern lows. It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

Candace Smith, July 8, 2015, ABC NEWS