Happy Cake Day!
9 Likes
Letâs leave things of this world behind and walk now on the path of Bob for this brief minute of Slack from The Church of the SubgeniusâŚ
âLegalize pr0nography and ban work! Let there be Slack!â
9 Likes
10 Likes
Weirdly, while I certainly have some nostalgia about the 80s, Iâm certainly aware of the actually history of that time period, too and know that that is when started to really go south⌠byproduct of being a historian, I guessâŚ
13 Likes
Gonna have to chime in and agree with the sentiment. The late 90âs for a middle schooler was a complete tire fire. The casual homophobia, the terrible sitcoms, poor kids being judged for not having the nicest name brand clothes, sexual harassment being treated like a party game etc etc. The only good thing was the beginning of a strong and affordable era of console games haha
5 Likes
In general, most people are probably nostalgic for their childhood, because they were kids, were maybe shielded from the political and social realities of that era, and just remember the warm fuzzies of whatever culture they were into at the time⌠And if theyâre lucky, they had good experiences with their families, etcâŚ
10 Likes
Nicest, comfiest, and most moral?
I donât have to wonder about the 2000 people they asked. 
Even as a kid, itâs impossible not to notice and learn a lot of shit about U.S. society.
11 Likes
4 Likes
Letâs just plant field after field of potatoes, a true monoculture⌠what could possibly go wrong? /s
8 Likes
Well, at least SK researchers can now determine the extent of covid and other diseases in the population.
4 Likes
My nostalgia gland is really screwed up, and itâs never properly worked.
Iâm a 1966 vintage. This (via wiki) happened on the day I was born:
The day after African-American activist James Meredith began his âMarch Against Fearâ, walking the 235 miles (378 km) from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi, to âtear down the fear that grips Negroes in Mississippiâ, he was shot from ambush.
The Detroit newspaper article about it - with a photo of him lying in the street, screaming - is in my fucking baby book.
We lived in a nice flat in a rough neighborhood when I was V little. We were evicted because momâs black friends visited us.
So much for equality.
ETA: So much for morality.
When kids were outside playing, I was watching the Watergate hearings (on a tiny pre-UHF hand-me-down B&W). Iâd already been reading the editorials in the paper for some time, and mom & I watched and discussed local and network tv news, so I knew what was going on.
So much for political stability.
So much for trust in our government.
Mom & I spent 1970-1972 living with her mom. Grandma owned rental property, and the block on which she lived has four sets of terraces and condo-style thingies, and mostly two-and four family homes. Most of her neighborhoodâs population was not permanent. Much of the housing in our immediate neighborhood from 72-84 were also condos and rentals.
While my age was still in single digits, I learned that no matter how much you love them, people are liable to move away and completely disappear from oneâs life. {ETA: I even remember the full name of a neighbor girl whose family moved away. Cynthiaâd never even told me. I went to visit, and there was a For Sale sign in front of their place.}
So much for personal stability.
Grandma helped, but mom worked shitty part-time jobs at a nearby department store while I was little, so she could raise me w/o babysitters. We got food stamps. Dad rarely paid the $16/wk court-ordered child support. I donât remember being hungry, but most of the time if mom burned our dinner, there wasnât a replacement to hand that wouldnât wreck the rest of the weekâs dinners.
When she got a good-paying job ($10,000/yr in 76, 77 was a big deal, esp for a woman), we still struggled. Sheâd bought a brand new car (canât be a field engineer w/o reliable individual transport) and sent me to the snooty private school. At least we ate much better.
So much for financial stabilty, let alone prosperity.
None of the kids I knew had any political awareness, until I met a few in jr high. They were mostly parroting their rich parentsâ cold conservative bullshit, so I couldnât discuss it with them. ânixon?! But he got us into China!!!â None had watched the Watergate hearings.
Few of the kids I knew read as much as I did, nor on such a wide variety of topics, esp history.
So much for intellectual stimulation.
When watching some tv shows from my early childhood, esp Dark Shadows, I occasionally get a form of warm fuzzies. Itâs an ethereal, fugitive feeling that makes little sense to me.
I think thatâs nostalgia, but Iâve never felt certain.
9 Likes
4 Likes
What is that?
4 Likes
⌠itâs a comically long and detailed research paper on something that doesnât matter and nobody cares about
I assume itâs some kind of elaborate joke 
2 Likes
10 Likes
How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery
David F. Brailsford, Brian W. Kernighan, William A. Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie was one of the lead developers on such inconsequential technologies as the C language, and Unix. (The story goes that once upon a time, if you wanted a copy of Unix to run on your mainframe, youâd write to Ritchie, and youâd receive a set of tapes, with a handwritten note that read âLove, Dennis.â)
This paper is Brian Kernighan (who worked with Ritchie to write The C Programming Language, amongst other things), and Dennisâs brother Bill, investigating what happened to Dennisâs completed but not awarded PhD, what was in his thesis, and how he produced his thesis (as in, how he typeset the manuscript, before Knuth had written TeX).
Itâs a history of early Computer Science and of early Computer Typesetting technology.
I care.
11 Likes
Cue up the Indy gif!
7 Likes
6 Likes
Okay⌠not sure what makes that odd⌠seems a perfectly cromulent dissertation topic?
4 Likes
