Good article. No picture, though.
Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
31–40 of 116 posts
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#32So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
The climate happened, I think. Difficult to maintain optimism on the ultimate destiny of consciousness when the science is telling you there's an extinction event on your doorstep.
Climate-change concern became a thing in the 90s.
The peace-love-dope crowd were a reaction to our defense of South Vietnam. Once North Vietnam violated the Paris Peace and successfully invaded South Vietnam, there was no need anymore to react — we weren't defending anyone at that point. I imagine that there might also have been some embarrassed reactions to the boat people, the re-education camps and the mass murder which followed the invasion — after all those years of hailing Ho Chi Minh as the George Washington of Vietnam and pretending that the Viet Cong were freedom fighters, it was probably a bit embarrassing to see that they were just your normal run-of-the-mill dictator and his thugs.
Also, I think a lot of the peace-love-dope crowd just grew up and got jobs.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#33> Eyles and some of his fellow Consciousness IIIers regard computer programming as a fine craft that might some day be elevated to the status of an art. “It’s possible to envision a time when there are professors of the literature of computer programming. Maybe some programmers will be minor poets of the 20th Century. The trouble is that programs are written in a language there’s no audience for. It’s like Nabokov’s…
Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not have been written before 2020).
Oh and obviously TeX will always be considered classic 20th century code literature.
And probably git too, especially as it's very useful and almost forces the casual user to appreciate the poetry of its data structures.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there was a sense that extinction could come simply from a single random error Agreed, I was there and watched the "Duck and Cover" films in school. That only stopped when leaders realized that surviving the initial blast was one thing, and surviving a month later for most urbanites was unlikely. > So, through things like the Moral Majority and the efforts of Thatcher and Reagan ... happiness and satisfaction comes…
Whose side was Reagan on? He certainly wasn't on the side of a lot of gays, blacks, or the other minorities his administration threw in jail, poisoned, or just let die through inaction.
That's just nonsense.
Re. gays, Mr. Reagan signed into law federal outlays of $5.73 billion for AIDS research and treatment and he opposed California Proposition 6, which would have fired public-school teachers for advocating homosexuality.
Re. blacks, his administration did push hard for tough-on-crime measures — measures which were supported by black groups in the 80s. They may or may not have been wise in retrospect, but they were a well-intended attempt to support black communities and black people.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#35>>> “They passed a resolution with a lot of whereases and things in my honor. I was introduced to Monsignor somebody-or-other. I was stoned out of my mind.”
1971. What can I say :-)
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#36Title correction: there should be an exclamation point after "extra". As in "extra! extra! read all about it", not "extra weird–looking freak". Although it did make me laugh :)
HN's software should probably replace non-trailing exclamation points with something rather than nothing. I took the Extra bit out of the title for now, since it isn't needed and I suppose might confuse younger readers.
What does this "Extra!" bit mean?
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#37So what happened to the optimism for the "consciousness III society"? Maybe it was naive but It's a shame we don't have that same forward looking feeling today.
We’re still around.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#38My favorite part:
> “Look,” he says, “they’re devoting three billion dollars a year to curiosity that might yield good results in the long run, and eighty billion a year to the Defense budget — to killing. I’d be for a bigger space budget as long as the money came from the Defense budget. That’s the one to cut.
Wish we had more people talking this way these days. Instead, they’re militarizing space.
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whytheluckystiff wrote some Ruby code that can only be described as good poetry (including at least one project used in production in some places, the Camping web framework) circa 2005. I'm sure some people write poetry-level code today (obviously the folks at shadertoy.com, but they're writing in a classical style, and I'm sure someone's writing code poetry that could not have been written before 2020).
Oh and obviously TeX will always be considered classic 20th century code literature. And probably git too, especially as it's very useful and almost forces the casual user to appreciate the poetry of its data structures.
> And probably git too
Not sure about this, given the fact that this exists::
Re: Weird-Looking Freak Saves Apollo 14 (1971)
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Whytheluckystiff Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. Is that the guy who ragequit and deleted all his tutorials/guides?
As far as I understand, he quit his public life when someone hunted down and published his real name and address. He removed his website and github, which contained his various writings, some of which had names with "tutorial" or "guide" in them but all of which were at least 80% works of literature and at most 20% works of technical documentation. Not sure I would call it "ragequitting". Virtually all his works were…
> Not sure I would call it "ragequitting".
Expecting to maintain a large public reputation and stay anonymous and then stopping when the facade is cracked is pretty unrealistic.