wespad

In San Diego, we have a discount store called GTM that buys Costco closeouts and scratch-and-dent items and resells them for less. It has a loyal base of bargain shoppers, and it feels a bit like a treasure hunt.

You can buy normal or even individual quantities, like a single roll of paper towels, with no membership required. I imagine other big cities have similar stores, probably in lower-income areas, that fill a similar role.

I agree with you on hip-hop. It's very important to me. And it's great that it's become so ubiquitous. But it wasn't always like that. Early hip-hop was just music created extemporaneously at a party or a park jam. It wasn't even recorded. It didn't fit the format of "about 4 minutes and some seconds." And the whole mixtape era was music of the moment, not even an official release, mostly a promotional product.

These forms of media were work-for-hire projects owned by the publisher, paid at a rate per word or page. Assignment turned in and paid for (or not) and on to the next assignment. A volume game.

Comic books, original paperback books (crime/detective stories, westerns, science fiction, etc.), hip-hop,... all intended as disposable entertainment—the commodified, created content of its day.

This was my first computer. I got it for Christmas when I was 9 or 10. Can't remember if it was 1983 or 1984. Mostly used it, and its particular flavor of BASIC, to create graphic images, pixel by pixel. I remember making a fantasy sword picture. What a memory!

Standard Ebooks is my go-to for beautiful, well-formatted Public Domain books. The 2025 page is a wonderful gift to start the year. I'm off to read Red Harvest and The Dain Curse. Happy New Year!!!

> The news isn't going to mow my yard, politics won't change a single thing about my life which couldn't be changed through more hard work.

Ain't that the truth.

Indeed they do. At least the Debian-based distros, like Ubuntu and Mint.

Every general purpose Linux desktop I setup gets Simon Tatham's puzzles and all of Kenta Cho's and Jason Rohrer's games.

Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.