Tocky on 3/12/2017 at 05:44
Interesting. And thank you for coming through for me Starker. I don't think we are so very far apart actually. When I was growing up there was still the vestiges of what you speak. We never waited in lines and there was near total freedom in every aspect of our lives but the south had just climbed out of the crushing poverty of the civil war after world war two. I recall my grandmothers house being heated by a pot belly coal fired stove. She still had a well for water though there was also piped in local water. Though there was indoor plumbing there was also an outhouse, rarely used, behind the barn. She saved scraps of fabric for quilts. Poor crosses all borders. We made do.
The thing is, we were self sufficient. We hunted. We fished. We gardened. We canned. We dried peaches on sheets of tin to seal in mason jars as we did all manner of vegetables. We kept orchards of our favorite fruits. We bailed hay to feed our cows. We got eggs from our chicken coops. Sometimes we petted the chickens until they lay their heads on the chopping block and they ran around headless until they fell over and were plucked and dismembered for dinner. We knew when hog killing time was on a cold winter morning and how to get rid of the hair with boiling water. We knew how to chop things up including our own firewood. Everything was labor.
I caught the tail end of that before truly modern times and count myself lucky I did. I saw the movie "Places in the Heart" the other day and the pathetic way they were picking cotton. I knew that wasn't how to do it. I've built fences with a post hole digger and tack hammer the hard way. I've pulled corn from sunup to sundown. I know how to dowse water and hypnotize a chicken and yes those are real things. I have ridden the mule of Faulkners bootlegger as it plunged toward a hog wallow to get me off his back. I've hunted coon in the moon lit hollows of a spring night listening to black and tan hounds bay and tasted my first whisky from men around the fire who didn't want to go see the prize. I learned to lead dove and wring their necks when wounded. I learned to teach a pointer how to hunt quail and how little actual teaching it required because it is in their blood. I spent every Saturday morning of my preteens before the sun was up waiting for the catfish to boil the misty water at sunup and take the bait of liver bundled on a treble hook and held by nylon stocking and Saturday evening skinning and boiling them in oil.
I loved that shit. I also read every science fiction and horror I could get my hands on and built models and rode my bike and hunted Indian arrow heads and millions of other things and when I was bored Mom would tell me it was my own fault and she was right. So I burned down the house. NO. No. I didn't but what she said was right. And damn it was great. Every damn bit of it. Anyway, I don't think we are so far apart. Nowhere near as far as we are from the current generation who has never done anything by hand the hard way. Or maybe I'm taking liberties in my assumptions? How old are you?
PigLick on 3/12/2017 at 09:11
Great read Starker, thanks
Starker on 3/12/2017 at 12:04
I'm comfortably middle-aged and yeah, our family's poverty was due to a war as well. Both of my grandfathers fought in the war on the opposite sides and one of them was a refugee that lost, well, everything. I'd say that poverty was different in the Soviet Union, though, especially for the urban poor. You know how the song goes...
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
Till you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
Well, in the Soviet Union, a working class hero was really something to be. The intellectuals had it harder and were denied more. It was more difficult to get a car permit if you worked in a university instead of a factory, for example. But if you really wanted to get ahead in life, you had to hustle and you had to grease palms and you had to give the appearance of toeing the party line. If you live in a cage, your freedom only goes as far as the bars allow you to go.
And the oppression was very real. If you didn't conform, the secret police would follow you. Propaganda was pervasive in every aspect of your life. Books and newspapers were censored. All the previous demonstrations and attempts at reform had been put down with tanks and executions and mass deportations. If you went against the system, the system hit back with everything it had. But that also gave rise to a real determined resistance. A resistance that played the long game and that knew when to talk and who to talk to. A resistance that stood up against tanks and used their own bodies as a shield when the time was right. Also, there's no punk rock like that made under a real threat of imprisonment or worse and we had real DIY punk rock that was subversive and irreverent as fuck.
Tocky on 3/12/2017 at 19:33
You know what Starker? I had to go a long way before I found any bars to rattle. There are no rules for you in this thread. Do anything you want. Tell anything you want. If you ran amok I think I would enjoy it.
Pyrian on 3/12/2017 at 21:17
Back in my day, if we wanted to draw something on a computer, we had to laboriously plot out each pixel by its screen coordinates. You could make simple shapes with algorithms, but you had to either write them yourself, or copy them out of a book (if you could find one). Don't even talk to me about PEEK and POKE. Then there was the "turtle" where you could give commands to what was basically a pencil. Programs were passed around on disks.
When I was teenager, we got our first modem. You took a phone and stuck it into this mount. You could hear the beeps and boops as the phones talked to each other at a mighty 300 baud. But suddenly you could talk to other computer people on forums! Well, nearby people. You got to know all the local Sysops. Played lots of turn-based multiplayer games because that's about what was possible. Eventually we got WWIVnet e-mail and could e-mail around the world!
I remember when C++ first came out; at the time, though, I was into Pascal, and specifically Turbo Pascal, which also got object oriented programming. Nowadays it's almost hard to believe that there was a time before OOP. Even at the time, though, sticking a function that worked on the contents of a structure "inside" that structure just wasn't that big a deal in itself. On the other hand, I remember spending a good bit of time trying to figure out what virtual methods were, and what they were useful for. (I still sometimes wonder about the latter, lol; there's a few in Glade Raid, but they're not necessary or even all that helpful.)
When OS/2 came out, complete with an IBM C++ compiler, the first printing of the manual neglected to mention the absolutely critical role copy constructors play in making operator overloading work. I was working with my Dad on his neural network program, and we were trying to do overloaded matrix operations. It was hell trying to work out how to make the memory management work.
I kind of wonder what my kids will talk this way about "when they were young".
Tocky on 4/12/2017 at 05:21
No telling. I don't even know what you were talking about now. Well, sort of. I've heard of it all but if you haven't experienced it then it's like reading about baking a cake verses doing it. I'll just stick to eating it anyway. I liked reading about it though. Do you know the computer on the Apollo missions was just a bundle of wires? Performed the same function as a circuit board which is what a chip is at it's simplest. At least if what I've been told is correct.
Pyrian on 4/12/2017 at 05:52
Quote Posted by Tocky
Do you know the computer on the Apollo missions was just a bundle of wires?
That's not really fair, IMO. It's "software" read-only memory was basically wires run through carefully arranged magnets, that's probably where you're getting that. The computer itself though was actually a bunch of integrated circuit chips - absolutely cutting edge technology at the time (Wikipedia says it was the
first chip-based computer).
Tocky on 5/12/2017 at 02:59
Sounds as if the "software" was a hard drive of sorts. I don't really know enough to be fair. I've studied the layout of a Saturn V taken apart at Huntsville Rocket Center and seen the ring of wires though I noticed no chip sets. Perhaps they are beneath the control panel of the command module. I've sat in that every time I've gone with various sets of grandkids. The Mercury module too.
I know Neil had to land by stick because it was overloaded with two sets of the same data by accident. I remember watching it on TV and how tense it was till they set down. My family broke out in a spontaneous cheer. Later we looked up at the moon bright in the night sky full of wonder as I'm sure everyone did. For the first time it didn't look like something out of reach.
Tocky on 5/12/2017 at 04:19
Okay then, the story of my incredible luck. Some of it anyway.
I first met Elliott when we went to scouts together. He could do a few more pushups than me and I could do a few more situps than him but we both could do more of everything than the rest of troop 202... except for swimming. Neither of us could swim a lick. At Camp Yocona lake there were three sectioned off swimming areas separated by docks with each farther dock being deeper. Beyond even these was the diving platform midway of the lake.
At first everyone was in the most shallow but as it was proven you could pass certain tests you went to the chest deep area. We all made it to that one quickly but in that one you had to swim the length of the dock and it had winnowed down to just me and him left. It was an ingenious way of spurring you to have your friends leave you. I beat him that time but over the years it was always back and forth with us. It was the same with our fights. We fought into adulthood long past the point we should have quit until the final time when he pulled a knife on me for not letting him hit his wife. At the end of his marriage to my cousin he had turned to complete shit but that is another story.
We did a lot together growing up in the same one horse town. I would have grown up a goody two shoes bookworm and perhaps made something different of myself if not for him but then maybe he fed as much off of me and neither of us would have been as bad apart. He taught me to steal my first candy and I was so nervous I nearly got caught. Not that we did it often and it wasn't about the candy but the thrill. We did a lot worse and I'll tell some of those stories as well.
This one evening as we hung out at his grandmothers he came out of her closet carrying an old rabbit eared double barrel shotgun. They call them rabbit eared because the hammers had an extra piece of metal that stuck straight up like rabbit ears for easy cocking. It was a neat old gun but I was listening to the latest Lynard Skynard Album and didn't pay it much mind. Maybe that's why he pointed it at me. While I was lecturing him about never pointing a gun he cocked and pulled both triggers click clack and laughed. Then he broke it open and his smile dropped. "It's loaded" he said with amazement.
Bullshit. He was always pulling some shit like that. They were empty shells he put there just to fool me. Only... his face said different. "Give me that" I said snatching it away. I pulled them out ready to show him he couldn't fool me. They were heavy. The ends were factory pinched. They were old paper shell federals that had likely been in there since the fifties. Now I was amazed. The primer caps were both dented from the blows of the triggers. He had pointed it directly at my face and God or fate or whatever had said no.
Oh shit I was pissed then. The first shell I bounced off his head but I had to chase him around with the second until I landed it in the middle of his back. I think we were both about thirteen. I'm glad I got to see fourteen.
Tocky on 6/12/2017 at 03:55
My life of crime.
At first I had been shocked by Elliott and his brothers stealing candy by slipping it in pockets as they pretended to count money but it was a cheap thrill so I tried it. After the first time it lost luster quick. We hung out quite a bit though. We made a fort of his barn. We swiped some hard cider of his dads and caught a mild buzz. We decided to tear the heavy drip rails off some junk cars to use as swords and large old hubcaps as shields and wailed at each other with them. Since it was his place he was king and me and his brother Scott fought for second place or first knight or whatever. Sounds silly except we beat hell out of each other for that spot atop an old Plymouth. Years later Scott killed a guy in a knife fight and all I could think was he didn't come in second that time. That was horrible though so maybe my mind slides off it into the past. There was like a piece missing from Scott that the rest of us have. There was piece missing from the other- no. It was awful. I wasn't there but my brother was. That's part of why I was so pissed Elliott pulled a knife on me that time. I'm wandering and need to go back again.
We would camp out a lot and go wandering late with friends of mine from school like Kevin or Richard (Elliott went to another school) who would spend the night with me to go along. Often we found ourselves in downtown Toccopola past midnight at the old store just bored. There was a hole in the brick wall about shoulder high on the side near the streetlight where electrical conduit ran through. Your arm could also go through if you were a skinny kid. There was a rack of cokes in cartons just inside so we helped ourselves but that wasn't fun enough. We would fill them up with rocks and place them back in the cartons with the caps hammered back on.
The next time they had moved the cartons over and we had to use a clothes hanger to pull them out and slide them over. It required someone at the front window to direct and was quite a challenge. Putting the rock filled ones back was even harder but we liked this game. The time after they had moved them to a bottom shelf but we prevailed. We imagined their faces finding yet more rock filled bottles and giggled.
The next time they had moved them too far. We sat on the sidewalk on that humid summer night defeated. Then Elliott decided he would break the pane next to the lock on the side door. No way. That just did not fit in the game. I showed him we could cut the old dry putty from around the pane then replace it like nothing had changed. We went inside. It was easy to drink the cokes then and replace them with rocks no matter where they put them.
It went on for over a month every weekend like that. They might never have known. We were becoming bored with it anyway and would soon quit I figured. It was too easy now. Then, while I was away at an FFA leadership camp, Elliott invited a guy from his school over and showed him how we had fun. He wasn't amused. He was mister serious upright citizen and turned him in. Problem for me was Elliott had already told him I was his partner in crime. When I got back from camp I was in trouble.
We went to court and everything. Neither of us gave up the others of our friends of course. Oh the judge was real menacing and put the fear in us alright. We got nine months probation complete with a probation officer and all of it serious shit without a smile in the bunch. I did get to explain the whole story to my probation guy on those Monday evenings and we became a bit chummy there toward the end but that judge was fear of God hell and damnation. The worst of it was we had to go to church every weekend.
I take that back. The worst was the look in my dads eye and his disappointment. Having to stand before him and explain why I had stolen was awful. He didn't even punish me and somehow that was worse. I never stole again. Well... borrowed a music van to cut donuts on the baseball field at school and there was the cottonpicker incident but not really stole as in take anything for keeps. You know who really stole? The storekeeper. He had claimed over a thousand dollars worth of stock had been taken which we had to pay back when it couldn't have been over twenty bucks total. That was a lesson in itself.
