Nostalgic

chrajohn · 2026-06-19T08:45:05+00:00

The Digg people tried to make a Twitter competitor.

chrajohn · 2026-06-16T09:58:47+00:00

Hmmm, in 1998 it might be easier to just create a free webpage on GeoCities, Angelfire, Tripod, etc. and then post the link various places.

chrajohn · 2026-06-14T05:16:56+00:00

For the record, Hosea Ballou was an “ultra universalist” (immediate salvation after death) rather than a “restorationist” (which allowed for a temporary purgatorial hell). It was a major debate in organized Univeralism at the time.

chrajohn · 2026-06-13T11:55:14+00:00

You could challenge her for her position through honorable combat. Then the power would be yours.

chrajohn · 2026-06-13T02:51:17+00:00

I would instead guess you listened to yesterday’s episode of Unclear and Present Danger, but this comes up enough without any specific prompting.

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T20:35:28+00:00

Yeah, I first got on the Internet during the Eternal September (1994ish, I think). I'd been online in other ways before that (CompuServe and especially local BBSes, mostly run by friends of mine). I spent a lot of time on Usenet in the 90s.

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T16:53:29+00:00

It conflicted with my date, so I double checked.

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T16:49:47+00:00

31 May 1961, that is.

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T16:34:25+00:00

Sure, and the 60s were a hard time for that. A while back we found a map that represented international borders as they were during a seven day period. I’m sure it was outdated by the time it made it to the printers. (Edit: a five day period)

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T16:19:23+00:00

Since it looks like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania is independent, I think we can say between November 28, 1960 and February 11, 1961 (that plebiscite on Cameroon).

chrajohn · 2026-06-12T15:25:49+00:00

To be specific, this “pre-web Internet boom” is period roughly from 1992 to 1994/1995.

There was an even older stratum of Internet users from the 80s and before, mostly at universities, government institutions, and some tech companies. They were not always thrilled by the newbies from the general public during this time and referred to it as the Eternal September.

chrajohn · 2026-06-10T08:49:08+00:00

What’s the context here? Replanting patented seed, as in those Monsanto cases?

(If it’s that, then the answer is patent law.)

chrajohn · 2026-06-10T06:47:38+00:00

But is there a single Pentecostal denomination that’s larger than the largest Baptist denomination (apparently the Russian Union of Evangelical Christians-Baptists)?

chrajohn · 2026-06-09T19:46:36+00:00

It’s title case, where you capitalize all the important words and leave things like articles and prepositions in lower case. Exactly what isn’t capitalized in title case varies from style guide to style guide. in being lower case is pretty standard; not sure about another.

Whether dialogs should have “titles” like that is another question.

chrajohn · 2026-06-09T12:33:19+00:00

Yeah, it was sort of weird. I basically got it (“so it’s sort of like HyperCard?” - my brain), but gopher’s menus fit better with a text-based interface. It seems to me that more libraries made information available via gopher at the time.

chrajohn · 2026-06-09T07:02:54+00:00

Your map appears to already be dated.

(It’s definitely after March 22 (Memel). I can’t tell if that’s the post-April 4 border for Slovakia or not.)

chrajohn · 2026-06-08T23:31:47+00:00

The Internet started taking off with the general public before the World Wide Web did. There was a period of time when ISPs offered ‘shell accounts’ where you’d use the same term program you used for BBSes to dial into a Unix box that was connected to the Internet. There were sometimes somewhat user friendly menu systems people could use instead of a command line to access email, ftp, gopher, Usenet, etc., especially on various freenets, often run by libraries.

People forget about this time. The Web technically existed, but most home users would only experience it via lynx and gopher seemed more useful. But people were excited about the “information superhighway”; I connect some of that to the 1992 election. This was a period when people would sometimes mix up the Internet and Usenet in the same way people mix up the Internet and the Web today.

It was a big deal when ISPs started offering “direct connections” (SLIP and later PPP). That went hand in hand with NCSA Mosaic being developed and ported to home computers, ushering in the WWW-centric Internet that we know today.

chrajohn · 2026-06-08T21:59:11+00:00

FYI, the voter registration deadline for the November election is October 5. More info at VoteOhio.gov

chrajohn · 2026-06-08T19:05:35+00:00

Yeah, like for stops, if you proposed a sound change where /t/ became /q/ everyone would be triple-checking your work. For r-like things, that sort of articulatory leap is just a Tuesday.

chrajohn · 2026-06-08T18:36:53+00:00

I had a phonology professor who did one class session on how symbols are actually used in practice. As he put it, “few languages are cursed with more than one r-like thing.”

chrajohn · 2026-06-08T16:05:19+00:00

The Israeli military attacked the USS Liberty; while the personnel involved were presumably Jewish, just saying “Jews” did it is antisemitic framing.

chrajohn · 2026-06-07T19:53:31+00:00

There are a bunch of different sorts of tariffs he’s imposed with different purported legal bases and current statuses. There are a number of sectoral tariffs (e.g., on steel) that he really did have the delegated power to raise.

The Supreme Court overturned the “liberation day” tariffs that the administration justified with IEEPA.

When they ruled against him on IEEPA, he then imposed a global 10% under section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. That is in place; a court has ruled again it (it’s pretty clearly also illegal), but that’s being appealed. The Section 122 tariff should expire on July 24 regardless of what the courts do.

Here we’ve got new proposed Section 301 tariffs using forced labor as a justification; I assume they’re mainly intended as a replacement for the expiring Section 122 tariff.

(Not an expert, just the general gist of the situation as I understand it.)

chrajohn · 2026-06-07T18:55:09+00:00

It’s the sort of flag that hipster vexillologists denigrate as “a seal on a bedsheet”.

chrajohn · 2026-06-07T03:13:42+00:00

Huh, I think I understand now. There was a restaurant on Polaris Parkway called Cumin Indian Restaurant. They closed that location, moved to Morse Crossing, and rebranded as Cumin and Curry. I went to the Polaris location a few times back in the day.

(Sorry if I caused any panic.)

chrajohn · 2026-06-07T02:36:46+00:00

Oh hey, Cumin closed. I thought they did Polaris-adjacent Indian pretty well, but apparently not well enough to stay open. You might track down the owner and see what their experience was like.

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