quod absurdem est

Which means my grandfather's father was a sharecropper, which is within my family's oral history for why the [surname] family property and farm is the way it is and has been in the family for so long.

My grandfather died at 96 years old at the turn of the century.

Sharecropping as we know it today ended sometime in the 1930s-1950s depending on the state. Not only was my grandfather a sharecropper's son- my grandfather was a sharecropper himself during his early adulthood before he left home to join the military and later became a preacher.

My grandfather marched with Martin Luther Kin Jr and educated my father on black politics and activism. My father just turned 71, the same age as Ruby Bridges, the little girl who sparked the mass desegregation of education. She was born in 1954. There exists a photo somewhere of a little boy on a man's shoulders in the crowd at one of MLK's public events. That's my dad.

That's how close this is to the current era.

I said that once as a teenager on a forum. I was mocked and told that I am either way older than I claimed to be or that I am way off in my estimations because slavery was long ago. Slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, the Civil Rights movement itself, that is in recent enough memory to be evident in the lives of those who are alive today. My grandfather's grandfather- I'm just 5 generations removed from slavery.

At minimum about 4.5 thousand people liked this without reblogging it.

Progress.

"The people of Faithfall are mighty, proud and loyal, to the very end. Their love of community and goddess bind them together in times of danger and uncertainty. And their leaders will sacrifice all that they possess to ensure the safety of Faithfall and her people."

"The people of Faithfall are mighty, proud and loyal, to the very end. Their love of community and goddess bind them together in times of danger and uncertainty. And their leaders will sacrifice all that they possess to ensure the safety of Faithfall and her people."

Poor thing, she's dying from cringe 😔

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.

ur so right i didnt realized the compression would make it go to shit

Smaugust day 5 - "Small."

Very, very small.

Bleeding Hearts, 2025

colored pencil and ink on paper

Art nouveau influence decorative end papers on a poetry volume c1905