After a few months away (oh how we’ve missed you!) we’re back with a great lineup of speakers for June 2020!
Talk # 1: Understanding Food Labels by Chris Perez.
Ever wonder what all those chemicals in food are there for? This talk will look briefly at what sorts of roles different additives have in our modern processed foods. We will discuss their roles, mechanisms and examples. With an intention to bring more awareness and understanding about what exactly goes into processed foods, this talk will tell you more about what you put into your mouth!
Talk # 2: Demos and Modems: The Outlaw Art of the Pre-Internet Dial-up BBS Scene by Luke Loughhead.
In the 1980s and 1990s, in the era of The Commodore 64, the Apple ][, and the IBM PC and its early clones, a hidden world of dial-up community computers existed in every area code. If you knew about them, you could dial in, one user at a time, and post messages, play games, and trade files. Many of those files were illegal copies of things like games and custom programs to make them work without paying. An underworld scene of technologically talented youths formed around trading these black market files, called “warez,” and the scene developed its own styles of art, animation, and music. Its aesthetic had a combative, competitive motivation that made it parallel to the contemporary New York City street art that gave rise to Hip-Hop. This presentation is a recounting of that warez scene by one computer nerd who was just a bystander at the end of that era, when the dawn of home Internet and graphical web pages ended the wild night of secret phone numbers and glowing terminal text. We will look at the art of the era that has been lost to obscurity, and the legacy of the aesthetic that lives on today.
Luke Loughead is a Computer Nerd, but a hapless techno-weenie compared to the 1337 cyberpunks of the Early 1990s. He now works a job as a corporate Systems Analyst, but he spent years as a kid tying up the family phone line playing games on BBSes, and rummaging through archives of files.
When, where, and how
We’ll be live on Facebook Thursday, June 24th at 8 pm with talks at roughly 8:10 and 8:45 pm. More details here: https://fb.me/e/IgMpEGP1