A new site logo has dropped: it’s a sea lion, sittin’ on a rock in the Bay, channeling Mr. Redding, with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background. It’s a reclamation of heritage, both personal and municipal. To understand what I mean by that, I need to explain its origins in a racist 19th-century rag.
Illustration of the Beale Street Wharf fire of July 25, 1877
Coöpting a Genocidal San Francisco
The new seal is inspired by the masthead of the 1884 The San Franciscan newspaper, a periodical so racist it openly called for the ethnic cleansing of Chinese San Franciscans in an 1885 editorial1. That was eight years after the anti-Chinese pogrom of 1877.
Original 1884 art
Now, in a more civilized time, it’s been revived in high resolution for 2025 by a Mexican of mostly Native descent living on Beale Street, the same street burned during that July’s anti-Chinese riot.
Baldemar Velásquez, president and founder of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC), spoke to a small group of San Francisco labor activists about the challenges of organizing migrant farmworkers in the Midwest and South. In the hour-long conversation, Don1 Baldemar recounted more than half a century of successful organizing campaigns that FLOC has led. Lessons from the Campbell’s Soup boycott featured heavily, from dealing with scabs to working with family farmers to ensure they understood that FLOC had the entire supply chain in its sights.
I mentioned earlier this week that growing up, I was lucky to have access to the Internet before the web. This meant I was able to take full advantage when I figured out how to use my dad’s dial-up account at Vanderbilt University during Christmas break in early January 1995.
Being a kid, one of my first instincts was to find a game to play online. With web search engines still rudimentary back then, I turned to Usenet, which I had been using for a few years. I posted a message to comp.sys.mac.games to help me find a game I could play over TCP/IP. For the sake of posterity, I posted the full message here. A less detailed version is also available on the Usenet Archives.
