Fun Family Moments with technology & the Memories they generate recaptured from May 2000 & June 2001

These pictures are not by any means “good” as far as quality of photography goes. They are fuzzy, blurry, and fusty. Nor is this a traditional article the general public may seize upon with joy. This is more of a family legacy post, a digital heirloom for now, nearly two decades later, and the future beyond every tomorrow. Yet these capture a certain nostalgia, a few moments back in yonder spacetime of joy and befuddlement, of tears and misery, of surprise, confusion, and laughter. Even moments of glee!

All but the last three fotos were taken by what was then an amazing new tool, a Logitech Webcam mounted atop and connected to our Compaq Presario desktop PC running OS Windows 98. At the time the Internet had shifted from bulletin boards & Gopher protocols to MS-DOS-based programing for Microsoft programs, IBM Peanut desktop computers, and Apple’s Macintosh to the growing, glowing World Wide Web with way cool browsers such as Netscape. Oh yeah, remember MS-DOS? And those fancy, old Peanuts and sublime early Macs? Gosh, remember Netscape? What an astounding expression of technology the Netscape browser was! All of these artifacts are today considered “vintage technologies.”

While we were having so much fun posing & goofing around with our new Logicam, these hi-tech companies were booming themselves right up into a massive financial bubble. The Dot-com Bubble began around 1994, the year my first daughter Morgan Hannah (now my eldest child Dylan Blair) was born, and ended in 2000. This hyperspeculative bubble finally burst, many companies died, the economy crashed, and a recession kicked in. The bursting of the bubble was a process lasting into 2002. Around the same time Compaq, once one of the top leading brands of personal computers, fell apart and was gobbled up by Hewlett-Packard.

This particular recession, which in some ways began a decade earlier in Asia, continued in parts of North America into 2003 and across Europe till around 2004-2005. This crazy tech boom of the 1990s laid the foundation, however, for stunning digital transformation of civilization over the next two decades. This remained true even into the midst of the Great Global Recession, an economic and financial catastrophe that began in late 2007. These events greatly affected our family and friends even as we carried on our daily lives. Our vintage technologies allowed us to preserve some of the good times amidst all of the gloomy news. Such memories remind us our glasses were more than half-full rather than half-empty or knocked over. So let’s raise a toast to those happy moments of yesteryear and be present to the little joys all around us even now, woo HOO! Yes!

Here we are, however, back in the day at the turn of the Common Era’s 21st Century in awe of those blurry, silly, and spontaneous “vintage tech” pictures. Digital spontaneity is one of the keys to understanding this brief time in history. The astonishing speed of computerized camera technology reached the point people felt free to be spontaneous in the moment. These were the beginnings of the digital selfie boom! People were goofy! Solemn. Smiling! Frowning. Weeping! And grinning, too.

Small, precision-image camera technology making the Logitech cams and then the tiny iPhone and Android fone cams were initially developed back in the 1960s by the NRO, the secret National Reconnaissance Office. This unique technology was finally released into the public marketplace, seized upon by private companies, and made its way into mobile devices such as cellphones. The NRO was a clandestine Federal intelligence agency formed in 1961 but wasn’t officially declassified until 1992 after the Cold War was over. It’s early cameras are considered superior to those in the later Hubble Space Telescope.

Social media entered the global picture, and, boom! Our planet would never be the same again. At the same time, sadly enough, this the lull before the storm, before the growing, intermittent Global Long War on Terror exploded into a worldwide conflict with the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States Home Front in September of 2001.

In the meantime, while this long war still burns and smolders around the world, let us nevertheless enjoy these precious moments in time. Perhaps they will fortify us to more closely re-examine our history of violence as a species. Perhaps doing so will illuminate and motivate us to find ways to generate peace and love instead of war and hate. Meanwhile, we move forward. Life is messy! Enjoy the pictures!

A few more snapshots from these Orca Pod days with a focus on my two daughters. Those were busy times, too, for our family. Gwen and I parented two little girls while living in an urban intentional community spread across 3 houses side by side with a number of other people including another family. My then-wife Gwen and I were outdoor adventurers, too, taking our kids on trips into the backcountry. We also entered an intense, beginner-level bodybuilding program. I was working two semi-full time jobs as a licensed massage therapist in a health clinic and taught at a local massage school. In addition I worked on my writing projects and served as a volunteer mountaineering instructor and an advanced alpinist student. Both Gwen and I were active in local Unitarian Universalist churches and Neo-Pagan Wiccan and Druidic circles.

Gwen had also returned to school to become a Registered Nurse. She worked full-time in naturopathic doctor clinics and part-time in toy stores. In addition we expanded our polyamorous network to include more partners, paving the way for Kristina to enter our lives in 2001. Kristina gave birth to Morgan and Kate’s youngest sister, their stepsister Talia, in 2002. When I look back on these crazy times I don’t know how Gwen and I did it. We had complicated lives, crazy lives, craved simplicity, and yet were expansive in our engagements during those years. We embraced our contradictions.

We didn’t earn much money, but lived simply in community. Juggling so much while being part-time, stay-at-home parents, however, often left us deep in debt in ways we have not ever been in before. These times took a toll, however, as Gwen was often exhausted and worn out. I developed heart problems later determined to be caused by sleep deprivation. My IBS peaked then and left me partially bedridden for about a month. My body felt as if bitten and gnawed in half by a giant shark. Overall I felt really stressed out and, altho that’s no excuse, began to lose my temper and yell and shout and stomp about more than I care to admit. Looking back at myself making “dragon faces” feels me with shame. Years later a combination of Buddhist meditation and psychotherapy and other things helped me address the fear, hurt, and insecurities driving my anger. Furthermore, Gwen and I reluctantly agreed to file for bankruptcy. We almost broke up one summer back at Orca Landing when we were both stressed out and looking for different ways to escape what felt for a while like a neverending deluge of problems. We worked everything out well, tho, and life moved forward. The Battle of Seattle happened in late 1999 during the Anti-Globalization Revolt. The al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 occurred on the American East Coast. Gwen and I considered moving back to our native Virginia by the Summer of 2002. Things changed, tho.

Kids kept being kids. Lots of birthday parties filled with parents who didn’t know each other. Morgan graduated from preschool and entered kindergarten as Kathryn began preschool. Something had to give, and eventually many things did. We moved out of Orca Landing in March of 2002 and paired down our activities. The following fotos were from early, now-vintage cellfone cameras and one from a slide transparency that were later scanned. All of the above fotos were taken by our LogiTec camera with our desktop computer. Most were cleaned up on my iMac many years later, especially as pictures were salvaged from both house fire and computer crashes. Enjoy!

Generation follows generation after generation. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for around 300,000 years at least. I recall when Homo sapiens was thought to have been around for 150,000 years. Now we may push deeper back in time as we better understand our complex biological origins. We originated not just from one place nor as offspring from one solo set of parents. We arose from both the commingling and the evolution of multiple hominin species. Indeed, our ancestors intermingled with other lifeforms including, well, viruses.

This foto essay represents a snapshot of two generations of humans living noisily amidst significant national and global changes. I do know these things: I love my children, always will, still love my ex-wives, very much so, and have many, many fond memories of our seven and a half years living as a family in Orca Landing Cooperative. Love Love Love…our world needs more of it. Fortunately, we can all generate love when we choose to do so even after entropy erodes initial attractions and connections. Choosing to live the lives we live keeps love in all of its myriad forms alive and powerful. So, what will you choose?

 

William Dudley Bass
Monday 22 July 2019
Revised 22 October 2019
Seattle, Washington
Cascadia
Sol

 

Copyright © 2019 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons.
Thank you.

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