Three months ago, in the comments to HN submission 'RIP Kuro5hin', I posted [1] about my story having been the last to post, and that I was thinking about getting a domain of my own. One of you responded, "Please do that. I enjoyed your stories, particularly 'Who Are Your Lifelines?'"
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11609802
All of the current blog posts at my new site - http://www.TaxiWars.org/ - were originally posted as diaries at kuro5hin.org (K5). I'd started blogging about my taxi passengers at K5 in March, 2012, after my eighth lease. My original intention was to help me better remember all the interesting people I was meeting. I posted at K5 because I wanted to be anonymous, and was not looking for attention (the site had already shrunk to a skeleton core of users at that time).
K5 users voted three of my story submissions to the site’s front page, and one to section.
“Electronic Taxi Dispatch, v1.0” is about how the taxi company’s pre-smartphone/pre-tablet GPS-enabled computerized dispatch system matches passengers with cabs: http://www.taxiwars.org/electronic-taxi-dispatch-v1.0/
“Who Are Your Lifelines?” is about the time that I bailed my passenger out of jail. He was a down-on-his-luck tech worker. He’d called me because he remembered my phone number. http://www.taxiwars.org/who-are-your-lifelines/
“Humanity’s Second-Best Hope” is about the dreadful seasonal job that I had just before I started taxi driving, mixed with some 2012-era political commentary: http://www.taxiwars.org/humanitys-second-best-hope/
The section story was an anecdote of no importance. It needs some editing.
The pages and posts are basically as I submitted them to K5, except I’ve moved the pictures and youtube videos into the stories (K5 did not allow inline images).
Speaking of youtube… The passenger whom I rescued from his new ‘friends’ built websites for people, iirc: http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/07/passenger-rescue.html http://www.taxiwars.org/2012/08/passenger-rescue-pt-2.html
This post is about why I decided to call my K5 account ‘TaxiCabJesus’: http://www.taxiwars.org/2013/04/origin-of-tcj-moniker.html
That post mentions Michael Crawford (whom I believe was K5 user ‘Zombie Jesus Christ’), who witnessed a murder while a student at CalTech. He eventually graduated with a physics degree from a California State university, but has struggled with mental health issues ever since. He was a prolific diarist at K5. Some of my K5 diaries were about visiting him in the San Luis Obispo county jail, that time he was arrested for stealing ketchup packets from McDonald’s (they dropped the charges and released him the day after I visited).
I kept notes about almost all my passengers. Some of the stories that I haven’t posted are of some importance. I plan to narrate “Ordinary Rendition” and get my EMACS friend from college (I suffered through a $100,000 computer science program) to help me find someone to help with animation…
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Thanks for reading this far. If you have any comments or suggestions about my little website (layout, etc), I’ll very much appreciate them!