T-Bone Slim, born on this day in 1880, was an IWW member, working class songwriter, and author. Due to his popular, labor themed tunes, Slim was dubbed the "laureate of the logging camps".
Born Matti Valentin Huhta to Finnish immigrant parents in Ashtabula, Ohio, Slim became an itinerant worker after leaving his wife and family in 1912. It isn't known when Slim became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), but he first appeared in the IWW's press in the 1920 edition of the IWW Songbook.
Slim became one of the IWW's most famous writers during the 1920s and 30s, and many people would buy the "Industrial Worker" just to read his articles - one ad from the paper read "there's a lot more in Industrial Solidarity and Industrial Worker than T-Bone Slim's columns".
Slim did not presume his working-class readership to be unintelligent people, making use of complex wordplay and experimental writing techniques, playing with ambiguity, satire and surrealism.
Slim was also well-known for his songs, such as the "Lumberjack's Prayer", a parody of the Lord's Prayer about the poor quality of food available for the working class, and "The Popular Wobbly", which experienced a revival among civil rights activists during the 1960s.
In spite of his renown in radical circles during his lifetime, many details of Slim's life remain unclear. During the mid-1930s, he settled in New York City, where he worked as a barge captain on the docks.
In May 1942, Slim's body was found in the East River. His cause of death remains unknown and has been subject to speculation. Following his death, Slim largely faded into obscurity, especially compared to more famous IWW-associated writers such as Joe Hill.
Slim's songs have been preserved, however, re-published in editions of the Little Red Songbook and covered by musicians such as Pete Seeger, Utah Phillips, and his own great-grandnephew, John Westmoreland.
Until recently, there was thought to be no surviving photographs of Slim, however, in 2019 two photos were discovered and published by Working Class History in a Newberry Library collection.
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I think human hair should grow from the tip of the hair like a plant, extruding hair from your scalp is some freak shit. Can someone work on this?
Yeah it was a hack we threw together for the initial human release. We were going to use the plant growth code to model hair as something like many, very small vines but that subsystem is full of a lot of plant-specific code and data accesses (plant metabolics, environment checking that doesn't make sense for animals like soil conditions and sunlight, etc) that made it difficult to use on non-plant entities. We were running out of time so instead we used the crystal growth subsystem of the minerals system to model hair as something like metal whiskers (like you see in old electronics) but soft, non-metal, and... floppy. Besides the scalp extruding properties and it being kinda gross that subsystem considers your hair to be a kind of crystal. It's pretty bad.
It hasn't been a priority, just because we have so many other bugs to fix but now that you mention it, let me get out my DNA assembler and see if I can refactor
[known bug: blood does not consistently coagulate from cut hair. Seek medical attention if hair bleeds for longer than 5 minuets.]
Using patch notes to explain weird or inconvenient stuff with reality is something i dearly love.