AIM will be discontinued on December 15, 2017
I just logged into AIM for the first time in probably a year. I was hit with this very comforting feeling of seeing my Buddy List populate (I'm amazed how many people are signed on right now...) and seeing how I used to categorize my friends into lists back in my adolescence.
AIM was a huge part of my social life growing up. There was no Facebook or Instagram and text messaging was just getting around to being cheap enough to do on the regular (used to be charged per text). AIM was the communication tool of choice and the one that probably, at least for me, made talking on the phone a thing of the past.
This year, on December 15, 2017, AOL will shut down AIM permanently. At least ICQ is still around...?
Hell's Hundred Acres
I've been incredibly fascinated with this NYC neighborhood name ever since I heard about it on the 99% Invisible podcast. As they said in the podcast, there's just something really cool sounding about "Hell's Hundred Acres" despite the rather dreary connotation (it was named that because the fire department saw the SoHo area as a huge potential fire hazard due to its old wooden buildings). The neighborhood eventually was renamed SoHo to spur development (just like "NoMad"!).
Anyway, I've been looking for a name for my new MacBook Pro and now I think I've found it.
Photos of the landfill that Battery Park City resides on
I suspect most New Yorkers already know this, but if you don't and are curious, here are photos of the area that today is home to Battery Park City. According to Wikipedia:
The land in Lower Manhattan upon which it stands was created by land reclamation on the Hudson River using over 3 million cubic yards of soil and rock excavated during the construction of the World Trade Center, the New York City Water Tunnel, and certain other construction projects, as well as from sand dredged from New York Harbor off Staten Island.
That's right, the shape of Manhattan isn't at all natural. We humans found it to be too constrictive so we literally built more land so we could build more buildings.
