EUGENE VICTOR DEBS (1855-1926) was one of the greatest and most articulate advocates of workers’ power to have ever lived. During the early years of the labor movement in the United States, Debs was far ahead of his times, leading the formation of the American Railway Union (ARU) and the American Socialist Party.

Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, on November 5, 1855. He left home at 14 to work on the railroad and soon became interested in union activity. As president of the American Railway Union, he led a successful strike against the Great Northern Railroad in 1894. Two months later he was jailed for his role in a strike against the Chicago Pullman Palace Car Company. While in jail, Socialist and future Congressman Victor Berger talked with Debs and introduced him to the ideas of Marx and socialism. When he was released from prison, he announced that he was a Socialist.

He soon formed the Social Democratic Party, which eventually became the Socialist Party in 1901. He became their perennial presidential candidate. He ran on the Socialist ticket in 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 when he received his highest popular vote—about 915,000 (3.4%)—from within a prison cell. He had been arrested once again, this time for “sedition”; because he opposed World War I. Many Socialists were imprisoned during this time because they felt that the war was being fought for the profits of the rich, but with the blood of the poor. Debs was fortunately released in 1921.

Debs died in Elmhurst, Illinois, on October 20, 1926, but he is remembered to this day by countless labor activists from all over the political spectrum. The Eugene V. Debs Foundation works to continue his legacy into the 21st century...

To learn more about Debs and his life, read Stephen Marion Reynolds’ Biography of Eugene V. Debs for a full accounting of his life and times.

Biographies, Critiques, Criticisms, Sketches, Autobiographies, Obituaries and Memoirs of Eugene V. Debs iww

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    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      1 year ago

      The really impressive thing, to me, is that your avatar has textures! So many flat or completely unshaded avatars running arounds.

      • Mehrunes_Laser [comrade/them, any]
        ·
        1 year ago

        Hahaha yeah I can't leave anything stock. I have to tinker with stuff. I'm not done with the body textures yet either. Those are the stock textures, just recolored. I do not like how much it looks like bugs bunny. I'll make my own with my own markings soon. I just like to hammer out all the inner workings and assets before I get real deep into a custom skin.

        I'm kinda obsessed with making my avatar look as "real" as I can. So I always make sure it has good shader settings and so on. Usually I'll make a change to something, and visit a few worlds to see how it looks. Then hop back on unity to make some more changes. Wash and repeat until I'm happy.

        I still need to make a few optimization passes as well. This avatar has like 130k tris and every texture is 4k hahaha. I think it's about 150mb. As it sits, only my friends will see it since everyone else will probably see my fallback.

        • Frank [he/him, he/him]
          ·
          1 year ago

          Hahaha yeah I can't leave anything stock. I have to tinker with stuff.

          100% with you. Games are fun but popping open the hood and ripping the guts out to see what can be done is just 🤌

          I'm trying to learn Blender right now to make an avatar for myself and I'm really trying to keep in mind the limits for Quest users and whatnot. I've been looking at character models from like 2001-2006 for inspiration. It seems like a lot of them compensated for the low poly, low rez textures, and limited lighting technology of the time by focusing on good texture work to create lots of detail with limited resources. I think that's the direction I'd want to go - try to keep things low poly, but then use texture as much as possible to put details in. I'm really enjoying learning how it all works.

          How long have you been working on your avi? Did you have prior modelling and texture experience before you started VR chat?

          Oh, hey, something I just learned - There's FOSS software for integrating a Kinect for body tracking. You can get a refurb Kinect 360 for ~20$ and a Kinect to USB cable for 10-15, and supposedly set up pretty decent full body tracking without having to go in for other, more expensive trackers. I'm still waiting on the adapter cable but I'm excited to try to set it up and see how it works.