I first learned about Sam Oser when she covered the Valero release of Hydrogen Cyanide in Houston Neighborhoods. While local papers are too busy licking the boots of the Oil and Gas industry or rank every new gastropub within Houston city limits as a 10/10. She is diligently covering the eviction crisis, the HISD privatization and contract talks, police brutality, falsified flood maps, and all the topics where class, gender, and race intersect within the city. She also hosts a show at All Real Radio called “Unconventional Journalist”, Saturdays 1:30 pm - 2:30 CST.
She was recently in a panel for local organizers and storytellers for the city of Houston, and she will be doing an AMA with us the afternoon (3-4pm CDT) of May 27th.
Neat! It might be worth throwing together some premade suggestions for this to make sure it goes off well. With site members not being very accustomed to this kind of thing there's a good chance the tight time window could result in many missing it so a backup to make sure it goes off well could be worthwhile.
Is 3-4pm based on Moscow time or something else?
I'd be willing to post the OP very early and folks are welcome to throw out questions the entire week if they'd like.
This is also a great way to incentivise people to make an account :think-about-it:
Mmmm especially if the site can built up a tradition of doing this, enough examples of it done successfully can be collated together into a portfolio that can then be presented as a pitch to major influencers - the podcasters, union organisers, streamers, youtubers, even leftist politicians. They bring their audience, get an ama format out of it, some two way promotion in a format they can't do on other platforms with an audience that will be positive, other sites write articles about questions answered in amas and that has knock on media effects for both the site and the influencer. It's been an idea on the table since the creation of c/ama but couldn't get bites in the earlier days. I could retry reaching out to others if we've now been around long enough for people to consider the site an established thing that isn't going anywhere.
Quite exciting to be honest. Very optimistic and positive about the kind of benefits this can have for all parties.
Just gotta get one of us on the Deprogram.
Was thinking of hitting them up for the topic "I was fired for labor organizing"
Seems like a good opportunity to talk about the does and don'ts and how to stay under the radar.
Do it. Do everything, cross pollinate, push all audiences around all other audiences, it raises everything up.
Was thinking of hitting them up for the topic “I was fired for labor organizing”
:meow-shining: HELL YEAH :sicko-charging:
We have had several AMAs a tradition I’ve kept up with since the /r/CTH days
Sick, houston is fucked. Shout out to her for doing the lords work
oooh, I wanna ask about the hurdles (expected and unexpected) to setting up radio broadcasting, but I can't make the time. Could someone ask for me?|
ie, equipment, cost, where to read up on broadcasting laws, how difficult was getting a license/accredition/reserved frequency
I’m never good with having the right questions to ask, especially not being familiar with her work, I wouldnt know what questions could be answered by anything she’s covered elsewhere and not potentially use what limited time she set aside for us.
There are no silly questions! But just in case, here's some of her stuff: Medium
https://samthemullet.medium.com/falsified-houston-flood-map-looks-like-it-26a4c299eefe
This is an older article but still interesting, I had no idea developers would/could be falsifying flood maps.
Yeah I think they had to update some of this shit after harvey bc some repercussions of it came to a head
Where I used to live is literally in a flood reservoir that was man made to keep the rich areas nearby from flooding. They really weren’t meant to build housing there but they did anyway and that led to some of the worst flooding in that side of houston. They’ve been building more since harvey lol
My parents live next to two neighborhoods that were built after they moved in, one was built on wetlands, the other they leveled up and completely fucked all the drainage locally. Developers seem to be able to do whatever the fuck they want in Texas.
100%. They’re not gonna let a little thing like “giving a fuck about what it’s like to actually live in these neighborhoods” stand in the way of making as much money as possible.
The drainage is completely fucked where I lived and I imagine it’s only gonna get worst as they build more. You literally have to drive over a little wall that keeps the water in that forms the reservoir to get into the area. It’s actually insane the city let them build homes in that area
You literally have to drive over a little wall that keeps the water in that forms the reservoir to get into the area.
:what-the-hell:
My awful math education from highschool is making all the engineering I'm trying to do difficult. All these engineering guidelines are like "just sin the cos and then use the phi of this angle and multiply the result by this number we pulled out of our ass" and I barely know what any of that is. And they refuse to ever explain if the number comes from some sort of mathematical constant or if it's a number they have decided to settle on for standardization. So far the only method for figuring that out I've found is to cross reference different documents and refactor the equations till they spit out the same measurements.
Edit: It's seriously frustrating that the shitty school I went to is making things so difficult rn. I'll be cruising along getting a ton of things done and then I find one thing that is supposed to be easier than the stuff I was doing before and it takes me two days because I have to learn a bunch of basic math before I can get started on the actual problem.
not that it's a magic bullet but you know about khanacademy right? their videos are basically top-tier explanations of every math topic you can think of
Yeah, it's what I've been using for the most part. Also just now realized this wasn't the megathread.
![[Announcement | Upcoming AMA] Sam Oser, host of Unconventional Journalist radio show and advocacy journalist](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/of3bJQaEmU.png){kind=link}