When and where: Half Price Books, 7:00 PM. May 21, 2006

Notes compiled by: DC Tedrow

Those in attendance included DC Tedrow, Jason McCollom, Todd Lacroix, Michael Billeaux, and Candy Rudolf.

Prior to this meeting, all TTT activity/discussion had been carried out online, via our Google Group. At Jason's suggestion, we met at Half Price Books in order to discuss the May/June issue and put names to faces.

Content 

The meeting began around 7:15 with some thoughts on content for the May/June issue. Because of the May Day demonstrations and the uproar surrounding HR 4437, immigrant rights was proposed as a general theme, which no one objected to. Proposed features included a lengthy piece on the "border wars" that defense contractors benefit from, interviews with local activists, and a piece on No Le Hace. Locality was stressed as a key theme.

Because Jason had discussed writing a piece on socialism in the United States, Michael and Todd came to discuss their experience with the ISO.  This piece was subsequently abandoned, however.

It was also stressed that we accept varied content -- book reviews, letters, comics, and so on.

TTT's Mission and Future

Because TTT is experimental and our stated mission is a fluid document, we also discussed future plans and changes to the mission statement. With respect to the mission statement, we agreed to drop our "students only" approach, as well as include xenophobia in our list of institutional failures.

Because DC has plans to move to Austin sometime during the fall, it is unclear what path TTT will take. Relocating efforts to Austin would mark a committment to see TTT expand into a Texas-wide publication, featuring content from writers in Corpus Christi, Austin, Houston, Dallas, etc. It would also pay numerous advantages that should not be overlooked:

• It would provide us with access to more contacts, writers, and other talents. Since many activists and prominent speakers appear at UT, golden interview opportunities are limitless. Needless to say, these factors could increase the content quality enormously.
• It would provide us with more stable sources of funding.
• It would help us to ally ourselves with related efforts in Texas, as well as independent media throughout the country.
  
• It would help us to expand our efforts throughout Texas.

If relocated to Austin, TTT would, of course, still distribute in Corpus Christi, as well as accept advertisements from Corpus businesses, as well as encourage submissions and discussion from Corpus residents. However, it also has the potential to fragment the efforts of the small core of persons already involved with TTT in Corpus. Because of this, the future of TTT is something we really have to think about.

New Computer

It was announced that Jeff Welch donated a fully loaded PC to TTT so that we could work on layouts. This solves the problem caused by the Island Waves fiasco. As regards the layouts themselves, we decided that we'd have to discuss them another time.