Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the clown show

    My second grade teacher, Mrs. Cervantes, was an old lady who liked to smoke during breaks. The fact that those breaks would happen in the classroom can tell you more or less how old I am. I remember little about the things I learned during second grade. Most of my school memories are blurred together and there are bad memories here and there. You could say that some things I put away on purpose.

    As a kid I didn’t have the concept of resentment. That’s something that I wouldn’t think of. Bad things happened and I would be told to man up and that was the end of it, but as an adult, I look back on those moments and realize how messed up the world was around me. I feel cheated and want revenge, impossible now that so many years have passed, even the people who wronged me are not around anymore.

  • Supermarket Nightmare

    I gathered around with four friends. We were shopping for chocolate and potato chips to spend some time at a park, especially since the weather was great.

    We pay for our stuff and head to the park. Suddenly, the store's staff stopped one of our friends AFTER we exited the store and paid for our stuff(we got the receipts too). They believe he stole a chocolate bar from the store. We all saw him paying for the chocolate bars so we intervened and they made us go to the back of the supermarket to speak with the manager. They made us wait for half an hour to check the camera recordings.

    Now here comes the infuriating part. They couldn't find anything, so they settled for showing a recording of two strangers who pocketed some stuff from the supermarket. I don't know how showing completely unrelated individuals serves their point but WHATEVER I guess.

    But it gets WORSE. After we told them we didn't know those guys, the manager started talking about how our friend was *about to* steal something but got scared out and paid for it at the last minute instead.

    ????????????????????? We were put away for 30 minutes because of some piece of poorly thought-out speculative fiction. It makes even less sense because we have been regulars to the store for the last two years.

    But It got even WORSE as the manager started yelling at our friend who told them they had no reason to be wasting our time when we didn't steal anything and paid for everything we left the store with. After that, a heated argument broke out and after another 10 minutes of our time wasted we were let go. I got kind of hot and let out a slur to the manager on our way to the park which caused one of the staff to try to charge at us but he was stopped by his colleagues.

  • Just a Little Sad and Jealous That The World I Came From Was Gone: Nikkiana's vintage throwback secret internet journal, and the Reverberations of What Came Before

    I found her site the way I suspect a lot of neocities sites are found: via neocities' browse function. Periodically I go see if there's anything interesting. Go to the site, filter by tag: diary, journal, blog. I look for something that catches my eye. So many of the sites are dead, or garish, or both. I'm not interested in the pixie-puke Win95-ish sites covered with fifty buttons and webrings and little else. Her journal, when I found it, was none of those things. Black and white. It would have been minimal in 1997. It feels even more so now. It's perfect.

  • My Musical Journey

    Forewarning: this will be a bit of a long one. So grab a drink, go pee, and get some headphones. This is my history as a musician.

    There'll be links to samples throughout. All of these are Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0. They're listed in the format [album] - [song] ([year]).

    I've written a few hundred songs in my life, easily, so I likely missed some things here. Oh well, it's long enough as it is ^_^

  • Academiology 0: On the willingness to know the value of university

    A significant part of my writing process involves not actually writing, but rather just allowing myself to be bored. When I do this, I find my mind starts racing, and I get all these ideas that can often be distilled into very terse one-liners. Whenever this happens, I put the respective one-liner in the notes app on my phone, and then one day, that one-liner becomes the title of an article I write.

• Health

  • Flossing Teeth Considered Harmful?

    I am not 100% convinced yet, but I think flossing teeth can cause more damage than good.

    While every dental heath professional will tell you to floss, if you think about it, there are problems.

    Getting rid of remaining food and bacterial accumulations forming on sugary residues on your teeth is a good thing. However, driving it around with a piece of string can just as easily shove it deeper under the gum and make matters worse. There is also a significant possibility of cutting with a bacterial-laden floss.

• Retro

  • 1971 Schwinn Varsity

    Last year I bought a 1971 Schwinn Varsity bicycle from my mechanic for 20 USD (143 CNY/1800 RUB). Schwinn seat, tires, original brake cables. That's why he hadn't cut it up or gotten rid of it. It was a bike in search of...me.

    I'm not much of a mechanic. If I could easily pay or trade for all the fixing on my bicycles, car, motorcycle, old computers, I would. But having a fleet of old stuff you want to actually use means learning to care for it yourself to some degree.

• Technology and Free Software

  • FLENG as a "Plan B"

    I like KL1, but KLIC is taking a long time to be put on a software forge; and a lot of the things I think would be a good idea (e.g. kqueue, pthreads) are already in FLENG. So I've been taking a look at the latter again.

  • Oh Boy, it's Steam Next Fest - Day 1

    It's that time again, Steam Next Fest! Where a good chunk of games put out playable demo for the masses to try out and see if it's something they want to wishlist and wait ever-so-patiently for it to come out!

    Last Next Fest I paid attention to, Enshrouded really took the audience by storm. I say, it worked pretty well, since I ended up getting the game on Early Access release. I'm also waiting on Deep Rock Galactic: Survivor. That one had their demo out about a week early, but it was available until a good couple weeks after Next Fest was over. That's another one I'm waiting on.

    After trying a few demos on the PC and wished I had played it on my Deck, I've finally got it in my head to install a bunch of them on the Deck. I'm going to try and put up a batch of quick impression reviews each day for this week on the different demos I'm trying. Keep in mind that, unless I say so, these were tested on the Steam Deck.

  • Letter Score

    Or how much "weight" does a character in a font have? The stupid, brute force way follows: write each letter to a (cleared) image, and count how many pixels have values. Higher count, higher scoring letter. (ASCII only, Unicode will obviously take longer and may have more bounding box issues.) The count is font specific: a bold font will score different from regular or italic, and some fonts are more chonky than others. The following score list is for a "Doves Type" TTF that I got somewhere on the Internet some time ago.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Why all those protocols

      This post was made because someone on BBS made clear that he's done with gopher since gemini exists. Here is my answer to that.

    • Okay! I'll answer your question, LinkedIn. Also, Orange Site! Orange Site! Orange Site!

      Today's “you're one of the few experts invited to add this collaborative article” from {^https://www.linked.com/ LinkedIn [1] is “How do you become a senior application developer?” My answer? Stay in a programming job for three years. Boom! You're a senior application developer. I know, I know, that's a big ask these days when everybody is jumping ship every two years. But hey, if you want to be a “senior application developer,” you got to make sacrifices.

    • So you want to amplify my SEO

      Since you neglected to include a link (in an email sent as HTML (HyperText Markup Language) no less!) it's hard for me judge the value Next Publisher will provide for my site, so I'm going to have to adjust my prices accordingly. My fee for both guest posts and link insertions is $10,000 (US (United States)) per. So if a guest post also includes a link insertion, that would be a total of $20,000 (US). If I'm going to be [DELETED-whoring-DELETED] selling out what Google Page Rank [1] I have, it's going to cost.

    • Solo Campaign 1 - Some preliminary thoughts

      I'm tired of constantly thinking, "Oh, I'll start a solo TTRPG campaign and write about it in this gemlog." All I did was think, think, think. Time to do!

      Of course, this prelim post will be more stream of consciousness. There isn't going to be any meaningful structure, I don't think. Mostly because I'm just jumping into it head first. But, I'll put each section into its own section so it won't be a huge wall of text that jumps all over the place. There will be markers!

  • Programming

    • agrajag dev log 5

      did your boy write the most half-assed, mostly-broken CSS implementation the world has ever seen? yes. does it make it possible to do offline conversion from certain epubs to edf?