Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AGIRYVT Wordo: FUNGI

  • Willow's HDR reviews

    Last month's winter storm in the Pacific Northwest was said to be one of the worst in recent history (although, the December 2009 snowstorm that shut down Portland for two weeks also comes to my mind). Many areas in the Greater Portland area served by Portland General Electric experienced a prolonged power outage that lasted for more than a week. Climate change seems to be creating events like this with an increased frequency (there was another big snowstorm in February 2021). With natural disasters like this, awareness of preparedness becomes a topic of popular conversation.

• Games

  • WotC vs Witches

    I’ve said this before but I really wish WotC woulda used the name “witch” not “warlock” for the class in both D&D and MtG, with a note saying that “some witches call themselves warlocks instead”. The 5e PHB in 2014 woulda been a perfect time for this change.

    Magic had two arguments for why they went with “warlock”. One, to match D&D. A good argument but only highlights what a mistake 3.5 made when they named their class. Second, to not offend real-world witches. An argument that becomes super bad given that they’re still using “witch” in card titles. “Super creepy evil witch hag”. Class: Warlock.🤦🏻‍

• Technology and Free Software

  • this post was powered by scenecore.

    in recent years I've found myself with an increasing hatred for the modern tech industry. I became fascinated by Linux and then began to realize just how fucked our reliance on big companies was. I've always been somewhat of a going-against-the-grain kinda girl (I actively dislike popular music. I stick to indie games mostly.) but with tech, it really goes up to another level. I began taking active strides to distance myself from companies like Google and Windows, doing things like moving to Linux and trying various browsers before settling on and forever rooting for Firefox. okay, I'm not fully on Linux. sue me. my daily driver is Windows, at least until I can make the needed fixes and upgrades to this PC and then I might move it to Linux. the main limiting factor is gaming, which I do a LOT of (no one needs to know the ungodly thousands of hours I have in cookie clicker).

  • More Random Things

    The Common LISP random number generator, at least in SBCL, is prone to spam perhaps excessive amounts of state. This state is probably good if you're doing long-running simulations where the RNG repeating too soon would be bad, but for other use cases, well, no news is good news.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The Stack

      When I started this capsule, I was really unsure if I would ever share it publicly. As I mentioned in my first post[1], I needed a place to write things where my actual name wasn't attached. Yes, I could keep a journal on paper, or in any number of offline electronic formats, but I really enjoyed what I was reading in other capsules, and felt like I wanted to potentially contribute here. By standing up a capsule, I got to play with something new, and if someday I wanted to share, I could.

      [...]

      I run a static site generator and my site is strictly .html .css. and .png/.jpg's, so wasn't worried about them finding anything to exploit. But it definitely put me in a "screw the web, and everyone abusing it" mood. And this made me submit my capsule to different Gemini directories. I'd rather share with actual people here than with bots there.

    • Am I Going to Need to Delete My Reddit Account, Too?

      Maybe it wasn't best to collapse every individual forum into a section of a single website.

      In the steady parade of depressing news, it's come to light that Reddit is planning to sell access to its user content for, what else, AI training. At least getting rid of my Reddit account will be easy: I used it heavily for a few years in the mid '10s, but it never had any kind of shine for me, any lustre. It was just where my community was, after people migrated away from the small collection of individual forums that served as a discussion place before.

      A few days ago, driving across the province with my partner, we got talking about the differences how we use the internet. I'm more active, more of a creator; she's a lurker, never posting, never making an account unless absolutely forced to (the old online gf/extremely offline bf meme in reverse). And we got talking about Reddit, and how different I find it from the forums I used to post on. The example I gave her was a forum for the sci-fi show Andromeda. Back in university, one of my offline friends had invited me there. Sure, why not? I didn't watch Andromeda, have never even really been into sci-fi, but who cares?