Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Things about my name

    I think I've been a Willow for about eight years now, and near exclusively so for roughly six. I thought about just going to the courthouse and make it official, since it's a very easy and straight-forward process where I live.

    But I decided against it for a rather practical and a thoroughly modern reason: In today's over-connected and over-shared world it is an advantage not to broadcast one's legal names everywhere. The sad state of affairs now is that identity thieves, scammers, and doxxers are plentiful. It's better if strangers online don't know your name if that can be tied to your financial and legal data with ease.

  • Sixth Sunday After Pentecost (G)

  • Once I wasn’t here and then I suddenly appeared and now I seem to be at home in earth and air

    The first statement is an overreach. A li’l bit of pain can be a good thing. Go see the original Inside Out. We humans use pain or pleasure to nagivate reality. If everything was pleasure we wouldn’t be able to do that. It’d be like trying to touch type of every key felt like an f. We’d just be rolling around like a giggling mass of broken bones. (Arguably that's what we're already doing according to Ligotti.)

  • The Glaks came back

    We chased the Glaks out beyond the farms with torches and rhubarb leaves three years ago before Jane left for new pastures, and we thought that was that. Now they've been spotted uprooting fence posts, filling in wells and displacing brick walls. It's only a matter of time before they start chewing toes again.

  • Chokecherry Leaf

    Normally I try not to focus on non-native plants, figuring that I have an uncommon opportunity here in Fairbanks to study native Alaska flora. But I have been especially interested in leaf structure lately, and the chokecherry leaves out in my yard have some compelling features. I started out with this sketch:

  • hello, midnight

    What a cozy little pub. Hey ~bartender, a whiskey - neat - if you please? :)

    I am glad I found this spot, this comfortable corner of the interwebs, what appears to be something made for me and those like me, those who eschew the bloated, ad-ridden websites and "social" networks of today, algorithm-driven feeds of those looking for that quick dopamine hit of attention, just one more "like!" Just one more virtual thumbs-up. Just one more meaningless interaction. Let me post just one more selfie - someone will notice me.

    No, I have longed for the internet days of yore for a long time. All the way from bulletin-board systems, to personal webpages, forums, and IRC - all where anonymous users talked about their interests and obsessions until they finally checked their clock and realized "Oops, I've stayed up till 6am again!"

• Technology and Free Software

  • Agile Manifesto

    • The Agile Manifesto: Is it sacred?

      In repressive countries, you get used to seeing people claim something and then cite a sacred person or book to support their claim. The other party can argue that the sacred source has a different meaning than what the first person had in mind (long live hermeneutics!), but they can never question the sacred source itself. For your information, questioning those sources is punishable by DEATH in some countries right now!

      [...]

      In repressive countries, you get used to seeing people claim something and then cite a sacred person or book to support their claim. The other party can argue that the sacred source has a different meaning than what the first person had in mind (long live hermeneutics!), but they can never question the sacred source itself. For your information, questioning those sources is punishable by DEATH in some countries right now!