Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Just throw the coffee away

    It's been a weird day, the kind that feel like time just started slipping away from me.

    I woke up really early and had such trouble waking up that I ended up making a Way Too Strong pot of coffee and, being thoroughly grossed out by it but afraid of wasting things, ended up drinking it all so no one else had to have any.

  • Almost halfway through summer

    My summer break is definitely going a little too fast. A lot of people I know have been getting covid but our little trio of a household still hasn't gotten it once yet.

    It's spooky because I don't entirely know what we've been doing differently than other people. I know that we're just asininely restrictive about wearing masks indoors and not eating or drinking outside of our apartment unless it's outside but we're not the only ones who do that.

    In other random news, I'm supposed to be teaching high-school teachers about how to integrate coding-activities into their curriculum even if they're not cs teachers and it's going to involve showing interactive fiction in twine, art and physics simulation in p5 and things like that.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AGITNRK Wordo: GIVE

• Technology and Free Software

  • Well, that was a long time without an new entry to the phlog

    Well, that was a long time without an new entry to the phlog! So, why the long silence? Well, i was pretty much always occupied with some task that magically appears in your life if you are a dad, owner of an centuries old house and son of elderly parents... life never gets boring :-)

    On the computing side of things - when there was some time - i am now relying only on the Devterm for all daily needs in my private life only seldom using my work issued smartphone whe there is some website that i NEED to use and there is no other workaround. Life without an private smartphone has at least teached me one thing: Those devices really destroy your mind if you are not really, really careful... ist like a drug: Seldom, in small doses it may be nice, but too much to often destroys you.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Social media, sumo, and other topics

      Big shocker, right? Social media can be unhealthy.

      But the issue I'm having is that I'm having a bigger and bigger number of people watching my words on the fediverse, to the point that I'm feeling like I can't just share my random thoughts or just talk with people, which is largely what I've always liked social media for. I was on twitter in the flipping 00s, y'know, and I got used to it being a place where I could braindump half-formed thoughts without it being A Big Deal.

      But now for the, like, 5th day in a row a random thought I have to get out of my head starts getting 100-200 boosts and my notifications become trash.

    • Where to look online for RPG conversation?

      This is a reaction to a post by the same title on the Grumpy Wizard blog. I know where I get my conversation in any case. But all the points the Grumpy Wizard makes need to be considered. I don’t care about D&D and Pathfinder. I don’t even care for the old editions. If at all, I care about the problems you ran into and your solutions at the table: techniques, procedures, house rules.

  • Programming

    • Chapter Twelve: Scripting

      I think that Janet is a *very good* scripting language. Janet scripts have almost no startup time, PEGs make ad-hoc text-wrangling easy and fun, and you can even compile Janet scripts to native executables if you want to share them with people who have never even heard of Janet.

      But in this chapter we’re going to talk about a couple of libraries that transform Janet from a very good scripting language into *the best* scripting language.

    • Chapter Thirteen: Macro Mischief

      Except, well, that just made the first problem worse. Now not only is `i` off limits, but we’ve shadowed the word `list` as well.

      It’s not hard to fix this, but I think that the fix is pretty confusing the first time you see it.

      The trick is that, instead of using identifiers like `i` and `list`, we’re going to generate new, unique identifiers that won’t clash with any other symbols.