Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Underclock thoughts

    You roll an exploding d6 and subtract it from 20 and something happens when you hit zero (and right away I wanna change it to you add up until you reach twenty. I am that much worse at subtraction than addition).

  • From the Ashes

  • The perfect storm

    Ever since 2020 started it has been ever more clear that this is going to be a hell of a decade. Four years in and we're already becoming quite comfortable with a world in absolute chaos. Old farts like to say that this is the "glass generation" (or something like that idk), but I think we're getting pretty good at facing wave after wave of absolutely batshit events. There's a global market collapse looming around the corner? Well, bring it fucking on, what else is there? The threat of a third world war? Ecological collapse? A new pandemic!? We laugh in the face of everything they're throwing at us, the absolute deranged madmen. Who was it that gave them the reins of the world anyway? A looney shot the Trump (probably at the orders of someone in the military-industrial complex tbh) and Biden dies, isn't it ironic? I would have liked him to live a little longer, to really soak himself in the humilliation of having lost the race before it even started, not just that but he successfully managed to take the whole empire down with him! Oh wait, he's not dead yet? He's dead to me lol!

  • fast playlist (eclectic)

• Technology and Free Software

  • More working frustrations

    The one thing I've always been sure of in my working life is that I never want to be a manager. Specifically, I never want to be responsible for people or workloads in general. I just want to be a code monkey who fixes problems and finds efficiency saves.

    There is a problem with this, however. When you're at the bottom of the chain, you find yourself with no real say in how to manage your workload. I'm in the fortunate position of being allowed to prioritize my own work, which is much better than I'm used to, but I still find myself having to really bully people into raising work to me in a sensible way.

  • Pocket Reform

    I got my MNT Pocket Reform miniature laptop! I'm hoping that this will be my new travel laptop as the Purism laptop I got back in 2017 has a broken hinge. The two halves are attached to each other using two super strong hinges. The hinges are so strong, in fact, that one of them ripped its screws out of the plastic. So now the screen is held up by just one super strong hinge and don't really want to open or close it all that often for fear of breaking it.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FSMOPRI Wordo: SITED

  • His Majesty the Worm, zeroeth (before first) impressions

    As some of y’all remember I had never heard of His Majesty the Worm until a few weeks ago. I’ve been hyped for it since it looked like a game tailor made for how I wanna play.

  • Book Report 2: Dark Wire, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and More Bobiverse

    This is the first piece of nonfiction I’ve read since I started reading again. I enjoyed it quite a bit but I’m not too surprised.

    A few years back the FBI revealed that they had been behind an encrypted phone being sold to criminals called Anom. This wasn’t a matter of them compromising an existing encrypted phone company, the company’s phones were backdoored from the very beginning and it ended in the largest coordinated criminal takedown operation in history.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I'm going to start microblogging

      I'm pretty bad at social media in general, mostly because I just don't care about it. I'd much rather just write blog posts. However, a proper blog post requires a lot of time and thought, and sometimes I just want to jot down some thoughts.

    • New Year's Resolution

      I resolved to end 2024 the same way I started 2004: with no Facebook profile. I wanted to do this long ago, but it's only in recent times that the platform has crumbled to the point where I no longer feel like the people who've yet to escape Zuckerberg's grasp can meaningfully "hold me hostage", to borrow a phrasing from Cory Doctorow.

  • Programming

    • Isomorphic hangup

      When I hack games I’ve got such a hangup to approximately match up with the same end results as the rule I’m hacking, just with a different interface. Like how I immediately wanted to hack the underclock to add up to 20 (just like a doomsday clock gets closer to midnight) rather than subtract. Same way I count monster HP up from zero to their death threshold. That doesn’t change any outcomes, just how we do it.

    • Hooks are great

      Modules with prewritten hooks are incredibly useful for me when DMing a larger sandbox campaign. The more we’ve play, the more that’s become evident.