Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Post-Absurdism

    Last week while chatting with screwtape in Lambda Moo's sushi shop, he mentioned my poetry. He hinted that my recent life hardship was an ingredient to better poems.

    I then added that, of course in time of distress, there is more creativity and in time of war and suffering, artists also created new trend, new genres. The surrealists movement came to mind.

    It made me wonder what will emerge from our present crisis, and as things seems to be getting worst, what will be the role of the artists in this current collapse.

  • lingering backlog

    I have this backlog of writing that I should post, but that I also don't really like anymore.

    I sat here at the kitchen table this morning, inspired to write but ended up annoyed that I mostly had to edit previous writing filled with previously undigested emotions.

    Only a couple week left, until my ex leave the home, until I am all alone at home. Today is a good example, everyone is gone, I am home alone. But there is still this lingering wait, this discomfort.

  • bravo bravo

    I didn't know the slashes in a URL indicated that. I didn't know MOST of the info contained within this post. Now I do :)

  • too good to not spew

    I was mind-meandering, thinking to myself, and came across medicine, (big) pharma, disease, health, et al. And pondered how many cosmetic conditions there are out there. I don't mean dementia, or schizophrenia, or depression (which are always backed by chemical proof, physical "a thing is happening (in the brain) hence, here is the diagnosis") - I mean COSMETIC ailments, such as ADD, ADHD, schizo-effective (the "diet light" version of schizophrenia), things "diagnosed" via behavior/habits, rather than any type of "chemical reaction" PROOF of their existence.

  • Antiqvvs

    I've always loved archeology and when Time Team ended there was a bit of a cultural gap in my life. For a while I subscribed to Archeology Today, but I'm not sure I've got the time to properly read a magazine currently. I haven't even been to the British Museum in ages.

  • Amusing

    But ironically, the overshoot the other way is ignored and soon the question of which Defines the Structural will clearly have reversed. But that MUST not be given notice.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — AEGRSTZ Wordo: FLUSH

• Politics and World Events

  • Overgeneralization

    In his excellent book "The Unsettling of America", Wendell Berry notes that the kind of knowledge acquired through farming is not specialized, but it is specific. The farmer becomes intimately acquainted with his land: he recognizes the hills and troughs, is familiar with the soil, understands how water flows, realizes how nutrients disperse. The sum of this knowledge helps him accurately predict how his crops will grow and how best to care for his livestock.

    There are some general concepts that can be gleaned from this work, but Berry cautions that no generalized procedures will apply equally to all farmland, or even to any given two fields. Only direct, hands-on experience with the earth gives the kind of intuition needed to make full use of land's power.

• Games

  • The Fate RPG Is Still Worth Playing

    Fate Core is a tabletop roleplaying game first published by Evil Hat in 2013. Despite being over 10 years old, it remains one of my favorite RPG systems of all time. Fate offers me things that no other system does and I want to share what makes it so great.

    On of the most important things about Fate to me is that it uses toolkit-first design. Fate gives you some simple tools that you can use to create any idea you can imagine. There's no need to dig through thousands of pages across multiple books in hopes of finding a character build option that can be used to create the idea you have. It's a universal system, allowing you to play in any kind of setting, or even mix multiple settings together.

  • Gaming Corner!

    Although it's still not sure if the "Gaming Corner" I introduced in my previous post will really become a regular feature, I've taken a step in that direction by making a dedicated page for it, and I copied my Marmoreal Tomb unboxing and initial impressions, and my Dragon's Crown review, to that page. The former is pretty much verbatim from the original gempost; the latter got some light edits and I added a bunch of screenshots, so feel free to check it out if you're interested in seeing what the game looks like: [...]

  • Programming

    • Petri Nets Log #010

      It's been hard for me concentrate on anything lately, both at and out of work. Yesterday I went back to pnee to try and implement the pnee:over_all() strategy. It seemed like an insurmountable obstacle, a lot more complicated than anticipated, because of the used data structures, because consumed tokens must be removed from their places, because non-consumed tokens must be kept in their original order, but especially because I couldn't concentrate on it and Just Get That Shit Done. I took a break for dinner and afterwards, with a lighter head, I came up with a plan. It's still a bit complicated, the implementation will be even more so, but I think it'll work!

      [...]

      After writing the roughest of sketches yesterday, and describing it in words today, I'm convinced it works. It's just a dumb backtracking algorithm after all. The complication stems from the data structures (which are generic, not lists), and the requirements.