Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABELUSQ Wordo: JAKES

  • Tár thoughts (with spoilers)

    In the theater, knowing nothing about it (I hadn’t even seen the poster, a friend wanted to see the movie and I sometimes enjoy experiencing books from page one and films from frame one, without any posters, covers, or back-of-book blurbs), I loved it. I thought it was so good.

    Coming home from the theatre and finding out that there were many rightwingers and anti-SJW folks who loved the movie, that didn’t bother me since I thought they were misunderstanding the movie. Like the scene where she’s clashing with a class of students who are on the progressive side… they’re caricatures, sure, but she isn’t coming across as “owning” them, she’s depicted as completely out of touch, cruel, out to sea, lost. The rest of the movie makes that clear. Again, those students’ perspectives aren’t necessarily 100% endorsed but the movie takes her side much less than it takes their side. That was my thinking.

  • Are traps great?

    The upside is... They add a rules consequence to diegetic engagement. Those first couple of rooms in B4 The Lost City (B4 is a great starter module for new DMs and new players) are a master class in teaching how to run the game as a DM and how to approach and describe your movements, exploration, and actions as a player. Especially if you do it “old school primer” style and not “lol you failed your automatic trap detection roll, you’re dead”. If you really do navigate the rooms carefully.

  • Halfway to Mars - I add a history section to /about/.

    When I started this capsule in late 2020, I thought to myself “How can I make it so the work of writing for the internet is as pleasant as possible? How can I keep the friction of writing as low as possible?”

    I settled on having no build step for the site itself, like I would with Hugo (a popular and very good static-site generator). I would just write, and then reupload everything when I wanted to publish or update something.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Receipts

    When you check books out at my local libraries, you have the option of getting a printed receipt with the titles and their due dates. I like to save these. I keep them in the pages of my journal. I've also started doing this with movie ticket stubs and museum passes and whatnot. It's a poor mans scrapbook. I like these physical reminders of what I'm reading, where I'm going, what I'm seeing in addition to my written account.

  • Tab Cleaning

    I have a whole lot of tabs open of blog posts I've been reading. I need to clear them out, and I thought I'd take the opportunity to give a sample of my reading. Also, there is something satisfying about posting links, of the feeling of weaving my little site into the network of the internet.