Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Posting From a Park (ROOPHLOCH 2024 entry)

    Oh ho ho, here I am finally browsing gemini and writing an entry for ROOPHLOCH 2024 on my ereader. I live near a huge beautiful urban park with acres of nooks and crannies and I’m esconsed in a particularly gorgeous forest canopy area with mugwort and many other reeds all around. The last time I sat in the park reading, only two days ago at this time, I was quite cold, and buffeted by soca music. Today i hear airplane overhead and a distant saxophone player murmuring an improvised jazz blues from among the trees. This is my favorite time outdoors, dinner time, when all families and sensible people have cleared out and I’m left to my own devices.

  • Wolf in the Wood's Gemlog: - Lingering Lies and Lazy Half Truths We Tell Ourselves

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACEINTX Wordo: QUOIT

  • Do you know the tune Ten Little Indians?

    About ten years ago in chapel at BJU, Dr. Greg Mazak was preaching one day on the importance of being kind to each other. It seems there was a concern among the faculty about a spirit of meanness pervading the campus.

    I don't actually remember much, if anything about his sermon. What I remember is when he was nearly at the end, he turned to the pianist and said, "Do you happen to know the tune 'Ten Little Indians'?" The pianist, an accomplished grad student with a degree in piano performance, appeared bemused but gave the affirmative. "Could you play it?" Obligingly, the pianist tapped out the tune. Dr. Mazak then explained to the crowd of 4000+ students and faculty that although he was not a good singer, he wanted to teach us a simple song to help us remember to be kind. Then, while the pianist accompanied him on the piano he sang,

  • pied piper and backwoods ponderance

    I signed in to tobaccopipes.com, first time in a long while. I put John Cotton Double Pressed Kentucky and Lane Very Cherry tobacco in the cart. 2 oz of each. I will mix them. The nicotine and boldness of dp Kentucky is amazing, the aroma of the cherry is heavenly. Best smoke I ever had was about this time, in 2019, just after the flood of 2019 (in STL, elsewhere) had began to subside in the Mississippi (River). The air lowered in humidity, the breeze picked up, and I smoked a Lovat pipe with this blend for over an hour on my balcony. I remember it being a turning point in mood/weather.

  • rays of golden Wednesday see coffee drank creekside

    the warm glow was misleading, as it was very cold (54F)

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Well, That Was Unfortunately Prescient

      A few days ago I posted a goodbye to cohost (which I'll fully admit was written a while earlier, but which got bumped forward in my gemlog queue). I'd been done with it for a while, and have always maintained a bit of a love/hate relationship with that site: you can write, not just post! But it's hard to find anything. But you can search via hashtags! But that only works if people use them. The frustrating, weird, wonderful site will go read-only at the start of October, and shut down at the end of the year. cohost is done.

    • Small Web Experiences...

      Sometimes algorithms can be a good thing. As a part time "musician" (and I use the term loosely), Youtube saw me seeking out all sorts of content about vaporwave recently, when it suddenly thought, "hey, let's throw a video about the indie web at this guy!" I forget who it was, but they focused largely on Neocities pages, and why we needed more personal web pages in our lives. Now I'm not going to lie about my age... I remember freaking WOODEN ABACUSES in elementary school. But I also remember Geocities and all that went with what was bascially a decentralized web experience about 25 years ago. It was good fun. Except for goggle dot com. THAT was a nightmare!!