Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • week 37 recap

    well. i had a few cozy lazy pajama days this week and it's wild how little i remember when i don't write anything down for the day. i don't know, is that hard mode, or is that some sort of non-attachment blessing in disguise? for now i'd rather know/remember/be able to at least see what's been happening in my life.

  • Old Fanzines

    I had a bad bout of insomnia earlier this week, so bad in fact that I called in sick to work the following day, which is pretty unusual for me. I was, for some reason, completely wired all night, didn't sleep at all, such that I was a sorry wreck by morning.

    Since I couldn't nap all day (though I did my best), and couldn't trust myself even to answer email coherently, I had to find something unimportant yet at least somewhat engaging to pass the time. Casting about, I lit upon the stack of old sf fanzines I had come across earlier in the summer, while attempting to make smaller the heap of old crap we keep in a part of the house euphemistically referred to as "deep storage." Dating from the late 70s and early 80s, I'd been surprised to find that I still had them, that they had somehow escaped both an ill-conceived "put away childish things" purge in my mid-20s, and my parents' tendency to clean house at the slightest hint of clutter (they were the opposite of packrats, whatever that is).

  • Driver changes 🏎️

    Logan Sargeant didn't make it to the end of his second season. Besides being well behind Albon, his team mate, in qualifying and points scoring, there were too many crashes. Hard for Sargeant, but not a surprise. So in comes Franco Colapinto. His form from F3 and F2 suggested good-but-not-stellar. And yet he scored points in his second race, having out-qualified Albon. Good start.

  • Becoming Oppositionally Defiant in an Age of Compliance

  • leap again, Ribbit!

  • of wishing the wishful wishes on a thousand stars and galaxies

    trauma, screaming in my head, the fault finding of atrocious parents, the hurt, the stomach churning, chest tightening heartache of hate and abandonment, the listless desperation of needing NEEDING a thing, not related to addiction, but just needing THE thing, and none of that ever being there

    it was enough. The bottle would do it. A fifth of scotch, a fatal amount. I was ending it that night. I woke the next morning, not sick or hungover, disappointed. I put on my shoes and got another bottle, home and drank it fast.

  • On Jason Hickel's 'Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World'

    Finished listening to the audiobook a couple days ago. The first 90% or so was fantastic. Hickel explores a central paradox of the capitalist economy: dependent as it is on near-constant growth, it also depends on creating perennial scarcity in order to reproduce its own conditions. Put another way: universal freedom and abundance - the things we're often told will come about because of capitalism - are not in fact possible under capitalism, because in the absence of artificial scarcity, capitalism cannot function. On the other hand, he argues, a degrowth economy represents a path to human flourishing and abundance, while reducing our ecological impact to a level that doesn't exceed planetary boundaries - in other words, to a level that's within Earth's capability to absorb/regenerate.

  • First day at the Ashram

    Coming back to the ashram.

    I had an enjoyable time with my landlord. It was better this time, mostly due to me being more relaxed.

    I'm nervous around him, I feel he can decide tomorrow to kick me out of his home and I wouldn't have any recourse.

    Dady issues anyone? I am not sure why I feel like that. Right now, I am definitly more nervous than usual, but I'm generally on my guard, seeing what life is about to bring me.

  • Second day at the Ashram

    The jeep is in bad shape. It doesn't feel like it's the battery or the alternator. The starter is fine...

    I registered just now to BCAA to get my free towing, but all the garage shop are closed in the region. I need to wait until tomorrow to get it towed.

    What a weird reality. I guess I am done with the Jeep too, a new era. I was hoping it would last for a few more months. We'll see.

    In the process of qualifying everyone at the Ashram, I also look at women and rate their attractiveness. I guess we all do that, and I used to feel really shameful about it. Now I see it happen but I don't really care. I know too much that look only won't lead to a good relationship. One women catch my attention though, and I try to be not too obvious about looking at her. But she reminds me of something.

• Technology and Free Software

  • talking: coffee, killers, the courageous and the caterpillars

    I sat on my porch, cigarette in one hand, steaming coffee to my right. Chatting on IRC with a friend (and Pubber) who is in a war zone - merits and strengths of those who stay in that situation. Honesty and those who fight for what's good.

    I then see a caterpillar creeping up. A moth caterpillar, I photograph it and check a search engine, a lesser-seen moth caterpillar known best in the NE, usually Maine. They've "been documented" as far south as Mexico, this one on my porch in SE Missouri.

  • Zaurus on Internet

    I still have the SHARP Zaurus SL-C3200. A cute tiny clamshell PDA - actually a tiny Linux laptop. I have got it when it was already obsolete and used it little. It's the most expensive model with the biggest RAM (128 MB, I think), the bigges storage space (the 6GB HDD) and - of course - the biggest power consumption.

    It runs the "Cacko ROM" which is a Linux with the QTOPIA-based environment (so an old QT stuff). Runs well and it's reasonably fast. The swap space on the HDD can be configured and used. On the cost of battery life, of course.

    The GUI is thus not X11-based and the terminal emulator (with reasonable font size) is of non-standard size. And the CPU is an old ARM (from times when the ARM was not very common). That made porting of software a bit problematic. Thus some things exes, some not. For example, I never managed to get the GNU Octave to run here. And I have never found (nor sucessuffly compiled) the Lynx WWW browser.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Goodbye gem.billsmugs.com, hello rainywhile.net!

      Back in May, I posted a gemlog entry about how I was considering changing the domain name for this capsule (as well as my standard username more generally):

      What's in a Name? (Considering changing my online identity)

      I'm pleased to announce that the new (and hopefully final) domain for this capsule is 'rainywhile.net'!

      [....]

      I've always quite liked the rain. I don't enjoy getting caught out in it unexpectedly, or walking to/from work in it, but I love the cosy feeling of sitting in a warm house watching the rain pour down outside and I even like walking in the rain if I'm properly prepared for it.

    • The Pubnix Diaspora

      Gemini basically grew out of pubnixes.

      Pubnixes are "public access UNIX" systems, basically a shared Linux box. Some of them still survive from the 1980s and 1990s, and new ones are occasionally being founded. A well-known example is "SDF", which also concerns itself with the preservation of old computing hardware.

      Consistent with its preservation of old computer systems, SDF afforded a hosting platform for gopher holes, and it became a key node in the network of interlinked gopher content. But SDF also alienated some of its user base, and some of its members left and set up their own hosting systems, either individually, or in collectivities organised around new pubnixes, and even in confederation of pubnixes.

      This entailed a diaspora, propagating outwards from SDF, and I think the "cosmic voyage" stuff carries on this theme a little. In any event, the SDF diaspora brought Gopher and pubnixes with them on their journeys, and as I understand it, the initial discussions about Gemini arose among this community, once they had settled new pubnixes.