Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • YOU'RE SO IMPRESSIVE (poem)

    Hey boyfriend. There’s copper in the jargon

    of your back. There’s a swamp made from velvet. I’m talking

    about the clutches where your muscles divot, about whittling

    a tree trunk frosted over with mud… Or just imagining it:

    glass bodies wrestling impressions into the long grass.

  • CLORYUT Wordo: DEISM

  • Five Habits That Will Change The Way You Read Books

    What follows is some insights I stumbled across on YouTube by Thomas R. Howell. I will publish his thoughts here as a reference to both myself and those who also take something useful from these guiding principles.

  • [Old] Reasons to use a bicycle

    By using the power of your body, you will save money that would otherwise be spent on petrol.

  • To me, vultures are truly among the holiest of creatures, and one of the birds I love the most. Vultures purify the world, and in so doing maintain its beauty

    To me, vultures are truly among the holiest of creatures, and one of the birds I love the most. Vultures purify the world, and in so doing maintain its beauty; how could such a creature itself not be beautiful? They take away debris and decay, and are among the few birds to have the strength to truly soar to unimaginable heights. The vulture, to me, is a symbol of sacrifice, the very mechanism by which the world sacrifices to itself in an ongoing and neverending cycle of generation and formation, and which corruption and dissolution are critical aspects that are inseparable from life itself.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Power to Appoint Managing Agents

    One of the key issues in UK leasehold and fleecehold is the control and appointment of managing agents for blocks of flats.

    If a managing agent is underperforming or overcharging, there is generally no effective remedy other than appointing a replacement managing agent. However, the power to make such an appointment might not be held by those actually owning the flats and paying the service charge.

    Management of a building is a natural monopoly: you can't have multiple players with the authority to fix the roof or insure the building. The general solution is to establish a corporation whose sole remit is taking control of the building, and allowing the directors of this corporation to delegate day-to-day management to a specialist agent who might actually be managing many buildings up and down the country. The question then devolves into ensuring that those directors are adequately accountable to the relevant stakeholders, namely the owners of the flats who are paying the service charge.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Re: Permacomputing: Manjaro/i3 on an Asus Vivobook 2020

    Arch while a wonderful operating system, is just one step above Gentoo in complexity (haven't tried Gentoo for years, but it used to be a lot of compiling). It is bleeding edge and very cool, but that means lots of fixes and breakages on larger upgrades.

    Manjaro suffers from similar issues, in fact a lot of the derrivative Linux variants suffers from upgrade issues in my experience. This includes Linux distro's built on Ubuntu/Debian.