Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Roller derby

    Yesterday some friends of ours had to cancel a planned get-together due to illness, and so with our suddenly and unexpectedly open schedule we went to see a nearby roller derby game, our first one ever. We had serendipitously learned that it was happening earlier in the week and had been disappointed to realise that it clashed with our pre-existing plans, so when the opportunity presented itself to go after all, we seized it. We went in not really knowing what to expect, only roughly familiarising ourselves with the rules the night before, and ended up having a really good time. The sport is not huge here, the league is small and games in our home town seem to happen pretty infrequently, but we'll definitely try to attend future ones.

  • Re: Night trains of Europe 🚆

    I recently went to Edinburgh by the Caledonian Sleeper¹. I mostly did it because it seemed like fun to go to bed in England and wake up in Scotland. But there's a bunch of advantages over flying or driving.

  • week 43 - autumn routines

    i'm looking forward to something new and different. perhaps - finally - an attempt at playing tangled blessings? things will get a bit looser once peachtober ends. and i've loosened up my language learning schedule a bit as well. but it is paying off, i had a little exchange with a neighbor this week, it was nice! even so, alongside regular responsibilities i feel a bit cramped re: what activities i fill my time with. i like most of them but many feel like a chore now. not sure where to find the space for a sense of play.

  • Using and Overusing Incense

    Something that I realized only when looking through the Greek Magical Papyri regarding incense is that incense isn't just burned willy-nilly, and there's no general prayers for incense. Incense (when and where it appears, which was not often at all) was almost always an offering—a sacrifice. That got me thinking: despite what many people are used to, we don't actually need to burn incense for everything we do in a spiritual, religious, mystic, or esoteric context. Incense is more than just something we use to set the mood, and we should all remember "waste not, want not", especially in an age where some plants and materials get harder and harder, rarer and rarer to cultivate, propagate, or harvest from. Many of us are so spoiled nowadays by having so many resins, plants, and the like so cheaply and freely available to us when they were in older times gifts for kings and magnates, tribute given to rulers, and sacrifices for the gods that most people would never just have lying around in their homes. Besides, the way the planet is going and how conspicuous consumption is going to be the death of us all, we're putting ourselves in jeopardy of literally running out of these because the supply can't keep up with the demand; frankincense, for instance, may well go extinct in the coming century, and palo santo, agarwood, and white sage are at severe ongoing risk of overharvesting.

  • Why I prefer injury to disease

    So you know, I've been looking at the world through a screen, but yesterday I smoked a bit of weed, after god knows how long, and went to my favorite place for that, where I can see the distance and feel more or less... um, connected, with reality. Or is it the weed?

  • Music log

    On Saturday, I invited a friend over. She had a little go at my bass guitar, though she had no idea what to do with it. I suggested we could just play whatever jingles back and forth, see what would happen. We did that, a little bit, but she just felt like she was at a loss with an unfamiliar instrument. I hope she gains a bit of confidence in doing little silly things like that, it could become something very fun one day.

    Today, I did some of my homework. I signed up for some classes, and actually doing what homework I get from there is surprisingly fun. My mind is still tainted by the homework of all my years in school, that it is a burden. But this is what I want to learn, not what I have to learn, I just need to overcome the barrier of actually getting around to doing it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Upgrading GoToSocial from 16.0 to 17.1

    Here's something to watch out for, if you're like me: Disable all the infrastructure that watches over your processes. In my case, the problem was Monit. It checks the website every five minutes and if it fails to connect for three times in a row it restarts the server, breaking the migration. 😭

  • Game of trees

    The OpenBSD developers are somewhat notorious for using CVS. No, US readers, that's not their choice of drugstore, it's their choice of source and revision control system.

    [...]

    Well, like many things in the OpenBSD world, it's a choice that seems to be based on the maxim "If its not broke, don't fix it". That sort of stubborn resistance to change for changes sake is a hallmark of what makes OpenBSD great. The developers care not a jot for fashion, they care that the system works, that it works reliably, in predictable ways and it does so with the maximum degree of security.