Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sunday

    The characteristic of a modern liberal that jumps out at me the most is an inability to take a joke.

  • Pu-erh

    One problem here is that puerh is the name of a town near where the pu'er tea came from, sort of like calling most any wine a Bordeaux because that's where your wine is traded from. So there are p‘u-êrh that do not smell like moldy leaves were raked off the floor of a bog-infested barn (yum!) as the leaves instead have had an oolong treatment, or whatever.

  • So much happening

    I am still waiting to go ice skating. It is the only thing I feel like I can control at this moment in time.

    We are in the process of fleeing the country. Finding ways to 'get out of dodge' at the drop of a hat if need be, because fuck a world that we cannot go piss without risking our own safety.

  • week 45 - incremental progress

    many little physical ailments adding up to a general meh and limited hand use, so a short one today: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • The Hermetic Texts Aren't Encoded or Encrypted

    No, they're not. Anyone who says things like this is trying to cover for their own lack of ability to actually read the texts, or trying to mask their own ignorance and lack of experience with cliché esoteric paranoia. These texts are hard to read, to be sure! But they're dense and difficult to read because their subject matter itself is dense and difficult to understand, much less communicate. We're dealing with the highest and most subtle mysteries of the Creator and the Creation, after all! They're also written in a pretty common literary style found in a lot of Hellenistic philosophical and mystical writings of its time. In that, they're nothing special, but that very same style can be jarring for a lot of people nowadays to approach without getting used to it. This is made all the more more complicated, sure, by longstanding textual traditions that do expect to see hidden layers of meaning in texts like the Qur'ān or the Bible beyond what is written, but beyond the philogical evidence to show that that was generally never the case, methods to uncover such hidden levels of meaning are often dependent entirely on a number of hermeneutic approaches that border on the culturally-specific if not entirely arbitrary; none of these methods are really appropriate for the Hermetic texts, not least because we shouldn't even consider them as anything close to some sort of divinely-immutable eternally-perfect gospel to begin with.

  • Writing Dense Assembly For Fun

    I've found that one of my favorite things ever while programming is: writing assembly, but no more than a few hundred instructions, and each one is ruthlessly optimized and packed to execute in as few cycles as possible (with an assembly language I like, and with a deterministic CPU that's possible to actually reason about). I also quite enjoy when it's exploiting obscure hardware quirks or doing something fun like self-modification.

    Makes me almost want to try writing an Atari 2600 game, but I am not a fan of 6502 assembly… I do have a ton of tech demos for the Game Boy Advance written in assembly that don't do anything particularly technically impressive, but they were made just because I just need to get that itch out and I really like ARM32 assembly. Although I do justify it with “oh, I can keep them around to use in case I ever do make a game” (as if lol).

  • More info on VF-1 updates

    In my recent post updating progress toward my various "Operation Blazing Star" goals, I mentioned that I had made a new VF-1 release (the first in over five years!!!). This post is to say a little more about that and the planned 1.0.0 release in the nearish future.

    It's been a long time since anybody wrote me an email about VF-1, or since I saw anybody mention it in their phlog. Which is perhaps not surprising, given that there hasn't been in a release in such a long time. But I remember fondly the days when it was newish, and this happened a lot then. I got really nice emails from people I'd never met before telling me how much they enjoyed using it, and it was very gratifying. I felt like VF-1 was a genuine success, that it was popular, that people liked it. I hope that's still true these days, that there exists a "VF-1 user community" not only in my head but also out there in the world. If there is, I hope this post reaches that community. If you think you can help make that happen by sharing the link via some channel, please do so.