Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Teen Cabbage in... Arrival at New Utah

    "Any hearsay on the Wizier's fifty-five word parables?" bemoans Teen Cabbage, flinging his crab knife into the World-River, which plunges into vast depths of inky blackness.

    "About as interesting as lime juice is effective at killing parasites in seafood..." replies the clergyman steering their Gondola-Rat through Utah's Flap Canals.

  • Teen Cabbage in... the Love Oasis

    Teen Cabbage approached the Wizier's dancing girls, a spasm in his throat caused him to stutter out, "I would like to buy one of you the customary Hickory Farms Summer Sausage Gift Basket."

    "Congratulations, I am now your wife," one cooed, furrowing her eyebrows until they relocated under her nose, as if a pencil-thin mustache.

  • In the corridor

    I'm a bit uncomfortable and afraid of sending this out, but bottling things up does not appear to be a great strategy. And given how universal human experiences tend to be, maybe someone will feel less alone by reading this.

    I'm between two jobs. Things are signed on both sides, with only minor wrinkles to iron out. The old job owed me a significant amount of holidays, which I am now taking. It feels weird right now, to be this free with my time. The only constraints are friends and family inviting me to visit. Life could be much, much worse. But it does feels strange.

    A little while ago, I was on another continent, considering signing for more time there. Life happened in a surprising, unpleasant way, as it sometimes does. I had my first "people call an ambulance and send you to the hospital"-level, panic attack. It was not an enjoyable experience. I really thought I was a goner.

  • Thursday

    Home again, naturally.

    Just blew a bunch of time adding a doorknob and deadbolt to a storm door. Since they came separately, of *course* neither had the right set of screws to make it work, and of *course* I threw a way a bunch of knobs/deadbolts a couple months ago because I'd been carting them around for half of forever, some with missing keys, but I couldn't see ever using them again being banged up, with paint on some, etc.

    But I'm certain I could have found the perfect screw needed in one of them. Ugh.

    Then, of *course* the dead bolt doesn't align wells with the openings for it in the storm door frame. It's close. But the only way I can lock it is while leaning into the door from the outside while turning the key. Can't do that from inside, which is from where we'd most want to lock the deadbolt.

  • Roofs on time

    In the late 20th century, people were optimistic about the future. “2000” sounded magical. People made science fiction and music videos with computer graphics. Now, in the early 21st, we are afraid of the future and miss the 1990s.

    The year 2000 was like a roof. It created a box to be filled. Now, it is at most some kind of ground leaving our feet as we propel ourselves away, riding a frontier into the scary unknown.

  • Teachers Should Grade Work Less

    I always fought against management demands for grades on most pieces of work. Apart from it being an onerous task, I could never convince myself that grading an individual task was valid — we had exam board grade descriptors, but they were holistic, judging a breadth of abilities across the whole course. If I set homework that most could complete successfully, how is that gradable? I switched early on to recording 'completion' grades, so I had evidence about task difficulty and student motivation. Class tests got a simple score. Grading happened with summative exams, usually.

  • BENEATH THE COTTONWOOD 2

    R.W. Emerson exposed a tender core of my being with these words. All of the greatest walks in my life were either in total solitude, or they were in the company of those I felt enough trust towards to be able to become that eye-ball with, and in my life I've only ever accompanied one man with such a perspective. It is perhaps one of the rarest and yet most valuable insights to be able to shed one's ego and to disappear into the environment one occupies. It is the sensation of becoming a dumb animal again, to put down language, and society, and rules of engagement; it is to take out the middleman of process that creates a barrier between the soul (if such a thing exists) and reality. We all have biases, and most of us are not blessed enough to be aware of them, and thus they mutely meddle and influence our thoughts, emotions, desires; it is as if we are all mere puppets, slaves to our so-called "natures" (the culmination of experience and genetics that creates the civil man) and incapable of connecting with the heart of our true NATURE (the animalistic core of our being).

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ACETHNG Wordo: JADED

  • Too much reincorporation can be a good thing

    One of the worst parts of Shrinking is also the best. In writing, there is “reincorporation” which just means “reuse existing characters, items, or locations” (as opposed to bringing in new stuff). Both reincorporation and bringing in new things have their upsides.

    Shrinking really overdoes reincorporation to a ridiculous degree so much that it constantly reminds me that this is fiction, this is a show. Yeah, yeah, I can handle laser swords and aliens without being jarred out of a watching experience but the constant crisscrossing “wait, those two know each other, too?” of Shrinking is out of this world. Friends and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia also has a very cross-connected core cast of characters but in a way that was foundationally set up to be one. In Shrinking, it’s always so weird and fluky and farfetched.

  • 14 November 2024

    The flu seems finally on its way out... though i have still a nasty cough that is seemingly trying to break my ribs sometimes. After spending the last week at home on sick leave this week really drags on, i know i have enough to do (and some quiet interesting things too), but my motivation to get things done is totally absent, perhaps due to a combination of that god damn flu and the dark, grey november weather we have now that is so typical for the part of germany where i live.

    A positive thing: In october i installed a small solar system to aid with keeping the electric bill down and even in this heavily overcast weather its producing (a little bit) of power. Quiet amazing.

• Politics and World Events

  • Infocalypse Won

    The propaganda / misinfo flow is so strong these days. That’s my election analysis: that it’s the GQP, that it’s the infocalypse.

    Most people who show up with an election analysis get mad at all the other people’s way wacker takes and I’m no exception but here we are.

  • On Joining Orisha Religion

    Speaking as an initiate of orisha (ordained as a priest of Ogún in La Regla de Ocha Lucumí in 2016), if you're interested in worshipping orisha properly, find a godparent who has license and lineage and get their guidance, help, and direction to do so. Unlike reconstructed paganisms like Nordic, Greek, or Roman practices, orisha religions (Lucumí/Santería, Candomblé, etc.) are living, continuously-maintained religions that operate on pacts propagated by initiation. If you're operating outside a pact, you can easily run afoul of orisha. Don't do it. Instead, find a godparent of good repute and good training (go to a local botanica, join non-initiate ATR groups, ask around, etc.) who can guide you, teach you, direct you, and do readings for you to see what you need to do and how you can best go about it. This isn't something to read from a book and try on your own.

• Technology and Free Software

  • [Updated] Mobile phones I have been using overtime

    The internet speed has increased a lot since 2000. Pixel size, colors and camera have also improved a lot, since 2011 I don't feel the need to buy new phones. Mobile internet was already good enough for me with 3G.

  • Multiple Monitorings

    Someone asked what one remote site should be pinged to verify that your host has internet access. One response to this is, why only one site? And another is, why only ping?

    Pinging only one site may yield a false positive if only that remote site is down. Some may argue that 9.9.9.9 or whatever hardly ever go down, except when their firewall hates you, or your ISP's firewall hates you, or your own badhost blacklist firewall thing hates the remote site you were monitoring. Maybe that corporation's IP address got added to a blacklist table, or maybe they put you into their blacklist table, or maybe a third-party security service they lean on now flags your address as something to blacklist. Or that highly reliable remote site could have a major outage, and due to your tight coupling of their availability to the question of whether you have internet access your internet access is also reported as down, much as a sailor is dragged down for the crime of being too close to a sinking ship. Pinging two (or more) remote systems gives more information, and different debugging options: is nothing reported down? Only one of N? All of N? The value for N need not be very large, on the assumption that multiple different redundant systems are unlikely to all fail at the same time, and that there are not many such systems available to ping. With only one remote system down it could be a problem with that site, or the route for that site; with several (or all!) remote systems down it is more likely to be a problem with your ISP, the uplink, your local firewall. This may save time on debugging by better directing the on-call to where the problem actually is, and "everything is down!" is a better story than "uh, I don't know" when someone asks what is wrong.†

  • Programming

    • How Much Faster is Passing-by-Pointer in Go?

      In every Go project of significant size there comes a point where someone, in the name of performance, goes around the codebase changing functions to accept and return structs as pointers rather than values.