Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Changing Interests

    I've started writing this during the night of the 9th, but while waiting for my mate to finish cooking dinner, I've been watching some videos on YouTube. My usual go-tos have been retro tech and gaming, but as of late, I've branched out toward green living, permaculture, alternative housing, vanlife/van camping, and tonight, I'd remembered about a channel known as /Grandpa Kitchen/.

    /Grandpa Kitchen/ is a channel originally run by an individual and his community in India, who prepared and cooked meals for entire villages, and especially kids. He passed away about 5 years ago, and I'd mostly forgotten about the channel since I had moved accounts not long after that. However, I encountered another channel called /Village Cooking Channel/ that was quite similar, showing up in my recommendations, and it brought back memories.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CUKORTI Wordo: SANDY

  • death by words

    I was going to write this as a reply, but I figured it would be better to make it a post. I've been reading a number of books on: the "occult", magic, mysticism. And yet, none of it feels like it's getting me any closer to reality. Indeed, no amount of words, no matter how scientific, poetic, or inspired, manages to break through the barrier of language themselves, and get to reach, even remotely, at the true nature lying behind our cerebral interpretation of the reality, at our cultural construction by which we measure and judge and evaluate and by which we limit the whole of reality to a few moulds that conveniently fit together on more or less consistent, more or less elegant theories that fit our intellectual conceits. No amount of Qabalah, no Book of Changes ever does much more than further bury my experience of the world in an ever-growing pile of words and concepts.

  • Eyes

    I watched your eyes tonight. Watched you watch me. I saw the space between our faces, the full sense of your face in my periphery, your round features, and especially that blue ring. I always focus on one eye when I stare at you. Usually the other eye is somewhat buried by the pillow. I don't move my sight from your pupil. I take you all in as one point of reference, and with it I get a full sense of you, your emotions, your silent presence. We watch each other for minutes at a time. Three minutes can be counted down relatively quickly in the real world, but in our bedroom it feels like I'm trapped in this position until the sun dies or until the encroaching blackness of my fading peripheral vision finally closes over you completely and I'm left looking at a black as total as your pupil. How is it that pupils can be so wide and take in such light, how can they fill the iris like an ink blot and show no sign of the veins within? What can a simple black object such as that express? I saw a vulnerable child in your soft roundness—the curve of your nose, the plumpness of your lips and philtrum. I saw an old woman, the matriarch to be in the sun-damaged freckled skin of your cheeks, mottled tan and rosy peach atop cream. I saw your concern, your serenity, your intensity in the light furrow of your brow. And I saw the quiet, nervous joy of love in the steady metronome of your furtive glances across my face: left, right, left, mouth, right…

  • Saturday

    Well, the time to awaken my wife is upon me.

    It's been a fun three and a half hours pretending to be a certain personage in certain person-centric settings.

    Well... not pretending in a "trying to deceive" kind of way. I'm just saying I don't think the conviction of being a given person is anymore more than a set of thoughts congealing into the notion of a person in a mind - i.e. conceptuality - context.

    I'm sure you think you're real, because the "me" I think I am beliefs there are other I's that consider themselves real. Grant it, said "me" goes on to want to convince those other I's they've merely thought themselves into being... but that's just more of the madness on "my" end, probably.

    It's complicated.

    But then it isn't once letting it go, for surely the effort to conceive ineffable "as such" (i.e. as though objective) is a fools errand, hence why - and how -the fool called I/me magically seemingly appears!

  • Paycheck

    Today I read the short story "Paycheck", written in 1952 by Philip K. Dick [1].

    Although "Paycheck" is just a short story --or "novelette", as it is called on Wikipedia-- is it turned into a Hollywood science fiction action movie, also called "Paycheck" [2].

    Several works by Philip K. Dick have of course been turned into a Hollywood action movie. Some of these works I have read once or several times, like "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" [3], first somewhere in the seventies, and a few times after that, while some other works I haven't read (yet).

  • ALLEN DAM

    A hot day yesterday, and forecast rain today. Not ideal for exploring the dam I plotted a route to last weekend. So I decided to go on Friday instead, with an 18degC forecast and light winds being perfect for some quiet bushwalking.

    Allen/Allenvale Dam/Reservoir (naming for these places is traditionally inconsistent) is among the last dam within comfortable day-trip range that I haven't visited yet. The Web provides every suggestion that it's not accessible to the public, but since it's in a national park with lots of walking tracks running between the innumberable waterfalls dotted around the coastal township of Lorne, the tracks cross the gated road to the reservoir and present a convenient backdoor route.

  • Be wise

    Direct yourself in the same way. Think before you act. You have all the means within you to know what you must do. You need not ask anyone else.

    Between 2023-12-27 and 2024-01-06, I played “Poetry for Neanderthals” for the first time. It is about giving descriptions using only single-syllable words. The same message, in its briefest form, soon became a farewell greeting in our rounds: “Be wise.”

• Technology and Free Software

  • f3s: Kubernetes with FreeBSD - Setting the stage - Part 1

    This is the first blog post about my f3s series for my self-hosting demands in my home lab. f3s? The "f" stands for FreeBSD, and the "3s" stands for k3s, the Kubernetes distribution I will use on FreeBSD-based physical machines.

    I will post a new entry every month or so (there are too many other side projects for more frequent updates—I bet you can understand).

  • Internet/Gemini

    • lot of innovations

      there will be a lot of innovations in the CMS and in the admin panel. I am currently testing the HamsterCMS, I will be laying out the 3rd issue of the magazine on the new version