Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Dankfest und....

    ... yes, I spent last night looking at a very thick binder full of notes from my summer abroad in Munich, 1991. Since we're moving, I did decide to toss (recycle) several thick stacks of photocopies of Schau Ins Land. But I kept my grammer notes, because they represent the last time I took on intense language learning, and should I decide to brush up, this will be my starting point.

  • The parting words I cannot share

    I left my job this fall for another one. I am therefore preparing something I thought about for several years: the corresponding announcement email.

    I had, like I guess all people have, frustrations at my job. One of which was where it made me live. COVID had the positive side-effect that it gave me some more flexibility regarding that, but it still stuck me in a sort of limbo. It was just a little while away from where I both could afford a home and enjoy being closer to my friends and family. Too bad that it was an infinity of pages of legalese away still.

  • Words won't come

    I've had an impossible time writing about the predicament lately. I initially thought I'd regularly vent through writing as a form of therapy. But that hasn't happened for a week or so.

    What I did manage to write in the past doesn't seem substantial enough to publish now, so it remains unpublished. But maybe that's the whole point of the exercise. Maybe simply getting it out is the goal, no matter how rambling and nonsensical the output may ultimately be. No matter whether it's published or not. Getting it out may simply be a way to help work through the emotions ... to unblock the dam if I were to choose a metaphor. Hopefully what comes soon is a clear flowing river as opposed to a reservoir of stagnant, algae-filled water. Hopefully.

  • The Inviolacy of the Soul

    From a Hermetic point of view, the soul is effectively inviolate: there is nothing anyone can do, no curse nor hex nor cross nor malediction, that can malignantly affect your soul. All that curses can do is affect the things external to your soul: your health, your physical well-being, your material circumstances, and the like. These can be damaging and are certainly problems to be fixed, to be sure, but none of this affects the soul itself. The only thing that can impact your soul is your own body. The soul, wrapped up in the body, can be impacted by the drive and desire of the body. So long as the soul can remain in control over these, everything is going to fundamentally be fine. It's when the soul loses a battle against the drive and desire of the body that the soul can be negatively impacted by it, but even then, the soul will always eventually find a way to right itself, one way or another.

  • Fighting evil - dilemma

    A brief introduction. It seems necessary. I will be brief. Evil is not necessarily what we think it is. Let me tell you about it using my own example. I grew up in the days when the image of evil as something mysterious, complicated, attractive appeared in the mass media. It was not yet the overtly meaning-reversing message we see in mass culture today, but it was already a colossal shift in the understanding and approach to evil.

    It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I realized that this image is not true, that evil is no more interesting than good, that in fact it is simple, it is ordinary, and by comparison good is infinitely complex, interesting, powerful, and demanding. It is a mystery that can be explored infinitely.

    Why did it take me so long? Especially since I've been reading The Lord of the Rings over and over again for all these years? I guess I'm not a smart person and that's it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Games with “content” are bad

    There’s a bit of a sliding, fuzzy border between what’s “content” in a boardgame. A Magic card that’s really world-specific and flavorful and has set mechanics is “content”. But maybe to some extent, so is “this chess piece moves in an L-shape and can jump”. It’s a sliding scale. I’m gonna propose that the more atomic and endlessly recombinable a game component is, the less it is “content”. The more it is just a game.

    It’s not just about complexity either (but it is about tight vs loose coupling), and here’s an example that illustrates that: A jigsaw puzzle is content. Playing the same jigsaw puzzle a couple of times is fun but playing new jigsaw puzzles is even more fun. Contrast this to a tile-laying game like Dominoes, Scrabble, or Carcassonne. The “puzzle pieces” in those games fit together all kinds of ways, always new, always beautiful. So a jigsaw puzzle is more “content-driven” than those tile-laying games. You always wanna get new puzzles with new art, is the idea.

  • linux log 04

    After a lot of distro hopping I have settled with Debian 12 bookworm with the GNOME desktop environment.

    Since my journey began I have tried Mint, Ubuntu, Alpine and Debian distros, and KDE Plasma, Xfce and GNOME desktop environments.

    So far in Debian I have got all the software I need up and running. I had to do a couple of installs from binaries, rather than from the apt package manager, but that was all straight forward.