Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner 

    Before reading this novel I had heard that it was a different take on the spy genre, and it is that. The usual intricate plotting and edge-of-your-seat moments are mostly absent here. Creation Lake is more concerned with the internal state of someone who is deceiving everyone around her and consequently is extremely isolated.

    The main character, who we know as Sadie and never discover her real name, is a private sector spy. Her missions generally involve infiltrating an organisation and nudging them into a situation where they can be undermined or arrested. Throughout the novel her ongoing mission involves a French communist/environmentalist group which is opposed to the government buying up farmland to build a giant reservoir. Her entry point is quite subtle - seducing Lucien, the childhood friend of Pascal who is the leader of the group. Lucien has no involvement with the group, but she spends months with him establishing a credible backstory before eventually approaching Pascal.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AEGRTUW Wordo: MINES

  • 📺💈

    when propane nightmares become lucid dreams involving our poletriarch the tezpole i give myself over to feeling i am \~washed out abandon my source filmmaker backseat

• Politics and World Events

  • What did Labour actually promise on leasehold?

    There's this weird idea about, that the UK Labour party promised to end "leasehold". That's not what they've actually been saying, and is not logically compatible with what they stated in their manifesto before they won this year's election.

    Labour didn't say they'd end leasehold; they said they'd end the leasehold *system*, which can't be the same thing. (Their manifesto proposed making commonhold the default tenure, not the sole tenure, for flats, necessarily implying that leasehold would remain as an alternative to this default)

    When I pointed this out on Twitter, some had the temerity to object that Labour had "pledged" well before the election to abolish leasehold, and then walked it back before their manifesto was even published. I really think we need to take those claims with a pinch of salt, though beneath it all is a disagreement about how to characterise the "small print" in political rhetoric.

  • Commencing the UK's leasehold reform legislation

    The UK's new Leasehold & Freehold Reform Act 2024 could partially be brought into force. I'm not convinced by the goverment's implied claim that no further measures can be commenced without consultation.

  • Interests and Complexity

    You can approach the same interest in a completely different way and that alone would say a lot about the differences between each other.

    So say let's say you like music, it is your life or whatever, you want to share it to others, then you did it to another person who also claims how music is their life, and they ended up seeing them in a completely different way compared to how you do it.

    That's fine and all, but for some reason the more attempts there is to share opinions the more condesending people will be. This goes for even positive reinforcements, but only if you actually gave a real opinion, so if you say something like "I like this drawing of yours" that's fine, but if it's something like "this drawing has some good shading and colours, I also like how you put these details XYZ into it, it adds a really nice touch to it" for some reason they would actually rather have you not say anything on the matter.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Dev Log 1

    All of the work I did previously on this project got corrupted, so I am stuck starting over. Thankfully not completely from scratch, as some mockup images have survived. That said, I have to relearn how to start a Game Boy project with RGBDS.

  • The Verge’s review scale

    I think about scales sometimes. When you’re rating things from 1–5 or 1–10, it’s probably a good idea to think about what each score means.

  • Weekly links 5

    One of several posts from someone doing a stint of seasonal work as a delivery driver. It's thoughtful and well written. I'd like to find more blogs with perspectives on different personal experiences like this.

  • Links - Dec 7, 2024

  • “Obvious” things aren't always obvious

    This video about washing clothes in the Victorian era [1] popped up on my YouTubes feed. It definitely made me appreciate modern washing machines, taking a two-day chore into a few hours, most of which is just waiting for the washer and dryer to finish their jobs (and as Simon Whistler [2], notable YouTuber with a bazillion channels [3], always states, “the past was the worst!”).

  • A literal book shelf

    This book shelf [1] might seem silly, as it's literally “a book” shelf (a shelf for one book), but I don't think so—he overkills it on the design (I can appreciate that, having written an over-the-top 6809 assembler [2]) and has a unique conversation piece. In fact, I could use a two-book shelf myself, for the two-volume Oxford English Dictionary I have.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gnus: Levels, Usenet (publ. 2024-12-06)

      Gnus was designed primary as a newsreader (think NNTP, newsgroups, Usenet). When you translate that paradigm to e-mail, you get a sort of "automatic inbox-zero", as the info manual puts it, where things vanish out of sight once you have read them or decide they are not interesting.

      BTW, you can mark items with a tick, using gnus-summary-tick-article-forward (!) if you want to prevent something from vanishing. Also, messages that have vanished can be pulled back up at any time with gnus-summary-insert-old-articles (/ o).

    • Tiny Notes

      I've had a license key for this blog site for a while now, but have moved onto other apps. While I'm happy on Pika for regular blogging, I still want to use this space for something. It's meant to just write, and not be too image heavy, so maybe I'll make it a link blog, or a "tiny" blog.

  • Programming

    • Notepad++

      A perfect balance of powerful and lightweight, Notepad++ is far more capable than Notepad, but doesn't complicate things like a full IDE.

      This Windows text editor launches fast enough I don't even bother using Notepad anymore. It works great for editing large files, using custom syntax highlighting, multifile / regex / multiline search and replace, sorting, dealing with duplicates, and all kinds of advanced things you might want to do on a text file or group of them. I've opened multi-megabyte CSV files, sorted or filtered, and re-saved in the time it would take Excel to parse them.