Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The weaponisation of resilience and mindfulness

    i agree that, in general, ‘resilience’ is indeed a good thing to have and to build. But it feels to me that the increasing emphasis on ‘resilience’ is often being used to divert responsibility away from significant structural/systemic issues to individuals - to make individual struggles a case of “just not having the right mindset”, as though one's capacity to be resilient is unconnected to one's economic / social / cultural capital[a]. This, in turn, has made me angry enough, in an ongoing way, that i've felt compelled to write a few poems on the issue[b].

    Stating or implying that a person ‘lacks resilience’ or ‘needs to be more stoic’ without consideration of their life circumstances is often, at the least, problematic - and in a number of cases, it can actually be offensive.. In Australia, a disabled Indigenous woman who's the daughter of someone from the Stolen Generations[c] will have had to develop a substantial amount of resilience as part of reaching adulthood, particularly compared to a non-disabled Anglo man whose parents were middle-class professionals. If the Indigenous woman constantly experiences harrassment and discrimination due to being Indigenous - which she's had to deal with all her life - how appropriate is it to focus on her ‘lack of resilience’ or ‘need to be more stoic’[d]? And further: how appropriate is it to do so whilst underfunding and defunding services and subsidies that might give her the ability to improve her physical and mental health[e]?

• Politics and World Events

  • Chaos Reigns

    Aside from his anti-fish crusade, previously mentioned in this very gemlog, the new President of the United States has withdrawn the United States from climate agreements, released angry tirades against trans military personnel in executive orders, sent ICE goons into a frenzy of racial profiling resulting in the detention of random Puerto Ricans[1] and Navajo people[2], and attempted to demolish the federal civil service, presumably so it can be replaced with his own crowd of sycophants, including - inexplicably - teenagers.[3]

    I don't intend to make non-ecological politics a regular feature of this gemlog, but if I have to, so be it; I'd rather be on record opposing this garbage than sit back and blog about tortoises while people are being harmed by an administration that goes against every moral and religious value I have in my body. My own politics are neither Republican or Democrat; they are off in their own strange little degrowth-socialist zone - but at this point, I would be happy to be counted with anyone that rejects MAGA hate and degeneracy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Analog Basics: Inverter/Amplifier (publ. 2025-01-27)

    Something confusing me for a little while was that, in the Grappendorf components provided, there is no inverter module. But after looking at some of the project photos, I realized that all I needed to do is add a resistor to the amplifier module.

  • mutt and deleting email via protonmail bridge

    I haven’t deleted an email message since 2018. This was not my intention, but deleting messages from the INBOX doesn’t actually delete messages when you’re using the ProtonMail Bridge. I have a lot to delete, and delete wasn’t working.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Searching the GnuPG encrypted org-journal

      To evaluate the performance of searching in the GnuPG-encrypted org-journal, I created a small experiment.

      [...]

      Performing the search

      I moved the files to the sub directory `2023' within the org-journal directory.

      Next I started org-journal-search, using "modern reformers" as search argument and 2023-01-01 ... 2023-12-31 as search period. The search-argument "modern reformers" was chosen because it occurs in 20 journal files, spread out over the year.

      The search runs through all journal files, starting with 20230101.gpg and ending with 20231231.gpg, and is done is less than two minutes.