Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Gender and language

    I'm always positively surprised when I see the guidelines on gender-neutral writing by the Federal Chancellery in Switzerland, with German, French, Italian and Rumantsch being full of those pesky gender thingies.

  • Almost gone 🚴

    On my way to work I was nearly hit by a car. I was cycling, wearing high viz. The driver slowed at the junction to see if anything was coming from the left. But I was on the right. My brakes were just good enough. The driver still didn't seem to notice as they went past me, despite me yelling some rude words very loudly.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello to everyone in the Bulletin Buble

      Hello to everyone in the Bulletin Buble, and to everyone else in gemspace!

      I have been lurking in the corners for too long now. It's been high time I docked. It's been high time I became a part of gemspace, instead of just a tourist.

      I'm here for many of the same reasons I've seen others echo. I feel more disconnected than ever. The mainstream internet has largely become a toxic sludge that I would much rather avoid - but I miss the genuine and sincere connections that it once was a gateway to.

    • In Response to Alex Schroeder's "Why Blog?"

      I started blogging - though we called it journalling at the time - sometime in 1998, though the dates are probably off, and the earliest site I've been able to fish out of the Wayback was from mid-1999. I consider mid-99 my official start, lining up nicely with a point in my life where it felt like everything was changing for the better. I was going to university. I kissed a crush in the rain under streetlight after our friends' electronica concert at a local school. Another friend tried to proposition me later that summer (I chickened out at the last minute). I fell for one of her friends, who she'd met online, and who was in town for the summer. All this is kind of to say that everything was both changing and extremely fluid, and I was reading other people's journals, teenagers like myself, in Canada and the UK but mostly in the States, who bought domains and hosted their friends and spent hour upon hour not posting on social media, but writing about their lives. I fell for reading about other people's lives.