Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CUIOPTH Wordo: BELOW

  • Larger themes in fiction across series.

    Watching a brief fan-made animation of parts of the story from Gideon/Harrow/Non the Ninth yesterday. I very much want to go back and re-read them all now to see if this holds up.

    The necromancy in the story iirc, was a side effect from a project that was working to save as many people as possible from some impending doom. The project was shut down, again iirc, in favor of some other smaller, more expensive program which would save a much smaller number of extremely rich people only.

    In the present time that the story is set in, there are two civilizations I think - one necromantic, the other not. The second one, I am presuming, was the result of the second program. I don't think the books have quite got to their origin.

    Still, there's a larger theme here. The rich abandon the poor, the poor do what they have to do to survive and the rich get pissy about it. There's a related theme in N.K. Jemisin's The World We Make (excellent book) where the older multidimensional beings are expecting the young to be grateful that they are being offered a quick death.

  • That One Person

    Some of us meet "that one person", and we spend the rest of our lives madly and passionately wanting them.

    For me her name was Niyati. We met when we were in the eighth grade. I was 13. She was very tall, with long dark hair, a small frame, and a voice that made my heart tremble every time I heard it. I concluded that she was totally out of my league, so I never gave her any indication of how I felt.

    Then I spent the next three decades and more unable to get her out of my head and my dreams. I was born to love her.

  • writing to write

    I write for a living. I have since I was 17 - literally last century. And if one more person tries to claim that "people write to be read" or "people write for an audience," I'm going to

    a. scream

    b. laugh

    c. shove them out an airlock

    d. all of the above.

  • Fuzzy Frontiers

    Music plays a big part in my recollection of *scenes* from my past. Though I can divorce myself from the phenomenon when concentrating on a piece or song, I can easily *swap out the chip* (as they say, and I am paraphrasing, in España) and have myriad musics hurl me back into certain swaths of time. This assists me in recalling the whole event surrounding the listening "session". The remembrance extends to fuzzy frontiers that are quite likely different for each "song". The strength of impression varies.

    A good example, and one I often for some reason come back to is during a walk from a *shop* somewhere in Galicia back to the tent I was occupying with Jana *One* in late summer of 2002. The music was the first few songs on *Sometime / Anywhere* by The Church. Now, these remind me of another prominent time in my life, also, and it seems contextual which nostalgic event washes over me - meaning the context of my situation in the *present* as I'm listening. In any case, I'm walking back to the tent along a dirt road that runs along one side of the whole campground. There were signs marking off the distance to the entrance. 200m. 150m. 100m. I thought about the length of time it takes to walk such distances and I wondered if slowing my pace would let me enjoy the moment more thoroughly. I had a bottle of beer with my purchases and knew it would irritate Jana *One*, but didn't let it bother me much, as I was listening and *strolling*. I recall the air, the humidity, the track and the crunch from the soles of my shoes. I remember Jana's surly impatience in everything as we travelled from San Sebastian to the western tip of Spain.

  • winter is finally starting to wind down

    good. looks like mother nature is trying to maintain a grasp with those high temps in the upper 40s/lower 50s. maybe this will get me to take a trip into nyc for some photography. it's somewhat odd that i'm saying that, almost acting like i live a few hours away. in reality, the nearest train station is a 5-minute walk away from my apartment, and a train ride takes 1.5 hours.

• Technology and Free Software

  • analytics are risky business

    For me, I mean.

    I've written "professionally" "for the Web" for nearly 20 years now. In some circles, that means I get to talk a lot of crap about being an "experienced SEO specialist" or whatever. (All it really did was ruin my writing.)

    As part of that, I kept a "professional" blog on Wordpress - sometimes .com, sometimes .org. I stared at a lot of analytics, too. I stared at my own blog's numbers. I stared at my clients' numbers. I pegged my personal and professional self-worth to those numbers.

    When I decided to break free of all that, I first landed at Bear Blog. I've been asked at least three times since why I'm on Bear, and each time I've said that I appreciate the "lack of comments and analytics."

    It's true there is no comments section. Some people widget one in, but I like that Bear defaults to email when people want to talk to each other (and that people can just...not share an email address). I find everything is more thought out over email.

  • Hello from the Smol.pub CLI

    This seemed to have worked! Very exciting. I made an iTerm profile just for this \o/

  • Internet/Gemini

    • i have ventured into Geminispace

      I have ventured into Geminispace and so far I am loving it. It's like I can hear myself think.

      Deleting all my social media accounts and venturing into the "small Web" was like this, but less so. We're still a bunch of folks who love video and pixel art and spinny gifs. And I'm cool with that! I also love those things!

    • Reflection on Four Weeks without YouTube

      About a month ago, I lost a couple days to YouTube - just getting caught on the cycle of checking and watching content. I was very frustrated, so when I was feeling better, I posted the litany against YouTube to my mastodon.

    • relief

      I've been exploring Geminispace for approximately two days now, and words cannot express how relieved I feel when I get here.

      My recent switch from the "five websites each showing screenshots of the other four" to the small Web produced a similar effect, but at a smaller scale. This one feels legitimately peaceful.

      The small Web is full of interesting stuff to see and explore. Geminispace lets me think.

  • Programming

    • Prism VCS Updates

      Been working a bunch on my Prism version control system. Today's update includes a better log command, calling out to a diff program for staged changes, a check cmd to check for repo integrity, and a few bug fixes. You can always view the latest updates at the following link, where Prism is self-hosted in a Prism repo: [...]