Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I Love My Bicycle

    I have a car, you know. I'm American, after all. A 2000 Saturn SL/2 sedan (purchased in 1999) with 222,500 miles on it. I drive it a little under 5000 miles per year these days.

    My commute isn't far—about 3 miles each way. Not too hilly. Perfect bicycle commute distance at about eight and a half minutes. I also don't live too far from downtown in our city of 100,000 people. It's actually more effort to drive downtown than ride.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AHLMNYU Wordo: LEAPT

  • master and the mountain

    The cold wind was blowing incessantly and with its strength, it had cleared all clouds from the sky: perfect blue now being painted with black spots where a flock of birds was moving South. The sun was setting, painting the skyline red and turning the snow-covered mountain tops pink. The shadows were growing longer and the only noises were the cicadas song and the wind blowing among the tree leaves.

    Near the woods, on a small grassy hill, the master sat in meditation in front of his three young pupils. The face of the master, a complicated web of wrinkles, was quiet. His shoulders were straight and his body was still and relaxed. Inside the shell of quiet calm that was the master’s body, strong energy stirred, so intense that it radiated outside. The master sat like a mountain. The pupils' faces looked calm, but the lines of their mouths were hard because their jaws were slightly clenched. Their backs were straight, but their muscles were becoming tense. They, too, possessed warm energy, but it was stormy, like boiling lava of a volcano. The pupils sat like animals ready to run. The wind pushed a dry leaf; it twirled, went up, down, then spiralled to the ground in front of the master.

  • Tariffs and Mediocrity and a Cheap, Empty Suit

    So today the tariffs against Canada and Mexico are supposed to take place. I say "supposed to" because last time they got pulled back at the last minute, and delayed. But here we are for the second go at this, and I assume this time it's for real. And I'm exhausted. He's been in power for six weeks and already I'm overwhelmed like I was from 2016-2020, when he was in the news every moment of every day, and I couldn't avoid seeing his accordion hands, his weird, puckering monkey lips, and stupid fucking oompa loompa face.

    Canada's promised counter-tariffs - I hope these hurt, but realistically, there's only so much you can do when you're about 12% of your larger, more aggressive neighbour's population. At this point, I know a lot of people have already changed behaviours, probably for good. Lots of texts and conversations with friends where I live about substituting this or that. Coffee I'll soon be getting from a local roaster, we cut out US orange juice immediately. I'm checking labels for made-in information, and from what I see at the stores, I'm definitely not alone. Some things will be harder, but the point stands that if people broadly change their behaviours, including not travelling to the US, it's going to hurt in I think a lot of unexpected ways. I know for me, the next four years, all my travel will be either in Canada, or internationally-elsewhere. Maybe back to the Dominican Republic, to Europe, who knows. But not the US, and maybe not for a long, long time after this, too. There's the open question about open elections ("have they had their last?"), about whether the spineless Republicans will alter the rules so he can run again, and of course about whether the elections themselves will be free. It's wild seeing the collapse of the US in real time, seeing a selfish, narcissistic man set the country's reputation on fire in a way it will likely never recover from. (What good are treaties if he decides he doesn't want to honour them? Why sign something if there's an excellent chance it just might not stand?)

  • Week 5/6/7/8: Photos

• Wellness/Mental

  • A Wellness Journal

    I think this smol.pub blog will work well as my wellness journal. It's not a part of my main blog site, I can delete posts easily if I want to, and I don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about the content. You can follow it via atom, gemini or gopher protocols.

  • Kink: ‘submissive’ vs ‘slave’

    Someone recently asked about the difference between a kink ‘submissive’ and a kink ‘slave’, and if a ‘slave’ should be able to have any say at all.

    Well, i ‘own’ one of my current partners, and she is my ‘submissive’, but she's certainly not my ‘slave’. i also owned a former partner (now friend), and again, she was my ‘submissive’, but not my ‘slave’. In both cases, it is/was about the connotations of the word for us: ‘slave’ was not a word that Sparked Joy for any of us, whereas words like ‘property’ and ‘possession’ do/did. As for what it means to me to ‘own’ someone, here's a post of mine about exactly that: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • A quirk of the Motorola 6809 assemblers

      I just learned an interesting bit of trivia about 6809 assembly language on a Discord server today. When Motorola designed the 6809 assembler, they made a distinction between the use of n,PC and n,PCR in the indexing mode. Both of those make a reference based off the PC register, but in assembly language they defined, using n,PC means use the literal value of n as the distance, whereas n,PCR means generate the distance between n and the current value of the PC register.