Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the future is uncertain and the end is always near

    i've been thinking a lot about what happens after we die. i don't fuss too much about dying itself - it'll happen sooner or later. we can't predict it. i could be walking down the street and be hit by a car, that kind of thing. i don't worry about it.

    science doesn't tell us anything, besides the biochemical basics. testimony from near death experience tells us it's calming. i want to trust that science. that i'll just drift off to an eternal sleep. it seems peaceful, more than anything. i don't believe in a hell. maybe i believe in a heaven, or something else beyond that.

• Politics and World Events

  • Canada

    Today I saw somebody posting a message about Trump's threats to annex Canada from a friend that wanted to remain anonymous. It seems pretty important to me because that's how every former friend of the US is going to react. Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark. Denmark is part of Europe. Denmark spent a lot to support Ukraine. The USA threatened to abandon Ukraine. Both Denmark and Canada are part of NATO. The USA is not behaving like a friend and ally. Not at all.

  • The history of commonhold in the UK

    In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Conservative MPs for Kensington proposed various leasehold reform measures. They were Dudley Fishburn and Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, who apparently coined the term commonhold.

    Commonhold originally meant a form of what is now called share-of-freehold, but with a requirement that all the leaseholders be members of an owners corporation. This was the subject of repeated backbencher parliamentary bills, which led to the Aldridge Committee of the mid-1980s

• Technology and Free Software

  • HOW DO YOU PROCESS THE NEWS?

    I get the impression that he doesn't often read Gopher himself, but I feel like replying anyway. An interesting thing is that he lists all his news sources as, what I gather to be, Mastodon identities. I'm not sure how that works, maybe like on Usenet people post links back to articles on the web. It's common enough for those articles to be from untrustworthy sources (either obscure or just popularly idiotic), so I don't expect to trust them just on the basis of the person posting the link. Or are they a direct repeater for articles from specific sources, like how I use Gwene to read specific RSS feeds (I've started adopting those lately)?

    Well it's probably in evidence now that my lack of understanding of Mastodon means I didn't really understand much of what Alex Schroeder said. But anyway, for my answer, general news all comes from the ABC, the Australian government-funded media agency. Usually TV and radio, but maybe once every month or two something might interest me enough to look it up on their horrible website.