Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Romanizing ギャル

    I’ve noticed different comics publishing houses romanizing the former fashion trend ギャル differently. “Gal”, “flashy gal”, and “gyaru”. “Gal” is the most accurate. It’s what many Japanese brands, magazines, and other writers use.

    “Gyaru” is what I see most often in comics translated to English. I do understand that there’s a little bit of value in sticking to Hepburn and a lot of value of having a unique, easily searchable, unadmbiguous word. A lot of comics these days don’t have any kind of note or annotation for words like gyaru or otaku, trusting their readers to if they don’t know what it is, they can look it up.

    But I still really bristle at “gyaru” and in general at using Hepburn for English words. Same as I how never call the Ring novel and movie “Ringu”. It feels kind of patronizing to the Japanese language and exaggerates the “Engrish” vibes as if they’re not capable of ordinary loan words and code switching like any other language.

  • Locarno Camellia park

    It’s spring and we went there. Locarno is in the canton Ticino, in the south of Switzerland, at the shores of Lago Maggiore (“big lake”) that it shares with Italy.

    They have a fantastic camellia park. In early spring, it's the best place to be.

    I tried to take pictures with my trusty Olympus EP-5 and the 30mm 1:3.5 macro lens. Sadly, I have been untrained by the phone and was confused by the settings and the tiny screen. Oh my! So this is mix of camera pictures and phone pictures.

  • The Art of Looking

    I've only taken acid once, technically twice (though the first dose was incredibly small), but even with that I have noticed that there are numerous tiny but certainly perceptible shifts to my mind that I was unaware of prior. I find myself much more easily able to just sit thoughtlessly and drink in my environment, or truly *taste* a good meal, or become starkly aware of the utter geometries of random everyday objects, or feel a sort of supervisual shift when I watch a car drive by—as if I had ‘changed lenses’ and the frame rate somehow improved at the same time—or become keenly if annoyingly aware of the microscopic bits of dirt on my windshield between myself and the road. Nothing has changed and everything is different. Even at the point of tripping, I never really felt like my vision was any different from sobriety: sure, there were subtle visual distortions but who doesn't see those sometimes? Things that seemed to just float apart a little and coalesce again as soon as I looked directly at them.

  • News and Links Digest (publ. 2025-03-28)

    Scientists witness living plant cells generate cellulose and form cell walls

  • The different mechanisms of road adoption in England

    These all arise in different circumstances, depending on who is initiating the process, and have different safeguards and veto-players.

    The underlying situation is that roads require ongoing maintenance and ongoing maintenance requires ongoing money. Highways that are not "maintainable at public expense" (in the terminology of the Act) are perforce maintainable at the expense of someone else, by default the owners of the property that fronts onto the street in question (see section 205 of the Act). In practical terms, roads must often be "made up" to an appropriate standard before adoption, and the detail of the various procedures often turns on the availability of the initial lump sums thereby necessitated.

  • Creat

    A quite absurd thought has been on my mind for quite some time. It’s a fact that since the dawn of Anthropocene, humanity has accumulated so many stories, books, music and later films, games, animations, videos, that a single person couldn’t possibly consume all that media over their lifetime even if they wanted, much less remember all of it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My first post with emacs

    I've wanted, for a little while, to find a better way to have a focused writing environment. I've been a vim user for a little bit, now, but for gemtext in particular, I'm not a big fan of the terminal experience. I wanted something a little more GUI-ful so that my headings could actually be a different size from my paragraphs. I considered, and even started, writing my own editor up using SDL as a backend, but I got overwhelmed by it, and at some point, I realized that maybe emacs could be it.

  • Star Trader

    Some games are called "roguelikes" (whatever that may mean) and sometimes, mostly in jest, "ponglikes". Another line of evolution originates more or less with "Top Management Decision Simulation" (1957) and from that "Trade Wars", "EVE Online", etc. "EVE Online" is therefore both a ponglike and a tradelike, as it has aspects of both trade and navigating some widget about the screen. Between these games lies Star Trader (1974) of which various versions exist.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Tunneling tunnels - masquerading wireguard

      I could not connect to my wireguard VPN! Now apparently, there is some motivation for some firewalls to disallow any internet-connections to ports other than, like 80 (http) and 443 (https).

      Their reasons? I am not sure. But I am not here to reason about their motivaiton. Much rather, I'm interested in how to restore full internet access!

    • Let's Keep Gopher Boring

      I agree, I'm quite happy with gopher's status as a boring relic of the ancient internet. Is there room for gopher to grow? Sure, but not at the expense of including such features. Not that anyone is clamoring to do that nowadays, save maybe TLS. And gemini has filled that niche anyway.

      A related thought I had was that one way to keep gopher less like the web is to avoid linking to the web, or, where you must - scrape the web content and archive it as text on gopher (lynx -dump works well for this). You can include the original source URL somewhere in the text content itself. That way you only need to provide gopher links. I've done this with my hosting of web articles on gopher history [1]. Even using 90s-html-on-gopher for content can work well in some cases [2].