Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • it's snowing

    Snow on April 9 isn't unusual at this latitude, but I am tired of snow. I'm ready for spring.

    My parents would be out there tilling the garden to drive the snow into the soil, on the theory that doing so incorporates additional nitrogen into said soil. I've opted for a no-till approach wherever possible, so I'm going to let whatever nitrogen is in the snow get there the old-fashioned way: by melting. (I am reasonably confident in my crop rotation methods anyway.)

    It's also testing season, so my day job was much slower than usual. I spent a chunk of it revamping my "professional" website. I'm not thrilled to be doing it, but it needs to be done, especially if the economy is about to go sideways. Though I suppose if it goes sideways far enough, money will cease to be relevant and my life will depend on my gardening and/or sharpshooting skills. Maybe I'll be glad my parents spent so much time dragging me into the woods after various plants.

  • LQ’s account of the end

  • What If Gordon Banks Had Played?

    As mentioned a few days ago, I am converting the alternative history "What If Gordon Banks Had Played?" to Gemini text.

    The original story was posted online in about 26 parts, two decades ago, and is now hard to find. I have converted the first six or so parts to Gemini format, and will release the rest in coming days and weeks.

  • Creativity and Agitation

    Yesterday on Bluesky, one of my mutuals wrote that it wasn't until the term was over and they had a bit of uninterrupted time to themselves that they found they wanted to write again. The stress of everything else going on around them kept them from wanting to write, they said, and they needed both the time and space to start to find themselves again.

    Four months into 2025 and I'm finding I work something like the opposite. I've always written in snatches - a phrase or a line will come to me, I'll jot it down on my phone, and try to write something more with it later. But I'm also finding that every other part of what I do creatively has gone into overdrive this year. I organize my poems in my git repo by year, and find that for an average year, I wrote 40-50. I'm already at 28, and I feel like there's a quality there that's been lacking the last couple years. The sort of thing that separates "complete, but meh" from "complete, and something". Not that I have any expectation of them really turning into something - I've been circulating a manuscript for years, and sometimes it gets "this is close, keep sending it elsewhere", sometimes it gets a bloodless form rejection. I tinker with it. I feel like it's strong. It picks up another rejection.

• Politics and World Events

  • What I’ve Come to Appreciate About Life in the USA

    (A personal reflection on the everyday comforts and public resources in the U.S. that make life unexpectedly fulfilling.)

    I arrived in the United States in 2018 to pursue a postdoctoral research fellowship at Washington University in Saint Louis (WashU). Having already lived in the UK and traveled around Europe during my PhD, moving to the USA wasn’t a major cultural shock. However, my understanding of the country was largely based on what I had seen in American movies. It has now been seven years since I moved—one year in Saint Louis, Missouri, and six years in Rockville, Maryland. During this time, I’ve come to appreciate aspects of life in the USA that I hadn’t considered before, and I suspect many of my friends and relatives in India are unaware of them as well.

    Recently, I’ve watched several Instagram reels and YouTube shorts comparing lifestyles in India and the USA. A common complaint is that people had more comfortable lives in India because domestic help was readily available, a service often too expensive for many in the USA. As a result, household chores here fall to the individuals themselves. This contrasts with the idea that moving to the USA always means enjoying a lavish lifestyle. While it’s true you can earn more here, you also give up certain comforts. That’s why when people ask if they should move to the USA, I always ask them about their purpose. Do they want to explore the world, find a more satisfying job, earn money in the short term before returning home, or permanently immigrate? Do they understand what they’re giving up, and do they have a realistic picture of life in the USA? Often, their expectations are shaped by social media, which tends to show only the glamorous side. It’s difficult to grasp the reality of day-to-day life in another country unless you’ve lived there.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Only consuming library media

    I recently watched a video on YouTube of a guy who challenged himself to disconnect from modern convenient media sources and only consumed his media from the public library. So that's what I've been doing for a while. My library has a huge selection of CDs, shows, books (duh) and much more.

    This is more of a desperate attempt to disconnect from the web and its attention seeking sites, but I am enjoying this 'challenge' quite a lot. I much prefer having to choose which CDs to bring along rather than having 1000s of songs at my disposal, as many time I barely know what I want to listen.

  • FreeBSD Linuxulator

    Oh wow, the #FreeBSD #Linuxulator is just magic! I setup an Ubuntu #LinuxJail as described in the linked wiki and was able to compile and flash #Arduino code to my Uno using #PlatformIO, which is absolutely mind blowing because the tools for compiling are not available for "freebsd_amd64", yet in this Linux environment (not emulated, not a VM, just a translation layer), the Linux binaries were able to compile and then flash to the USB device (using the FreeBSD kernel and drivers). 🤯

  • Internet/Gemini

    • CSS Naked Day 2025

      Today is CSS Naked Day! I completely forgot about it until I checked my RSS feed reader and saw that Matthew Graybosch was celebrating again this year. Good thing I prepped for today by getting rid of all CSS on my site preemptively! That can be seen in my post from a few weeks ago, linked below.