Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACEIURQ Wordo: DIVAN

  • Narc Jarvis is no milkshake duck

    Yesterday I noted I was having some kind of Thought. I have now read so many articles on identity and technofeudalism that I'm losing my own plot. Here's a first shot at an abstract slash summary of whatever point I'm attempting.

• Technology and Free Software

  • $80 for a Nintendo game is pretty cheap by my personal early-to-mid ’90s standards

    I’ll put this link up front not because it’s likely that you’ll need to refer to it to understand what I’m writing here — you won’t — but more on general principle:

    [...]

    Now then.

    Recently, many people have been discussing the prices of first-party Nintendo Switch 2 games. Current estimates are that digital games will cost $80 (the price of Mario Kart World). As I write this, most of us are used to paying $60 for first-party Nintendo games, with The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom being a noticeable (and alarming) break from tradition at $70 at the time of its release in May 2023. In contrast to games sold on Steam, first-party Switch games sold in the Nintendo eShop rarely go on sale and when they do, it’s usually for only $10 off the unchanging sticker price.

    While $80 gives me sticker shock just like everyone else, I thought that this would mostly be in line with inflation. Kyle Orland, writing at Ars Technica, has a nice chart showing “Average inflation-adjusted prices for top-end video games” (in 2/2025 dollars). Long story short, games were significantly more expensive than $80-in-February-2025 back in the 80s and mid-90s:

    => https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2025/04/will-mario-kart-worlds-80-price-become-gamings-new-normal/ Kyle Orland at Ars Technica, “Mario Kart World’s $80 price isn’t that high, historically”

    However, even after seeing this article, I didn’t really have an idea of what I actually paid for games back in the day. Sure, one could look at scans of 30-year-old advertisements passed around on the Internet, but those are sales and it’s not really obvious how representative those numbers would be. Plus, I generally didn’t buy games at the more expensive toy store — I bought them at a decent discount later on at the local boring department store.

  • Tinylog

    I agree with the all things described in last commit. The tinylog format should be easy (as the Gemini protocol is) and human manageable. So the simplification of date format and in the same manner simplification of response format will help us to use tinylogs.

    The only open issue for me is how people who use more complicated date format should behave. I'm using the linux date command in vi to add date heading of every entry. And it's easy to do that in the new manner for new entries. Should I have to correct the older entries?

    P.S I've announced RFC update call on comp.infosystems.gemini so more people will be able to remember about tinylogs.

  • Digital housekeeping: ~/.alias

    Today, alongside clearing out about an inch-high stack of physical paperwork, I hacked back the hypertrophy in my ~/.alias file. This is the file that sets up the abbreviations and utilities that are available on the commandline for me, beyond the system defaults.

    This file is part of a small set of material which gets hodded from laptop to laptop and from one shell account to another; those dotfiles go back to 1995 in my lamentable case, and represent a series of nine personal machines such as laptops, and a bunch of work/social UNIX and Linux accounts. Continuity is good; clutter is bad.

    Getting the most out of muscle memory means having roughly the same shortcuts and commands everywhere, so some means must be found for keeping my personal day-to-day machine in sync with the three or four others I must use for work or social matters. Nowadays there is no longer NFS to centralise all this.

    Ultimately this material is pretty valuable. It saves huge amounts of repeated effort, and is how Ken Thompson and Doug McIlroy wanted us to use UNIX: gradually building up tools based on other tools. I have a tool just for finding out what commands I am overusing, so I can save them as aliases or scripts. That is of course upstream of the problem of having so many saved scripts that the system starts to become cluttered and unmanagable.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Why I do not use social media

      As common as this type of post or blog entry may be, I really wish to speak out on this.

      For years and months long before, I thought I would not be able to live without some sort of social platform. In most cases, I spent time and time again, looking at varying posts on various apps.

      I probably spent most of it on YouTube. Considering how easy it is to find content on there, with sheer amounts of videos, it is no wonder why that is the case. Though, all of this is still pretty much served by the algorithm and not my own sound reasoning.

      Now, algorithms are various - today this is pretty much a blanket term. Either way almost all, if not all, social media use some sort of algorithm for finding and choosing the content you are most likely to consume and, thus, spend more time on the platform. As a result, however, it ends up destroying the human brain, with endless stream of mindless content.

      This is not how it used to be: without enough computational power or the modern technologies we use, there was no way of serving such an algorithm en masse. Somehow, people still found entertainment in the BASIC programs from magazines or their own discovery and learning. People spent time finding good sites and reading blogs or, at the time, just reading the personal sites of others.

      Now, though, we are served a mindless and ad-filled web. We are served filtered content and censored news. Sites are heavy and riddled with useless features or tons of spying javascript. That is not how it should be.