Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • April

    It's April already. I'm still here, but distracted.

    I want to talk a bit about solo RPGs. At some point I want to write a longer post on this topic. This could be it, but I'm not sure I have the energy today and I'm tired of not posting anything for months on end. So we'll see.

    RPGs (the tabletop variety) are a weird thing. They're also the most natural thing. I see my young daughters roleplay constantly. Sure they don't use polyhedral dice, but yesterday I watched them spend a whole hour sitting in a tree, talking out scenarios and building a world. So maybe they're only weird for adults who've forgotten how fun this used to be.

  • April

    Despite having a lot of fun playing and actually getting fairly immersed in the stories, there was still something missing: crunch. Games like IS are particularly focused on the "narrative". While they do have "mechanics", these are always subservient to the "narrative". Furthermore, the mechanics work on a very high level. The "moves" in IS are very general purpose and lacking in specifics. The game doesn't even track inventory. If, say, you find yourself needing a rope, you're encouraged to make a "check supply" move. Success means you have the rope, failure means you don't. I'm simplifying, but that's the gist. While these mechanics are beautifully designed to produce amazing stories, this somehow isn't completely satisfying for me. I don't really want to feel like I'm writing a story with dice, I want to feel like I'm actually exploring a cave/dungeon/spacecraft with real constraints. I want more game in my game.

  • I Like Being Autistic

    Recently, US Eugenicist in Chief and conspiracy theory trafficker RFK Jr. held an unsurprising, yet somehow still shocking, news conference in which he reduced humanity’s existence to economic utility and normative behavior. RFK has promised to find the cause of the “autism epidemic” - which doesn’t exist - by September, and has added David Geier, a hack previously fined for practicing medicine without a license, to the clown convention in D.C.

    RFK stated that autistic people will “never pay taxes”, “never hold a job”, “never play baseball”, “never write a poem” and “never go out on a date”. Speaking only for myself, the IRS and git would disagree with the first couple of quotes, and while I’ve never played baseball, I enjoyed being a soccer keep back in the day. And I play a mean game of Rocket League these days. Holy cow!

• Technology and Free Software

  • Toby's tinylog

    Ok, so check this out. I raved about how magical #FreeBSD #linuxulator is, but it gets even better! In my Ubuntu linux jail, I downloaded the source for the #mobian kernel, installed cross-compiling tools, compiled the kernel and modules, copied to an sdcard, and booted up the kernel on my #pinephonepro 🤯 So, on my amd64 FreeBSD, I used a translation layer to load up Ubuntu Linux, used it to cross-compile a Linux kernel for arm64, and booted that up on a device! How unbelievable is that?!?

  • Flexible document numbering (ASN) with DevonThink

    I digitize every important physical document and organize it in the extremely powerful DevonThink. I rarely need the physical copy—retrieving the digital version is faster and easier. To bridge the physical and digital worlds and be able to find the physical document when needed, I assign a unique number to each document and write it on both versions.

  • Four Tech Answers

    Here's my contribution to the "Four Questions: Tech" theme currently making the rounds. I heard about it from Anna [1], who heard about it from Ben Colliver.

    [...]

    Before I got interested in computers, I was what you might call a "painting geek." I don't know what they're teaching in art school these days, but back then they'd just show you a bunch of examples of different kinds of painting and let you figure out what you wanted to do and how to make it, and then critique the heck out of your floundering attempts. My teachers really frowned on the idea of teaching classical painting technique, fearing it would lead us innocent souls away from developing our own unique style or artistic statement. Also, most of my teachers had themselves been taught according to those principles, so they didn't really know much about classical technique to begin with. This approach never really worked for me, so eventually I thought I'd try teaching myself technique from books, starting with Ralph Mayer's classic "The Painters Handbook of Materials and Techniques (4th edition)," a 730 page tome which I basically had memorized at one point. I studied what you might call the "kitchen chemistry" of painting, learning all about the different pigments and their various properties; how to make a proper painting medium with damar varnish, stand oil, and turpentine; how to properly stretch a (linen) canvas with rabbit skin glue, carpet tacks, and a lead-based primer; and on and on. It didn't make me into a great painter, but it did make me a better painter, and it was interesting and a lot of fun.

    One thing I remember was how, even 35 years ago, it was getting harder and harder to find all the things you'd need to paint in a traditional way. Some of the pigments beloved of earlier generations were either unobtainable or incredibly expensive, and so had been replaced by more modern synthetic equivalents that didn't behave quite the same. It was surprising to learn that even very traditional technologies like oil painting were still evolving.

  • A story of ultralight virtual machines designed to run anywhere

    Imagine a world where the history of computing went a slightly different path, where computers would become more powerful over time but still would stick to numeric input and output only. Could they be as useful as the current generation machines? Could we do real work or even play games on them? Well, the topic I'm gonna discuss today makes a pretty good attempt to answer those questions. It's gonna be a long read, so make yourselves comfortable, grab some snacks, fasten your seatbelts and let's go!