Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Brian Lumley’s Necroscope Series

    During a brief discussion I mentioned having read Brian Lumley’s Necroscope series and how much I enjoyed it, a friend said they would look into the author. I started thinking about the books and how young I was when I read them and wondered how I’d feel about them now, and before long I located the first novel and started reading it again.

    It’s good. It’s good in a way that childhood me probably didn’t understand. But there are some coincidences that are somewhat tropey and it absolutely makes sense that I would have enjoyed how things unfolded.

  • The history of Marriage Value in leasehold valuation

    In certain contexts where a leasehold in England is trying to extend or buy out the remaining term of a lease, something called "Marriage Value" (MV) is payable. This is the industry lingo for a corresponding economic concept whose name I can no longer remember.

  • Death In The Afternoon

    Notice: drinking Death In The Afternoons is not a productivity hack, even if what you're trying to be productive at is writing incoherent esotericism. However, drinking cafecitos and listening to psychedelic trance usually is.

  • Thoughts at three am

    A breakup sucks. Every time my phone rings, every notification I get, every time the screen lights up; my heart jumps a bit and I start hoping against hope that its from her. That she's reaching out to talk.

    The reality of it is that I messed up and hurt her. In my cyclical breakdown and self isolation sessions, I didn't respond back to her. After a couple of times, she felt jaded and lost affection to me. Perhaps even resented me. The time she confessed that my presence and absence were indifferent to her was when I realized that I was dead to her.

  • On Foot 1 -- Results

    I walked a million steps in a hundred days. This met a standard that I call "On Foot 1". If you are curious, you can see the full spec for the On Foot 1 standard in a previous phlog post.

    On Foot 1 is, of course, physical in nature, but I don't consider it to be a physical challenge. The standard requires an average of about an hour and forty minutes of walking each day for a hundred days, but the time isn't important, just the number of steps. You can go at any pace, with as many breaks as you like. This wasn't tough for me physically, nor was it intended to be.

  • Ceci n'est pas une gardening blog

    I have gardened nearly my entire life. One of my earliest memories is of my parents teaching me to plant corn. Another is from later that year, when I ate an entire peck of tomatoes by myself. That's a lot of tomatoes for a toddler! (Surprisingly, I suffered no ill effects.)

    I moved a lot in my 20s and 30s. Anytime we moved someplace I couldn't garden, I had a lowkey anxiety that never resolved. An "it's not safe to be at the mercy of the commercial food supply chain" anxiety.

• Technology and Free Software

  • solarized colors in mutt

    This is an addendum to my note about setting up ProtonMail and mutt by way of ProtonMail bridge. After I launched mutt on a new system I wanted to change the colors. Below is how to do get the Solarized color theme into mutt.

  • Comms

    In theory you could have two people who share a unique language, in which case Facebook (may) not be able to extract the usual from the content of the messages. This language in cryptography goes by the name "one time pad" which has the same problem as a unique language shared by only two people: that of getting that unique language only to that one other person. There is also the metadata problem, in that Facebook knows who is messaging whom when. Possibly this could be worked around, somewhat, by delaying and batching the messages, which might raise the simple point of why not not use Facebook?

  • opacity in kitty/neovim

    It’s not enough to enable opacity in kitty, the background has to be set to none in vim as well.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello, world.

      Obligatory first post, have to keep up the good old tradition.

    • we now have a first 88x31 banner!

      you can use our 88x31 banner to link to this site: [...]