Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABDGVON Wordo: BEAUS

  • Revenge of the Poseur Nerds

    Last night, I was telling some friends about Peter Thiel and one of his intellectual gurus, Curtis Yarvin. I ended up pointing them at a great piece published in The Baffler in 2014.

    Then, out of curiosity, I went looking on the Internet to see if anyone had made any commentary on that piece. What I found was plenty of unabashed nerd-bashing. But I'd argue that billionaires seeking wealth, power, and status are not nerds at all. They are not of my tribe.

    A nerd tends to not give a fuck about things like wealth, status, and power. They pursue intellectual interests for the pure joy of it. Many obsess over those interests. Nerds do things like write free software, such as GNU and the Linux kernel. Some are obsessed with math, or physics, or breaking into computer systems just for the hell of it. Some of them are into lock-picking. Games of the mind are popular. Nerds with a linguistic bent might take interest in constructed languages like Esperanto, or Lojban, or the much newer Toki Pona. Some are even interested in languages from mythical worlds, like Tolkien's Quenya or the language of the Klingons from Star Trek. They're often into science fiction, fantasy, or both. Maybe they play D&D in multi-hour stretches. With all of these interests, they don't have the time, the drive, or the ambition to build a capitalist totalitarian hellscape.

  • love detox day 2

    From emotional distress, my mind completely flipped in an instant.

    I would see her in a few hours, and then my mind completely calmed down. Everything was fine again. I can't believe how easy it was for my mind to flip from a complete emotional storm to being fine, and even happy.

  • Zipf's law in concrete poetry

    The project is making progress. The simplest part is to generate huge quantities of text. But there is no point in generating a long manuscript or thousands of short poems just because you can. I'm trying to make this readable literature. Reading it aloud is the most exacting test. Although I don't quite know what the words and sentences mean, I often have a vague sense of the poem's atmosphere. And I'm working on an appendix with a dictionary where some of the words are defined in a hybrid of the language of the poems themselves and a pan-european ad hoc pidgin language. The current stage of the work is mostly about manual editing of these computer generated poems.

    In the first phase I tried various strategies to create new words with some similarity to existing languages. The words should be possible to pronounce, not necessarily easy for a non-native speaker of this quasi-language which of course has no native speakers. With some practice one can learn to read even rather awkward phonetic sequences. You can't know what flows smoothly and what doesn't without reading aloud. Now that I have some 200 pages of poems, I have to worry about structure, narrative construction, metaphors, rhymes and alliterations. Well, that's an exaggeration. Since the words mostly haven't settled on any fixed meaning yet, there is no way to work on the semantic level. But I'd like to imagine that I do, and in some sense I try to care about the meaning of these poems. But I'm making slow progress on finding out what word classes some of the words might plausibly belong to, and sometimes come up with definitive meanings. Rhymes have their place, although it is often difficult to find any suitable rhyming words in the word lists I have accumulated. Palindromes are usually easier, because I have a function that reverses words and "spell-checks" them against some rudimentary rules. Reversed words are only accepted if they pass the spell check.

  • British homebuyers must boycott flats with third-party managers

    Of course in the comments it is revealed that the owners of the flats do not actually appoint the board that hires the managing agent, so of course the service charge is too high.

    England simply to has to move away from the idea of unaccountability as the norm in residential service charges. Either we say there's to be a permanent underclass that is allowed to own a flat but not allowed any say about whether they should be ripped off on bills, or we do not. I say we do not.

• Politics and World Events

  • Caving with old order Mennonites

    I have a complicated relationship with old order Mennonites and Amish. My mom's family's from Penn- sylvania Dutch Amish country. My great-grandpa Amos (mom's grandpa, who taught me to play chess) and great-uncle Johnny (dad's uncle) spoke Pennsylvania Dutch. I have a few phrases from my family lexicon.

    When I was a young lady, I attended a protest with hundreds of Amish and old order Mennonites. They completely filled the Pittsburgh district court building. A midwife was absurdly being tried for murder of a term stillbirth.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The phone system is trash and getting worse

    Many of those reading this will still have a telephone. And, what is worse, a telephone number.

    [...]

    This doesn't surprise me at all.

    Many years ago I was being harassed by someone whom I could not afford to take out an injunction against. She constantly filled up my voicemail, SMS messages and email. Now email I can block and filter, but the phone company refused to block the contacts without an injunction.

    They then double billed me, and cut me off for supposed non-payment. Then restored my account. Then cut me off again. In the middle of this, I got a text message from a friend who was having difficulties, wondering why I seemed to be ignoring him, "hello mate are you still alive?" ... he shortly afterwards committed suicide, and I complained to Ofcom about the whole affair, who put me through to the Executive Office of the phone company who refused to apologise but did offer compensation. I refused the compo.

  • Running Xeno Crisis Neo Geo version in Mame

    Xeno Crisis is a 2D game (originally for Sega Megadrive) developed by bitmap bureau and funded with a kickstarter in 2019.

    [...]

    This game is available for many platforms and on some platforms it uses 2 sticks: one for moves and one for fire direction like robotron.

    The Neo Geo vesion doesn't have twin-sticks.