Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BELMNZT Wordo: ROCKY

  • From "dumblins" to goblins

    In the great days of Épiroux, when goblins feared men, there was a dark, terrible place that humans called Bormassé. These was but one of many of the Sweet Iron mines that dotted the hills to the northwest of that evil city. Those led there, by chain and lash, would be turned into a contraption of flesh and bones.

    Let's call them miners, for mining they did, sixteen hours a day and more. Some were criminals, that was true, and you might be inclined to be less charitable to those. Most were children of slaves, or kids sold by starving parents or taken by force or fraud. Among these were many young girls, of all races, even humans themselves, but goblins were more common. The reasons were simple: goblins were weaker at the time, easy to feed and breed, and adapted themselves well to the conditions of the underground.

  • Panning for Tunes (May 2025 Edition)

    I had originally envisioned this series as being a monthly thing, but it's looking like it might be more like semiannual. Quality over quantity!

  • Prequels vs Lost Episodes

    Sometimes a movie that comes out later in the series takes place before the ones that came earlier. One of the best examples I could find was The Scorpion King 2. It’s got a number in the title, is intended to be watched after The Scorpion King pt 1, only makes sense if you watch it after, but takes place before.

    I’m gonna call these kinds of movies “prequels”. Watch after, takes place before. Easy peasy. And there are many, many other examples of prequels without a number in the title. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom comes to mind. Watch after Raiders of the Lost Ark but takes place before. (Or maybe don't watch it. I'm maybe not the biggest fan of the two first Indy movies.)

    Contrasted with them are “lost episodes”. Made after, or at least published after, but totally makes sense to be seen before. These are rarer.

    I’m not going to police anyone else’s usage of these concepts, but please don’t “carrot and cigarette” me either: I am making a distinction between these two types of movies for the purpose of this essay only. “Takes place before but should be seen after” (prequels) vs “Takes place before and can, if you want, be seen before”, or even “should be seen before” (lost episodes). I need two words (and I went with “prequels” vs “lost episodes” here) for two concepts. But I don’t mean to from now on and for all time be the source of a bunch of “well actually” if other people use these words more loosely or even oppositely.

  • Split

    We drove all the way to Split, visited the old town and what remains of Diocletians palace, had lunch and then we went walking through Marjan forest park. Wonderfully quiet.

    On the way to the city center, I spotted a passion flower. So beautiful. They look like cosmic spaceships or pschedelic temples in miniature.

  • going full Marie Kondo: one year later

    I checked out Dominique Loreau's L'art de la Simplicité because it was shelved with the "sustainable living" books. On perusal, I realized it's not really about "sustainable living" at all. It should be shelved with books like Fumio Sasaki's Goodbye, Things and Joshua Becker's The More of Less and Marie Kondo's The Life-Changing Joy of Tidying Up (all of which sit side by side in my local library). It was not what I expected, and it's making me think about minimalism in a new-to-me context.

    Last year, I went through a big phase of reading "minimialism" books. I also sank $10,000 and six months into a home update, after I sank three months into a major cleanout.

    It was necessary. I was three years into widowhood. The house was full of things we kept because we - my husband and I - found them useful in the life we shared.

    But that life is over, and too many of those things were no longer useful. They were just clutter. Debris from a shared life that ended. I wasn't using any of it. All that stuff did was remind me of the home I no longer had and the life I no longer lived.

    The stuff - both used and unused - sat on and in a house that we inherited when my grandfather died. We'd moved in without changing anything. The carpet was cheap and worn; the walls ranged from "okay" to "badly in need of repainting." Most of the rooms still had contractor-grade "boob lights," which I have never liked:

  • Krka national park, Vodice

    I expected the Krka national park to be similar to our visit to Plitvice national park. But no, it was very different. There were wooden walkways, lots of greenery growing in the rapids, lots of tufaceous limestone. Everything else was different. 😄

  • back for good

    You know how military is... They are full mouths of candy, when they lure you into cooperation and then dump you without a word of explanation if it suits the narrative.

  • Midquel

    In addition to prequel and sequel one might coin the midquel for an episode that happens not before (because the group hadn't gotten together yet) nor after (because, uh, spoilers?) but during the events depicted elsewhere. The Cowboy Bebop movie comes to mind as a midquel. These are probably rare? Possibly midquels could be a subset of lost episodes that are located within the timeline not before or after it. This probably works better if one has a storyline or plan to fit new things into e.g. the Star Wars universe(s), or can fudge events with stardates and faster than light photonic gradient flux… look, squirrel!

• Politics and World Events

  • What Is To Be Done about Residents Management Companies?

    After my recent talk at Land Talks #1 I noted that I hadn't really done justice to the questions from the floor: [...]

• Technology and Free Software

  • What I'm playing 🏌 4D Golf

    I did as a kid (nerd). Each group in literature class got to choose a novel to study and we picked Flatland. One day, two-dimensional creature A. Square gets a visit from a three-dimensional creature and gets a glimpse of a new dimension beyond his world's two.

    [...]

    Sphere was wrong and 4D Golf is the proof. I got it on the recent sale and just started it and it's just about what I expected.

    It's really a straightforward game. You play mini-golf, but the course spans the space of four dimensions instead of three. However, you, the player, are still a 3D creature and can only see a slice of the 4D space. That means the part of the challenge is just to figure out where you actually need to face to get the ball into the hole.

  • Thoughts on x402

    Recently Coinbase announced a an online payment project called "x402." Named after the heretofore-unused HTTP 402 "Payment required" status code, x402 is an API that enable site operators to block access to a page until the visitor provides a cryptocurrency payment. The required payment can be any amount, down to as little as one tenth of a penny, and access can be granted for as long as possible, from a single page load to indefinitely. x402 is blockchain-agnostic and has no in-API transaction fees, though the underlying network may still have fees.

  • Programming

    • The right way to write software

      Adapted (mostly pasted without modifications) from Jonathan Blow. Originally found here: https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1923414922484232404

      I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it:

      https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

      For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing.

      But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it's so wrong because he has never experienced the alternative:

      "Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because http://libfoo.so is now http://libfoo.so.2. 2

      I have had scripts silently fail because a website changed its HTML layout. I have had configuration formats break because of upstream version bumps. I have had Docker containers die because Alpine Linux rotated a mirror URL.