Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Bike messenger archetypes in fiction and reality, past and present

    I got a flat tyre riding home from work today. Not a big deal, as I always ride with a spare tube and necessary tools to change it out. But I had been pondering writing a bike-related post for a few days, and decided to take the flat as a sign that, yes, I should indeed to do that.

    The trigger for all of this is a series of video games I've been enjoying recently, Citizen Sleeper and it's sequel Citizen Sleeper 2. I'm so into these games I might well make a separate post about them, so I won't say too much now. As a kind of quick summary, Citizen Sleeper is a really nice cyberpunkish interactive fiction game with a great soundtrack and beautiful character art as a background to reading a compelling story, combined with a lightweight dice-rolling mechanic inspired by table-top roleplaying games. It is big on story and characters and themes and feels, light on fancy graphics, not anywhere close to so complicated in mechanics as to get frustrating (don't be scared off by the TT-RPG comparison!) but also not so simple as to be boring. It has really nice themes, of community, of helping people out, of finding a sense of place and belonging. Highly recommended!

  • Bike messenger archetypes in fiction and reality, past and present

  • In Pursuit of the Hyper-real

    The more I gaze throughout the internet, as little as I do to avoid drama, the more I see people lose themselves in the confines of the internet. I partially blame Covid-19 for a severe altercation in the behavior of millions of people's behavior, because when you condition an entire population to be anti-social...it can have an impact that lasts a lifetime.

    Meanwhile, to compensate, some people take to pursue that which isn't real, but hyper-real. A sensation of realism that in my personal opinion, can only be felt in the realm of imagination. The hyper-real, is that which seems larger than life itself, and to many it can feel inviting, maybe even enticing. Because who wouldn't want to live out the best life that they can possible imagine? Anyone would.

• Politics and World Events

  • The girls who own womanhood [Ed: Womanhood is not just a mood, it's biology]

    Recently I finished reading *The Sapling Cage* by Margaret Killjoy which is a good book by a cool person. I've never been much of a young adult novel person but this one is very thoughtful and has a lot of themes I think esteemed readers of njms.ca would enjoy.

• Technology and Free Software

  • My ideal computer

    The processor will be some kind of ARM thing. I’m not quite ready to declare that x86/x86_64 is cooked, but it’s not clear to me that it’s capable of the performance-per-watt characteristics that I like.

    I want to like RISC-V, but from what I’ve heard, I don’t think the performance is there yet, at any wattage. I want a computer that can play proper games.

    The RAM and GPU will be part of the whole package, much like how modern Apple computers are. There are performance benefits to be had by having the CPU and GPU share the same pool of RAM, and having the RAM be built in likely increases the reliability of the whole thing by having fewer things that can go wrong in the interconnects and whatnot.

    [...]

    …I pretty much don’t need it. I really want one for the VERY occasional CD rip, but from what I can tell USB-connected external CD drives are OK enough for this sort of thing.

    I’m tempted to say old-school 8x CLV drives instead of newfangled 32x CAV drives that spin up and make jet-engine noises will be available for sale, but that’s almost not worth an additional wave of a magic wand.

  • What I'm playing 🟥⚔️🟦 Beat Saber

    My gift for Christmas is sore arms from playing Beat Saber. It's a serious workout playing high-difficulty maps.

    I consider Beat Saber to be one part of the essentials pack of modern VR gaming. As a rhythm game fan, it's what got me hooked on VR, having played it at a VR arcade back when the HTC Vive was considered new. I visited that arcade multiple times and would spend my entire time slot playing Beat Saber. A few years later, I got a Valve Index and it's still one of my go-to games when I use it, alongside Half-Life: Alyx.

  • BYO backend apps are a thing again

    Basically, he’s proposing an app architecture with a server component where you can run your own server component or not, and switch back and forth between the two without ungodly amounts of hassle.

    I’d like to point out that OmniFocus does this. The easy path for anyone who wants multi-device sync is to just put your to-do list file on Omni’s servers, and they’ll let you access it over WebDAV.

    Of course, you can run your own WebDAV server if you don’t want your to-dos visible to someone else. The UI for both paths is pretty much the same — a long while back, when I was trying to set up OmniFocus on my phone and _just_ out of WiFi base-station reach, the “make sure this WebDAV server is up to snuff” part of the setup failed and I had to try again in a different part of the house.

  • Have to buy a cheap new phone... Thoughts?

    My last phone was a Samsung A14 (meh), and I lost it. I am back to using my old moto G play (2021) with cracked glass, for months now. The glass is very cracked and I am not sure how long before it breaks or starts cutting my finger. So I think I better get a phone.

    [...]

    I've considered getting a Pixel and degoogling, but it seems like a bit of an expense in time and money, and kind of a losing proposition. I can't imagine trusting an android device -- degoogled or not -- with anything sensitive. It pains me to do anything involving money on a phone.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Multi-line toots with curl

      Tooting from the command line with curl is efficient. No need to start a client or to write in a browser form.