Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: UIKLNSF Wordo: BESOT

  • Medical Aid in Dying, My Health, and so on

    I'll start at the end, because that's the most important part. Later this month, I'm obtaining medical aid in dying AKA death with dignity. Barring unforeseen circumstances or unexpected changes, my last day on earth will be June 13th, 2025. Realize that I'm just over 46 years old. So how the hell did we get here? I've written part of the story in dribs and drabs over the years, so I may as well write up the whole thing.

    Late on the night of November 14th, 2021, I went to the local emergency room. I had a blood pressure of 55/37 and a pulse of 220. I had a heart attack at some point. I'm not quite sure when that happened. They admitted me for a hospital stay.

    [...]

    I'm basically terminally ill. I got a referral to hospice, and I've been on that program for several months. I still have heart episodes. I can back them off with morphein, which I use very judiciously. But I expect that at any time, I could have an episode strong enough to land me back in the ER. At that point, I'd most likely just die naturally.

    I am afraid to so much as go for a walk, because the last thing I want is to die in the middle of the sidewalk, or worse, be discovered by paramedics and accidentally receive medical intervention.

    [....]

    So anyway here I am, planning for my upcoming death. And I don't have enough nice things to say about this process. At every point, the choice is entirely mine. From the beginning of the process all the way until I consume the cocktail of meds that will end my life, I can decide not to proceed, or I can decide to wait to fill the prescription, or whatever. This is my choice all the way.

    As it was put to me: "Chris, you're dying of heart disease. You can choose to just let it naturally run its course. Or you can choose a controlled exit. Either way, if you choose medical aid or you choose to let it run its course, you're dying."

  • Texture

    I had the modest notion that Tomita's "Pictures at an Exhibition" was better than an orchestrated version, though on review it was probably some combination of nostalgia and memory throwing off the rating; both are good. Or can be good. A live version could sour on account of the orchestra or the facility or the audience being off, while the Tomita recording is more or less the same, though the quality of the speakers or headphones can move the goodness knob around. In both cases the listening environment is important, like if there's a leaf blower that's no bueno. Orchestration or more recently the synthesizer allows the composer to play around with texture, which is less possible with fewer instruments, and very limited on particular instruments. The piano or piano-forte or soft-loud more or less completely replaced the harpsichord for various reasons, one of which probably being the ability to make the notes sound differently. Synths or more accurately the mixing can easily play around with where the sound seems to be coming from (and the bass you hear? Your brain might be hallucinating that), though there are orchestrations where the players surround or even move around the audience. Texture can also apply to a harpsichord; the notes (which are more or less the same in texture) may be played one or two at a time, slowly for an "open" texture, or there could be a lot of notes at the same time and in succession, a dense texture. At worst this gets into piano roll players or "black MIDI" that most humans have a low to zero chance of being able to play. Samuel Conlon Nancarrow might be worth looking up. Texture in music could be distinct from the lower level counterpoint and harmony (or these days the perhaps neglected monody, which is a melodic line free of the usual distractions) or might be integral to a particular composition that uses timber and other auditory details to deliberate effect. "Pictures at an Exhibition" and the various renditions thereof, for example.

  • Inescapable Questions

    When you enter the gravitational pull from a black hole, could you ever escape it?

    When a black hole can't be seen, could you ever tell where the outer space ends and the event horizon begins?

    When a cosmic veil conceals everything, could you ever distinguish it from the surrounding walls of a deep cosmic well?

    When atoms are mostly empty space, could you ever distinguish the atomic emptiness from cosmic emptiness?

  • lyrics: The Pomps - Grudges

    This is a self-aware song called "Grudges" by Boston-based ska band the Pomps, a relatively recent 2023 release.

    I relate to the song a bit too strongly. Is it because of the game-design art scenes I was part of? The music scenes that emotionally defined me? My various fandoms transformed through cycles of fan-creator auteur-ship and omnipresent culture war? Being a traveller along many booms and busts of technology and startups? yep. I'm doing better and starting to learn, and this song reflects that, too.

  • Summer Updates

    I haven't been getting out of doors as much as I would like, owing to a lot of overcast days and some rainy weather. A cold wind has been blowing this last week or two, so that it is uncomfortable to go out on a day that is not sunny.

    [....]

    The Tanana River is still very low compared to my memory from last summer — about six or seven feet lower, I'd estimate. I can walk out onto large sand and mud islands that were mostly covered in water last year. Just underneath the edge of the water, I can see some dune-like patterns in the mud. There are many miniature ridges, going parallel to the shore, which meet up at larger ridges that point away from the shore. These larger ridges are wavy. This first section of mud has a very small slope (almost level). About one foot out from the shore, the smaller ridges disappear, but the large ridges continue on for another foot or so down a steep incline (about 30 degrees) going deep into the water and then are no longer visible due to the murk.

  • The Art of Looking 2

    I've really begun noticing that some days I just seem a lot more visually integrated than normal; it's almost like I have some kind of feeling of being hyper-visual, where all of the sight stimuli that normally might just mildly intrigue me are instead impressed upon me in a more superlative way. Colorful objects now look dazzling. Sometimes I'll see a shiny object and it looks like it's shimmering like jewelry, or people's faces look more beautiful than they normally do. I saw a beautiful woman today, and it wasn’t that any particular part of her stood out to me as more attractive than any other, but there was a kind of symmetry and poetry to the way her facial features all combined, the way she smiled at her friend in conversation, all of these things combined into a wonderful package. I only wish it weren’t ill-mannered to just sit and stare, and take in her visage the way I may watch a tree dancing in high wind. I find a *lot* of people attractive anymore… a harsh, war-wrought face of an older man speaks to a certain resolve of character and ‘get-about-it’-ness that I find alluring. I want to talk to him, look at his face, watch his efforts to retrieve or constrain his emotions. Little children have such remarkable eyes, wide as stars and probing, prodding, analyzing, taking the whole world in. Do I look at the big people the same way they do?

• Technology and Free Software

  • TV died

    My TV died! Looks like a backlight failure, so time to get out the tools and see if I can repair it. It's quite a mission to disassemble it, especially when handling the fragile LCD panel.

  • Get excited for new products

    I’ll get one. Eventually. I’m in the queue.

    WWDC 2025 is the week after.

    The page for WWDC (no point linking to it; it’ll change in a year) has a frosted-glass thing going. The rumor mill is abuzz with how the whole OS is going to change the look to have more frosted-glass-type stuff instead of the flat everything that we got as, quite frankly, a breath of fresh air from the initial iPhone’s excessively-skeuomorphic phase.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Here are some ideas you all can start working on. I'm an ideas guy.

      Here are some ideas you all can start working on. I'm an ideas guy.

      [...]

      Search

      We need to fix this yesterday. I know of a group of people running a "working group" about this but I am not a part of it. But I can introduce you.

    • yeeting social media and Oligarch Tech: month 6

      I'm definitely calmer day to day and more satisfied with my daily life. I'm certainly not some kind of bodhisattva. I still get angry and annoyed and fearful and all the rest of it. But those states are less common, and when they do happen, they're milder and pass more quickly. My "default" state is genuinely pretty chill - a sentence I thought I would never, ever say about myself.

      [...]

      I'm spending less time at my computer than I was even a month ago. When I quit social media, I signed up for several forums (fora?), and I checked them daily; now I check weekly, if that.

      Instead, I am very into my garden and chickens at the moment. Part of that is seasonal as well, but part of that is having the mental and emotional energy to put into project planning and execution. It's also having this newfound drive for real, physical activities that make real, physical changes in my world.

      Today, for example, I bought a flat of marigolds on sale and planted them everywhere I could cram a plant between vegetable plantings (accounting for the expected August size of said plants). Now I can look out my window and see the safety orange marigolds in the garden. Neat.