Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A Post by Bones

    If life imitates art and art imitates life, then which is truly being imitated. Is it just a feedback loop? Imitating and imitating until no one remembers what they originally were? Eventually one, say art in this example, will have one minute difference. Not large enough to be significant at the moment but still very much there. And then life will copy art, including that difference. Maybe life gains a new minute difference as well. Eventually after much copying back and forth those minute differences have been amplified worlds over and now both life and art are very much different than they once were, all for the sake of being the same. That’s how life is going right now. Art, that is to say writings, drawings, movies, games, and all of the such, change reality a little bit, mostly on purpose. Life of course imitates it and now those changes might become part of reality. Maybe not in such a large way as in the art but they will influence it none the less. Now reality is a bit more like the art. The art copies that new thing that life picked up from some very specific art. Everyone is doing it now because that’s just how reality is. And of course, artists add in differences from reality as well, and reality copies them, and art copies back, and on and so forth. This is why artists are so influential. They dictate the direction reality will take. Sure it won’t be drastic. If someone makes art of the world ending in flames tomorrow, that likely won’t happen, but life will shift towards that, even if by small amounts, until eventually with enough art of the world ending in flames, it becomes reality. I however, don’t think artists should change. They’re not the problem. The problem is life putting so much weight on art. Art is important, yes, but it shouldn’t decide the fate of the world. It shouldn’t even decide the fate of your world. You are not immune to propaganda but you should be aware of it and fight against it where you can.

  • Sanseveria bloom

    The season has begun: as the sun sets, the Sanseveria flowers hidden deep amidst the leaves open and that sweet opium fills the room. I walk past the door and stop as if running into a different medium. Have I stepped out of an air-conditioned room into a Bangkok summer night? That sweetness takes me away as if I could bury my face into the neck of the love of my life. Sanseveria bloom. You are blessed if you have experienced it. Now is the season of my heart.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — CDHILMU Wordo: WOODS

  • "A Monk's Guide to Happiness" book notes

    These are my personal book notes from Gelong Thubten's "A Monk's Guide to Happiness: Meditation in the 21st century." They are for my own reference, but I hope they might be useful to you as well.

  • a stone thrown into water

• Technology and Free Software

  • MY SESSION WITH THE BOTS

    On Monday I got emails from failed cron jobs on the VPS that runs my website, caused by failed connections to other websites. I tried to SSH in, but it couldn't connect, nor could a web browser, oh dear. Onto the VPS control panel website to piss away my home internet data quota using their web-based VNC, where a hopelessly laggy stream of errors like this was pouring out over the vitrual fbcon:

    nf_conntrack: nf_conntrack: table full, dropping packet

    A quick web search reveled that this meant there were too many connections for "nf_conntrack" to handle, solved by the dodgy-sounding solution of setting /proc/sys/net/netfilter/nf_conntrack_max to some random huge number. So I typed that in blind to the laggy stream of errors in the VNC terminal and eventually saw my commands scroll past, then SSH finally worked.

  • (Autodesk) Animator

    In short: The Animator application formerly published as Autodesk Animator from 1989-1994 was released with a BSD license by its developer Jim Kent in 2011. It can be downloaded from GitHub. The binary version was removed from the Releases page a few years ago, but it is still possible to find a download in the Git history.

  • reading: Domain-Driven Design Quickly

    This slim volume summarizes the many dense concepts of domain-driven design, a software engineering philosopjhy that seems borne of certain dense problems in enterprise software engineering. That gives you some idea of whether it would be of interest to you. The ideal audience is probably someone with some software engineering experience who has heard of some terminology of DDD - maybe in a positive context, maybe not - but wants to better understand, without yet having gone through the investment of the longer foundational works of the topic (like the "Blue Book", Domain-Driven Design by Eric Evans).

    Reading it feels like a fever dream, an fast infoburst of terminology and the outline of big concepts, bold declarations of terminiology with capital letters. My honest initial reaction was mild skepticism in truth - isn't this too much complexity? How could these extra layers of engineering lead to a better product, or let me keep my job?

  • First time with wireless earbuds

    For reasons that are too convoluted to summarize, I own a set of wireless earbuds now. I've had them for about a week now, and these are my assorted thoughts on them.

    Wow, my ears (the pinnae specifically) get sore wearing them. I'm not sure why. The eartips feel fine and seal properly. If I switched to smaller ones, they wouldn't fit right. These earbuds do have little fins to keep them stable in my ear, so could that be why? Are these like shoes and I have to break them in?

    These earbuds have surprisingly powerful noise cancelling. They're actually stronger than the noise cancelling on the over-ear headphones I normally use! It reduces outside noise enough to feel kind of unnerving. The resistance to wind noise is also much better than on my headphones.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Making a link blog

      Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte[1], I've gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too[2].