Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • synth moon and mush

    Every full moon, Will ingest a good quantity of mushroom and play electronic music for hours. This full moon he decided to invite me to partake in his ritual.

    Theatre is done for the season so I had nothing planned, and I really liked the idea to have a music focused mushroom trip. Will and I have always had a good time playing electronic music improvisation in the past so I felt fairly comfortable with my limited skill.

  • The Phoenician Scheme

    After wasting a good deal of life on MI7 (Amazing stunts though), we saw the new Wes Anderson movie which brought a great deal of joy even overcoming the horribleness of the modern American theater experience. I love Wes Anderson movies.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ADEHWNI Wordo: BALKS

  • purpose is a dying bird

    Today, while on a walk through the neighborhood, my friend and I chanced upon a baby bird sitting on the pavement. It was tiny, and weak, and underneath its gray wings was pink flesh. It could barely open its eyes. As my friend searched for a nest, I studied its shaking body in the palm of my hand. The fledgling and I breathed together. I found a makeshift nest, where it will die peacefully enough, hidden from the cars.

    Although no sound sprang from its opened beak, I would know the bird species anywhere. They roost in all the trees in the city I live in. They have their own roosting season: two weeks in fall, immediately before lifting off in mass migration. In those two weeks, if you get downtown early enough--between 6 and 7:15 in the morning--you will hear them, thousands of birds singing and awakening together, drowning out the city's soundscape. No amount of human activity or infrastructure can match the noise, not even the construction.

  • cycle

    never been more relieved to bleed
    a phrase I keep repeating 
    funny how your greatest wish
    so easily becomes your greatest fear
    maybe funny is not the right word here
    but it's what I have
    the recurrence
    first a cruel sign of failure
    your body refusing 
    to function, to create meaning
    then with time comes to be 
    the most welcome gift
    a celebration 
    relief
    assurance
    you can remain whole
    and not give away another piece of your soul
    to someone else
    

  • (Not)virtues

    A certain paradox of modern moral norms is that we don't seem to recognize the difference between classical virtues and their opposite. Not only have the boundaries blurred between the two, but because of this we forget at all what virtues are and why we should want to exercise them. We have traveled a path from the division between virtue and the lack thereof, the clear division between what is desirable and what is undesirable, through the ridicule and negation of the value of virtues, on to filling the void thus created by elevating to the status of virtues what is their opposite and, consequently, getting completely lost in the hierarchy. We have ceased not only to see what is better and what is worse in us, but we cease to have the ability to such categorization at all.

    I am writing again about certain mechanisms. It is not about “all of us” or anyone in particular. Nor is it about the fact that it is the only thing that happens and the changes have taken place in full and are irreversible. No. It's about a regularity that I notice. The direction of change seems to me to be quite common. I come from observation of my own life and my own struggles. I matured in the conviction of the lack of value of classical virtues, they were at best the object of jokes. This caused many years of powerful confusion in my hierarchy of values, inability to discern, inability to choose directions and make life choices.

• Politics and World Events

  • Whose agenda was LAFRA implementing?

    Last year the UK government reformed leasehold and freehold law, via the Leasehold and Freehold Reform Act 2024. The law is now known as LAFRA and much of it is not yet in force.

    It came after a long process of proposals involving the Law Commission and electoral manifestos. The Law Commission's reports (on Right To Manage, Enfranchisement and Commonhold) were referenced in the government statement of its agenda in January 2021. These reports were commissioned in 2017 and published in 2020.

    But LAFRA doesn't touch on commonhold, and only half of it is even to do with leasehold. The legislation has eight substantive parts, and parts 5 to 8 are about estate management and building safety.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Generative 'AI' in citizen science: the iNaturalist backlash

    A couple of days ago, _iNaturalist_ – a citizen science project/platform for observations of living beings in the natural world – announced that they were going to be part of a grant/program of Google to implement _generative 'AI'_ (or "GenAI"[^1]) into their tooling. Since then, many users of iNaturalist, including many power-users, have been making their dissatisfaction about this heard, on social media, the iNaturalist forum[1] and the blog post that the iNaturalist team made in an attempt at controlling the damage[2].

  • Project Yeet Broadband?: early observations

    I have stopped looking at my phone when I'm working. It's right here; it's connected to my laptop, as the hotspot works best that way. But I don't pick it up.

    I still get the urge to do so. But then it seems silly, somehow, to look at the Internet on a device I have connected to my laptop *to look at the Internet.* So I don't. I got a client project drafted in record time this morning.

    I'm sure this will change. It always does. But for the past three mornings, my phone has been sitting right next to my laptop, yet I haven't picked it up once. That's pretty impressive.

  • Steam Next Fest (June 2025) — Day 4

    The black cat-themed day of Next Fest

  • Internet/Gemini

    • back online

      The Gopher server is back online.

      The content is a little bit different, lots of dead stuff has been removed. It's mostly just the phlog now.

      I shut down my Gopher server last year because there were too many overlapping "channels": Blog, phlog, twtxt, Mastodon/Fediverse. I didn't know anymore where to post what kind of content.