Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Papaya obligation 🥭🏁

    McLaren car liveries once featured papaya orange until cigarette sponsorship started to fund motor racing. But cancer is nowadays A Bad Thing and eventually papaya returned. But at the same time, Max Verstappen's fans all wear orange, which gives us the plesant irony that supporters of all three likely winners are wearing the same colour.

    This year McLaren are way ahead of the rest, so the races could be dull if their two drivers can't fight each other. Happily, they seem keen and able to fulfill this obligation. In Canada they had a beautiful moment. Norris dived in front of Piastri, surprisingly but not decisively, and they were side by side on the longest fastest straight. It was an edge-of-the-seat moment. Surely they can't keep this up? Piastri was back ahead at the next chicane, but slow off the corner. Then Norris just... knocked his front wing off on the back of Piastri. Excitement was deflated.

  • Smoky days

    This summer is a little different from the last 3 or 4 in that my youngest child is weaned and sleeping through the night, so I've been able to go out jogging early in the morning. It's a wonderful way to start the day.

    It's currently light all night, of course, so the sun is well up when I go out around 4:30. The streets in the neighborhood are very quiet, though around 4:40 there starts to be a pretty steady trickle of people leaving for work. The temperature has been pleasantly cool, around 55 degrees F when I am out. As May has turned into June, the heavy perfume of chokecherry blossoms in the neighborhood gave way to the more pleasant scent of lilacs.

  • Mid year review: what is in and what is out for 2025

    After three long-ish months, I finally return to this blog. I would like to update it more often, but burnout is limiting my creativity a bit, and when I sit down to write, I just end up staring at a blank page for a while. Also, because I work at my computer all day, it's hard to find the energy and motivation to turn it on also during my free time.

    Anyways, this seems like a good moment to regroup and set some goals for the rest of the year, in the form of "what is in and out for the rest of the year".

• Technology and Free Software

  • don't mind me, just having a midlife crisis (it's my jam)

    Week 4 of The Artist's Way includes a week of "reading deprivation." It's exactly what it sounds like. One does not read for a week, on the premise that blocked creatives often keep themselves that way by stuffing their heads full of other people's voices instead of listening for their own.

    The Artist's Way was first published in the early 1990s - a time when whiling away hours in front of Internet forums, social media, algorithmically-driven automated content delivery, and infinite-scroll pages were simply not things. With this in mind, I decided the "no reading" rule applied to anything I would ordinarily do as mental "white noise." So no forums, no reading the news, no streaming anything. (I decided movies and TV shows I already own are okay, since those don't auto-play or seek to monetize my attention.)

    I spent a large part of last week cleaning and rearranging my basement. It's where the very large TV lives - the one that was my husband's and that I rarely if ever use. I also hooked up the DVD/VCR deck I scavenged from last year's high school band room cleanout. I took it because the Booster president swore to me it did not work. Since it was already headed for the dumpster, I figured a detour through my basement wouldn't hurt it.

  • Too few characters

    Okay this is gonna be heresy to my OSR and PbtA peeps but hear me out.

    I think there are two kinds of game systems that work for my group.

    One is the rules heavy “buildy” games with lots of character options and crunch to choose from. You’re building your character out of Lego pieces, out of big ugly rock pieces even, but you have plenty of pieces to choose from. Like 5e with its dozens and dozens of subclasses and spells.

    The other is the more story gamey system that’s super rules light where the little crunch that’s there generates all kinds of characters. We’ve had fun with Microscope and Fiasco and Hillfolk and DitV and Cthulhu Dark, and I would imagine that games like Wushu and Fate would fit in here too. Games where a simple core system evoke millions of character options, more clay than Lego.

  • The Altair of Prometheus

    One of my projects this summer involves putting together a small exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Altair 8800 which, as the first commercially successful personal computer, basically launched the microcomputer revolution in the late 70s.

    The exhibit will be installed for a month, in a couple of display cases abutting a square pillar just inside front entrance of our university's main library.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • No scripting, honest! 📜🙅

      No one thinks scripts in Gemtext are a good idea. I implemented it just for fun, but I'm not goung to release it (and I'm basically the only user even if I did).

      Notice that I said Gemtext, not Gemini. If you want scripted pages in Gemini, how about HTML over Gemini? For example, any web browser could easily support that. If the Gemini protocol became suddenly very popular, that wouldn't be outlandish.

      Although I don't want scripts in Gemtext or Gemini, I don't think that the specs can prevent it. What prevents it now is the Gemini community and the relative obscurity of this corner of the internet.

    • Topics to Write About

      Being this Internet log new, I have some pending thoughts (some are theories) to write about. I have to go deep into each of these, in order to write proper articles. So, here I will be writing the topics of these upcoming articles, so that I may not get stray away and not get lost in this path of thought.

    • Mid year review: what is in and what is out for 2025

      After three long-ish months, I finally return to this blog.

      I would like to update it more often, but burnout is limiting my creativity a bit, and when I sit down to write, I just end up staring at a blank page for a while. Also, because I work at my computer all day, it's hard to find the energy and motivation to turn it on also during my free time.

      Anyways, this seems like a good moment to regroup and set some goals for the rest of the year, in the form of "what is in and out for the rest of the year".

  • Programming

    • A Tour of Old Languages

      The idea certainly isn't due to me, but I may have mentioned previously that a much lower-cost way to deliver systems is to compile to native code (i.e. no JavaScript/Python/whatever - Golang might be a reasonable choice) and use SQLite. This means you can run on a (potentially large) cloud instance instead of a K8S cluster which is drastically simpler.

      If you go a step further and don't need a Web app, you end up with requirements like old Visual Basic (and before that, dBase or Clipper) used to satisfy. A good way to satisfy these nowadays would be by adding a Golang interface to Tk, but there's actually something much closer to Visual Basic - PureBasic. Commercial product, but I didn't mind (I thought the price was reasonable). Has a form designer for quick prototyping, and the usual structured programming tools (i.e. no line numbers). Looks much faster to develop those line-of-business CRUD apps, *if* you can get away with running locally.

  • Poetry/Writing

    • as if I might escape

    • That Constant Wish to Make a Fanzine

      Even though I'm an avid tabletop role-player I don't do much gaming these days, for lack of time and a consequence of prioritisation. When I do it's mostly one-shots with simple home brew mechanics. My bookshelf is very devoid of RPG products, especially commercial ones. I just had a look and it's even emptier than I though! I have a printout of the free Labyrinth Lord pdf (is there still a free version? I don't know) and a printout of the free Stars Without Number basic rules pdf. Then my own games and adventures, of course.

      Most of the shelf space is occupied by the RPG fanzines I've been a part of, and a few issues of some I haven't. There are a couple of pretty thick issues of a fanzine that I've edited but not gotten a physical copy of myself. Maybe I'll get those eventually.

      Suffice to say it's quite obvious that I love making and partaking in fanzines. I wish there were more fanzines out there, and that I had more time to read them.