Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • excision

  • Gen Con 2025

    My oldest daughter (I'll just say "Daughter") and I went to Gen Con last week. It is the first time either than us have been there, and it was a huge event. The central room in the Indiana Convention Center was filled with booths to buy everything from games to clothes and everything in between. A couple stores had great Cosplay outfits. You could spend a lot of money on Cosplay, including sets of armor and shields which I enjoyed looking at and trying on. Note, the armor was expensive. So were the hats in one of the stores (running hundreds of dollars for a hat).

    We spent a lot of time the first day there. Daughter really enjoyed the Warhammer booth. I headed by the Critical Role booth, and checked out their new game Solar Gardens. I saw a demo on how it is played, and picked up a copy to try out with my family.

  • regular

    being a regular to a place is interesting. you get to keep a tab on who the familiar faces are. get a chance to know the staff, and their hours. who makes the better latte, who has the better stories. and they get to keep a similar tab on you: when you usually come in, what do you order when you're feeling down, where you usually sit…

    I like those intricacies. it makes a place feel like home, even if you don't know anyone's name. there is a certain belonging you feel, a certain trust. an unspoken contract with your usual spot, for it knows when you will be sitting there. sometimes, you bring friends over. sometimes, they also stick around. now, it's a bigger family. most of the time though, they will be the one-off characters to your play. they are meant to spark new conversations in your mundane relaxation.

• Finance

  • credit cards are weird

    My parents, who got themselves into trouble with credit cards in their early 20s, warned me away from all the offers I got in college. I got my first credit card at age 25 but rarely used it. My debit card had a higher limit (because I possessed more than $500 US dollars in any given month) and didn't require me to keep track of what I'd spent. I ended up closing that first credit card a few years after I got it, having used it maybe twice.

    For years, I didn't bother getting a credit card because I assumed no bank would give me one. Lenders don't like working with the "self-employed." For some reason, they think it's a safer bet that a single employer won't fire me than that a dozen clients won't walk all at once. Weird.

    Anyway, I decided to try again on the credit card front - nearly 20 years later - when my bank offered a zero annual fee card with cash back on stuff I actually buy, like gas and groceries.

• Technology and Free Software

  • review the vision

    I'd like to think that the deepest parts of my soul have been touched more by conversations and books than by comment sections and memes. But at this point, who knows?

    I should know better. Shouldn't I? Why do I keep consuming that same intoxicating mix of rage bait chased by reaction commentary? When I come to, my cortisol is spiked, I feel like shit, and I can't entirely account for the last few hours. God, I really need to quit. I swear, that's the last time. I will never scroll again...

    I have to be careful around YouTube. It's a mixed bag; there's some valuable and wholesome stuff sprinkled in with the poison. And just now it occurs to me that how it's cut has been algorithmically optimized for me. It's precisely at the edge of my tolerance and always will be.

  • 🖥️ Framework Laptop - First Big Upgrade

    I’ve had my Framework 13 for 2.5 years, and it’s performed like a champ, throughout. I don’t use it every day – I work from home, and have a rig – but it’s done everything I’ve wanted from it when I’m on the road.

    But it’s started to pant a bit. Software is as Software does; things get fatter, slower, and more Electron, and lately, it’s not taken all that much to get the fans going. Obviously, the whole point of going with a Framework was to get to this point, wanting to upgrade, but without spending a whole load of coin on a new machine, generating e-waste, or adding to a shelf of Thinkpads. Since I’ve finished a project, and got a new job, I thought I’d treat myself and see if the dream could come true.