Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • open plans

  • New Orleans medic

    I'll retell two more Katrina stories, this and one more. It's been 20 years of this hurricane. We're too used to it now. Accounts written then recall our shock and disorientation as blind we scrabbled to comprehend the shape of this new world.

    Scott W. joined our little clinic on the West Bank of the city after he got fed up with the military Woodstock across the river. He's a nurse. We'd known each other at least five years, but he didn't trust what we were doing at first. Below's his second email, shortened, headings added by me.

  • Community

    From my journal this morning... Am I deeply motivated by community more than I realize? And then a couple paragraphs later... My best thinking and writing happens during and after a walk by myself.

• Politics and World Events

  • is Trump trying to crash the US economy?

    In Naked Economics, Charles Wheelan lists several factors essential to the growth and development of a national economy:

    * effective government institutions

    * property rights

    * no excessive regulation

    * geography

    * openness to trade

    * responsible fiscal and monetary policy

    * human capital

    * democracy

    * peace

    * woman power

• Technology and Free Software

  • Openness balance

    Today, I was supposed to write a post as part of ROOPHLOCH (Remote Outdoor Off-Grid Phlogging Challenge, where phlogging is blogging in the gopher protocol. A glog, which is the equivalent of a blog in gemini, is also allowed in the challenge rules). My idea was to go out with my old laptop, whose battery lasts for about an hour, and write from the city park, connecting to the network remotely via my smartphone, but unfortunately my plans were thwarted. Such is life. But here I am, writing from a hammock that I hung on the balcony this year, and I'm still quite following the rules of the challenge. I'm outside, connected to the internet via WiFi, so I guess that's okay. So I decided to write. This will be one of those chaotic posts, more of a stream of consciousness than an edited, thoughtful entry.

    The content of the post will be a short meditation on the need to maintain the right balance in life between closing oneself off and hardening oneself to survive the hardships of life, and the openness needed to truly experience and live life.

    Let's start with a moment about a month ago, when I spent a lot of time in this hammock. I was recovering from an illness, which I wrote about in a long post for you. This period of returning to life and regaining strength was characterized by an incredibly strong sensitivity to all aspects of life. I was in a state of constant wonder. The feeling of life returning to my body, the intensely vivid experience of the taste of food, delight in every little aspect of the surrounding nature (the tree nearby, the flowers on the balcony, the sunlight, or the touch of the wind on my skin). Every second, I was filled with gratitude that I could experience this, and I was moved by this experience many times throughout the day. In a way, I was able to return to the state of a child absorbing reality with wide-open eyes, and it was a wonderful experience.

  • Update on Participatory Interface Theory (PIT)

    There is a lot new in the world of PIT. Please see the updated PITkit site for further info.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 2025-09-05

      Back again with more gopher car opinions that no one asked for. Am I the leading car content creator on gopher? heh.

      Today's subject is the new Honda Prelude and the fundamental struggle of trying to sell nostalgia as a new product.

      For a lot of things, but cars especially, the rosy tint of nostalgia is an actual market moving force, for better or worse.

      Like movie studios, car companies have been trying to tap into that soft-reboot playbook in the hopes that people who loved the original product will buy the new reboot. Or more realistically, people who grew up hearing about how "good" the original product was, will buy the brand new version of it.

      And so it is that a brand like Honda will try to dredge up old nameplates of nostalgically popular cars. Of course the core issue with that is whether the consumers will think that new product is an authentic homage to the original or just a cheap nostalgia cash grab...