Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • As long as you are consuming, you are not creating

    As work has started taking most of my focus time, I'm in a bit of a pause regarding all my hobbies (except learning how to play Riichi Mahjong, of course). This, however, isn't going to extend for long, but at the same time it allowed me to think about some things I just didn't have capacity to think about. While watching yet another video on YT, I suddenly had a thought that bothers me to this day: "am I doing the right thing by watching YT instead of building something of my own right now, at this very moment?" Indeed, I came to a conclusion that no matter what you're doing, your creativity process stops once you start consuming other content.

    This, to some extent, also applies to tools you use in your creative work. You inevitably consume them even while you're creating. One thing that can't be doubted though is the creation still is attributed to you, not the tool. For instance, lexipwn wasn't created by Vim, Go and Fyne; it was created by me using those three tools. i still was consuming them but also putting in my own input for producing some valuable output. The tools I use are quite advanced but I still am in control of the process. The real problems start when your own input becomes almost nothing compared to what the tools do for you. But an even bigger problem is... that's what the users had always been wanting.

  • threads of warmth

    ball of yarn in my hands
    becoming practical beauty
    each stitch made with love
    to warm the wearer
    

• Politics and World Events

  • First aid station

    This is the end of my commemoration of twenty years of hurricane Katrina. After this I can forget again.

    In August '05 an arsonist burnt my squat and all my stuff. Spoonie shot and killed my dog. My boyfriend was in jail. So when Mo and Bork told me to get to New Orleans now, my cousin and I said fuck it, hustled medical and construction supplies, and took a bus to Philly where we smuggled ourselves there in a truck of relief supplies.

    My trusted comrade Roger was relieved when we got to the first-aid station he started with neighbors and friends. His parents were dying. With Mo and I there (we arrived the same day) he could go.

  • The World We’re Not Supposed to See

    We were promised progress. We were told that with enough money, meetings, and good intentions, the world would get better. That if we just tried harder, listened to the right people, and supported the right causes, we would see change.

    But the quiet, horrifying truth is this: the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.

    It doesn't fail because it's weak; it fails because, for some, its failure is profitable. The world doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be managed.

    Instead of wells, food and solutions, we get reports. Endless reports. PowerPoint slides that sound like prayers. Summits where leaders nod solemnly while signing agreements that are never implemented. We are sold words like resilience, sustainability, and stakeholder engagement—all beautiful, elegant, and empty.

  • A Simple Fall Haiku

    Two Maple Seedlings,

    Floating down in Autumn Breeze,

    Spinning endlessly.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Searching for impermanence (a gazebo is too permanent)

    This month, in an attempt to outdo last year’s underwhelming ROOPHLOCH post, I’m going to make ALL of this month’s Scrawlspace posts ROOPHLOCH-compliant.

    (Capsule updates elsewhere aren’t bound to this. If I make any more headway on Wrangel’s _Always with Honor_ this month, it’s gonna be totally indoors.)

    If you’re an avid feed consumer of Halfway to Mars, you probably saw a post this month from a couple days ago. I nuked it because, on second thought, it wasn’t QUITE up to Unambiguously Full ROOPHLOCH compliance; I uploaded the change from a computer indoors even though I composed it kinda sorta outside (well, in my car).

    Now I’m sitting in the shade from an umbrella that could be blown away given a stiff-enough breeze, and I’m on a real computer that can run everything in my publish-it Makefile target.

    I should do more posts like this. If nothing else, it’s helping me realize how nice it is to have a bright screen with many, many nits of brightness and a light theme I like for my favorite text editors.

  • Spell Skills

    Spells use physics not (as far as Materialism knows) present in the Real™ world, while skills do. The author calls these physics "ultraphysics", beyond the ken of mere mortals. Cartoon physics are a thing, where for example gravity takes effect only after the soon to be falling character looks down, or where characters can survive being hit with an anvil. The custom physics must ideally be consistent and at least somewhat believable; years of training on certain historical films in the Western genre might lead one to believe that hats can be shot off heads without harm to the wearer. Or maybe not years. Some humans can be pretty quick to pick up on rules, while an LLM trained on all the chess games and the rules of chess and much commentary about chess—centuries of information!—can still make illegal chess moves. At least one chess grandmasters did a mate-in-one, so rules understanding varies over time even in the most skilled, or maybe the grandmaster did know and wanted to be somewhere else. However grandmasters (unless there has been a lot of grey matter loss?) are hilariously unlikely to try an illegal move, as opposed to a more likely but still rare bad but legal moves.

  • re-Dedigitizing

    Autumn is coming, and I am continuing the cleanse of my home. It's been since June now that I've been actively purging my home.

    I say actively, because for the last year, I've been purging, cleaning, getting rid of object that filled my 15 years of life with my now ex. In June I decided to double down on the clean up, the stagnation of the house was too much for my own enjoyment.

  • Navigating the "ASE2" Websit

    I mentioned previously that although the ASE2 Website was good to see what was available, I failed to use it to actually download anything. This was easy once I found out how, and I also managed to read the latest versions of some source code I was interested in. It's embarassingly simple, although all links from the ToC are broken, if you traverse the "ase02_02" links from the top-level page you can find the zip files you need.

  • Adopt multiple Git repos in Forgejo on FreeBSD

    Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight open source Git forge.

    On FreeBSD, Forgejo can be simply installed using the package manager. Forgejo offers support for migrating repositories from well know public forges, like GitHub and GitLab.

    Bare Git repositories can be easily adopted in Forgejo in bulk.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Notes on a Stormy Night

      I've mostly been posting rather technical things on here but I never meant this to be solely a tech sort of capsule. It just so happens that getting the capsule setup so it's comfortable for me is a rather technical process.

      So with that in mind, on this stormy night with the lights flickering, let's talk a bit about comfort. I find Gemini extremely comfortable. There is a coziness in stepping into a space where every page has been put there deliberately, where people are writing because they want to, not because an algorithm told them to chase engagement.

      Part of that comfort comes from the quiet. Gemini has no notifications, no autoplay, no doom scrolling waiting to pull you under. It asks you to lean in, like reading by candlelight when the power’s gone out. The words are just there, waiting, and you can decide how long you want to linger.

    • I Cracked Today

      I was having a decently poor day. I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, it was crazy at work for no particular reason and the upper management was breathing down our necks and making it real hot and sweaty. And to top it all off, I'm feeling like I'm coming down with something.

      I spent a bit of time today scrolling through Reddit (accursed be that site) and bingeing Seinfeld. Of the two, I believe the former is worse than the latter; however, I spent perhaps an hour on Reddit versus four hours of Seinfeld.