Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Maybe these will last longer than two years

    I no longer have to tape them to my head to keep them on. Even better, I can now clean my glasses with cursing like a sailor.

  • Why I love the Phantasm franchis

    Sometimes I get really side-tracked when I'm writing.

    It's like the daydream gets a little too strong, and you begin to drift with it. And to compound matters, if you're working on a creative project, you're probably already thinking a little strangely.

    Anyway. I've had an interesting person relationship with the Phantasm franchise. The first one I saw was Phantasm 3: Lord of the Dead. One of my best friends rang me up and told me to check out cable channel whatever, and I tuned in right in time to see someone get decapitated with a boomerang! I was sold, as any good elementary schooler would be.

    Now Phantasm 3 is by no means the best in the series. When I got a little older, I used to scour DVD racks at different stores, and lucky for me, one day I happened to find Phantasm. The first one. So naturally, I bought it, having only a vague but nonetheless fond memory of the 3rd movie from childhood. It was like reuniting with a childhood friend!

    I showed that movie to everyone I knew! One of my fondest memories is the time my friends and I, already graduated at this point, went to the student union at the nearby college to play video games. You see. We had a tv at home, but it was a lot smaller than the one at the union. Well, one thing led to another, and pretty soon we had carted my XBOX over to use that gigantic tv instead. Probably to play the beat-em-up game based on The Warriors.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A blog post appeared

    "Lane departure" may also be a polite fiction that misdirects from such things as road design that favors speed over safety and a somewhat negligent state of driver training. English is more agentive than other languages, so why the lack of agency when a vehicle is involved? Other departures here are political speech and Overton windows.

    A productive exercise might be to use more or less agency, similar to writing prose with all passive verbs instead of active, though the other way around is typical. Or study the language, "leaning toothpick syndrome" (when there are many backslashes, usually in a heavily escaped string or regular expression) could have a whiff of agent about it, though "lean" does have a non-agentive sense.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Reading RSS feeds on OS X Mavericks

      NetNewsWire supports syncing with Google Reader. Google Reader is one of the many discontinued Google services.

      Several self hosted online RSS aggregators support the Google Reader API. The advantage is that you can use different devices when reading your feeds, without the need for any synchronization.

      Unfortunately, the connection to Google Reader is hard coded into NetNewsWire, and it is not possible to connect to a different aggregator.

    • ROOPHLOCH 2025

      i tried participating in ROOPHLOCH last year but i got this really big idea in my head about like i would set up a persistent netbsd live usb and run a USENET server on it that i would upload my gemlog to, and then when i got home it would share with a USENET server on another machine at home, and then that would bridge to a gemini server or whatever. i'd never even used USENET lol idk but i ended up not doing it

      anyway so i am keeping it simple this year by like. not introducing any technology for the sake of the ROOPHLOCH challenge that i wasn't already familiar with. i'm just out on a bike ride and typing this up on my chromebook