Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ACELVUO Wordo: LUVYA

  • J.G. Ballard’s The Drought

    So The Drought, from 1965. I loved The Crystal World and I love how different this is. Crystal World came after but is absolutely no retread. Ballard grows as an author in my appreciation for creating two masterpieces that are so different from each other. That’d be like if Mondrian had also made The Last Supper in between his haunting plastic visions.

    Years ago I bought a box of a hundred postcards depicting paper back covers. The four that made the biggest impression on me were a collection of Heine poems with a mindblowing op art cover, Iris McCullough’s A Severed Head with that just-manic-enough stare, and the contrasting dichotomy of J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and The Drought. I always wanted to read them. Turned out that it’s not just two books, it’s an entire series. I managed to read The Crystal World a few years ago, in Swedish; this copy of The Drought was in English.

  • Gamboling with Odds

    'formalized' is important as there have been prior arguments that anticipate some forms of Pascal's reasonings, the Apaṇṇaka Sutta (MN60) being perhaps the earliest known. 'reasonings' is plural on account of there being apparently at least four forms of Pascal's wager in Pensées.

  • Christina's 5 Questions

    There are far too many films that I've watched over and over again. If I had to list films that I've seen more than half a dozen times, you would move on before reaching the end. I have a friend who studied film, he helped me expand my selections a bit while he was around.

    You know a movie I watched way too many times? The Bourne series. I guess that's actually 5 movies. I love Little Forest, both the Japanese and Korean versions. I'm a fan of most of the Studio Ghibli movies. I like period romance adaptations; love the Jane Eyre miniseries with Timothy Dalton. All the above I've easily watched 6+ times.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Depression of 2026, Fred Foldvary

    Have you read this?

    https://www.progress.org/articles/the-depression-of-2026

    This fellow predicted the 2008 depression (I know, that word is on the Controlled Words list, and has a variable definition) in 1997. And, he predicted a worse one for 2026.

• Science

  • Watches

    Some people are big watch people. I'm not one of those, but I do have a small soft spot for watches. When I was a boy, I was fascinated with pocket watches. I still have the one that my grandfather gave me. I recall going to an electronics store, and they had a watch section. I believe that's where I picked it out. I still have it around here somewhere. The only thing I didn't like about it was that it was battery powered. Even as a kid, I thought a pocket watch should be wind-up.

    There are a few other watches I remember. I had a Timex Datalink watch as a teen. If I recall correctly, you held it up to the computer screen, and the software blinked the screen to transfer data.

    My dad bought me a Citizen Windsurfer D060 a few years after that. I still have that watch. Recently I saw it in a photo, and so I dug it out of storage. The band was crap (and not original) so I got rid of it. The body is in reasonable condition, but the polarizing film is failing, so the display is a little dim in areas. But it still works (with a new battery, of course).

    In my 20s, I had a Fossil PalmOS watch. That thing was clunky, and had horrible battery life. But hey, it had a tiny stylus and PalmOS!

• Technology and Free Software

  • News

    First, I'm back posting on gemini! I know it's been a while. Got my server setup tweaked a bit so that I'm happier with it. Mainly the OpenBSD sysupgrade(1) stuff is better now with more space for /usr (for now).

    Second, some brief reflection on news. I thought about consuming content including news while out on a walk. There may be a choice of different attitudes with which to approach consuming the news. I can certainly relate to chasing news that show the shocking, unexpected, exciting... With this attitude, sifting through the news is mostly a search for those items that fit this sensation - certainly not the majority of news reports fit this (although the 24/7 news cycle tries to make everything "breaking news").

  • Still cursed after all these years

    It often strikes me as so wild, the fact that I’m typing this in a curses UI in 2025. I see this less as a vindication of the durability of the textual software stack (although it is) and more as a failure of the stack as the whole. [I hate laptops] but Linux on the laptop and desktop was in a great place. I had my own fork of dwm (hopefully I can still rescue that dwm code at some point in the distant future) and I was running Emacs with proportional fonts and everything was peachy and even keen.