Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I'm Creating a Fantasy World/Legendarium

    I started reading Tolkien's Silmarillion, and was deeply inspired by his legendarium which attempted to create the mythology that England never had, but deserved (I especially LOVE the creation story, Ainulindale, and the way it beautifully uses music to depict the harmonizing of distinct voices, including Melkor's!).

  • Death of a Cable Box

    My parents love watching television. For many years, they had almost ten TVs scattered around their house, some dating back to the 1980s. Having televisions that old required them to use a service that sent signals directly over coaxial, without requiring a cable box. That became tough to find by the late 2010s, and in 2022, the last such service in their area switched to IPTV. My parents eventually changed providers and now rely exclusively on set-top boxes.

    The former provider never asked for the cable box to be returned, since it was now useless. A few weeks ago, as I was helping to clean out my parents' garage, we found the box and its remote control. The box had a hard drive inside, and back in the day, they had recorded several hours of programs on the box. I offered to take it home and try to extract the recorded data.

  • Beacon Pines is honest about not being a game

    A horrible flaw permeats nearly every instance of [fiction, of the branching narrative genre, presented in the medium of computer software], the flaw of pretending to be something they're not. The sorry state of mainstream vocabulary is such that all kinds of interactive entertainment, so long as they're delivered using computers, are called "games", even when they're decidedly un-game-like. And so, with precious few exceptions, _visual novels_ bill themselves as "videogames", address their reader as "player", and use second person pronouns for the story's protagonist, whom they pretend is a "player avatar".

    It's hard to clearly perceive a flaw when it's this ubiquitous. Sometimes, you need an example of something done right, before you can crystallize a general sense of wrongness into a concept the can be pointed at. Named. Banished. For me, that first[^1] example was Beacon Pines.

    [^1]: The second being Dr. Ludwig and the Devil, which uses a different framing device from Beacon Pines, but is equally honest about the level of agency afforded to the reader. It's also quite short and doesn't cost anything, so give it a try.

  • My TMNT books arrived!

  • 🖼️ xkcd — Bridge Clearance #3174

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ABCTIMH Wordo: PARDS

  • cheap paid

    Hi, as twenty, I work my love work, IT, but it wasn't like a dream, I got paid $100 included taxes. I don’t know that can I continue with this job.

    I just like coding, just love to create things, but the bill doesn’t pay for itself.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Simple vim-like editor

    I have a TUI widget library with a basic editbox which similar to the basic editbox in the web browsers. This editbox widget is used in my `ink` markdown editor.