Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — FHLYTUR Wordo: STEEP

• Politics and World Events

  • Against English

    It's been a while since I last posted around these parts of the web, or anywhere on the whole internet, for that matter. Indeed, I've been mostly away for the last few months. Not that I've been completely disconnected, I do watch stuff on youtube, though not as much as I used to, and not the kind of content that the so-called algorithm tries to force-feed you with. In other words, I've been judicious in my use of internet content.

    I have actually been frequenting the pub, both the midnight pub and the smol pub, but mostly as a viewer, reading every new post but not actively participating. Whenever I open a web browser it's either to find the meaning of a word, perhaps some concrete piece of information (such as the location of a city or the date of a certain event), or to peruse the pubs and see what is new. I've been staying away from "social media" and from anonymous boards and all that garbage. Which brings me to the topic of today's discussion.

    For many years it was the English-speaking internet where I spent the vast majority of my time online. For one thing, English has been the "lingua franca" of the Internet, and for many of us also a sort of promise of opportunity: opportunity to engage with people from all over the world, to access the largest body of information, in all sorts of formats: videos, blog posts, books, sites for discussion on very many different topics, you name it. But that is rapidly becoming a thing of the past. Recent events are rapidly eroding the desirability of the English language as a source of information and contact with the world, I've been aware of this for a number of years already, though this awareness has been gradually becoming. After a number of years of frequenting English speaking sites I started to notice many cultural assumptions that belong mostly, if not exclusively to the countries where it is the dominant language. For example, politics. Whereas the (already vanishing) status of empire has meant that it's politics do affect the rest of the world, even today, participating in English-speaking sites does mean being inundated with news of politics which are not directly relevant to one's country, if one lives almost anywhere else in the world. Moreover, putting a particular countrie's internal drama at the center of the stage has tricked us into confusing the interests of the empire above those of our own countries, I imagine a lot of people here may be quite familiar with this situation.

  • Symposium of Destruction

    Here the translator Benjamin Jowett, quite the heretical reformer in his day, indicates that Plato has no wrong-thought, being the cradle of Western thought. The Irving Finkels of the world will meanwhile happily show you the Babylonian, that is, Eastern, tablets which have greek on the backside to aid with the pronunciation and understanding of all things Babylonian. Sharing was perhaps more common than citation.

    [...]

    Ergo, Sparta, given all the buggery, should be but somehow is not invincible. They do run out of dudes and eventually are steamrolled by someone presumably with more Love Points. Other commentators point out that Rome is rather more the model for the very model of modern day Americanism, as in Rome the masculinity is more performative even if there is still buggery on the side. Fake it until you make it, eh, Caligula? Benjamin Jowett the Victorian Anglican for some reason leans towards the less messy and more Platonic flavor of love, or Love as the Platonists would have it, being as ever eager to inflict the needless use of the shift key on others.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 🚔 PXN VD6 Bundle

    Back in, oooh, 2010 or so, I thought I’d give that fancy iRacing a go, as one of the coders I worked with at the time was singing its praises. He knew that I was into my racing games. I rinsed Stunt Car Racer, spent fuck knows how many hours on Crammond’s F1 sims, and wasted most of a Uni year, smoking spliffs on the sofa, taking turns at GT1, 2, and Colin McRae’s Rally. But they were all joypad / joystick affairs. iRacing – if I was gonna git gud – needed something a little fancier. So I bought a Logitech G25, second-hand, off eBay. (My first eBay purchase!) I figured, if I didn’t like it, I could always sell the wheel and pedals again. No harm done.

    Fast-forward 16 years, to last week, and the trusty G25’s pedals stopped working. Right in the middle of a race. Balls.

  • Can solved problems stay solved, please?

    In October 2024 I wrote a small (~600 lines) program in Zig that formatted YAML files in some $dayjob-specific way. Instead of parsing the whole document, the program linked to libyaml tokenizer and operated on tokens, which ended up factor 10 faster than pyyaml.load/pyyaml.dump implementation. Success, right?

  • Programming

    • A Slew of (Breaking) Fixes (MfGames Writing Tools)

      We've just pushed up a new version of mfgames-writing-js[1]. Naturally, this started with the usual process of doing a little housekeeping, and bringing packages up to date.