Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Academiology²: Dishonesty

    When I was in my first year, I remember having a conversation with a friend—a science student—who was complaining about the arts. They believed that art degrees were useless, and that people should only study things that'll help them find a job in a real world. The old "liberal arts are a pyramid scheme" mentality, that the only role of an arts major is to create new arts majors. Put another way, the role of the arts professor is to bring up new scholars of the arts, who will then be responsible for growing our collective knowledge and transferring it to others. Contrast this with the hard-science student who's role is presumably to leave after their bachelor's degree and produce value for a corporation. I've always found this kind of thinking frustrating because it seems to spit in the face of the purpose of the University, at least as I see it, which is to expand and share knowledge.

  • what if

    what if nothing ever gets better

    what if everything could

  • Locarno: Camellias and the Maggia valley

  • approaching april

    i did buy a Second Thing of the year: carding brushes. but! they're doing what they were supposed to - helping me make progress on that kilogram of fibre from last year. so not only it's not just sitting there, crafting in general has inspired me to do more things. i still want to try make a frame loom, try sprang weaving, too. but i don't have the resources for that right now. i did start a little patchwork project - my first, all by hand. i was switching out clothes from winter to summer and did some sorting. whatever was in too bad a shape to be donated got chopped up instead. so i'm hand-piecing some blocks. probably won't finish anything just yet, might need to collect more scraps before it amounts to anything. and then either buy the batting and backing (next year?) or use a flimsy second hand coverlet that we have as a 2 in 1 and just quilt onto that?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Arvelie calendar converter

    I recently stumbled upon the Arvelie calendar [1], made by Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits [2], and I loved the idea. The date notation is short and looks like a little coded message. Arvelie dates have an arbitrary starting year, which can be used to measure different timelines. For example, I started using Arvelie for my pen-and-paper notes, and the starting year is the year I started writing in that particular notebook. Each new note has an Arvelie date that I need to calculate before writing, which is a great little math problem for 'warming up'.

    After some time, I entertained the idea of personalizing the calendar, so I replaced the English alphabet with the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet. Arvelie calendar has 26 months, which perfectly correspond to the number of letters in the English alphabet. The Serbian alphabet has 30 letters, so I just don't use four letters: 'Љ', 'Њ', 'Ђ', and 'Ћ'. Now I have dates that look like this: *01Ж03* or this: *01И08*.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • silly standards sunday: fursona schema

      so, I'm a big nerd, furry, and enjoyer of the small web. as such, I feel compelled to inform all of you of this thing that tickled my brain in a fun way: [...]