Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Boogeywoman

    That's not as frightening as boogeyman, is it? Boogeywoman sounds like she'd wear a slick yellow jacket, have a solid dealer on speed dial and know the best late night diners.

    No, we need a boogeyman, dragging away women and children. Big bad boogeyman with stringy hair and stained camisoles. Bargain bin boogeyman with chipped nails and too much eyeliner. Brash bitty boogeyman trying too hard or not hard enough, failing too hard or not hard enough.

  • molly reviews: seeds

    Seeds are a psyop.

    I tear open a little paper packet. Inside are some grains of expensive dirt. The packet assures me this dirt is not ordinary dirt, however. No. This dirt is MAGIC dirt. If I put this magic dirt on top of some ordinary dirt, add water, and stick it in the sunlight, a plant will happen.

    Sure, Jan. I think you're gaslighting me with your "magic dirt" nonsense. But whatever. Let's go.

  • walking away

    you keep walking away 
    from me 
    your back, leaving
    the most familiar sight
    and I still follow
    

  • The Country Market

    It is an abnormal feeling for a prince to feel typical. Once a year, the city of Kynsland hosts the “Country Market,” when traders and merchants of all kinds would clamour into its town square from places throughout the Commonwealth.

    This year, the Country Market held special significance. The king was in attendance, accompanied by diplomats from neighboring countries whose merchants had been invited to participate. Though his children were less interested in statecraft.

    The market was bustling with an explosion of sights and sounds. Free food and mesmerizing attractions lined the streets. Few had any bandwidth to pay attention to two very well-dressed young boys who, just for today, were like all the other children in Kynsland.

  • Waves licking at my ankles

    An Americano, bartender--no, just tonic water. Old habits.

    I've been sailing, spending time in bars other than this. Or drinking alone. Mostly alone. It's been almost two years since I set foot in here. I wasn't anywhere far, Bimini and about there, fishing. And fighting, when I could find someone to fight with.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Introductory Guide to using STXGE

    All the content I've published on Isekai Rocks, both for my personal capsule and the main site, uses a static site generation tool I wrote called STXGE. STXGE is a highly modular set of tools written in Guile Scheme which can programmatically generate pages written in Scheme, then render them to (X)HTML and GemText. It is an incredibly flexible tool, but it can be hard to understand at first, so this guide is meant to be a more gentle introduction to the topic.

  • I wanna have a better relationship with my computer

    I end up feeling this way often. But, I lose too much time to just surfing, and I want to figure out how to improve my relationship to it. There are things I want to do: engage more with town, do my necessary computer work, and work on fun projects. I'm currently reading Crafting Interpreters; I'm into chapter 5 right now, but I'm struggling to push myself to work on it more than even once a week.There are things I don't want to do: spend so much time watching videos or scrolling, especially when I'm in bed.

  • Procgen Go Thud

    Mirrored totems in Brogue pull the player should they step on one of the red activator cells, preventing them from getting to a resource or through a door into a room with loot. There are various ways the player can avoid the blink-to the totem, usually by spending certain limited resources, though sometimes the procgen will be "bad" or "good", depending on your perspective. The above is a "good" (for the player) situation where the shape of the prefab room causes the totem to not prevent the player from directly obtaining the loot. Usually the procgen "does the right thing", but there are edge cases where it fails. Another "good" (for the totem) case is when the totem is adjacent to lava, and thus if the player is pulled they will land in the lava and die by default. Players are generally less enthusiatic about such sitations, especially when the totem only comes into view when they step onto an activator cell. Again this is rare, but not impossible; most "machine rooms" as Brogue calls them are middling.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Moving to Miraheze

      For a while, I've been self-hosting a wiki for a little Minecraft server I run called Warlords. However this has been kind of a pain and I'm honestly not that great of a sysadmin. Recently, the version of MediaWiki[a] I was running was moved out of long-term support, so I had to update for security fixes (and I wanted to update anyway for some newer features that weren't available). After performing the upgrade, editing just completely broke. I could not figure out why, and so I had to reinstall everything. This /would have/ worked, but then I realized I forgot to make an XML backup of templates and modules. So, all of those were gone. If you don't know what that means, basically it meant that most pages were broken and had errors all over the place. Great.

• Programming

  • The value of writing headers

    However, I don't think there's absolutely zero value in having a separate header file. Having to write the header separately makes me think more about my API and what functions I actually want, or which functions would be convenient to use, rather than which functions would be easy to /write/. Of course, it's not like you can't do this with other languages. You could just write the signature of all your functions before writing the implementation, and that would practically achieve the same thing. But honestly, I don't do this in other languages because it's not very convenient (and the LSP will yell at me that my functions don't have an implementation). C forces me to.

  • Brogue Seed

    The default seed in Brogue is derived from the unix epoch. This is a small information leak. That is, assuming you play games with the default seed, people who obtain the game recording or otherwise learn the seed can know when the game was started.