Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Wallawood Tree: Ophelia's Secret

    Conner stood alone in the throne room. The chair that his brother would eventually occupy struck a careful balance: ornate enough to command respect, but not so lavish as to belittle those who might stand before it. Hanging just behind the throne, very prominently on the wall, was a giant painting of a strange tree. Deep sprawling roots, slightly crooked trunk, and tortuous branches like a crown of antlers. The bark was bone-white, and the leafy vines that hung from them were blood red. The spherical fruit that it bore was shown to emit a yellow glow on the surrounding branches and vines. The tree was set against a mountainous background, which accented the midnight sky. The image had faded over the centuries, but it was well preserved enough to admire.

  • the french cross

    the french cross and its variations is a versatile spread for all sorts of questions. traditionally it was laid out with the major arcana only, which i only do if i use a majors-only deck. some readers lay out a layer of majors followed by a layer of minors, which i tried but is too fiddly to bother with. many folks nowadays just deal from the top of a completely shuffled deck and that's where i lie.

  • who i am

    hello, i'm just a guy from eastern europe living in "the west".

  • 2026 tarot project

    as part of my bigger year of contentment, i decided to really focus on using the tarot decks in my inadvertent collection. deck acquisition has been a long and winding road for me. as a teen i wasn't really advised well on where to start (the worst of both worlds: a "lazy-pips" deck with curated art for the majors and courts), so from the get-go there was the sense that i might be able to "buy myself into" a better understanding. obviously the tool you use makes a difference, especially at the learning stage. but over the years, what with the rise of tarot's popularity, the boom in indie publishing, the rise of tarot youtube channels - intentionally or not - promoting acquisition and having a wide choice of decks, well it all got to me and i bought in.

  • children of morta

    (12/04/26) i finished my first play-through of the main story-line today! it was very fun, considering i don't usually play "fighting" games (or any stressful games that require quick reflexes etc).

  • return once again to the self-induced hellhole, why must i repeat the sufferings? love, why so cruel...

    i made it pretty far this last bit- 1.5 weeks, or was it 2? where i was on my own and away from xenotrek... i did pretty good up until the final 2 days, where- admittedly- i became... homesick.

    how embarassing is that? a 27 year old woman, homesick, and for someone who doesn't even give two shits about her!!! what the fuck is that! ugh. love is HORRID. EVIL. oh my Heavens if only one could find a reciprocity in this nullified and paranoia-stricken bastion of suffering.. woe is most certainly me.

• Politics and World Events

  • Passports

    Yeah, passports. Those little books that are a legal basis for discriminating people by a factor outside of their control, used to handwave one's unwillingness to answer the question of "why is this obvious criminal and an extremist talking head allowed here, but this calm and nice hard-working person isn't", because otherwise the answer will sound like 1930s Germany or pre-1994 South Africa.

    These little books that are, more often than not, much more of a problem to get than it should be. Exceptions exist, like the German option to get one in 3 days (working days, of course, it's Germany, it is only a civilized country for 5.5-6 days a week), or even right now (for "now" being defined is "when your local Bürgeramt decides to open its doors and let you in without an appointment"), but even Americans, as far as I know, have to wait for weeks for them to be issued, and if you dare to live outside of the country of your citizenship, oh boy, almost any embassy will find an excuse on why it should last for months.

  • Why I'm not watching global news

    So the world is pretty crazy right now. I think you know what I'm talking about, and I don't want to mention everything that has happened in like the past month because it's just insane.

• Science

  • Science and poetry

    So a random recent read was "Science and poetry" which posits science rising (Spock) as poetry falls (Kirk), or something like that, as the context is 1926 and thus foreign in parts.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology

    Some time ago - I don't remember exactly when or exactly how, this post has been sitting on my severely cluttered mental back burner for probably over a year now - I learned of the existence of the Bandai WonderSwan, a delightfully named handheld gaming console released only in Japan in 1999. I'd never heard of it and was really surprised by this; not because I'm any kind of expert on handheld consoles, but just because back in the days when I was building my Z80 machine and was really interested in early consumer computing architectures, I thought I did a relatively deep dive, reading about all kinds of obscure home computers, business computers, game consoles, and so on, and this included, I thought, a lot of "the Japanese scene". I knew about the MSX machines, the PC-98, FM Towns Marty, Sharp X68000, and so forth, I knew about the failed VirtualBoy, and that there used to be a CD-ROM add-on for the Super Famicon. Somehow the WonderSwan never came across my radar. It's a really interesting device, along with its successors the WonderSwan Color and SwanCrystal. They were not terribly commercially successful, despite having a whole lot of really ahead-of-their-time seeming slot-in hardware accessories available, including a GPS receiver that allowed you to, no joke, play PacMan using the actual streets of Tokyo as the map by walking around, a full 15 years before the arrival of Pokemon Go, and also an MP3 player.