Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • out of my pores

    the bog seeps out of my pores
    is it possible 
    ever to leave it behind 
    will it hold me here
    like when I was a child
    foraging for cranberries
    

• Politics and World Events

  • Frans Vera finally needs to shut up

    Does anyone remember the rewilding project in Oostvaardersplassen? It quietly faded into obscurity after it turned into a disasterous PR failure, with multiple mass starvations of red deer causing such a massive public outry in The Netherlands that Vera Frens, creator of the project and the wood-pasture hypothesis, got stripped off his authority [1]. Just as the artificial pasture, Frans Vera also slided into obscurity, despite quite a bunch of people still defending him and blaming the public for "romaticizing nature" – even though there's nothing "natural" about 3000 red deer starving to death during a regular Central European winter that were confined by fences in an area of the size of an airport.

  • the billionaires don't understand how reasonable our terms are

    I spent the weekend thinking about various and sundry warehouse fires. And Luigi Mangione. And universal healthcare. And "all you had to do was pay us enough to live."

    The Epstein class does not understand how reasonable our terms are.

    The vast majority of people agitating for change aren't asking for a fundamental shift in the US's social, economic, policy, or monetary systems. They're not calling to abolish private property or guillotine the billionaires. They are, largely, not calling for an end to the hegemony of the US petrodollar. In fact, most agitators' demands boil down to two incredibly tame, milquetoast, reasonable things:

• Technology and Free Software

  • Board and Card Games

    My two older boys recently got old enough that we could start playing together some board games and card games that I enjoy as well.

  • Home Lab Setup

    While these days a home lab entails a server with suitable software installed, others may opt for a more traditional approach. The ideal lab will have some sort of imposing doomsday device, possibly installed on a rotating platform. Around this might be arranged the accouterments of science: glassware and bunsen burners, the lathe of heaven, server rackmounts with tape reels and blinken lights, etc. A moat is also a near necessity, ideally filled with lava, sharks, or both.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello Again

      I’ve been here before, from late 2022 until mid 2024, and now I’m back, and I bring gifts.

      I’ve been working on GmCapsule in the last couple of days, because I wanted to use my enhanced Antenna instance, which needs CGI, which I worked on before. My preferred Gemini server used to be Agate, capable, quick, uses little resources, doesn’t support CGI.

      One of the reasons I left was that I wanted to limit access to my blog/gemlog, which I can only do effectively with HTTP and JavaScript. Thank you, my dear AI bots. I wrote a nginx WAF server-side and used JavaScript client-side to filter even more, showing content only to — hopefully — non-bots. AFAICT, it works quite well.