Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The ‘Burbs (1989)

    I heard there was a TV remake of The ‘Burbs so I called the kids in and told them they were in for a treat. We watched the 1989 original.

    It must have been 25 years since I last saw this, which is long enough for a rewatch to be a new experience. It was even better than I remembered. It’s such a simple, compact film, and perfectly crafted; a breath of fresh air compared to flabby 21st century blockbusters with a hundred actors and a thousand sets and a million cuts.

  • The Click Farm Not Taken

    On my daily commute to work,
    I turn onto a US highway
    And for whatever reason,
    Google Maps always shows that intersection
    As being very congested.
    
    
    By this road, there is a warehouse,
    And one day, my wife suggested
    That this fake congestion might be because
    The mysterious warehouse is hiding
    One of those click farms
    

  • lore dump: my high school's batshit graduation rules

    I went through high school in the mid-late 1990s. It was the era of "Zero Tolerance" - the bonkers theory that if you punish the crap out of the tiniest infractions, nobody will commit larger ones. In middle school, this meant we got group punishments if any students were caught fighting. If two students in the same grade fought, the entire grade was punished. If students from different grades fought each other, their respective grades were punished. if they were fighting at lunchtime, the entire lunch group was punished.

    I remember once sitting in "punishment" next to a student *who had actively intervened to stop a fight* before the participants could actually lay hands on each other. Didn't matter. He got punished too. It was SO backwards.

    But this was the philosophy upon which we entered our senior year. The list of possible infractions was mind-boggling. But they all led to the same consequence: You Will Not Graduate. We Will Withhold Your Diploma Until You Take Summer School, Even Though You Don't Need More Credits. We Will Punish You All Summer Because We Can.

  • It's oak processionary panic season!

    There are way too many cases of conservation projects failing in spectacular manners that environmentalists still fail to call out for various reasons. This one however, is so "in your face" about it that it's becoming more and more obvious that most of the public's rather sudden interest matters were pure fads that will get abandoned and even its own respective history obfuscated the moment it stops being the latest political trend.

    The oak processionary is a moth species assumed to be profiting off climate change – or so it seems, since it was accidentally introduced to the UK in 2005 via commercial trade of oaks. While the imagines are unremarkable in virtually every sense, its caterpillars are feared among mayors and tourists for causing pseudo-allergic reactions. The term "pseudoallergic" is being omitted in public discourse due to defeating the point of the recurring mass hysteria regarding bugs that CAN be harmful to humans if they're dumb enough to chew on them (such as kids picking everything they see lying on grounds, even a Meloe proscarabaeus, up to chew and suck on them because their parents failed to teach them that stuffing stuff you find on the ground of your local playground is gross and "no-no"). Pseudoallergies resemble a typical allergic reaction in terms of visible symptoms in the absence of Immunoglobulin E (IgE), the mediator during allergic reactions. Mast cells instead are being activated directly and is often considered to occur after taking certain drugs, such as aspirin and opioids [1].

  • pastanza

    I think about rewriting 
    that old piece
    four stanzas 
    I wrote about pasta
    not really about pasta
    as if I could rewrite
    my whole life
    only the recipe
    unchanged
    

• Politics and World Events

  • The Terminal of Freedom

    The apartment smelled of dust, solder, and burnt tea.

    Outside, winter pressed against the cracked windows of the concrete block like a gray hand. Snow fell over the city in silence while police sirens echoed somewhere beyond the rows of decaying buildings and giant government banners. On television the President smiled with cold confidence, speaking again about stability, enemies, patriotism, sacrifice. The same speech repeated every week in different forms.

    Inside the apartment, four people sat around an old kitchen table beneath a weak yellow light.

    [...]

    For years the state tightened its grip around the internet. Independent news disappeared first. Then discussion forums vanished. Social media became monitored territory filled with informants, bots, and fear. People learned to speak carefully even in private messages. Certain words alone could bring interrogation. Sometimes prison.

• Technology and Free Software

  • UDP Game Forwarding Over SSH

    One of SSH's most prominent features is that in addition to getting a login shell on a destination server, it can also forward ports and sockets across the secure channel and open them on the other side.

  • Feel good security with bubblewrap

    It's a dangerous world out there and today I got blocked by my own cairn running this page because my publishing frontend didn't correctly close its titan sockets running into a per ip connection limit I implemented.

    In hindsight everything worked as it was supposed to but my first thought was I had a server bug or had been careless enough to have the server crash through some script kid or what not. All is good but it got me thinking about the dangers of running around having skiff parse stuff from all over gemini and the web in general.

  • Announcing Phobos

    I instantly fell in love with the concept. I don't know if that's a one of a kind thing or if there's a word for that sort of site. Anyway I thought to myself, of cause, a terrestrial city can't seem to work in geminispace and in a spree of wrestling with my first attempts at making ascii art and whatever today's brainfog allows me to write, I came up with Phobos Station[2]

    [...]

    Keep in mind that at the moment, none of this is running any code. It's just static gemtext and me, checking my mailbox for requests.

  • The Tool For the Job

    I have noticed an interesting phenomenon with LLMs. There is something I have never quite understood.

    From what I have gathered from people talking about LLMs in comments, and blog posts, and chat rooms, and Youtube videos, etc. One of the most common uses for them is looking up information. And I don't get it.

    I do try to avoid using LLMs where I can, but this particular case is not aversion or resistance for me. It is categorization. I simply that I don't associate them with finding information. When I want to look something up, I go to Wikipedia[*], or Youtube[*]. I go to a search engine and look for blogs and forums.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Alhena 5.5.9

      A small release but my daughter is graduating from high school and I'm going to be busy with that and other things I've neglected. Knowing all that, I wanted to get a fix for the regression and the streaming enhancement for my slots game out the door. Alhena is in a pretty good place in that I'm not aware of any issues (at least within my control). That may be a first. Anway, it's also not a bad place to call it good if I get hit by a bus/meteor/idea.