Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Purpose and passion

    I was surprised and impressed -- somehow I had gotten the impression that, outside of his acting roles, Harrison Ford was kind of an ornery crank who lived in Jackson Hole. He comes off as a thoughtful, caring elder, here, who has been - since the 80s - living out values of respect for land and indigenous people.

  • Cuneiforth, for real this time!

    Hi again Gopherspace,

    It's been several months since my last phlog entry. This year isn't off to a great "start" (seriously, it's May?!) on that front. Of course I always say something about this being my happy place and wanting it not to feel like a chore, but I'd be lying if I said it doesn't weigh on my mind a teensy bit. Particularly as I visit Logout's Bongusta feed most days and really enjoy reading other people's posts. This ritual starts to feel like lurking after too long without saying something in return.

    In any case, I've had an excuse. My last post [1] teased that I was working on a FORTH for the Nguyen and Kay's Chifir VM, and I was intent on "releasing" this in the follow-up post. While it's taken a bit longer than I thought it would, I'm very happy to report that "Cuneiforth" is finally "done"; at least to the point where I'm comfortable asking people to take a shot at getting it to run.

  • H.C. Ricci

    I think it’s no secret that the idea of solitude in nature possesses a strong romantic appeal. There’s a reason that the Wanderer above the Sea of Fog has been used as a bookcover for some of the most seminal works of the nineteenth century, including both Frankenstein and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Wilderness and desolation provide scope for the uncanny and otherwise unimaginable to occur. They also serve as romantic backdrops for adventure stories and useful literary devices for exploring the depths of a character’s psyche. From Heart of Darkness to The Mountains of Madness, and from The Shining to The Lighthouse, remote wildernesses allow us to ponder our place in the broader universe while also examining the human condition.

    I myself have spent many glorious afternoons wandering through lonely hillsides or exploring empty coastline, and many weekends driving down desert roads into the remote badlands of Baja. And like a lot of people, the idea of becoming a hermit and disappearing into a far away wilderness serves as a sort of escapist fantasy, a psychological safe place whenever I feel overwhelmed with responsibility or bored by the drudgery of daily life.

  • Theory of everything; a poem (tho/en)

    are there any walls?
    the borders don't exist.
    thoughts crumble
    at the sight of broken windows.
    
    
    the walls lie fallen
    on the sands that shift
    and cover them --
    overshadowed by willows.
    

  • next room over

    you only wake up 
    when I'm planning to leave 
    why do you not remember
    to love me 
    when I stay
    

  • soften your gays

  • back and forth

    In a camping chair
    I close my eyes
    Is it raining,
    or hailing?
    
    
    I can't warm myself up
    I drop into my heart
    Scorched earth
    We're partying
    at the end of the world
    

  • A Trip to the Baltic Sea

    Today we returned from the Ostsee (Baltic Sea), we did a spontaneous family trip over there beginning on Thursday and ending on Sunday. It was... exhausting, but oh so good for the mind. We rented a little holiday house just a couple of hundred meters from the beach, a bit cramped, but that doesn't matter when your plan is to spend most of the time out there.

  • Me (or someone claiming to be me...)

    "Start typing" it says!

  • Sauna

    After caving or leading educational tours many cavers congregate in the sauna. I hear them in the night from the bonfire or my tent. I'm modest of dress and don't drink. I don't get naked with my friends.

    The chair of my grotto put dozens of hours into work parties to build it on the steep slope above flood elevation -- lots of enthsiasm, money, and love. I trust his judgment, but didn't understand the appeal of the sauna.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Super Cub, or thinking about technology two-dimensionally

    Alright, we're actually getting close to the bottom of my dusty stack of posts I have been meaning to write for years! This one is a little unusual in that not only have I had the intention and rough plan lying around all that time, I've actually had the bulk of a draft written as well. I am going to try to adapt it into a complete post today. I hope it goes well. This post is largely a reaction to and a musing on an anime series I watched probably over two years ago and have not rewatched since, so I no longer have detailed memories from which I might pull extra thoughts. Also, somewhat to my own surprise, re-reading the draft after all those years I am surprised how well some of it resonates with the Smol Earth manifesto I published at the end of last year. I was not really conscious of that connection or influence, and I might try to rewrite or expand some parts from the new perspective of having finished that project. Yosh!

  • Super Cub, or thinking about technology two-dimensionally

    Alright, we're actually getting close to the bottom of my dusty stack of posts I have been meaning to write for years! This one is a little unusual in that not only have I had the intention and rough plan lying around all that time, I've actually had the bulk of a draft written as well. I am going to try to adapt it into a complete post today. I hope it goes well. This post is largely a reaction to and a musing on an anime series I watched probably over two years ago and have not rewatched since, so I no longer have detailed memories from which I might pull extra thoughts. Also, somewhat to my own surprise, re-reading the draft after all those years I am surprised how well some of it resonates with the Smol Earth manifesto I published at the end of last year. I was not really conscious of that connection or influence, and I might try to rewrite or expand some parts from the new perspective of having finished that project. Yosh!

    Very long time readers of my phlog might remember that I used to be quite into anime and manga earlier in my life. They certainly occupy a lot less of my time and attention these days, but not absolutely none. I don't want to bother trying to dig too much in to why, trying to tease apart to what extent this is just me ageing out of the adolescent target audience for a lot of the industry and to what extent it is due to shifts in the style and content of what is being produced (I mean obviously I think anime was, like everything else, Objectively Better last century but nobody really wants to hear that rant, and I don't even want to write it). I find the modern range of offerings generally pretty darn weird and unappealing, and it's a *very* narrow slice of what's on Crunchyroll or Wakanim that doesn't get a very quick and very hard pass from myself, my wife or most often both of us when we try browsing from time to time (in fact now I'm not even sure we have active subscriptions to either of these platforms anymore...I'm not sure Wakanim even still exists). But usually we do stumble across, I guess, one or two genuinely worthwhile titles a year on average. Somewhere toward the end of "last year", I really, really enjoyed the 12-episode show Super Cub (スーパーカブ), released in 2021, and then immediately afterwards the manga of the same name released between 2017 and 2022, both of which are adaptations of a series of light novels written by Tone Kōken between 2016 and 2021, the last of which I (still) haven't looked into yet. I think I actually enjoyed the anime more, for the record.

  • GNU Taler and Modern Digital Finance

    I've been following the GNU Taler project on and off for a few years. Taler^ is a digital payment system that seeks a balance between privacy and compliance with existing financial regulations, using blind signatures to protect the anonymity of buyers while allowing sellers to be taxed and audited. Unlike cryptocurrencies, Taler isn't designed to be a store of value; it must have backing from another currency. It also doesn't use blockchains or other decentralized ledgers.

    Taler has an Android app available on F-Droid. I installed it a while ago and have played with the demo exchange a little bit, but I've never used it for any serious purpose. In 2025, a Swiss company called Taler Operations AG began providing a Taler exchange for making payments with francs. I learned about it a few days ago through their integration in the Taler app.

• Programming

  • Markdown into Micron

    RNGit has a utility for converting markdown into micron and it works really well. Better still, I don’t have to maintain anything for it to work, I can just make use of the latest RNS library and I get it for free.