Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Impressions of Auckland

    I'm keen as mustard to maintain my current streak of having gemlogged something every single one of the past however-many weekends, but at the same time I sunk an awful lot of hours yesterday into migrating the Zaibatsu to a new, hopefully more reliable and also more competent VPS provider, and I want to spend less time in front of the computer today. So instead of my original plan, which was to finally write a response to freet and anna and their responses to my "Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology" post, I'm going to write something which involves a bit less careful thinking and technical accuracy, so I can just smash it out. Apologies to freet and anna and also anybody who I told to keep an eye out for this post today. Check back next weekend!

    Earlier this year, something of a family health emergency pushed my wife and I to travel to Australia again, for the first time in something like five years. Since we were already going all that way, and since we are trying to do less and less long distance flying going forward, we figured that while we were in the area we should tack on a short stay in New Zealand afterwards. Some good friends of ours whom we've not seen in something like seven years live in Christchurch these days, and since we didn't know how long it might be until we were down that way again thought it would be to catch up with them. Afterwards we spent a few days in Auckland, for old time's sake. Long-time readers with good memory will recall that my phlog, and indeed my identity as "solderpunk", was born in the final months of me living in Auckland, scrambling to prepare for our move to Finland. We have not been back since, which was shockingly close to ten years ago now! Here are some scattered impressions, probably not likely to be of substantial interest to anyone other than locals or former locals, and rather specific to my own interests and former neighbourhood.

  • free rein

    those hands of yours again
    they sure like wandering 
    lazily they find the edge 
    where lace ends and skin begins 
    tracing all the borders
    scouting for the best place
    to enter
    

  • Magic rules I’d change

    Right now the rule is that you can use substitute cards for double-faced and meld cards. The rule is also that if a card gets marked during play (perhaps someone spills water), the head judge can issue a substitute card. There’s a third rule for “pringle” foils but I’m not sure exactly how that one works.

    But if you show up with a card that’s already worn ("marked" through wear and play), you don’t get a substitute card, you get punished.

  • Ouch

    I want to say right out that Bunny is doing fine. Well, as fine as one can be having broken both shoulders. And at this time, that's about all we know, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

    Earlier today, Bunny went to the gym. I pulled out the lawn mower and was finishing up when I received a call from Bunny. Or rather, the EMT (Emergency Medical Technician) was using her phone to inform me that Bunny had fallen, and to meet them at the gym. A minute later, I received another call from Bunny's phone—this time the head EMT told me to forget the gym, head to the hospital as they were taking her there. As I learned, Bunny was trying to get off the treadmill when it moved when she wasn't expecting it, followed by a rather hard tumble as she tried to catch herself.

  • Notes on an overheard conversation at the Emergency Room

    “So do you have your medical insurance cards on you?”

    “No. It's in my purse, sitting in my car, at the gym.”

    “Okay, so to get you admitted, we'll put you down for ‘paying out of pocket.’”

    “So does that mean we need to pay now with a credit card?”

  • supportive habits

    one week in i already see a necessary tweak. generally things are going well, although i do feel a little mentally "busy", trying to remember to do all the extra things. they don't really have a natural place in the flow of the day. on one hand that keeps it interesting and less stressful - i can fit things in wherever and be flexible. on the other hand i'm constantly checking what else needs to happen. so i don't know if that needs fixing, i'll keep it flexible for now and keep observing.

  • The intersectional solidarity of Mesa Pegasus

    Banding was an incredibly powerful and underrated creature keyword in Magic that ended up a bit dysergic together with evasion abilities on cards like Mesa Pegasus. If Mesa Pegasus and Benalish Hero attack in a band, the flying becomes pointless. (Flying + Banding still pretty good on blocks though.) Because if the enemy can trip up the Hero on the ground with a Wall of Brambles or something, well, RIP the pegasus too.

    Similarly, the Capital can attack all of us through one of us. That’s why intersectional solidarity is scary. No social movement has successfully overcome its backlash. Labor rights, reproductive rights, BIPOC rights and queer rights are all down.

• Politics and World Events

  • Time-discounting shenanigans

    Economics really undervalue future damage. The reason they do that is this:

    Imagine I’ve used the time looker-forward tube and seen that a broken staircase step will cause a $10000 Steinway piano to fall down the stairs and break in the year 2126.

    Repairing the step will cost $10.

    The time-discounting economics say that if I instead invest the $10 in meme stonks, and it compounds to $10000 and 50¢ in the year 2126, I can buy a new piano and have enough left over for a pack of chewing gum too. Ergo we need to time-discount the future disaster’s value to see if it’s worth the $10 today. And this has become mainstream in economics. This is how things are actually priced.

  • In the Age of Left or Right Extremism — A Call to Hear the Voice of the Silent Majority

    Across the Western world today, millions of ordinary citizens wake up every morning with the same quiet feeling: that nobody truly speaks for them anymore.

    In parts of Europe, governments and political systems drift further and further toward ideological extremism detached from the daily reality of common people struggling with rising costs of living, insecurity, immigration crises, collapsing public trust, and the erosion of social cohesion.

    In other countries, including modern Russia, power has hardened in the opposite direction — toward authoritarian nationalism and political repression where dissent itself becomes dangerous.

    And in the United States, perhaps the most influential democracy in the modern world, society appears increasingly split into two hostile camps locked in permanent political warfare. Republicans and Democrats no longer merely disagree; many now see one another as enemies. Truth itself has become fragmented. Every newspaper, every television channel, every social media platform presents a different “reality.” Citizens no longer know whom to trust, what information is real, or whether any institution still serves the public honestly.

  • The Man in the Green Coat

    The people in the neighborhood knew him only as the man in the green coat.

    In winter rain, in dusty summer evenings, in crowded buses and empty streets, he wore the same old dark green coat his father had bought him when he was still a quiet nervous boy. The sleeves were worn thin near the wrists, and one of the buttons had been replaced years ago with a different color, but he never stopped wearing it. Sometimes he thought the coat was the only thing in his life that had stayed loyal to him.

    He had always been a stranger.

    Even inside his own family he felt like an unwanted guest who had overstayed his visit. His childhood home was filled with shouting, long silences, slammed doors, and disappointments nobody explained. He learned early to disappear into corners and into his own thoughts. Teachers called him distracted. Relatives whispered that something was wrong with him. Other children sensed his loneliness the way animals sense weakness.

    When he was young he tried painting. He spent long afternoons mixing colors nobody understood, painting lonely buildings, cloudy skies, old train stations, empty parks at dusk. But eventually life became too heavy, and he stopped.

    [...]

    He built personal websites too — fragile islands floating quietly in the endless noise of the internet. Some people visited for a while, left messages, then vanished forever. Online friendships came and went like ghosts.

• Technology and Free Software

  • 📦 I just discovered .zim files

    A few days ago I found out about ZIM files. I am surprised I never looked into them earlier. A .zim file is basically a compressed offline version of a website or collection of pages. They're commonly used with Kiwix for things like offline Wikipedia, documentation archives, and other knowledge dumps. The format is designed for fast browsing, indexing, and portability.

    What I really liked is that you can create your own offline web archives pretty easily.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Concerts

      A bandwagon is making the rounds on fedi: “Introduce yourself with 10 bands you have seen.”

      I haven’t seen 10 bands? Or maybe I have. Let’s see.

      The Cure, I guess. Disintegration was the best. Many years later I happened to see The Sisters of Mercy. A wall of sound that left me stunned. I hadn’t realized that Andrew Eldritch was still touring.

    • Documenting my Work on Cuneiforth

      I was reading around the other day and I stumbled across a neat little programming challenge in a gopherhole. I'm not necessarily much of a person who likes jumping into these sorts of things, but this one struck me as interesting. It's called "Cuneiforth" and it's about building a small computing system built off of a disk full of bits. You can find a link here.