Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Another Bozo on the bus.

    Lately, I have been hearing of people struggling with finding themselves or trying, sometimes too hard, in finding what that is. Sometimes even forcefully constructing some kind of identity for themselves. It has been on my radar for the past couple weeks and when a topic like that recurs, usually it is something I need to pay attention to. This topic has been vocalized by other people in my circles and not some kind of urge to define myself. Usually I just listen when they talk about this and reflect on how I've dealt with that in the past.

    The human experience has been part of my journey for several earth decades now. What my experience tells me so far on this journey is that this identity question thing comes around every now and then and I take a look at where I am at. This inquiry is usually a catalyst for some kind of change in my life. So I look at where things are at.

  • on having a daily tarot practice

    disclaimer: i'm the first to admit that reading cards is fun and i truly understand wanting to do it every day, finding a way to make that happen. if you're doing a daily reading and are fulfilled, all the power to you. this semi-rant is about the poor souls who think it's what's expected otherwise you're somehow a tarot fraud.

    it is kind of interesting how the tarot world went from "you really shouldn't read for yourself" to "if you're not doing your cards every day, do you even have a Practice?" in a matter of a few decades (what's a practice? like - tarot as magical practice? as a spiritual practice? what if that's not what tarot is to someone? regardless of whether they have an actual magic and/or spiritual practice alongside it)

    i think somewhere along the way we conflated two different meanings of "practice". there's the evergreen advice given to beginners to pull a daily card for practice (ie. for learning, getting familiarized with the cards) and that's somehow morphed into doing a whole daily reading for yourself as "your tarot practice" (be it magical or spiritual, practice as "path", kind of akin to the business meaning of idk having a dental practice or practicing law).

  • We've got ourselves...

    We've got ourselves an overachieving Haworthia right here.

  • Beach Day

    This morning we picked up our friends and their daughter and drove an hour north. The destination: a little town on a lake, for a short day at the beach. We got in, unpacked, changed, put on sunscreen. My partner and I got into the water with our goddaughter and floated around and sprayed each other with squirt guns for an hour or so. At that point, I tagged in our goddaughter's mom, and went to go lie in the sun.

  • Gratitudes part 2: a briefest mention of Synefra

    In the early years of "playing in the MUD", I was a youngster who was prone to being influenced by others in the way that partially-formed adults often are. Friendship and camaraderie came and went easily, as it tends to do in youth and in fully digital spaces.

    So too follows my memory of those times and places: often fleeting, but occasionally latching on to personas that have left a remarkable lineage in the wake of our brief interlude.

  • by the window

    I sit by the window 
    and knit
    
    
    the light slowly dimming 
    still enough to see
    

  • Checking in – June & July 2026

    Once again, a little bit of a nothing month, but not as much as previously, so let's have a look.

  • What's happening in June of 2026

    An update of the various things happening in my life

  • Putting Myself Out There

    The last couple decades have had me working on things obsessively, though never releasing much. Always, I tell myself, I'll do it when I'm ready. There are some exceptions: my big software project, released a decade ago, maintained regularly since. Two poetry chapbooks. But in general: I polish. I obsess. And nothing is ever ready.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Should I move back to plaintext pages?

      Around two or three weeks ago I changed my tooling for my gopher content to create gophermaps instead of plaintext files for "pages". It always annoyed me that I couldn't use links in a normal way in my posts. And it was really some work to change my scripts for creating the phlog index and RSS feed files to use gophermaps instead of plaintext files, every page in its own directory.

      Don't get me wrong! I still mostly create my Gopher pages manually, the converting into real gophermaps is done by gophernicus, which adds a filetype "i" to each line and completes "h" type URLs to be understood by _most_ Gopher clients. My generation scripts just create the phlog index, the RSS feed and add a header and footer to my pages. And I was happy that my scripts were finally the way I wanted them!

      But shortly after my first (just a test) or second post, I got an email from Anna from SDF, telling me, that she can't read my posts anymore because she was using the UMN Gopher client, which doesn't seem to understand the "new" "i" filetype in gophermaps.

    • So I rolled back to a plaintext phlog

      After a short but nice correspondence with IanJ I'm convinced, that it's more important that my phlog is really readable by my (few) readers and not breaking with the long-established rules of the Gopher community. And I can't (and shouldn't) demand people to change their reading habits (for example if they're using UMN Gopher Client, which should now be able to display my pages again).

      Therefore I rolled back my phlog to use plaintext pages instead of gophermaps for a few conveniences again. Fortunately I found my old scripts to publish plaintext pages and updating the index and RSS feed correctly (hopefully). So moving back was not *that* painful.

    • CAs

      (Amdist the current AI wave of vulns) I'm very conflated about TOFU certs. I get that the design is so Geminispace don't need CAs. But people routinely switch out certs because of a disk misfortune or just regular rotation. Indexers and archivers have to trust whatever certificate is presented as long as the date and CN is fine. Which... severely degrades the (already low) security TOFU provides.

      I don't think there's a reason to attack Gemini beyond to show off. But I'm anxious

    • This thread has turned up at the *perfect* time

      I /think/ there's a subtle issue with how Rogallo handles the server fingerprints, but I can't quite put my finger on it (no pun, etc...). I suspect there's something to learn via that thread.

      Has me thinking that I might have to finall crack and spin up my own server (locally), so I can play round with this stuff and understand it from the server side.