Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Goosey Goosey Gander (by ~moendopi)

    There is a silly old poem out there from the 18th century, probably earlier.

    I weirdly only first heard it while listening to Discount Dan. It is called Goosey Goosey Gander.

  • Let Kids Be Kids: When Collectibles Lose Their Playfulness

    There’s something unsettling about watching a child flip through a Pokémon card collection, only to see each card reduced to a dollar amount scribbled on a Post-it note attached to the sleeve of that card. The magic of those cards, the strategy of building a deck and the joy of battling friends seems to vanish when the only metric that matters is market value. Of course, the excitement of finding something rare is real, and if the kid is happy, that’s what counts. But when the game itself fades into the background, replaced by a spreadsheet mentality, you have to wonder: what’s the point? If no one is actually playing, if the cards are just tiny, untouchable assets, then what value do they truly hold? The soul of the game is in the playing, not the pricing.

    [...]

    I’m not judging anyone’s collecting hobbies here, if you’re an adult, it’s your money, and if creating little tombs of video games brings you joy, then by all means, carry on. But we do have to acknowledge that this collecting behavior fuels a more extreme problem: scalping. When rare or nostalgic items become financial assets rather than sources of fun, it can price out the very people who might cherish them most: kids who just want to play.

  • not sorry

    you say I can do whatever I want
    and I lose the ability to speak 
    as if I don't remember so clearly
    the consequences of the last time I did
    so out of proportion
    and one year later 
    I haven't heard a single sorry
    

  • Cities of the Red Night Book Review

    Cities of the Red Night is the feverish wet dream of a dying teenager who has some really screwed up fetishes. William S Burroughs was a gay paedophile heroin addict obsessed with black magic, and this book is exactly what you would expect somebody like him to write. Everything can be solved with heroin, hanging, or magical sex. Erotic asphyxiation draws a wandering soul back into the body. A young gunsmith makes a technological breakthrough whilst being anally penetrated by his best friend. An outlaw band of elite boy-assassins rise up against an empire of mutants by inducing heroin withdrawals in their eunuch slave-soldiers.

    The book is nonlinear, dreamlike, and connected more by symbolism and imagery than conventional plot throughlines. The first two thirds of the book are divided between two time periods: a psychic detective mystery in the late 20th century involving mysterious sexual strnagulations of boys on multiple continents, and a crew of polyamorous gay anarchist pirates in the Age of Sail waging an insurgency against the Spanish Empire. In the book's last third, these two plotlines are mostly sidelined in favour of a time-travelling space opera revolving around the titular 'Cities of the Red Night', which existed 100,000 years ago in the modern-day Gobi Desert. There's a lot of whacky sci-fi worldbuilding involving sperm extraction gangs, cabarets culminating in sexual hangings, genetically modified slaves, and fatal chemsex— typical stuff. The plot thrust of this section deals with a gender war between a slaving evil empire of female White aristocrats (created from an alien virus) and their eunuch servants, and a rag-tag, racially heterogenous gang of outlaw boys. There's also time travel and an Old West bit. Linking these disparate settings, the same characters reappear throughout as reincarnations and doppelgangers, as well as shadowy inversions of the same places and events.

  • dreaming of her

    I dream about her.

    Sitting there, looking at me. I was lucid in the dream, but couldn't keep the lucidity going for some reason. I wanted to offer her a massage. I couldn't get to her. I woke up from the dream, got back into it. She was still there, smiling. I stood up, wanted to reach her, I wanted to connect. The excitement woke me up again. It's a dream, why am I so gentle in my approach. The experience left me with a sweet sensation.

    A lot of dreams. A mountain lion is around. I walk up on a little hill, grab a stick. The animal want to attack me, but I can defend myself really easily. It runs away. When I come down, I see the cat is really small after all. I wonder why I was scare.

  • from edgy to jaded.

    So I thought it would be fun to write about my blogging journey.

    It starts at the age of 16. Believe it or not, I used to have an "edgy atheist teen" blog. I was fairly popular, in fact, among other edgy atheist blogs of course. I contributed two some other blogs and also had contributions on my own. If you have ever read my stuff, I guess it wouldn't be too hard to imagine what that looked like.

    I am no longer an atheist.

    It took a while before I would open another blog. This time, it was a brief (and ultimately failed) attempt at writing short fiction. I think I was around 21 when I did this, so, 5 years passed between the first blog and the second one. My writing was (and still is) shit, but it was something, and it was fun. I actually managed to write for a while before I ... life changed. I also got discouraged because my writing was so terrible , what can you do.

• Programming

  • Lali Lambda: lhas

    After a while here is an article about simple Lali[0] snippets.

    Now, the 'lhas' function, with the help of 'lhas-op'. 'lhas' is a "list has", and 'has' has already been presented.

    'lhas' gives 't' if all elements of LST also belong in some elements of LST-WITH, 'n' if LST or LST-WITH is an empty list, 'f' otherwise.