Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • circo del umbra

    Circo del Ombra

    Creating a tent that is easy to setup and bring to different festivals and events. From burners to rainbows, traveling setting it up. Growing a group, loosing members. A circus, for enlightenment, for awakening.

    Taking people in, strays and misfit. Teaching them, training them, being weird with them.

    I've met some groups like that in the past. I've dreamed of a life like that with friends. I've talked to some people about it. Nicola, in particular. A Clown Shaman, he had a similar ideas.

  • The Great Exodus part 2

    Last year I gave myself a year to clean up the house, get rid of all the things that I didn't need. Only keep what I would move when I move. It was a success, and now my house feels very light. I am sure I'll get rid of more things, but if I were to move tomorrow, it wouldn't be too hard to pack my stuff and go.

    For this year, I want to continue this process on the financial front. I give myself 1 year to be completely debt free, have some savings, and also have my work completely mobile and multi layered.

  • I converted an xkcd drawing to unicode text

    The drawing uses 2 by 3 pixel characters (sextant) from the symbols for legacy computers unicode block (unicode version 13).

    I resized the original drawing with gimp, decreased the color depth to 2 colors and converted the image using image magick convert to text.

  • Dead ends

    Apart from the output of my professional life my hobby projects all seem to end up in the same way. After the novelty wears off they all get thrown on the pile of done.

    I feel like there is very little I carry along and most of the fruits of my efforts lay by the wayside once the focus shifts to the next new thing. And sometimes there isn't even a new thing stealing my drive, some projects just run out of gas by themselves.

  • Re: Dead ends

    As someone who has a fair share of hobby projects waiting in the drawer, I can say this is an opportunity to consider your true motives for working on these "failed" efforts.

    A hobby project is fueled by excitement and the enjoyment one gets for creating something new. The unfortunate truth is that excitement is always fleeting and, once a software project grows larger, it is less and less enjoyable to work on. The increasing cognitive load makes the process more and more challenging as time goes on. It is only natural that eventually greater enjoyment is found in something else.

  • bin a long time

    It's heartening that things I'd put aside for "just a moment" are still here, a few years later, when I'm ready to pick them up again. I'm experimenting with a Second Place to think, and do, and since I'm using a smaller device my mind naturally wandered back to the world of text and the places to store and post it.

    A weekend stuck inside gave me the push to make it so. I now have a nice little setup - not distraction-free, but with different ones that move at a slower pace.

• Technology and Free Software

  • The LGS as a third place

    These days, my primary "third place" is my local game store (LGS).

    For those unfamiliar, an LGS is a small independent retailer of physical gaming merchandise that can include board games, card games, tabletop games, and role-playing games. Not every LGS serves all of these categories of gaming in great depth, but most will carry at least a few product lines of all of the major brands in each space. If you're new, you'll probably be able to get what you need to get started in whatever floats your boat. It is quite common for an LGS to specialize in one or more of these categories. For example, one LGS near me mostly focuses on carrying all of the latest indie board games. Another specializes in trading card games (TCGs).