Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • how lucky

    to take all the steps
    and see
    I'm still the same old me
    scared and shaking
    indentations from teeth
    on the inside of my cheek
    how lucky you don't see me
    now 
    how lucky you don't see
    

  • On choosing to be good

    About halfway through the semester we talked about subjectivism. Unfortunately I don't remember the name of the article, but the author's position was that subjectivism was meaningless as an ethical philosophy. If subjectivism is true, then everything can be moral, and nothing can be moral. It shouldn't be of any interest to moral philosophers because it isn't useful. The value of ethics is to come up with a way to figure out what's morally good *in general*.

    They extended this thinking to cultural relativism, which is the idea that morality differs between cultures. They argued this belief was a form of subjectivism because there's no smallest society that can have its own distinct morality. Of course, that doesn't mean you have to be racist to be moral, because if you think about it for more than five seconds, it's pretty clear that most cultures do have the same underlying moral principles, even if their applications look different. Even our Western Canadian obsession with lighting the Earth on fire comes from the moral belief that poverty is bad, and the mislead belief that the only way to prevent poverty is to light more hydrocarbons on fire.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Tilde.pink Guide

      Tilde.pink is an open tilde server providing shell, email, gopher, and gemini accounts. It runs on NetBSD and focuses on being a "web-free" tilde using geomyidae for gopher and gmid for gemini.

    • Making a Guestbook (and log) for the Tildeverse

      This guide shows how to set up a shared guestbook on a tildeverse server, with logging to track who added entries and when.

  • Games

    • games - updated july 22

      rebound game after coffee talk. since i already just bought a game, i had to seek recourse in our switch library. this was in there? also extremely frustrating, obviously for different reasons. mostly hate how slow the first run-through of each level is, since i have to die a bunch to figure out What is even required, before attempting to execute it properly. i've made some decent progress and am still going back to it. even if i don't manage to proceed with the levels, i'm curious as to what i've missed in the completed stages, where are the damn songs? also i do enjoy the nostalgia of a platformer, brings back early SEGA memories!

    • Variable Odds

      One may have an odds table that specifies variable chances of various outcomes, whether it be monsters or loot or whatever. A fairly common wrinkle is that there is an item or skill or whatever that gives someone "better" results, so one would need a means to favor "better" items depending on the strength of the effect.

    • Gratitudes part 3: Matt, who wore a miniskirt to prom

      My childhood friend Eric lived in a yellow house at the end of a cul-de-sac. We spent our summers and after-school evenings playing video games (SNES, later N64), ping pong, and street hocky. We blasted the Mortal Kombat soundtrack on CD and played tackle football in the back yard. Young and indestructible, we never donned helmets or padding, but wore our bruises proudly.

      Eric had a neighbor named Matt, a regular kid, but two years older than us. Matt was lanky and tall and, owing to the age difference, generally beat the crap out of us at any of the physical games we played. He was always nice about it, though, and we enjoyed our time together. In retrospect, I find the overall lack of drama to be quite surprising, although I thought nothing of it at the time.