Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Should I eat this Crunchie bar from 2013?

    It’s been waiting 13 years already so I figure I will wait a while longer, to give me time to gather advice on the risks and potential rewards.

    I’ll compare to a modern bar to obtain a shrinkflation data point.

  • The knight (poe/en)

    mined my mind for traces of might
    shall the knight venture into the night
    to keep bright the sight of onlookers
    fighting off lightning, inducing wonder
    for tolerance to spark a fire in hearts
    colder than a mountain peak's spikes
    

  • Bloodstained gold (poe/en)

    there is still
    a glimpse of hope
    when pockets full
    of bloodstained gold
    fall apart and
    those who lost it
    gain control of
    what tortured their
    kindred souls.
    

  • dream of radha

    I met Radha some twenty years ago at a teen camp at the yoga school I was living at.

  • 5 of pentacles

    by the way, this is the first time I’m seeing this card to mean these people without any means are seeking sanctuary. Up ‘til this point I’ve always read it as the sanctuary having cast them out, the hypocrisy of the church, preaching love but practicing greed and self-preservation, the system and social safty nets failing those in need.

  • ugly ones

    push pause
    and let the world rest 
    while I arrange my thoughts 
    into neat piles
    each carefully labeled
    lock ugly ones in a box
    give the key to you
    knowing
    you won't give it back
    

  • The Sophomore Slump

    In my experience, the hardest part about any activity is, by far, beginning it. The second most difficult part about anything, I'd say, is finishing a thing. Sure, if you abuse the nomenclature you might argue that whatever doesn't fit as "beginning" a thing, fits as "finishing" it, but you have done things before, you know what I mean.

    What I really want to discuss is the bronze medallist of generic difficulties: doing a second thing. Following up.

    I've always loved music very much, so, as a teenager I was soaking up knowledge about all sorts of musical genres and artists. It didn't take long for me to notice a pattern in the factory-inspired music production style of our "phonographic industry": I tended to like the first records the most. That didn't feel right to me. I expected people to learn from their craft as they went, or at least to be able to do more of what they had already done before. Pondering that question over the years taught me a lot. About aesthetics, about people, about life and its obstacles, about myself, and about, you know, thing... making.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Alignment-Flipping Liquid-Crystal Ink Delivers 3D-Printable Programmable, Flexible Soft Actuators

    Researchers from Pusan National University, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), and the University of Maryland have come up with a new way to 3D-print more flexible soft actuators — using a "smectic liquid-crystal elastomer (LCE) ink" capable of flipping molecular alignment during the printing process.

    "Our work provides the first demonstration of switching molecular alignment between two orthogonal directions using a single 3D-printable smectic LCE ink," claims project lead Suk-kyun Ahn of the team's project, "simply by tuning the printing speed and temperature. Over the next 5–10 years, this work could help 3D-printed x-x-objects go beyond just holding a fixed shape. Instead, they could actively change shape and carry out specific functions."

  • The Mandatory Phone Addiction

    Okay so I went on this rabbithole of anti-smartphone stuff online (don't worry, my goody-two-shoes writing-things-down-on-paper self said that I could) and one thing that came up a few times was the whole “phones and social media are actually super necessary and it’s classist and clueless and frankly cruel to say you can just quit that so I’m not gonna quit because that’s impossible, counterproductive, dumb, wrong and elitist” angle. And I get that. (Arguably why did you then make a video about quitting the internet but I get that too.)

    Because please, let me zoom out and reframe this issue a bit. Let’s look at the forest and not just this one tree.

    Algo silo media with vendor lock-in is wrong and evil. (I've said why a hundred times but overshortified: they proprietarized our communal infrastructure and exploited it for huge wealth gaps.) But it’s the corporations (and the politians that kept them legal) that did wrong, not you the user.

  • A Vintage Web Game Gallery

    My major project over the last week and a half or so has been curating a collection of old Flash, Shockwave, and Java games on my #CGHMN site. Your first thought is probably, "why do that when Flashpoint Archive already exists?" Indeed, most if not all of these games are already preserved and curated there. The difference is that, while Flashpoint uses emulators and containers to make the games playable on modern systems, I'm specifically targeting vintage machines with the original plugins. You can visit my site from Win95 or System 7 running Netscape 3 and everything will work exactly like it did in 1997. Or WinXP, IE 6, and 2002. You get the idea.