Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Fireflies and Reflections on Nature

    Own City's Fireflies is a very nostalgic song. I'm a Zillennial, so I grew up with a lot of Y2K music, and this was one of the songs that popularized the Bedroom Pop genre. It reminds me of being a kid playing outside with my siblings at night, where we could see a bunch of fireflies in the backyard. It's been so long since I've seen a firefly nowadays. They seem to have declined vastly here in Iowa, although they had a ressurgence in 2025. Unfortunately, fireflies in general seem to be losing habitats across the US, along with the pressures of changing temperatures and rainfall, and the light pollution of cities.

    Two days ago I went outside in the morning with my mom to feed the squirrels and watch the birds eat the bird feed. This is the first time I've actually done this. We have a yard and a small woods area behind our house. What usually felt like a silent and still space became a habitat full of animals that one only notices when one really pays attention. It reminds me of the opening sequence of the Pixar movie Hoppers. I've never noticed so many squirells and different types of birds as I did that day. We saw pidgeons, nuthatch birds, and Bluejays. We also have cardinals, but not many come to our yard.

  • Shore Pine

    Here in Fairbanks, AK, my family was visiting our local Hot Licks on college road. I don't eat ice cream generally but my family loves it. In their little parking lot where two tall trees with many similarities to the lodge pole pine in our front yard; that is, similar long, paired needles, a spruce-like rough bark, and similar cones. The tree I looked at appeared to be somewhere around 70 to 80 feet tall, unlike the short, shrub-like trees in our front yard, which are only around six or seven feet tall at the high points. Another very noticeable difference is that, on this tall tree, the cones were pointing backwards along the branch, back toward the trunk. Usually in sets of three or four cones. In my field guide, it appears that this particular variant of lodgepole pine is known as Shore Pine.

  • paws

    keep those paws tight on me
    don't let go
    don't you dare
    I might float away
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • “jgs” or Me Stumbling on ASCII Art Internet Lore

    Even though I’m not using ASCII art on my capsule because I think it’s better not to spoil a screen reader-friendly environment, I occasionally like to see it on other capsules and especially in Gopherspace.

    The ones that stand out to me are those with either a little bit of background, like stars, or actual ground because everything becomes more alive, and the ones by “jgs”.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • human.json

      I maintain a feed aggregator that is used to generate a static web site. That is, you subscribe to some feeds and run my program to download the feeds and generate a HTML file.

      Typically, if all the feeds are on a certain topic, this is called a "planet". I also maintain such a planet for role-playing games: RPG Planet. If you use it for a bunch of blogs you're interested in, you could call it a blog roll. I have one of these as well, although it's badly maintained: Blogs.