Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Back from the Retreat

    I am still tired and exhausted, which was to be expected. Considering how fatigue had kicked my arse last week, I was expecting even worse, though.

    But I had fun. I did new things in our workshops. I hung out with great people and received unhinged pamphlets. It's worth the week or two of low energy.

    I also now have a drawer full of proper and beautiful bookcloth thanks to swapping and a little trip to Kumetat. Lots of reds, some Duo beauty and beautiful, beautiful, shiny Colibris. I fell in love with the Colibri bookcloth when doing the Under Ostentiferous Stars bind. And it's not produced anymore, the company who made this cloth shut down in 2022. So whatever you can get now are the leftovers. When they're gone, they're gone. (I'll end up hoarding more and more of them, am I? Any excuse to order some bookcloth, I'll add some Colibri just because, you know, I don't ever want to run out of them, do I?)

  • The Hunger Games (2012-2015)

    At the insistence of eldest who is a mega-fan, we watched the first four Hunger Games films over the course of a couple of months.

    It's impossible not to compare it to Battle Royale, which it royally ripped off, and which I enjoyed a lot more. This series is relentlessly grim and washed out. The first one is OK, but not exactly fun. There are hints of interesting worldbuilding, but it's paper thin, with little explained.

    It goes downhill from there in the second film. The high point is probably the end where <SPOILER> happens. The rest is an un-fun version of Jumanji, which might be a little unfair since the first four Hunger Games movies predate the modern Jumanji movies, but in a world of audience-controlled watching order, life ain’t fair.

• Tech

  • Planner Decisions Have Been Made

    I actually already ordered last week. As I pretty much already had decided, I did go for the Jibun Techo. The vertical weeks layout might come closest to the Hobonichi.

    I really hope it'll fit well enough into my mock TN cover, because I'd miss it. It's so nice and handy and I was excited about finally using it properly and seeing the leather change with use. (It hasn't changed a lot within the year.) I know the B6 slim planner will peek out, but I hope it'll still be bearable.

  • I still have a Smartphone

    Still, this resonates.

    I can only have my degoogled Fairphone 6 (that's the most recent one, right?) with /e/OS as my main phone because my old iPhone 11 Pro Max still works.

    When searching for a new phone, I also looked at Jolla and Sailfish OS, and to be honest, their siren call was stronger than /e/OS. Alas, I need my banking app. And I need to be able to hook up the phone to the car for navigation/music streaming. I could not find information on how viable that'd be with Sailfish, so the seemingly safer route it was.

    The banking app thankfully works fine on /e/OS.

    My Apple Watch isn't working. But I also haven't even tried to make it work. Getting used to it's absence didn't take long. (Don't ask me why I got it in the first place. Can't even blame FOMO, it's always been quite unnecessary and I knew that before I even bought it.)

    Whatsapp doesn't work. They banned me for a day when I tried setting it up.

  • A New Android TV Box

    We own a second-generation Amazon Fire TV streaming stick, purchased new in 2017, that we still use to watch various media on our living room television. The stick runs Android under the hood; I used a tutorial on the XDA forums to install a custom recovery and LineageOS on the stick, which breathed new life into it and has kept it going string for the last 9 years. However, it's perpetually stuck at LOS 12, based on Android 5.1, and services like Netflix and Disney+ are no linger releasing updates apps for the platform. (My preferred workaround is to watch local media instead, but that's neither here nor there.) We decided last week that we were due foe an upgrade.

    Our new Android TV box is the Onn 4k streaming stick from Walmart. I chose it because it was very cheap ($40 at my local store), and according to XDA, older firmwares are rootable. Unfortunately, the streaming stick I purchased had a newer firmware pre-installed and had a locked bootloader, but I decided to keep it anyway and work around the limitations as best as I could.

  • Stockholm Syndrome of [slop] Acceptance

    In his essay, Ploum makes a rather radical case for an outright refusal to use [slop] in any form, as well as interact with the results of its use. Schreibfaultier portrays Ploum's stance as one that lacks nuance, being a "blanket refusal" rather than an answer to a "legitimate question", and proceeds to explain how the real line of demarcation lies not between the human and the [slop], but rather between the processes of decision and execution.

    Since my opinion is obviously what the Internet needs the most, I thought I could as well provide it - in the form of an essay of my own, where I will attempt to balance out Schreibfaultier's points with ideas that are more in line with Ploum's original article.