Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The Two Row Wampum as Theory and Method

    The Two Row Wampum, Guswenta in the Haudenosaunee tradition, is usually introduced as a historical object: a treaty belt recording a 1613 agreement between the Haudenosaunee and the Dutch. The framing is true and too small. The treaty is still in effect. I will argue, following Philip P. Arnold and Sandy Bigtree (Akwesasne Mohawk), that the Two Row is also a method. I will show it by reading the belt, then following it into research, museums, and planning.

    [...]

    The design is simple and carries an entire political theory. Two parallel rows of purple beads run against three rows of white, all made from quahog shell (a hard clam of the eastern seaboard, white and purple inside). One purple row is the Haudenosaunee canoe, carrying their language, songs, dances, governance, and relationship with the Creator. The other is the Dutch ship, carrying the newcomers' languages, laws, and spiritual life. The two vessels travel side by side down the river of life. Neither steers the other. Neither passenger climbs into the other's boat uninvited. The white rows, peace, friendship, and reciprocity forever, run unbroken. The Haudenosaunee, the Dutch, and the natural world are all parties. It is the 1613 version of stay in your lane.

  • Is a Budget Spreadsheet Ministry: Luther's Beruf, Volf's Charisms, and the Divide That Came Back

    Is a budget spreadsheet ministry? Budgets are moral documents, so yes, and the whole argument sits inside that question. I will argue that how work gets theologized determines how workers get formed. I will trace the sacred-secular divide from Luther's attempt to abolish it, through Miroslav Volf's alternative to the word "vocation," to where Kathryn Tanner makes the affirming move expensive.

    Start with the Reformation. Medieval Christendom mostly reserved the language of vocation for those who entered the monastery or the priesthood. Luther blew that reservation up. Under the German word Beruf, every legitimate station becomes a calling from God: household, civil authority, ordinary trade. Gustaf Wingren gave this its definitive treatment in Luther on Vocation (1942; English 1957), and his Luther is startlingly concrete. Vocation is horizontal, not a ladder you climb toward God but service to the neighbour who needs something. God works through the worker as through a mask; God milks the cows through the person whose calling that is.

  • Second Fish Leather Done

    It seems I might be done with the fish leather.

    The tea tannin tanning seemed to have been finished, so I did the stretching. (Rolling up the hide and rolling the fish cigar between your hands is so much easier than running it over the table edge. Which I also did a few times for good measure.)

    It's now been re-oiled and I hope it won't be sticky with the shea butter. But we'll have to wait to see how that ends up.

  • nataraj

    The cedar bugs are invading my house. A new flock of bird is feasting on them. The Blue Jays particularly like eating the cedar bugs. It's the most invasive bug in the region, although they are so slow, they've acclimated very well.

    Natarajasana, the dancer. It's one of the name of Siva. I woke up, practiced the small bridge, got out of bed, practiced natarajasana on both side. I am working on my lower back. My hips are tilted backward. It give my body the shape that most middle aged people have. Hips rolled backward, the stomach protruding forward, the head and the neck moving forward to balance the whole body.

  • end goal

    it's not the end goal
    it's the journey, someone said 
    and I try to remember
    when I want to skip to the end
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Perhaps this is why I keep tinkering with computers

    I’ve noticed that when work gets complicated, I often find myself fixing something that isn’t very important.

    All the stuff I've done with DeckZero [1], messing about with scripts and file formats to try and make some sort of coherent system [2], mucking about with daft little machines [3] -- most of it is probably unnecessary by any rational standard. But I've enjoyed myself through it all and to be honest, that's rationale enough for me. I think the reason for this has a lot to do with the job I do.

  • Assembloids on the Alice Matra, Part 4

    The previous round of work was mostly about getting the different game states into shape. Since then, the Alice version has gained sound, better timing around its messages, a small but important rule borrowed from the Lynx version, and one unexpectedly subtle keyboard fix.

    The first gameplay change prevents a board clear from happening much too early. During the first nine successful moves into the four outer windows, one randomly selected tile position is withheld. This makes it impossible to complete an outer face while the rest of the board is still essentially empty. Once a face has been completed the restriction is lifted, and after a genuine board clear a new protected opening begins. This follows the solution already used by the Lynx version of Assembloids.

  • The Letter That Took Two Hours: Media, Focal Practices, and the Limits of AI-Mediated Formation

    Ong's Orality and Literacy (1982) is genuinely unsettling. Writing, he argues, is a technology: artificial, learned, tool-dependent. Arriving in an oral culture it hands people no new container for the same thoughts; it changes what thinking is. His fourth chapter is titled, flatly, "Writing restructures consciousness." Writing separates the knower from the known, and suddenly you can have analysis, abstraction, a solitary author, where oral knowledge had to stay memorable or die. Take Ong seriously and the question about generative systems is not output quality. It is this: what consciousness does a culture grow when composition itself, the labour of finding out what you think by writing, can be delegated?

  • Internet/Gemini

    • First Post; ROOPHLOCH 2026

      I have been reading Gemini posts for years. I have even been working on my own Gemini browser (A full GUI application using Löve2d which I'll write about another time). I had never thought I had anything to say for myself though. This ROOPHLOCH, I decided I'd better change that!

    • Anti-ROOPHLOCH entry redemption post

      And if that doesn’t count, I’m posting this while walking outdoors, using iOS Lagrange and my gnarly line-by-line text editor mlogging SCGI app.