Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • I forget

    ..and then we talk
    and for a moment
    I forget to hate myself
    

  • Trying to do the right thing

    “The good that I would, I do not. The evil I would not, I do.”

    St Paul has been sounding unusually plausible to me this weekend.

    I’ve been left to my own devices for a couple of days. I am perfectly capable of eating sensibly. I know what constitutes a reasonably healthy diet. I know that I feel better when I eat and drink moderately.

    And yet, presented with freedom, opportunity and a fridge containing tiramisu, I appear to have concluded that fat and sugar are essential components of a balanced diet.

    There is no tiramisu in the fridge now.

  • Three Pages Before the Day Arrives: Julia Cameron's Artist's Way as Scholarly Method

    Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way (1992) does not cite Foucault and was not written for a dissertation committee. It was written for blocked artists, it has sold millions of copies, and in some academic circles admitting you use it will get you a look. I will argue that Cameron's practices belong in a scholar's method, not as a detour from theory but as the ground theory stands on. I will show it by taking her two core practices seriously (morning pages and artist dates), adding a third, and placing all three in conversation with Thomas Merton, the Rule of St. Benedict, and Makoto Fujimura.

• Poetry/Prose

  • The Great Outdoors: Speculative Realism and the Fossil That Nobody Watched

    Immanuel Kant taught that we cannot know things as they are in themselves. We know how things appear to us, structured by our own cognitive faculties. The world is always mediated, always filtered through human categories. Meillassoux, in After Finitude (2006), gives this orientation a name: correlationism, the position that we can never access reality except through the correlation of thought and being. Note what correlationism does not say. It does not say the world fails to exist. It says the world is always the world for us.

  • Small (poe/en)

    this path into nothingness
    makes my stubborn steps feel small
    there's no other, i'd have sworn
    if there was -- my mind stays sore
    

  • Sail (poe/en)

    the more i know
    the less i know
    the less true it feels...
    yet still i sail
    
    
    i can't defend
    from a word
    just a single word
    you always say
    

• Science

  • How to quickly subtract seven from fifteen

    Yeah, yeah, you can do it normally and just figure out that fifteen minus seven is eight. But you can also take the tens-complement to seven (which is three) and add that to the last digit which is five and that makes eight. It works for all single-digit numbers subtracted from a number 10–19. When you’re subtracting from an even bigger number, it’s not great (subtract ten rather than just lop off the first digit. So 123 minus 7 is absolutely not 6, it's 116).

    Maybe this is just a me-problem it’s just my weird brain (because I was out of school in second grade and missed out on subtraction drills) but I hate subtraction. It’s easier if I convert it to 7+X = 15, my brain right away returns with “eight” when seeing 7+X = 15 whereas when it sees 15 - 7 it returns with grumbling and rusty creaking and paaainful struggle of “okay first subtract the fives so we have two below ten that is eight” or I dunno what the heck it’s doing back there but it’s not fun for it (🧠) to do. But if I’m gonna juggle the numbers to turn it to 7+X = 15 anyway I might as well juggle them to be 3+5 instead because that’s even easier.

  • Turning Research Papers into Working AI Agents with Paper2Agent

    Scientific papers are how we communicate new discoveries and methods. But papers themselves are passive.

    Suppose you find a paper describing a useful computational method and want to apply it to your own data.

• Technology and Free Software

  • James Bowman's SPIDriver Quattro Is Everything You Need to Debug and Diagnose SPI Bus Projects

    Excamera Labs' James Bowman is preparing to launch a device that aims to make Serial Peripheral Interface work a breeze: the display-equipped power-monitoring SPIDriver Quattro USB to SPI bridge.

    "SPIDriver Quattro is an easy-to-use tool for controlling SPI devices," Bowman explains of the device. "It works with Windows, Mac, and Linux, and has a built-in screen that shows a beautiful live display of all SPI traffic. As soon as you plug it in, it shows up as a standard serial device; no drivers need to be installed. If you work with SPI devices — displays, bulk flash, ADCs [Analog to Digital Converters] — SPIDriver Quattro is a fast, reliable tool that gives you control over — and visibility into — your SPI transactions. The extensive monitoring and capture tools let you debug complex SPI issues non-invasively, as well as reverse-engineer embedded systems."

  • DMs don’t know what players want

    There’s generally this theme I hear whenever I talk to other DMs online or in person, and I get frustrated with my fellow DMs for not understanding this: the kinds of games DMs love are not the same players love. Not every DM, but some forever DMs are all about super minimal games and they really love constraining the players and taking options away from them. My players love crunch and options. Classes to pick from and build out and test. I hate that and prefer way more open-ended and creative games like Fate or OSR where there’s only a few options that you can flavor as you wish. I love the blank canvas, they want the menu of options. DMs love minimal games because there’s less rules for them to have to remember and fiddle with and adjudicate and they can just concentrate on the prep. But there are many things that bring a player to the table. For some the game system in and of itself is the appeal. Getting to pick some actual abilities with actual crunch and tangible in-game effects is like Christmas for them.

  • trying out joplin

    i'm trying out joplin! i'm very fond of my basic text editor, i just keep it open at all times and dump random notes and ideas in there. they might become obsolete, or i might develop them into something to post on here (and remove from the file) so it's ever-changing and not really Eternally Growing. but even so, it was getting a bit troublesome to keep scrolling to reach whatever it is that i needed to reference at any given moment.

  • An offline experiment

    There was one idea that started circling my head once I thought about it, and it wouldn't leave! So I had to implement it and try it for a few days. Overall, I would say the experiment went well, but the time is not right to keep it going.