Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Hello world

    This is my first post here, and I am not very familiar with the etiquette, although I think I get a basic understanding. This space feels like a private semi anonymous place where to vent out about life, although none seems really to hide who they are, like in the original social media… just like in a pub.

  • Calendar recommendations?

    Hi! I've never used a calendar. I'm not capable of maintaining it up to date.

    I don't look it up because it is not complete. It is not complete because I won't look at it...

    Maybe the problem is that I didn't find the calendar that works for me...

    - I tired paper: It is a mess, very inefficient, I forget it, ... - I tried framagenda.org but I having to synchronize was a pain. I've a pinephone with Phosh, if I wanted to edit something I had to make sure It was synchronized...

  • use it up, wear it out...

    A common refrain from my childhood. My grandparents came up in the great depression, and it strongly influenced both their approach to...consumption? I guess? as well as my mom's. Add to that, while I wasn't poor growing up, we definitely weren't well-off, at least not when I was a little kid to pre-teen.

    I remember my mom r e l i g i o u s l y (heh) reading the frugal zealot, back when it came only in book form. We had a garden, so we could can things and save money on groceries. I don't think I actually bought new clothes until I was...a teenager? probably? because we got hand-me-downs and went to goodwill.

  • What Is Wrong With Me?

    I seem to have a problem. While working, I find that I work best with trashy TV playing. It has to be something I don't feel a need to look at but involves several people talking. I discovered this with the madness of th Below Deck franchise. These follow people who work on super yachts and it is full of mad guests. The crew are just as mad with power struggles, love triangles and general work place drama. It is rubbish and trashy but addictive. The captains are always interesting characters and respectable. The chefs are just crazy. They often do some weird things and argue over nothing. No idea why but perhaps you have to be unhinged to be a chef.

  • Lumpy Gravy

    One of the issues of aNONradio is that I have something to listen to most of the time. Throw in podcasts and I find myself sitting down with an album rather rare. Today, I decided to sit down with an album and felt in a Frank Zappa mood so ended up with Lumpy Gravy.

  • Old Inventory

    In the Rules Cyclopedia, all characters can use the same kind of inventory sheet, you don’t need to look at things like strength score and so on.

    Hence, here is my suggestion: A “block” is 100 cn. Each block can contain 100 coins.

    Make eight “blocks” by drawing dividing a sheet of paper into eight parts, or even having eight separate pages in a notebook if you’re carrying lots of gems and other coin-sized unique trinkets.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: FILRTUY Wordo: TYING

  • Status and Photos

    We have a dig bin for our ferrets containing rice grains. Rice is safe for ferrets to play in but not to eat, as it can cause an intestinal blockage. Last week I needed to step away while the ferrets were playing, and when I came back, I found one of them standing in the dig bin licking her lips. That evening she began making strange noises and defecating less frequently. After an extremely stressful night with her, during which we discovered there are no emergency veterinary clinics in the area that treat ferrets, we took her to her regular vet. It turned out she simply had a minor respiratory infection.

• Politics and World Events

  • Might Makes Wrong [Ed: The old "whoever kills more", irrespective of motive, is wrong, no matter how it started and what it's all about]

    When the Galactic Empire killed two billion on the planet Alderaan, there was a of both-sides-do-it rhetoric in the public discourse afterwards. The rebels also kill people, even shoot them and they have Y-wing ships that drop actual bombs. “Surely they would blow up Coruscant if they could”, they were saying on debate shows.

  • Turning the tide on drug policy: Why re-criminalizing is not the answer and the urgent need for health-centered approaches

    The debate around the complex issue of drug decriminalization and its impact is multi-faceted, with strong arguments on both sides. However, the path toward re-criminalizing recreational drug use is a step backward, not forward. The case of Oregon's Measure 110 illustrates the rocky road of decriminalization marred by implementation challenges. Yet, it underscores a pivotal truth: Substance abuse is a public health issue that requires a health-based approach, not punitive measures.

    First and foremost, I stand opposed to the re-criminalization of recreational drug use. Our history is littered with the failures of the war on drugs—a costly, ineffective campaign that has done more to inflame the issues it sought to extinguish than to provide any real solution. Re-criminalization is merely another chapter in this ineffective approach, failing to address the root causes of drug abuse and addiction.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Facebook as Containment Field: Rebuilding the Partition

    Lately I've been feeling like I use different social media for different purposes. Not, "status updates on Facebook, pictures on Instagram", but more like: Facebook is where all the regular people in my life can find me; Bluesky and Mastodon for the more adept; Geminispace devoid, as far as I know, from anyone I've ever met.

    The freedom in that, of wandering in the land of invented names.

    [...]

    Even though there was a mingling of my online and offline lives (which if we're being honest, I was never super comfortable with), it didn't feel so bad because by and large, people who were online in 2002 were people who wanted to be. Facebook was still years off. The iPhone even more so. You sat down at a creaky desktop and plugged your $15 headphones into a set of terrible Altec Lansing speakers (it was great).

    Facebook collapsed everything. It was great to reconnect with some people; it was horrifying to reconnect with others. To have your suspicions confirmed, and to confirm suspicions about you. Posts spread so easily. Every time I was about to hit send, I thought about whether I wanted someone I knew from a couple of English classes in the late 90s to see it.

  • zed, rust, school

    Zed is the text editor I've been looking for. It has great language support and isn't electron-based VS Code. The bonus is that it's also made in Rust, which means it has a great foundation in code. I have been using Zed as my code editor exclusively for a week and have not considered switching back to VS Code. That's probably because I only used it for its extensive language plugins, but Zed covers all the languages I write in natively. No plugins for me! So not only is this software just software, but I also don't need to load it down with plugins. Everything is fast and responsive. I'm glad to have learned about it. It's Mac-exclusive right now, but it will probably branch into Linux in the future, which will be nice because I like to use Linux more.

  • Depression driven development

    Depression driven development, or widely known as "DDD", is commonly thought of as just a software development process. It can, however, be applied to all aspects of life, not just programming, development, or other projects.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • An unofficial icon for gwit: 🪩 the Mirror Ball!

      A funny little emoji icon popped up in this site's index page and in some recent post. In the beginning I was only looking for a way to visually distinguish the links in the index, but I must admit that the icon that I chose for the gwit link did grow on me…

    • Quiet

      Hello, I've been quiet for a while. I usually am quiet. I've never understood how some people come up with so many things to say—and so many words to say them in. I have written and felt like I'm rambling, meandering, repeating myself—and looked back to see that it's all only a page or so. How books are written is a mystery to me (a mystery for which I am very grateful).

    • hopefully more fiction soon here (pages)

      Last week I tried to upload a zine and the uploader isn't working; I emailed smol.pub admin and hopefully I'll hear back in the nearish future ...

      In the meantime I will, hopefully (again), get the energy this week to add some more microfictions to yon actual capsule.

    • Enemy at the Gate

      I temporary redirect requests from unwanted locations back to those locations. If the HTTP referrer is the same location where the link was on, then users might notice a short flicker on the screen. And can try again, greeted with another flicker.

      I know that I might hurt unsuspecting potential readers, but I don’t want to support those sites or services they are using in any way. Others might be happy about the increased traffic; I don’t care.