Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: GHLORUY Wordo: LIARS

  • On shimmer fountain pen ink

    I love glitter as much as (or maybe more than) the next guy, but the one place I really don't care for it is in fountain pen ink. It looks delicious, but it's way too high-maintenance and hard to clean to be practical.

    There are a lot of amazing shimmer inks that would still be amazing if they didn't have the shimmer, particularly if they sheen as well. I would buy 1000 bottles of shimmer-free Diamine Garland and drink them all - it's teal-ish green with strong bright red (bordering on hot pink) sheen, which is already unbelievable before you even add the blue shimmer it has.

  • Magical realism

    I have always super hated the term “magical realism” when-and-only-when it comes along with disparagement of other fantasy genres. Here in Sweden there’s, among literature critics, such unawareness and disparagement of fantasy that it’s mindboggling to me that they then drop their jaws with amazement at something like Gabriel García Márquez or Knut Hamsun.

  • Performative friendship

    I'm starting to realize that what the industry calls "networking" is sort of like their way of saying "making new friends"

    It feels a bit silly, but I do think that realizing this had gone a long way towards reframing my understanding of what it means to "network," that is, what it means to these people, probably a lot more intersectionally normal than I am, to form connections with people.

• Science

  • The analog gap

    I remember a while back, I was making a music compilation for some of my friends. There was this song we used to really enjoy: Klô Pelgag's cover of Demain L'hiver by Robert Charlebois. It's kind of hard to find, these days. It was produced for a podcast about Robert Charlebois by the CBC a few years back. It used to be on Spotify, and then one day, for one licensing reason or another, it disappeared. I really wanted to include it in my compilation, so I went digging.

  • The misguided idea to do math to numbers rolled on dice

    While the “d20 system” as introduced by D&D third edition wasn’t the first game to have this not-so-good feature as a core part of the design (the original "d6" version of Star Wars has the same problem, requiring you to add dice together), it’s well known and can serve as an example of what I’m talking about.

    In 3e, 4E and 5e D&D, you roll a d20, then add a number to that die roll, and then compare to a target number. In its worst iteration, that target number is even kept secret by the Dungeon Master, but even when rolled against an open target number, this has a couple of problems.

• Technology and Free Software

  • trouble getting NixOS on my GPD Win 2

    I have a GPD Win 2 that had Artix Linux on it. I keep running into key issues because I go long periods of time without connecting to the internet. I was going to install NixOS on it, but the latest installer ISO would just drop back to UEFI when I tried to boot anything from it. I resorted to using a much older installer with the intention of updating to the latest. I copied over my configuration.nix from my other x86-64 system and commented out the stuff that isn’t valid yet. I ran the install, and it appeared to go fine, but then rebooting it drops to a prompt in UEFI-land instead of booting. That was last night, not sure if it was the UEFI shim complaining it couldn’t find grub or if it was grub complaining it couldn’t find something. I’ll poke at it some more this evening.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Portable vs Window AC Units - Why You Shouldn't Make a Cake out of Acorns

      I’m getting better prepared for that sweet 108 degree 90% humidity weather coming my way this summer. I was debating between types of small ACs. It seems there’s a huge difference between window AC units and portable AC units.

      It helps to first understand a simplistic model of how an AC works. There are two separate coils. The condensor, the hot side, is where the heat is released outside. The evaporator, the cold side, is where cool air enters your living space.

    • CORS on the Drogon web framework

      CORS, the problem that every web developer has faced at least once in their life. Drogon does not come with built-in middleware to handle CORS, but it is easy to implement it yourself.

      Usually, you'll want to expose your APIs to the world. This code will allow any request to the `/api` path to go through, and will respond to any `OPTIONS` request with the appropriate CORS headers.

  • Programming

    • Meson considered harmful

      Many Free software and/or Open Source projects this day  |
      | and age are switching away from old tried and true tools |
      | such as GNU auto tools to meson.                         |
      |                                                          |
      | This phenomenon isn't particularly new, if you've been   |
      | around for a while, you'll remember this happened before |
      | with jam and then, notably, with cmake.                  |
      |                                                          |
      | Meson being the latest fad in build systems however, is  |
      | particularly annoying if you're fond of more esoteric    |
      | platforms, old or new, because it depends on python, and |
      | it's ecosystem, and a rather new-ish version at that.