Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CEULOSG Wordo: WHIMS

  • post v

    Was imagining myself on a panel with Judith Butler and Amia Srinivasan, as you do, and I imagined what I would say were someone to ask me the vague question, "what are your thoughts on love?"

    I began to think of how the metaphore of distance that we often use to describe our feelings towards others may have more metaphysical significance the we realize...what if certain emotions really were a function of distance? Imagine a stranger who you know nothing about and never think of as the furthist away (basically invisible); then aquantances are closer, definitely within sight, but not close enough to touch. People we like, and maybe also those we don't like, are closer, so that we may touch them but there's still distance between us; finally, people we love are the ones we keep so close as to almost always be touching. Due to their closeness they are constantly affecting us: how we move, what we hear, and how we feel.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Word Games

    A lot of the alternatives people propose to Scrabble has the same drawback as Scrabble (needing to learn a specific set of words—Paperback and Word on the Street has that issue also) and some of them (like Boggle and Bananagrams) don’t have the fun of Scrabble’s spatial and timing tactics. I think Scrabble does have the “the other half of the game outside of just knowing words is also fun” quality of games like Wordcraft or Paperback. Quirkle, Hippos and crocodiles, Go might be options for a similarly spatial game but without words.

  • Smashing Windows: Part II

    Even the venerable Notepad isn't safe from Microsoft's astounding ineptitude.

    I'm at work today and, consequently, need to use Windows. I open up Notepad to work on a *very basic* HTML file and...it crashes. For real. Notepad!

  • jumping ships

    i'm incredibly close to being able to eschew what others would have me believe are embellished and necessary items, like that of Outlook and Blackboard...

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Masto’s “explore” tab

      A reader wrote in asking why I hate Mastodon’s “explore” tab so much.

      I’ve been against the explore tab all along but what really broke my heart is how it looks more or less the same across the several different Mastodon instances I looked at.

      For me, I feel like the mechanism of social media to emphasize a handful of a-thousand-likes big viral posts over your own friends is dehumanizing.

      [...]

      One reason I’ve been enjoying Fedi is that it breaks down this monolithic, monocultural, “everyone sees the same super top ten sponsored megaposts” bull that corporate faux “social” media has broken down into. Just like real life, every li’l ant sees the ants next to it and have fun with them in a Dunbar-number sane way.

    • Re: Masto's "explore" tab

      I find this look at social media to be very supreficial, even if we've been severely burned by things like Facebook and TikTok. The reason is because it ignores (intentionally?) all of the progress that is happening in the Social Media space in both "corporations" and smaller companies and projects. I also think it falsely attributes social media tendencies to corporate culture, when in fact it's just human tendencies.

    • Competing protocols like Spartan and Nex have not done especially well. A new protocol has to have a killer app quality to it.

      Gemini can handle any document type, not only gemtext. A new doc type needs to innovate. Adding a few markdown niceities to gemtext isn't especially compelling. It would be better to go with an existing solution like CommonMark, for which there are existing parsers out the wazoo.

      [...]

      Competing protocols like Spartan and Nex have not done especially well. A new protocol has to have a killer app quality to it.