Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Live shows: for me, smaller is better

    i recently went and saw “Stickybeak”, a live comedy show about suburbia. i thought it was brilliant, and indeed, it's critically acclaimed, winning the “Best Comedy” award of the 2023 Melbourne Fringe Festival.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABLOPYR Wordo: MULLS

  • Fall in Spring

    I'm going to my thesis advisor's funeral tomorrow. He went like flame, before I managed to see him. I tried to see him twice; the first time he got rushed to the hospital, and the second time he died in the night. I'm sick like a dog, but there's now way I'm missing him a third time.

  • Love Is Infinite

    In spite of its flaws, which are numbered, Halo Infinite will always have a special place in my heart.

    During the Covid-19 Pandemic, I had a long distance girlfriend named Brianna. She was very special to me, but unfortunately, due to the Lockdown, we couldn't see each other in real life.

  • Multitudinous Levels of Coping Mechanisms

    A good deal of people I know or have known have Anxiety Hangovers. Or Anxiety Anticipations. Or even Anxiety Flashbacks. Or the horrifying Anxiety Nostalgia. Or combinations of them. The hangovers I can understand. They are a lesser form of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. And in that case, the flashbacks are related, and are also understandable. The worrisome part is the degree to which these flashbacks occur and how debilitating they are. None of the humans I'm referring to have been in a war or associated "level" of trauma. I realise that said "level" is relative. A human born and raised in a BOX who knows nothing else may receive its first anxious moment whilst crossing a busy street or peeling a banana, for example. This experience could scar them for life! For even three or for lives. Imagine it!

  • What's in a label?

    Life seemingly doesn't want to be what we say it is. In fact, given the likes entropy and Murphy's Law, I wouldn't be surprised to learn it's generally the mathematical inverse of whatever we say it is. There's something about attempting to label reality that makes it cantankerous - if not downright rebellious (to the labeling).

• Language

  • Gaeilge Uladh (Learning Irish and some resources)

    Since I've seen a few mentions on gemini of people learning Irish I've decided to start noting down resources in the hope that other people find them useful. I'm not sure yet how else this space may get used beyond that.

    My target dialect is Ulster Irish or Gaeilge Uladh, so most of the writing here will be about that specific dialect. While there is overlap with the other dialects, if you are plannig on learning one of the others you might be better served elsewhere.

  • Ulster Irish

    Been learning Ulster Irish seriously for the past month and a bit. Going to start keeping a list of resources and other content on my capsule.

• Books

  • re: Books vs Internet

    Even if you're looking at “the good parts” of the internet, I feel like there's one key difference between a book and a website: books go into much more detail and depth. Like, you *can* make a website with a book's level of detail and depth, but even in the historical style of personal sites on personal interests it'd be rather rare to see that; while with books it's the norm.

    I've never written a book but when doing longer-form writing it is pretty refreshing to be able to go into depth and explain literally every single detail and nuance of what you're discussing. Or even just getting to elaborate on related topics rather than having to stay perfectly directly focused for the sake of brevity. Versus even in a blog post, you often feel somewhat pressured to stay concise to what you're writing about; or at the very least it's more “throwaway” so you're not necessarily putting all of your efforts into exploring every detail of it. Not that all books are thoroughly in depth or all online blog posts are lacking in depth lol, many many many counterexamples both ways.

  • Today's book haul: Muster, Masterpieces of Fantasy Art, and Enchanted

    I don't buy fiction in print anymore, except for a few very special items, but there are still some books that I get in print: roleplaying games, some computer books, and art books, all of which for me benefit from having a physical copy. I find it is much easier to learn technical material, such as RPGs and computer books, if I have a copy I can hold in my hands and flip back and for through, and put multiple bookmarks in. And of course having physical versions of art makes it easier to look at it. Anyway, today I got three books in the mail.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Refactoring Again (Priduck Color Theme)

    Originally, when this theme was created, it made sense to create two separate packages to provide the theme, one for the CSS files themselves and the other for a CLI to generate the source files.

    These we needed to generate GPL palettes for Inkscape[1] and that specific abstraction started to crumble. The result is that we merged the two Priduck repositories together and made it a single theme, with the intent that one would generate the files they want instead of a tiny package that just provided a single CSS variables version.

  • More RPG books: Hexagram #12, Quick Quest #10, and Longshot City

    These were all the physical results of Kickstarters. I read both Hexagram #12 and Quick Quest 10, and both are good, although I have to wonder if there is an effective way to deal with one of the creatures in the Quick Quest other than “Run away”? It still looks fun.

  • Windows Features Soon To Be Removed

    As technology evolves, so does software. To streamline operations and focus on future innovations, Microsoft occasionally removes features from the Windows operating system. This can be due to several reasons, such as low usage, security concerns, or the availability of more modern alternatives. If you rely on certain features in your daily workflow, it's important to stay informed about upcoming changes. Let's explore some Windows features that are scheduled to be removed soon.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Profectus Beta 1.1: Removed WebP Support

      I have removed libwebp support at the request of a user. This is temporary until I can make webp fully optional and provide two different versions of profectus with and without webp. It is also good to provide this option because libwebp may not be preferred for users that care about security vulnerabilities (libwebp has had security problems in the past).

    • Goodbye, and Thank You

      When I first entered Gemspace one of the first anchors in this strange, but exciting, new realm was geminispace.info. It was - at that time - my sole gateway to discovery. It is very sad, therefore, to find out that it will no longer exist past June 1st.

    • geminispace.inf

      When geminispace.info shuts down it will be missed. I have found the list of new gemini hosts particularly useful and hope it will resurface somewhere. Although many new capsules greet the visitor with a Hello World or the hoster's generic message, some already have enough content to indicate if it might be interesting to follow. Many of these capsules do not turn up at all in the usual aggregators, or not very often, so being able to spot them as they are launched is really useful. On the other hand, the "newest gemini pages" feature may have been relevant early on, now it is dominated by what seems to be automatically generated content.

      [...]

      I understand perfectly well that many people prefer having music in their ears instead of being exposed to the unstimulating, sometimes harsh sound environments of cities. Personally, I have never had the habit of listening to music that way. I did have a walkman, but can't recall bringing it with me outdoors. Instead, inspired by Cage, I would listen to the sounds of the environment as if it was music. If you walk, there is already a metrical grid to project any sound events onto. The rhythms and timbres can be quite fascinating.

    • Frames Of Reference- Chapter 14

      “That’ll be all for now,” I reply. “Get on back in there, champ.” To my left, Carla-Jean sits applying nail polish, her arduous curves sinking into the swivel chair beneath her, plump envy lips jutting out beneath her rectangular quartz glasses with the delicate beaded chain on the side. It occurs to me that she shows up less and less often these days. Of course, she has barely any actual work to perform. She’s paid simply to appear.

    • Frames Of Reference- Chapter 15

      I don’t know how I made it home. I don’t remember driving. There she is, though, I don’t know how or why I deserve her. Maybe I don’t, maybe we’re stuck together purely by chance. I feel her satin gown lowering next to me, her soft touch on my forehead, I don’t open my eyes because I don’t want to see her or anything in the world, it’s enough to merely feel her presence in the timeless vacuum.

  • Photos

    • Ideal family photograph

      The ideal family photograph is a pastiche of church architecture. The mother and the father are the two main steeples, with the two or three children being the lesser triangles forming the entrance and stained glass windows, the spangles of the church. A baby in their mother’s arms is a protruding minaret of sorts (with the vocal aspect and all), and the dog at the father’s foot is the garden at the entrance.

  • Programming

    • Software development is antiscience

      What I think it means to be a scientist is that you use and believe in the scientific method. The scientific method is a handy tool for revealing useful information about our world¹. It gives us a repeatable algorithm we can use to demonstrate that something is true in different circumstances.

    • Emacs as shell

      On my uconsole, I am using exwm as my window manager. I wanted a similar feel in termux on my phone so I installed debian as proot in termux and compiled emacs 29 from source. Then I chsh'd my user to /usr/local/bin/emacs. Pretty much just like exwm. I use term and eshell, depending on what I am trying to do. I have emacs set to use bash (found an elisp blurb on stackoverflow). Just what I was looking for.