Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • "part of a whole" tarot spread

    art is at a standstill recently. i did however manage to add backs to my "candyfloss" tarot deck. annoyingly every step of the pattern made it progressively worse, until i painted over everything with gesso (beloved) and arrived at the perfect look. unfortunately that meant recreating the shitshow on every single card. but i managed to get it done within one day, so that's a relief - not having to look at the ugly stage for long.

  • Wegovy

    I reached my heaviest weight ever last month and it coincided with some health stuff that led me to a cardiologist. I'm going to a follow-up today, in fact. Good news is that I'm not in danger right now. Bad news is I have heart disease. I've got a family history of it, and I'm overweight with borderline pre-diabetes, high blood pressure, and low fitness level. All not great.

  • we have the relationships of too many rats in a cage

    a woman i went on a coffee date with some weeks back tried negging me over text. we've been in and out of touch since the initial date. this week she seems to have decided she wants to hit it, and it's threatening to her self regard that i'm not dropping everything at the opportunity. in one breath i get “i think you are hot... been feeling rowdy again a lil”. in the next “you can always hire me lol”.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pebcak upgrade: FreeBSD 14.1 - GMID 2.0 🩹

    Also this upgrade/update has been full of PEBCAK which made the capsule unaivable for a couple of hours…

  • Internet/Gemini

    • 👻 Mediocre Feed: My New Feed Reader

      I've long since replaced all of my social media usage with an old-fashioned RSS feed. It takes a non-trivial time to amass a large enough collection of websites that you are both interested in and update semi-regularly, but after a few years it's pretty rare that I feel that I'm lacking.

    • A Deep Dive into the World of the OpenEarth Foundation, Part 1 of 2: Funding

      It's no secret that I have a hard time trusting the intentions of influential fediverse folks who cheer on Meta and Threads as they expand into the space. Every so often I like to check in on what they're saying and doing, if only to get insight as to how they approach things at an ideological level.

      So when I noticed that Evan Prodromou, co-editor of ActivityPub (and vocal advocate for Meta's adoption of the protocol), has had a full-time position at a non-profit called the OpenEarth Foundation since May 2022, I was curious to know what it was all about. Plus, based on the name, I genuinely worried that I might have misjudged him. So I decided to take a look - and risk feeling the discomfort you get when you realize you've been (loudly) wrong about someone. Because hey, humble pie is ultimately nutritious, even if it's kind of hard to swallow.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Announcement: Upcoming Closure of Chess Over Gemini

      At the end of August 2024, I will retire Chess Over Gemini.

      In late 2021, I decided to try my hand at serious CGI programming in my capsule. I wanted to build something users could do together--partially to provide something fun for Geminispace, and partially to practice user management and large amounts of data. The project I ultimately took on was asynchronous chess.

      My first iteration of chess was written entirely in Bash and used flat text files to hold game data. The scripts were buggy, the service did not scale well, and it was difficult to add new features. The biggest issue, however, was that I had to calculate game states manually. This included checks, checkmates, stalemates, draws by attrition, and draws by no capture. At the time, my capsule ran on a Raspberry Pi, and the calculations were extremely slow. Connections would often time out before the backend finished processing a move.