Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sketching Plants (publ. 2024-06-11)

    I've continued my spring time walks along the Tanana River, two or three times a week. I've collected some additional photos from that but haven't had time yet to get them organized and published.

    Also, a week or two ago I decided to shift some of my energies towards sketching plants instead of just photographing them. Photography is rewarding in its own way. Nevertheless, photography doesn't force you to spend much time studying the intricate details of the subject.

  • new display

    large. need to alter the color gamut. ont he warm side.

  • Pub replies entanglement

    Today I noticed that the "reply" link to a reply is a link to a new-reply-to-be, which got me wondering if there are ever collisions between separate people replying to the same reply at roughly the same time, or if perhaps there's some server-side fancy-schmancy to prevent that?

    I noticed that because I earlier to day I'd noted the reply id at the end when I replied to a reply, and was surprised that going to that link after replying brought me to *my* reply instead of the reply I was replying to.

  • yay HDMI

    I have a gaming monitor arriving soon. But no HDMI cable. That arrives tomorrow. I check User Manual (from Amazon) and it comes w/ an HDMI cable. Nice!

  • Make Things and Leave Traces: On Choices and Inevitability

    I've been reading Mark Fisher's "Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?" And I'm struck by the way he writes, persuasively, that one of the weapons capitalism uses against the populace is the normalization of the perception of a lack of alternatives: the presentation of a small, pre-approved list of options, from which, we grumble, we guess we ought to pick the least worst. From our position, it seems like things will never change. Inevitability, we are told, is inevitable.

  • Hi folks!

    Hello sweet people, I'm shoebx! (you can pronounce it as "shoe box")

    I started passing on the main street lately and I couldn't stop overhearing the nice music and discussions happening through the big window.

    I planned to come later, perhaps a bit more rested, but on the way back home I couldn't stop myself from at least saying "hello", just to get me known here.

  • Wassail!

    I suppose I should introduce myself. Those of you in the Matrix room know me well, but I figured I should re-introduce myself since it's been a long time since I've participated here.

    I'm Travis, a 30-something libertine polyamorous polyglot, (somewhat) traditionalist/reconstructionist English heathen and aspiring homesteader from central North America.

• Poetry

  • the blue line swinger

    a pair of trembling eyes, tracing

    shadows cast from blank referents

    quivering and interpreting

    through dust-filled, thin, curious tears

    expecting moldering blueprints.

• Technology and Free Software

  • VVO Client Now Displaying Map Tiles

    Continued good progress on VVO, my multiplayer roguelite. One major development: The client is no longer written in Electron. I wanted to use something that would let me bundle web tech into a desktop application because being able to build the UI with HTML and CSS would have been easy and convenient, but the complexity and aggravation of getting Electron to allow the simplest things due to incredibly cumbersome security features became too annoying.

    So, I've switched to writing the client in Pygame. I don't even particulary like Python as a language, building the UI elements will be more cumbersome this way, and it's slower than molasses so generally not very well-suited to performance-intensive applications (any "Python" packages that need to be high-performance like math and AI are just Python wrappers build around code written in much faster languages)... but I made this decision because (a) my simple client won't need to be high-performance anyway and (b) if there's one thing Python is usually good at, it's being simple, and I was very ready for "simple" after the boggling over-complexity of Electron.

  • Finally Found My Human Calculatable Hash Function

    In my journal post "Hosts (Resolutions?) for 2024" from back in the end of December of last year, I wrote about how I was trying to find a human calculatable hash function to create a secure pencil and paper authentication scheme. Below is that journal post.

  • OpenBSD Pubnix

    Or ideas and documentation and some code and configuration to allow users to create accounts and change their passwords. Needs more work to offer any sort of real features, and there's a lot more concerns (rate limiting new accounts, blacklisting bad IPs, etc) not covered that probably should be.