Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Jarlo Martel-monto, what a bizarre poet.

    The literature I grew up reading was mainly science fiction. Then, by the time when I had actually borrowed and read each and every SF book available on the two nearest libraries, my literary interest got caught by dadaism, absurdism, and all kinds of experimental poetry. For years I would find conventional story-telling tedious. This was in the late 1980's and early 1990's, a period when experimental writing was largely viewed as an embarrasing historical misstep. Only two decades earlier, formalist literary experiments were not uncommon and got published by some of the largest and most prestigious publishers, so a few titles from this golden era were still available, collecting dust in the libraries.

    [...]

    In a famous episode, during Hammarberg's début exhibition as an artist in 1965, he had put a sign on the entrance to the gallery that said (in translation): REFUSE TO KILL. REFUSE MILITARY SERVICE. For this peaceful statement he had to pay a fine. He had also hung a large handwritten poster in the gallery with some kind of artist statement, a text that ended with a question: "Is there a girl who is interested in me? Yes, I'd like to have a girlfriend." Sonja Åkesson was there, and they would later get married.

  • Hoodie

    I wore a hoodie, jeans and runners to work yesterday. I usually wear a button-up shirt and dress shoes, often with a blazer, sometimes with a suit. Basically, my work "look" is a bit more formal than the average. It was kind of funny how changing this to be a bit less formal really threw a couple of people.

    [...]

    Anyway, I guess I've been thinking about how I want to relate to work, and who I want to be at work. I've made an effort to create a mental separation between work and non-work life, but that's to stop work infiltrating my non-work time, rather than wanting to stop people at work knowing about who I am and what I do outside of work. At least, that's what I've always thought I was doing. Maybe I wasn't. Maybe I have been maintaining a "work persona" and I ...can't be bothered doing that anymore? Hard to say. But the new hoody is very comfortable.

  • Hello.

    It's going to be a long day. But we are going to make some music today. God knows what that's going to sound like.

    If I'm going to make a home here in the gemini-verse, "you people" (© Constance, 1985) will need to understand that Troop Groop is a thing. What's a Troop Groop? It's my never ending college-band-project.

  • Grouper - Sleep

    I've been listening to this album in the evening and enjoying its repetitive reverb heavy melodies. Very chill.

  • title

    So what, listening to some music, this russian music really gets me in the mood. I just sit here, as comfortably as I can, sipping my beer and looking at the pubgoers, and try to catch an interesting conversation here and there. But the pub has been very quiet, a bit gloomy, if you ask me. I like that, it fits my mood. So I just sit here, thinking that later I may read Journey to the West or The Brothers Karamazov... idk. My brain is tired from reading the other kind of stuff, the non-fiction. Especially the math, the languages, all that stuff. I just want to relax now, listen to some music, enjoy the evening. The pub is nice, it's always open, unlike the tea place, which only opens a couple times a day, a bit too early in the morning, a bit too late in the evening. The pub is always open and it lets me sit here and enjoy my drink as long as I want. I like that it is slow, it lets me think. I'm happy to have left the other, bustling places of activity. They were doing me no good. They are no good, they are mind poison, for real.

  • The Lies of Therapy

    I am grateful that many more of today's people are becoming aware of the rampant abuse of the Troubled Teen Industry, myself being a survivor among them.

    It is not easy trying to uncondition myself from the harmful thoughts, train of thoughts, and mental patterns that were quite literally forced on my by those who claimed they were doing this "for my own good".

    It still makes me sick when I think about the man I used to be, a hollow man who was robbed of his own autonomy, agency, molded into something that I simply wasn't, a complacent and capitulant in the face of adversity, manipulation, and susceptible.

  • A month and a week til the academic year

    It's so funny how the perception of time works because on one hand it's like "oh I have nearly half of my summer break left" and on the other it's "oh my god I only have a little over a month left of summer!!!"

    I'm so worried about this training teachers thing I'll be doing tomorrow. I'm not worried about the Twine part of the class. I've taught Twine so many times including to teachers. I think that'll be fun. I'm slightly worried about the p5 portions because there is just so much I could say that I don't feel like I've managed to narrow it down sufficiently

    These teachers have a super broad area of backgrounds so I guess what I can try to do is just show that you can handle equations of motion, draw various shapes and curves, and show off the support for vector math in 2 and 3 dimensions?

  • Unicorn

    My friend Lee creates this oppotunities to play music in public, and gets me to participate in them. In return I do whatever she ask me to do. It's a symbiotic relation, where I wouldn't go out and find out about these possibilities, and at the same time she might not participate in these events if I wasn't part of adventure.

    A couple month back, she invited me to Bragg Creek to perform with her a sound healing journey. As we played often together with meditation and sound, I was eager to participate and it was a great exprience.

    A few week ago, she invited me to the Unicorn Festival. We were to perfome on a floating stage on a lake in the middle of the mountains. Although I'm comfortable to perform for a sound healing journey, a 'stage' presentation is completely different. It's denuded from a lot of the intuitive, meditative aspect of what I usualy like to perform.

  • Re: Man pages (kensanata)

    In his phlog "Man pages" [1], Alex Schroeder praises man pages and states that software developers should prefer man pages above README's, HTML-files, and web pages for the documentation of their software.

    I totally agree with this.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Web applications

    For my own peace of mind, I have resolved to no longer think of websites as "websites". Instead, there are *web documents* and *web applications*. I find it easier to accept to use a browser like Firefox like a virtual computer for web applications. Many of the websites these days are in fact web applications.

    There's no point in railing against web applications. I like to write web applications! And I use many of them myself, too. Things like Face Generator, Text Mapper or Hex Describe are impossible to do as documents. In an emergency, you could have a form that then generates a PDF to download, maybe? But is that really preferable? I don't think so.

  • CHANGELOG 2024-08-14

    The biggest change I'd like to note is that I've organized all the art that I've posted to the site over the years into a single place, and linked to it from the homepage. So far this only includes the various digital works that I've ever published here on the site.

    I also added a "🚀 What is Gemini?" page and linked to it from the homepage, as well as a header which I've included on (most) pages of the HTTP mirror of this capsule.

  • Writing in style

    As I mentioned in a previous post[1], I'm struggling at the moment with complexity of markup in our developer documentation at work. It seems to me that we keep coming up with new requirements for formatting content that aren't ultimately making anything easier to read.

  • Drowning in CD

    So they want to containerize their OpenLDAP directory. Or at least part of it.

    And "we" (ahem) enhanced an existing docker container. And (ahem) enhanced an existing HELM chart for Kubernetes. And told them it was all fine. Just go do it.

    And it isn't just fine. And "we" (that one of us) didn't really understand enough about the details that "we" further confused them.