Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • ROOPHLOCH 2024 round up

    So long, September! The window for participation in ROOPHLOCH 2024 closed a few days ago. Sorry that this round up post is coming after a short delay. Unfortunately I was travelling for work on the 1st and 2nd of October, so this is the soonest I could get it out. Thanks, as always, to everybody who participated, which, as we'll soon see, was an awful lot of you! As in previous years I've prepared a page of links to all participating posts I know of. If your post is missing, or you notice a broken link, please let me know!

  • Bathroom renovations

    We've been having our bathroom renovated this week. According to our downstairs neighbour, the previous owner spent about 2 years of weekends updating it himself. And it just wasn't really good enough. The tiles on outer corners just had exposed edges, the shower was kinda dodgy, the pipes running along the base of one wall were just covered with loose wooden covers. It looked nice at a glance but it was all a bit dodgily done. Plus everything was grey - almost black floor tiles, grey tiles on all the walls, black countertop. It's a north-facing room to begin with and the greyness really didn't help make it any brighter.

  • Asteroid City

    People say it’s full of nothing. Emotional detachment. I disagree. In fact, I’ve connected most to this film more than any other one I’ve ever seen.

    People say Wes Anderson focused too much on the visuals. That they distract from what’s actually happening. I disagree. The visuals, in some cases, actually were story.

  • setup (10.3.2024)

    The Sceptre arrived. The desk is clean, clutter-free. L100 keyboard is dwarfed by a regular sized monitor, as it looked like it was "dominating" the laptop it sat on before this.

    Display is crisp. 1080p, all I need. The Web is fast, 1000Mbps (all I need)

    [...]

    So now, I resume the lurk. IRC, M.p, smol web hubs, places of interest

• Technology and Free Software

  • Why my switch to emergent story style gaming?

    So prodded by the WOTC license fiasco, I started grabbing a few of the cheaper "OSR style" D&D type games. Basic Fantasy RPG, White Box, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Shadowdark. At first it was just a fun rediscovery of the games I grew up on, and how well things like DCC & SD could adapt them to a modern version of the old school feel.

    Now I'd come from the super long arc narrative style of the Pathfinder Adventure Paths that could span a full level 1-20 epic scale arc, with everything mapped out ahead of time. My first big shift came when running the AP Kingmaker, a sandbox style AP that still had a ton of railroad potential, but led to my players doing so many really fun and unanticipated things, growing whole character arcs by how they organically interacted with the world instead of planning ahead.

  • When it rains it pours, projects!

    Ideas and projects seem to be flowing in at the moment, so I am hoping to catch a few before they flutter away.

    [...]

    I got a reply from another friendly Geminaut on my flatfile database idea, so I wrote Rob back in an email. He was quite receptive on letting me work a bit on his OEIS project, to try and see if there is something there.

    We are mostly just talking tweaking an already running version of my idea, well his idea really, to see if we can eek some performance out of the search and maybe even run a few tests to see how it would perform vs a similar database tool. Very exciting!

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello World

      Welcome to my tiny tech blog and portfolio. I wanted something super lightweight to write notes with and have on a resume, and decided that smol.pub was perfect for the job.

  • Programming

    • Fencepost Rhythms

      The idea here is to calculate some function at regular intervals (the fenceposts) and based on some condition being true generate a MIDI event, otherwise to extend silence. An improvement may involve a graph of the equation and the fenceposts so that you can better see what the equation is doing, but that is more work.