Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Convergent Evolution in Spirituality

    Bats and birds do not share any recent common evolutionary ancestor, but both evolved wings that do the same thing—flying—and end up looking awfully similar. Convergent evolution (or parallel evolution) is a thing! It doesn't make bats birds or vice versa, but they do the same thing in the same way. Just so are not all spiritual practices that aren't necessarily your own or "of your own culture" culturally appropriative; sometimes there are parallels that go way back, and sometimes you just do something that anyone can/should do and could have come up with.

    To be sure, there are certainly times where cultural appropriation is indeed a problem, and often a major one at that! But far from everything that crosses cultural borders does so in a way of appropriation; sometimes it's cultural diffusion and exchange, sometimes respectful cross-cultural participation; sometimes it's just something for anyone to pick up and use without claims of ownership or propriety. There are also times where something makes a circuit through multiple cultures before ending back up where it started, having picked up more along the way. It becomes a shared cross-cultural phenomenon that nobody can lay claim to, and as such should be celebrated and enjoyed by all.

  • update time!

    Howdy, all!

    ~bartender? Some good filter coffee with cream and sugar, ah, take a big mug, it needs to last a bit. Thanks! --- Ah, and one of your ethernet cables, please! No, wireless is kind of never working when I need it most. :-)

    /me heads over to the table in the dark corner near the power outlet and the hidden ethernet jack. I fetch my small notebook and the key dongle from my backpack and set those up on the table.

  • wind and sun

    The winter arc is starting soon. For better or worse, time to get the winter clothes out. Time to have some alone time with the cold winds. I’ve been walking to the places where I found solace. Some still keep the warmth one needs on a cold day. Some don’t. Some are not around anymore. Funny how life decides to keep people around, even after they leave.

  • Week Notes 1

    I’ve been going through a little bit of a writer’s block lately, so I figure I’m going to start trying this “week notes” format I’ve seen from some other bloggers. Not that I expect I’ll be very good at sticking to a regular schedule, but I like the idea of having somewhere to put some of my shorter thoughts that’s more organized than somewhere like Mastodon.

• Politics and World Events

  • Culture matters.

    This week's fallout from the 2024 U.S. presidential election proved the assumptions of many Democrats wrong: the so-called "culture war" was not a distraction to keep the electorate from focusing on issues like income inequality and corruption; as it turned out, the culture war propelled DJT to his victory. As LGBTQ Nation reports in "How anti-trans attack ads helped Trump reach male voters & beat Kamala Harris" (Nov. 8, 2024),

• Technology and Free Software

  • VIM Tips and Tricks - Blog

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Yet Another Gemini 2 Atom feed generator

      The convention for blog/gemlog feeds seems to be Atom+XML, and looking round at the options for generating these i noticed it was easier to implement my own