Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Starship Troopers Last All Summer Long

    The next person who tells me that Communism is a failed evil system needs to come and visit Vietnam. Sure, it's not a hard-core Marxist state -- nothing is. Or ever was. Such an idealised state would need to be populated by limited-state machines rather than people. But it is an authentic communist state all the same, and at least at a superficial level it seems to be flourishing.

    I'm sure there are problems. People live here, after all. There is wealth inequality -- this authoritarian regime has embraced a fair dose of market capitalism, and capitalism is of course doing its thing and chowing down on the place. But is hasn't reached the marrow-sucking phase here yet -- the capitalist overlords are still fattening the middle class up. And meanwhile the communist foundations seem to minimise the existence of abjact poverty. I've seen no evidence of widespreaqd homelessness, at least not in Hà Nội (an admittedly wealthy city in the scheme of things).

  • Enchanting Dreams: Brilliant Sun in a Black Sky

    I'm not someone who thinks dreams hold any kind of spiritual or metaphysical significance. From studies showing that when people are prevented from dreaming, they develop memory and cognitive problems, it's clear that dreams play some kind of role in maintaining mental function. I don't pretend to know the real purpose of dreams, but I have a hypothesis that they're roughly analogous to defragmenting a hard drive -- the brain moving and consolidating thoughts and memories, and this process sometimes touches on the "aware" part of the mind as strange nonsensical flickers, just like the kind of random data fragments you'd see if you monitored data moving around in a computer. Of course, I could be totally off-base, but the point is I think dreams are just a natural part of the body's processes.

  • Introductions, introductions

    I'm glad I recieved my key! I've been reading posts from here for a few weeks, and I absolutely adore this place. I'm probably younger than most folks here, I'm 19 and currently studying engineering in a third world country, I hope to save up enough so that my girlfriend and I can leave here one day.

  • No, Cory, it really is about sovereignty

    At the time, I was a bit taken aback by Cory Doctorow's prickly (and frankly, pretty condescending) response to a post he calls "the precipitating incident". In his blog post, Cory doesn't name names, but it's pretty obvious he's referring to a piece by Paris Marx that Paris linked on his Mastodon account back in September.

• Technology and Free Software

  • EmacsConf 2024 Backstage

    As mentioned, my two EmacsConf 2024 videos have already been uploaded, and now the captions are done.

  • This is a reply to 2025 Markdown Calendars[1] by Ellane (webmention).

    I keep an old style analogic paper wall calendar by my side on my office desk where I mark main events and appointments; for some reason I like to have it at hand. I could use this plain text variation at some point at least on my digital garden, linking the weeks to my weekly notes, for example 🤔.

    Anyways, here is my adaptation putting the week numbers in the first column, and marking the quarters as well.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Flounder's pretty coo

      Flounder's pretty cool, actually. Mainly because it's the smOllest, simpler, faster content manager I've ever have the pleasure to encounter. A perfect fit for Gemini/Gopher. (Not so much for the web, but then, nothing's perfect and all that).

    • I suppose I'll have to write in English.

      I suppose I'll have to write in English. Well, not that I actually have-to, rather that it makes sense to use English for reasons of reach and accessibility in a already small writing space. I'm talking to you small-web(ers), geminauts and gopherers, wherever you might be.

      Plans? Er... no plans at this time, just being a good citizen and post somehow regularly, daily perhaps. I don't know, not sure. I'm afraid that would entail writing when I can only ramble through my mind and pick whatever comes to it.