Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Friday

    I had a modicum of leftovers to accompany the downing of vitamins and a couple "baby aspirin", then got with a piece of dark chocolate, and some of yesterday's coffee (my wife often doesn't finish the pot, and I've actually come to prefer room temperature - and even cold - coffee).

  • Theory Matters, Especially in Divination

    Theory matters. Theory is as important as practice; practice is not more important than theory, theory is not more important than practice. Yes, without theory, you can get by on practice alone, but without theory, you cannot expand upon or understand practice; without theory, practice becomes dead and hollow; you're limited in what you can do to merely what's passed onto you (not necessarily trustworthy) or what you stumble across based on dumb luck. However, with theory, you can cultivate, develop, and grow practice into something beautiful.

  • Of squirrels and magpies

    My good neighbours, a pair of squirrels, frantically run up and down the large spruce which has been sentenced to death. I hope I'm somewhere else when it gets taken down. Had inter-species communication been easier I would have expressed my deep regrets directly, instead of spreading the word on the smolnet. It's not that I haven't tried. Their dry clucking sound seems to be a warning signal, or something they say when they are dismayed, like their way of cursing. It's not too hard to imitade by smacking your tongue and shaping an approximately squirrely vowel. I sometimes talk back to them like that. Maybe I once succeeded in piquing the curiosity of a squirrel who flitted across the apple tree; as I clucked it actually approached me a bit and looked at me with what may have been puzzlement.

  • Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren (1930)

    Materials stolen from the New World for the benefit of the Old. One could argue that the Noble Europeans put the gold and silver to better use than the Heathen Savages ever did, or one could view this as a more aggressive yeast making, at least for a moment, outsized use of the contents of a petri dish.

  • Be sentimental

    A key point in Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchimist” is that you can read meaning into the material world, as if it carried a conscious message for you — but you can lose that ability if you stop believing in and using it.

    When I deliver written reports, I tend to add quotes and allusions. I tend to describe banal events in sentimental terms. You see this in my writing. Someone once described it as “prone to enthusiasm”.

  • Episode 51

    I wanted to talk about Halberds & Helmets but I ended up talking about 2d6 systems and how to model armour and shields. Oh no!

    It seems to me that I keep coming back to this because I want something out of it and I'm not getting it and I'm also not getting any closer.

  • Episode 52

    In this episode I talk about the two-headed Ettin!

  • useless

    I am so useless right now!

    Dress rehearsal went really good, which is not helping with my stress.

    I am not agitated, or panicking, just useless. I'm glad I don't have smokes with me or I'd be going outside to smoke all day.

    One hour before I have to leave for theatre, but we could leave all the gear as is, last night, so there isn't a lot to setup. Make-up, costume, I have to review the sound effect for Gregor's voice...

  • The joy of making

    I have a fear of failure and of being unproductive that is undermining me. I don't like it, so I am digging at it. I am investigating this issue through different lenses. The one in focus today is: why do I tend to feel happy when I work? And to the contrary, what happens when I am miserable at work? My work is, unsurprisingly perhaps, engineering related. I've been doing this for close to ten years.

• Technology and Free Software

  • XYAB

    Too late to fix now but I wish the button labeling on the SNES was rotated 90˚ clockwise.

    On NES, A was for acrobatics and B for brawn or battling or bullet speed. Usually jumping with A.

    On SNES they kept the classic NES grip except the labeling was garbled so Y was “the B” and B was “the A”. And the A was now specials like the weird twisty jump in Mario. Instead of being the most basic button it was relegated to being a weirdo button.

  • Starting afresh

    It's nice to set up your digital workspace again sometimes, from scratch. One that isn't your main computer so as to not interfere with ongoing work. You are freed from the shackles of backward compatibility and limitations of your previous setups. Pick a new shell, use another file manager, another editor.

    Pubnixes[^pubnix] provide you a shell account and web, sometimes gemini and gopher hosting. When you log in with SSH, you are presented with a new home. A shell that may be different to your primary workstation, none of your familiar aliases and shell scripts, only some CLI programs you know and love are installed and there are some tools you've never heard of.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Community-to-community network

      I've been doing a lot of thinking about online communities and social networks in response to both recent events (election) and a reading of a couple of blog posts/talks about how the many-to-many social networks seem to amplify the worst in human tendencies [...]

      [...]

      I ascribe heavily to this belief. I think a big part of what has allowed the current rightward trend of politics is the amplified voice that anger-stoking reactionaries get on platforms like twitter, under its current leadership. So, after the election, the thought I had was: how do we change these information systems to prevent the spread of bad information, and disincentivize troll-y behavior? As Kissane notes in her talk, these platforms are great for sharing what's happening in the world, and connecting people who otherwise wouldn't be connected. Those connections can lead to great things.

      A root cause of the problem with many-to-many social networks is, in my opinion, that humans aren't very good at large communities. Some people can manage remote empathy with mindfulness, but for many, a death on the other side of the world is simply a statistic. This isn't an evil - no person can hold all the world's suffering without exploding. Humans have a hard time summoning empathy for people who are remote, and as a result, we're much better suited to small communities of people immediately around us [citation needed]. We can better summon our care when the number of people we summon it for is limited.