Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AYEHKPC Wordo: WINDY

  • Progress of Winter Nights 2024 Oaths - Update 1

    In Mid-October, I wrote a post mentioning oaths I'm making for this Lunar year. As it's about a day or 2 until the Full Moon before Yule, I figured I'd write an update on where I am on these oaths.

  • Couch to 5 biminutes

    I used to meditate regularly. I went twice a week to a Buddhist centre. The weekday session was about an hour, mixing sitting and walking meditation. The weekend session was similar with added chanting. At home I had a simple set up to do ten-minute sitting meditations. I aimed for a daily practice but didn't always manage it.

    For various reasons I dropped away from all this. (One reason, not profound but quite impactful, was that the meditation cushion I bought, made of natural fabrics and stuffed with organic cereal husks, turned out to be infested with what I think were drugstore beetles. They spread all over my apartment and I had a desperate battle for control with them one week when I was at home sick with the flu.)

  • Skeleton Crew and the Grubby Mitts of Industry

    I watched the first episode of Skeleton Crew, the new Star Wars show, yesterday and I really enjoyed it. It is fun and sweet. The designs of familiar-but-different space suburbia are great. I loved the effects that looked like puppetry (maybe they are CG, I don't know). I felt positive about it. 

    And yet.

    I've felt differently about Star Wars since the last movie. The Rise of Skywalker didn't annoy or anger me. For me, it was like watching a committee pitching ideas for Star Wars. Here are some things we could put in this movie when we make it.

• Politics and World Events

  • They Wrote a Song about Virtue Signaling in the Sixties

    Yes, decades before anyone was talking about virtue signaling, performative social justice, keyboard warriors, and slacktivists, there was this lovely piece: Easy to Be Hard. It originally came from the musical Hair. It has been covered multiple times. I like the cover by Three Dog Night, so that's what I'm linking to:

• Technology and Free Software

  • Gopher, HTML and the 90s Web Aesthetic

    HTML is a non-canonical gopher item type (h), but is supported by most clients, even the original gopher client. I think HTML pages are a neat way to capture the 90s web aesthetic without leaving the gopher protocol. An example I found of just this is at the Endangered Software Society gopher site [0], which has a fravia.org archive from 1999 [1], viewable entirely over gopher.

    For those who don't know, fravia.org was a popular reverse engineering site in the 90s, created by Francesco Vianello (aka +Fravia) [2]. I can remember going through the site myself via dialup, taking in everything I could so I could crack shareware programs.

    While the site's pages are certainly viewable in console browsers, to really do them justice requires an older GUI browser. On my Debian Lenny desktop in Iceweasel 3.0.6, you get the full 90s web experience natively via gopher [3].

  • captions

    I may have mentioned this before, but when I'm ripping movies, I often end up modifying the subtitles, if only converting them from pictures like PGS (Blu-rays) or Vobsubs (DVDs) to SRT (plain timed text). There's a newer variant which I believe is SSA or ASS (kind of like DivX and Xvid) that is a bit heavier but provides more options, but editing those is a chore if you really want to customize. And for future reference, though subtitles and captions are used interchangeably, I refer to picture-based "text" as subtitles and plain time text as captions. I mean that's basically how they're defined anyway.

    The most I'll do is reposition them: SRTs have prefixes to gravitate the text to a certain sector, any combo of top, middle, and bottom and left, center, and right. And that's only if I'm feeling really OCD about things. I have a helper script to move text automatically if I thing it will obscure other subtitles which weren't properly separated. Captions default to bottom center, meaning if the movie has burned in subtitles and captions that simultaneously appear, such as "[SPEAKING GERMAN]", the default position would most likely obscure the burnt-in English (in my case) translation.

  • Giant Days by John Allison

    I held off from finishing this comic for a long time.

    I started reading it years ago and I adore it. It tells the story of three friends, Susan, Daisy, and Esther, meeting in university in Sheffield. It begins with their first year and over the course of 50-something issues takes the reader through three years of university with them.

  • The Page Flow Ad

    I saw an ad in the subway from a bookshop chain (and yeah they do sell my books 🤷🏻‍♀️) that I thought was a li’l bit clever but I wanna add some nuance.

    The add was all the text from (supposedly) a real 13 yo’s TikTok flow, typeset as a book page with ligatures and ragged right margin. It was really effective both at making us cranky old boomers get appalled at all the adds and messed up messages kids are exposed to, and at making a real book seem way more appealing by comparison. Not literally (since I had Shirley Jackson’s Dark Tales in my purse which is one of the best books of all time, and yet I read the entire page in the ad instead) but in the long run it made it seem so much nicer to dream away with a real coherent story or non-fiction book. I wouldn’t get through a whole book of the kind of junk that was in this ad.

  • Building The Stilts

    The game is excellent. I love it. Until now I've been running it from the PDF but the print edition should be available early next year. It contains a great one-page procedure for creating a map for a campaign, which I followed to create the Realm of Zaraz.

    Zaraz has four large settlements, two of which have featured prominently during the campaign to date. Over the Christmas holidays I plan to flesh out the remaining two settlements. (This is a generative, improv-driven game, so if I did nothing beyond the simple prompts I gathered when creating the realm, it would be enough to play with. But I know more about our campaign and what to offer up to the players now, so I'm keen to do some more prep.)

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Archiving homepages

      I keep thinking about self-hosting and people dying, myself included. So my first wish for the end of the year is a solar-powered machine that takes all my websites and turns them into clay tablets to bury and survive the coming darkness.

      Other than that, however, I think the solution would have to involve a kind decentralized archive sharing where I offer an archive (zip, tarball) for download and whoever has it can share it peer-to-peer with others. Is this how BitTorrent works? I think I don't understand what words like "tracker" mean. Also, where does the original torrent come from and where does it go? I know there are sites where I can search for and download torrent files. But what happens if Alice has a file she wants to share with others including Bob, does she create a torrent and offers it on her website, Bob finds it, downloads it, runs a torrent client and gets a copy. If Alice and her website disappear, how does Charlie get a copy now? Bob isn't hosting Alice's torrent file on his website. So are they all dependent on a torrent hosting site?

    • 2024-12-13

      I had a revelation recently (regrettably, I should've thought of this sooner): this absolutely no reason for my Gemini capsule and website to be generated from the same repo. all my SSG woes pretty much stems from this limitation. Hugo is *that* bad when I remove Gemini (or email or anything else) from the equation. using a tool to do what it does best should have been obvious. oh well. I'll look into pure Gemini capsule SSG options. currently looking at a custom ad-hoc solution that just executes templates with a script.

  • Programming

    • Advent of Code 2024, Day 13

      At first I thought I would need some kind of two-dimensional dynamic-programming array, but it turns out you just need to solve two equations with two unknowns and then check if the solutions are integers. This runs in constant time for each prize.

      In part 1, I solved the equations halfway and let the loop do the rest. In part 2, I solved the second equation as well. I lost time there because I made a mistake on paper and because I needed to find the right tolerance for the integer checks.