Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • relative realness

    so uh, if we're in a simulation, and our parent reality might also be in a simulation, and turtles all the way up... and we could simulate realities inside our own, there's two directions simulated realities go, outward and inward.

    I'm gonna choose to define realness based on how many layers of simulation we traverse, with our current reality being our "base" reality which is the most "real". anything simulated in here, or anything simulating us, is "less real". anthropocentric definition ftw?

  • The Other Other Side of Midnight

    Maybe I can tempt fate and finally talk about the last few months.

    I haven’t been able to even think about it, really, without bringing on the anxiety attacks.

    I never get anxiety attacks, despite my lifestyle… and it’s been sixteen years since my first panic attack (the big one).

  • thoughts on ink: a long-winded ramble about my first year of learning to draw

    about a year ago now i decided to start learning how to draw, from scratch, with almost no prior experience or knowledge.

    well, i had a few scattered & unguided art classes in high school during which i did photography because my attempts at painting were so terrible. for the record i was also terrible at photography and still am.

    i always felt pulled back to doodling little pictures in the margins of notebooks and textbooks. crappy little stick figures, awkwardly proportioned cats, pages and pages of overlapping concentric circles. i wanted to draw but i believed it was something reserved for others. i got laughed at and told i couldn't do it, that if i wasn't any good now i would never be, and my self esteem was so bad that i accepted what people said.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: AGHINRY Wordo: CABLE

  • Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

    Sally Rooney has had massive success with all of her books, but this is the first one I've read. My only prior experience was watching (some of) Normal People, which I found hard to watch because of people being horrible to each other in it, especially at the younger ages. (I recognised it as very good though.)

    It took me awhile to get into Intermezzo. At about a third through, I was considering giving up because it was solid sadness and loneliness. When I was two thirds in it was hard to put down. We were dog sitting last week and there was a little dog actually climbing onto me, trying to stop me from reading, but I kept at it.

    The main characters are two brothers - Peter and Ivan Koubek, both living in Dublin (Incidentally, it was nice to see Dublin depicted in the book). Peter is a barrister and Ivan has just completed his studies and is a serious chess player. The story begins at their father's funeral. For various reasons the brothers aren't close, and so the early chapters are them grieving in more or less isolation.

  • Weird but Apropos Dream about Textbooks

    So I've always had these really oddball dreams about school or being back in school. In yesterday's edition, it was the very first of the school year, so I was receiving and unboxing my braille textbooks. I was eight years old or so. Some of the boxes contained complete and correct textbooks. At least one box was completely empty. Another contained a single volume, in Spanish. Realize that braille textbooks usually require many volumes. Like, a 20-plus volume mathematics textbook is by no means unheard of. The 1959 World Book Encyclopedia is some 144 volumes of braille. Big, thick, hard-backed volumes which could serve as effective bludgeons. So I've got this box with one volume of a multi-volume text, and I'm like, "At least it's in a language I can speak and understand." Though how eight-year-old me knew Spanish is beyond me; I did read and speak it in high school, though no earlier. It's a dream, for fuck's sake; I should stop trying to examine it so rationally.

• Technology and Free Software

  • More questions on gemtext parsing

    I'm rewriting my gemtext parser and I've landed on questions that I decided to ignore the first time around, but now I really want to solve: [...]

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Prime Directive: Minimalism and Efficiency with Gemini Protocol

      Just a couple of weeks ago, I restarted my site (the one you are reading right now) with the goal of maintaining a minimalist approach—focusing on content rather than flashy styles or colorful themes. For the first time, I also decided to implement dual hosting, making the site available via HTTPS and the Gemini protocol.

      An idea that had been floating around in my mind for a few days was that, since the HTTPS version of the site was already quite basic in terms of styles and layout, why not serve the same content I use for Gemini? Yesterday morning, this idea came to life thanks to a small proxy tool called Kineto [1]. This tool acts as a proxy, allowing a single Gemini capsule to be served to regular web browsers.

    • SpellBinding is moving to tilde.team

      I was just notified by @satch that tilde.cafe may be shutting down. I had no idea, so had to scramble to move it to tilde.team.

    • Ensemble is moving to tilde.team

      Apparently, tilde.cafe is shutting down, and I had to move the game to a new location.

    • 2024-08-28 - Specification changes (0.24.1)

      Today I have published an updated version of both Gemini specification documents. The current versions are designated 0.24.1. A full description of all changes follows. A total of six open issues on the GitLab repositories can be closed as a result of these changes, reducing the number of open issues from 31 to 25.

      I consider all of these changes very minor, either addressing rare edge cases or fixing ambiguities and inconsistencies. It is possible that some software or Gemtext document files may need to be updated to achieve/maintain strict compliance, but practically speaking failure to do so is extremely unlikely to cause actual real world problems. I do not think there is any risk of these changes "breaking" existing software in the same way that the 0.24.0 changes accidentally did.