Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Becoming Nothing

    In my 38th year I was shattered to find out that the people whose identities I had assumed up to that point were shaped primarily by my own trauma responses, in addition to marketing and active measures campaigns, the latter two being indistinguishable from each other.

  • HOW FAR OUT?

    While repetitively building things to sell lately I was supposed to be thinking about what business project I want to tackle next - more electronics gizmos, more planning towards my big website idea, or stuff making money and get around to some of the side projects which I've never started or are progressing at glacial pace on occasional weekends?

    The last one is by far the most attractive, but even last month I couldn't actually do it. Business-wise I need to be working on finding new products to replace things that have all mysteriously stopped selling on Ebay. On the other hand if everything is selling well I haven't got a chance to do anything but focus on ordering, building, packaging, and communicating. I'm built into the same corner as everone else: not finding time for my life's ambitions until retirement. By which time, if I even make it, I'll quite likely be too old to enjoy it anyway, and quite possibly to broken to even attempt to.

  • the other side of midnight

  • Tritone

    What's the deal with the tritone? Mi against fa. Very much frowned upon in counterpoint practice. Dissonant, not harmonious. However if you look at compositions you'll find it used, often for dramatic or emotional effect—"War Requiem" by Benjamin Britten comes to mind—and if everything is harmonious, the work risks being a bore, just like a TV series that omits all cliffhangers and other such devices. Certainly some music can get by without drama; the music should after all suit the circumstance, so one might use some highly harmonious (that is, in the not dissonance sense) for a bit of fun in, say, heavy metal where dissonance might well be expected. However! Britten is modern decadence and all that, so how about something older?

    "De profundis" by Johann Joseph Fux dates to the Baroque, a random pick from a church music section, and in church music one might expect the devil interval least used, and because Fux is the author of a notable work on counterpoint in the Palestrina style (a work used by Haydn, maybe less diligently Beethoven, etc). Also because the Orlando di Lasso work I already had only had a MusicXML file, and LilyPond crashed and did not manage to convert said MusicXML to MIDI. Oh, well. Anyways, it was faster to look at the score than to devise some tritone interval detector software thing (vertical is easy; complications arise if you want to look for a tritone arising from "close enough" but not simultaneous voices, parallel major thirds, or, tritones outlined by a phrase or worse different voices, none of which programming would much exercise a brain for music).

• Technology and Free Software

  • Unicode Pixel Art Web Tool

    I just threw this JavaScript client-side tool together to generate "pixel" art from the Unicode block elements.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Is it just me or does Mastodon... suck?

      I recently joined Mastodon, via ~insom's lovely little instance. I haven't been using it very extensively, I mostly just wanted to follow some of the cool people I met at town con, but I'm having a really hard time with its interaction model.

      [...]

      I'm also not a huge fan of time-based feeds in general; they hide posts from infrequent posters under a deluge from people who post often, but that's not a mastodon-specific issue.

    • Nice personal website

      This is kind of a scrapbooky thing that collects all kinds of stuff about having a nice personal website if Gemini is too restrictive for what you want to do.

  • Programming

    • I am Socrates

      And I'm like, Yeah, you have 30 years of programming experience backing that up. What about programmers today who don't have that experience? They just accept what's given to them uncritically? [Yup, A reactionary cynical new-Luddite. —Editor] [Sigh. —Sean] At least the code in question were unit tests and it wasn't he who had to write unit tests for AI (Artificial Intelligence) written code (which was my fear just prior to leaving The Enterprise).