Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • LA County Wildfire Update

    My thoughts and prayers go out to all those that are affected by the fires in Southern California.

    My house is right outside the evacuation warning zone for one of the several fires in LA County. I am not in immediate danger but I have been on standby for the past 4 days. It is not a good feeling and I think I am starting to burnout. Heightened danger and alert fatigue is setting in.

    I have turned off the TV and have restricted my exposure to information to the county emergency web page. [1] For my own sanity, I only check this in the morning and evening. My mobile has been blowing up with alerts since this all started. I still read them, but don't take them too seriously since they seem to be mostly false positives for my situation. The alerts tell me to evacuate now even though I am not in the mandatory evacuation zone. So I get alerts and double-check the map on the web page. There's too much FUD out there.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BEUKLTI Wordo: IXNAY

  • 📚 The Anthropocene Reviewed

    This would have been a great opportunity to use "The Anthropocene Reviewed, reviewed" if not for the sake of my conforming to consistent title format for book review posts. Alas, the pun is already used in one of the episodes of the author's podcast of the same name.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Militia and the Mole

    Just a quick entry to note a fascinating article I came across at ProPublica, about a leftist survival trainer who infiltrated the AP3 militia and provided a massive cache of documents on the groups, its members, and its supporters and collaborators.

  • Ideology Is Utopia

    Something that irks me with the recent political turmoil in the United States, is how aggressively leftist movements and spaces foresake those who refuse to partake in ideological infighting. A prime example for me is the recent allegations placed against Luigi Mangione, who is by no means a pure little leftist. The moment his politics came out I witnessed multiple left leaning political people and spaces foresake him and move on, refusing to engage someone they view as "problematic", or to use a more inflammatory language "tainted".

    Because that's what it is, isn't it? Someone does something, displays any signs of ideological failures, and they are removed from the discussion. They challenge the utopia that people believe in, so they have to be removed.

• Technology and Free Software

  • ARRL Code Practice Files (publ. 2025-01-10)

    I have continued to use WebSDR the last few weeks, but I discovered that, in practice, mostly all I do is stay tuned into W1AW on 14.0475 MHz any copy the practice code that they are transmitting. With a little research, I found out that these code files are all uploaded to this page, as simple links to MP3 files — no JavaScript required.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • On Social Media

      I realize I'm likely preaching to the choir here, but I want to get some thoughts down.

      First of all, I'd like to differentiate "timeline social media" from "suggestive social media". Timeline social media just puts all the posts from everyone you follow in temporal order and doesn't filter above and beyond what you have explicitly put in place. Suggestive social media decides what you should see next in your feed.

      Mastodon and IRC are timeline. Facebook and TikTok are suggestive.

      Timeline feeds tend to be federated, as well. There's not much money to be made with them, and often servers are put together by volunteers and run at a loss. People pay for them with their day jobs.