Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding — EFVLOTG Wordo: KNOCK

  • Dangers - Mysterious Friend

    "Kish said that we weren't in the same place. Not only that, he said that it was like you were in a different land, the way his life in a big city in India feels different than living in Houghton. That sounds weird, doesn't it?"

    Lantashi smiled. She shifted her position on the couch, looking a little uncomfortable, and finally stood up and walked around the living room a bit. She shifted moved the coffee table, lost in thought.

    Finally Lantashi turned back to her friend, a determined look on her face, a decision made.

    "I know some people," Lantashi said. "I have contacts in the security industry that are not, well, conventional."

  • The girl in my inbox

    The story within a story went something like this: many years ago, I was dating this girl. I'm using the word "dating" a little liberally, but you'll understand why. She was ostensibly my first girlfriend. We would have met at some point back in middle school, and the year before I moved on to high school we got together (to the extent to which middle school students can be said to "be together," but we'll get to that).

    I would have told one of her friends that I had a crush on her, who, of course, immediately turned around and told the girl herself. It was sort of a picturesque young-love story: we stayed together for a year, which is like a century when you're twelve; we had lockers right beside one another, we were in all the same classes and spent a lot of time with one another.

    There's just one weird detail about this story: our entire relationship existed over email.

    We'd see each other every morning, but we'd awkwardly avoid eye-contact, not talking to each other. The closest we ever came to talking to one another in person was when we were hanging out with the friends we had in common, when we'd kind of sort of talk to each other through others. After school, however, when I'd go home and my iPod connected to the WiFi, I'd hear a little ding noise that'd tell me I'd received an email. She was one of my "favourited" contacts on the iOS mail app, so she got a special notification sound I didn't hear for anyone else. We had an email thread thousands of emails long, chock full of the garbage your default mail app puts in your emails, templated signatures, colourful email thread quotations, and so on. We'd often have a few different conversations going on at the same time, each consigned to their own paragraph; we'd talk about history, life, culture, politics, all kinds of nerd stuff. All in all, we had a great relationship.

  • This is what my therapist calls depersonalization-derealization disorder

    The question motivating today's article is this: how often do you feel like you're attuned to the natural world?

    My campus is built on the side of a mountain. If you walk up passed the academic buildings, past the residence buildings, you'll eventually find yourself at the mouth of a path that leads into the backwoods. Following this path through the ponderosa pines will eventually take you to a fork in the road. If you take the much steeper, winding path on your right, you'll eventually find yourself in a clearing on the peak where workers seem to have dumped fill that has since overgrown with shrubs and small trees, possibly while constructing the old water station nearby. It's one of the most beautiful spots on campus; from it, you can look out over the whole valley, watching the sun set over the mountains on the other side

• Technology and Free Software

  • Shavian alphabet 8x8 pixel typeface

    Instead of working on stuff I probably should have today, I procrastinated by making an 8x8 pixel typeface for the Shavian alphabet I'm calling "Eight by Eight" (·𐑱𐑑 𐑚𐑲 𐑱𐑑)

    It's likely that I'll use this for an NES or Game Boy project eventually. I'll probably also modify it a bit and add more punctuation. Who knows, maybe I'll even make a font file at some point.

  • Programming

    • Devlog 9

      Slow progress, but progress nonetheless. Lots of frustrations, but at least I've ended up with something tangible.

      [...]

      I spent the day trying to get some frontend stuff set up. This meant adding CORS logic to the backend and attempting to set up a docker compose environment so I can easily spin the dev environment up and down. This was a hugely frustrating process. Node remains a disaster to work with, particularly if you're working on an ARM machine with AMD64 containers. I'm not knowledgable enough about Docker to get this working quickly, so I've quietly abandoned it for now in favor of just using Makefiles.

      Anyhow, all this has culminated in me actually getting started with frontend work (finally). I now have a somewhat functioning login page which at the very least sends data to and receives a payload from the API. I decided to write out all interactions as an API client class so I can easily access the necessary parts in my Svelte components, which has already made my life much easier.

      In addition to this, I added support on the backend for searching the TMDB database. I'd prefer to use Wikidata personally, but the REST API just isn't fully-featured enough for what I want. I need to be able to limit search results by entity type (e.g. "Movie") but it doesn't seem like this is supported yet. Using TMDB will introduce some burden for hosts as they'll need to create a key, and it does add a small amount of complexity on the API side too. But it gives me something to start with.