Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • long time no see

    Hey friends. I made an account here in March of 2022. I've been sort of on a nostalgia kick lately. I'm moving from my hometown pretty soon so I guess that's where it's coming from. I've been trying hard to distance myself from the whole social media thing lately, is anyone else here doing that? It's a tougher thing than many are willing to admit. I've thought about getting rid of my cellphone all together. It's nice to think of the internet as a place to visit, rather than an all consuming whatever-it-is-now. It seems like so many sites have come and gone in my admittedly very short time on this site of the net. Do you all ever think about that kind of thing?

  • Beginning Meditation

    February has been a stressful month. I find that when I'm stressed, I go back to engaging in activities that are bad for my health, like being sedentary and eating sweet foods. As a result, my weight went up slightly last week.

    I'm trying to replace unhealthy habits with healthy ones, one at a time. And part of that process involves swapping out behaviors I do when I'm stressed. Instead of pulling up some dopamine-triggering video or game, I'm trying to swap in meditation.

    Meditation doesn't come naturally to me. I've tried meditating a few times before, but I was far too restless to focus for more than a minute or so. My mind would immediately bounce around from one thought to another: something uncomfortable about my sitting position, a distracting hum in the room, a memory evoked by the sound of a background track, an itch on my leg, a draft blowing my hair and tickling my forehead. In seconds I would give up and return to my normal activities.

  • dansk

    Here I am again. A small detour from my, now regular, walk across this new campus. Down to this familiar bar. ~bartender, some of that shitty vending machine coffee I had back in my hometown, please. I need a familiar taste.

    Been in Denmark for quite a while now. Climate is cold. Days are rather short. No stray cats or dogs which means no animal photography. Still, beautiful scenery and functioning public transport. As someone that likes to drive and travel alone quite a lot, this is a good enough substitute.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Poison as Praxis

    There's been a recent uptick in the availability of a particular kind of software tool: the AI poison text generator. It's encouraging to see - although obviously it would be way better if they weren't needed in the first place.

    The idea is to empower website owners to defend their work against the contemporary scourge of AI scraper bots, parasites that aggressively appropriate our collective human effort so that a small handful of trillion dollar fascist-adjacent tech companies can each build their own energy-guzzling conflict-mineral colossus and churn out an endless stream of grinning corporate-speak reply emails that no one wants to read.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Re: Blogging is not always about traffic

      I can only affirm that Jedda is absolutely correct. I always suggest people who hesitate to blog to just start blogging and not worry too much about the audience. This is especially true on the Small/Indieweb, Gemini capsules, and gopher holes. They crave new and unique content. In fact, I would even recommend running a Gemini Capsule or Gopher hole as well. Additionally, don't overthink the topic of your blog or gemlog. Write about whatever you want without caring too much about the judgment of your readers. Most of the time, the hardest critic is oneself. Share your (niche) hobbies, journeys, experiences, or life in general. And you'll see how rewarding it can be to receive an email from someone who is genuinely interested in your post.

      Simply enjoy what you are doing. Blog for pleasure! It's an outlet for personal creativity. If you were to create a painting without liking the process and solely for profit, I believe in my opinion that you're wasting your time, even if you manage to earn some money. However, if you do it for fun then the number of viewers of your artwork should not matter.

    • So You Want to Blog for Traffic?

      I want to be clear that this isn’t intended as a dig at the author. Different bloggers obviously have different reasons they write. Some do it to build a following, others do it because they enjoy designing their own space on the web, and still others write for no reason other than to organize their thoughts. And I’m sure there’s a bunch of other people I’ve left out.

      The problem is that the original article is based on what I believe to be a misconception about modern blogging.

      Assuming you want more traffic, optimizing your site for ingestion by machines is entirely the wrong way to go about it in the current decade. Google will never be a meaningful source of visitors to your personal website, and in fact they have their own reasons why they would want to make it difficult for people to find. I wish this wasn’t the case but that’s sadly not how the web works anymore.

  • Programming

    • Naming types is hard

      I came across this interesting discussion on the opinion that 'Naming sum types is often hard' [1] and I guess I have never even thought about this problem before.