Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Some Thoughts

    While I am still posting updates to my capsule on a regular basis, I haven't been writing in my log very much. I simply haven't been motivated; real life tasks and events have pulled my attention away. Beyond that, however, I sometimes worry about the state of the modern world, and I don't want to whinge about it on my capsule without putting any thought into my feelings.

    Late last year, I read a book titled "Good Energy" by siblings Casey and Calley Means. Casey Means is a former ENT surgeon with Stanford training, and Calley Means is a former political consultant for the food and pharmaceutical industries. Both left their respective fields and founded companies to promote health, aiming to escape what they believe is a treadmill of processed food that makes Americans sick and big medicine that profits off the sickness. Mainstream media accused the Means of politicizing health after they appeared on podcasts with Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the book itself is entirely apolitical, focusing on the science behind how industrialized food harms our health and providing concrete steps to help undo the damage.

  • dream diary: mar 18, 2025

    if it isn't obvious at this point, all of my dreams are a jumbled mess... today, i feel like, i'm starting to remember a good chunk of it. maybe not in a chronological order though :( !! my brain just groggily types up what it can gather, and then hours later i sit down to document it here.

    i don't really think much people read this. even if they do, these more personal entries have... personal things! personal things that, as a result of differing contexts, people may not fully understand. which i think is nice, actually! sometimes i feel like i babble about embarrassing things—but it's like my little secret here!

  • Weather

    Does it want to be hot or cold? Why is it never comfortable? This is March so why is it so cold and hot and cold in 3 days?

    I've never been good at adapting the change of seasons but this year in particular feels worse than ever.

  • library escape room: success for all involved

    Today, we devoted the last two hours to a "reward day" for students who had zero tardies or unexcused absences the previous marking period (and study hall for those who did not). I created an escape room in the library. The kids cracked it with only eight minutes to spare. I call this a success.

    I'll be reworking all the clues for next marking period's escape room, so I don't feel too bad about revealing the whole thing here. Besides, if one of my students manages to find this post, they're a better sleuth than I expected and I commend them. Stop by the library and show this post to me, and I'll give you some candy.

    Actually locking the kids in the library was a fire code violation, so I settled for locking a file cabinet drawer full of treats. The key went on a combination lock, which was attached to the leg of one of the library tables. Three different clue "strings" each led to one of the three numbers in the combination.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: YDINOUB Wordo: TURDS

  • The Two Wolves

    Sometimes it’s “I ought to” running the internal monologue, the “school speakers in my brain” so to speak, and verbalizes things that I ought to do and gets frustrated and surprised that they do not get done.

    Other times it’s “I don’t wanna” that’s set out to rest and calm the heck down but can’t because there’s a gnawing guilt.

    So it’s not that one is always “the conscious” and the other is always “the subconscious”. That can change. (I know calling it "sub"-conscious has fallen out of vogue in psychology but I wanna bring it back, I do think it's a great name for it, bubbling juuuust under the surface, you can barely feel it out.) But they’re both in control; they equally affect what I actually do.

• Politics and World Events

  • Resist MAGA

    I'm pretty sure everyone who pays attention to U.S. politics already knows all of what I'm about to say, but I'll give a brief recap anyway to lend support to my conclusions at the end.

    [...]

    This authoritarian fascist takeover is supported by a dangerous cult of personality called MAGA, a group which the ignoramus and his allies created and radicalized by spreading massive amounts of right-wing disinformation through media.

    MAGA supporters occupy an alternate reality, and they don't care that they don't live in reality. They purport to have principles, but they instantly betray their own principles as soon as the ignoramus changes their marching orders, and then they engage in mental gymnastics and excuse-making to explain it away. They stand for nothing other than their side winning at any cost.

    So that's the situation. Luckily, there's still a lot we can do about it.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I

      It’s been a slag against blogs and social media that the word “I” has become more commonly used (which is true, it has).

      That’s taken as a more selfish generation.

      Maybe. Another explanation might be that it’s a more personal, a more humble way of speaking that contextualizes what we’re saying to our own experiences. “I” have not only tragically taken the place of “let’s build a better world together”. It has also joyfully taken the place of speaking ex cathredra and being overly general and dogmatic and patronizing.

  • Programming

    • Atom feed and a thematic Magic 8-ball

      I wrote a script that creates an Atom feed xml based on the entries of the logbook. The code is in the same repo of the logbook script.