Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • [12] dream diary: mar 19, 2025

    two for one again babeyyyy. i'm starting to get vivid dreams, but no less on the randomness. it's starting to get entertaining sometimes, so i think this has been a good habit.

  • Steven universe: vCJD edition chapter 6/ Entry for side G of vCJD

  • 🔤SpellBinding: SEGKMOB Wordo: FIRMA

• Science

  • Measuring the cosmos, part II

    Last month, I mentioned part one of how we measured the night sky [1], and now, part two of “Terence Tao on how we measure the cosmos [2]”.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Who serves whom?

    “Pluralistic: AI can't do your job (18 Mar 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow [1]”

    This has always been my fear of the recent push of LLM (Large Language Models) backed AI—not that they would help me do my job better, but that I existed to help it do its job better (if I'm even there).

  • Crystal Project

    I’m not sure why this game jumped out at me so much. Yes, I have a huge soft spot for lo-fi games, but at first glance Crystal Project doesn’t have much in the way of either visual pizzazz or quaint retro charm. It just looks like a combination of Octopath Traveller-inspired character designs in a Minecraft-esque 3D voxel-y world. It’s very straightforward. However, I did do a tiny bit of reading about the game and it turned out that exploration plays a big role. Also, there is a Final Fantasy-styled system whereby characters can change classes and even have a sub class. This feature can apparently lead to the game opening the door to all sorts of exciting broken builds, which I generally tend to find super interesting. With that I was intriqued.

    When I started up, there was only a few classes to choose from so I made a fairly bog standard fantasy RPG party of a warrior for tanking, a monk for physical DPS, a cleric for healing, and a wizard for magic DPS. From there I was plunged into a world where I was basically just told to go on an adventure, explore, and be curious. There was an NPC waiting for me named Nan who was kind enough to show my party the ropes regarding some basics of the game, not that anyone who has played an RPG in their life will have trouble figuring this stuff out. What was weird was that there were a lot of NPCs named Nan in the starting zone. I just leaned a bit harder into my suspension of disbelief, politely went along with various Nans' kindly advice, and made an effort to move on to greener pastures as soon as possible. Eventually I got there but they were brown, and more of a valley, but at least there were a variety of NPCs to meet now, not just an army of Nans.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • A network of bloggers, a reel of YouTubers and other collective nouns

      While I just made up the “network of bloggers” and “reel of YouTubers,” other collective nouns for groups, like a gaggle of geese, a murder of crows, or a pod of whales, are not quite as old as they may seem, and were largely made up just a few hundred years ago, and there were a lot more than we use today, according to this video [1]. Neat.

    • go-gopherproxy - A Gopher-To-Web proxy in Go

      I'm developing a Gopher-To-Web proxy for my own needs. It's in early development, but I already have set it up on my server. So I'm eating my own dog food and my Gopher content is now also available on my www homepage[1].

    • Re: blogging is not always about the traffic

      fab's response here I think gets at the heart of what makes good blogs good: the person who's writing wants to write, rather than feeling obligated to. Since the rise of Instagram, so many blogs have either vanished (correlating with traffic moving away from the open web, and toward social media), or become product-shilling shells of themselves. A while ago I wrote about someone I peripherally knew decades ago, who sang and played keys in indie bands in my hometown. She now runs a blog that isn't corporate, but feels like it, if you know what I mean - a certain style of writing, certain keywords inserted. Perfectly competent, uninteresting writing.

    • small Web as self-expression

      I mean, yeah, there's CSS now. I added that yesterday with the sole purpose of making the HTML site look more like the Gemini site does in Lagrange. It's CSS designed to make the reader experience what it's like to read my site on a protocol that does not support CSS.

      (The only reason I don't strip out the CSS entirely is that I find HTML's default styling nigh unreadable. I can't expect anyone else to want to look at my site if I don't.)

      There are many forms of self-expression. Mine has always been the written word. While I love MelonLand and the panoply of "Web as digital art showcase" options available by browsing Neocities or Marginalia Search, the visual arts have never been my preferred mode of self-expression. Writing is.

      This is why I liked Gemini from the moment I encountered it. It's also why I'm warming to Gopher. Both emphasize the value and beauty of digital interconnectivity as a way to share writing, and to connect written works to one another, across vast distances of time and space.