Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🎥 blue lock the movie: episode nagi (2024) (8/10): mar. 20, 2025

    nagi seishiro's marriage and divorce and remarriage: the movie (8/10)

  • Rubber Band Odds

    The curious name "rubber band odds" is taken from the game Brogue, where certain dice rolls are adjusted on the fly to increase or lower the odds of some item being generated. Food and strength potions, in particular, as without food the odds of completing the run can be low, and without sufficient strength potions the player runs higher odds of getting behind on the "power curve" and totally unable to deal with deeper threats, even with skilled play. To avoid these issues, the odds are stretched as if with a rubber band to even out both good and bad runs of the random number generator (RNG). Not all items in Brogue get such treatment; other items and monsters and attack rolls are generated with all the good and bad that comes with taking whatever the RNG gives.

  • Steven universe: vCJD edition chapter 7/ Entry for side H of vCJD (Finale)

  • More crochet

    I finally finished the hat and mitts for my oldest niece. I had to pull them out and start over at least 3 or 4 times, sometimes because of mistakes I made and sometimes because of difficulties adjusting the size of the pattern to the yarn I was using. But eventually I got done and I was so pleased with how they turned out.

  • in which i tear out a fence and remember my fake best friend

    The back of my house faces my back yard. At the back end of the yard is a row of white cedars, which were originally planted as a privacy screen. They've outgrown their usefulness, though, and now only threaten my roof and my neighbor's pergola. Today I removed a bunch of branches and the fence; tomorrow a tree company comes to take down the trees themselves.

    Their timing is perfect and heavy. Four years ago Saturday, all my worst fears came true at once: my husband and I were in a motorcycle accident that killed him and left me at the mercy of medical teams for nearly a year. I spent a month in the hospital and then six more in my own spare bedroom, staring at those trees. Hating those trees. The trees embodied my helplessness, my grief, my rage.

    See, my husband was supposed to take down those trees the spring of 2021. But he died. And I was stuck having to deal with them, and the neighbors, on my own. Only I was even more stuck in that bed, unable to walk, needing other people to make my food and clean my house and get me in and out of the shower. There was nothing I could do except stare at those trees and hate them for still standing when my husband and I were not.

• Politics and World Events

  • Politicians intervening in leasehold disputes

    Since the last UK general election, Labour and Lib Dem MPs have taken to interceding with property managing agents for leasehold and freehold dwellings.

    [...]

    This activity has generally involved inviting managing agents such as FirstPort to Parliament for discussions, and attempting to obtain new undertakings. They also seem to be keen on announcing things that that already exist, such as a FirstPort team for talking to MPs, as though they haven't had one for the last twenty years.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Dependencies

    I use Yggdrasil on my personal devices. Yggdrasil is primarily an experiment in efficient decentralized routing, but its software implementation--an IPv6 tunnel on Linux and Windows and a VPN on Android--allow me to build a private local network over the Internet. I can connect to any of my devices from anywhere and transfer data between them easily.

    Compiling Yggdrasil on Linux is straightforward in terms of commands. One simply installs Go, downloads the source code, and runs the build script. But during the build process, Yggdrasil pulls down several dozen dependencies from both Go modules and GitHub directly. The actual code that comprises Yggdrasil's source is far from sufficient to get Yggdrasil installed and running on one's computer.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Happy Spring - Finally Rid of Facebook

      Happy March Equinox! Something I enjoy a lot about today is that the amount of sunlight everyone gets (accounting for average refraction from the atmosphere) on Earth is essentially 12 hours and 10 minutes, no matter what latitude you are on. Well, technically you can extend or shorten the day if you move East or West. Go at just the right speed Westward and you can have UNLIMITED SUNLIGHT!!!

      I was reminded of a game that released on the WiiU (and I assume other consoles and PC) called "Race the Sun", where you are a solar powered aircraft that needs to be in line of sight with the Sun to keep going. I'm pretty sure that game was a procedurally generated infinite racer game.

      Well, tomorrow is the first day of year 54 of my Limerick calendar, so I'm starting this new year off by FINALLY getting rid of my Facebook account.

    • new here

      I just found this place and it seems cool!

    • [Old] Stop Trying to Make Social Networks Succeed

      Lot is happening in the social network landscape with the demises of Twitter and Reddit, the apparition of Bluesky and Threads, the growing popularity of Mastodon. Many pundits are trying to guess which one will be successful and trying to explain why others will fail. Which completely misses the point.

      Particular social networks will never "succeed". Nobody even agree on the definition of "success".

      The problem is that we all see our little bubble and generalise what we observe as universal. We have a hard time understanding Mastodon ? Mastodon will never succeed, it will be for a niche. A few of our favourite web stars goes to Bluesky ? Bluesky is the future, everybody will be there.

  • Programming

    • Thus spake the master programmer: “time for you to leave.”

      Read enough of my posts over the past year or so, and it's clear that I am not happy working at The Enterprise. The process über alles, the overly managed and useless laptops, the bad communication (which I don't think I've mentioned, but man, I didn't expect the telephone game [1] to be an actual strategy of a company), the so called “agile development” that is anything but agile [2], the twice daily scrum meetings (because my manager wanted his own scrum meeting with just the team with no other departments involved—that's the other daily scrum meeting), and the testing.