Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • More flowers

    Looking at the pictures that aren’t camellias and magnolias.

  • Love Story

    I just want it to be a nice love story!

    There is no such a thing than a nice love story.

    These two conflicting thoughs just arose in my mind.

    Do I truly believe that there is no such a thing as a nice love story?

  • Parent-child relationship

    Parent-child relationship, is a relationship in which one almost exclusively gives, the other almost exclusively takes. And what it takes, that's what it soaks up with, that's what it becomes, and that's what it will give later to it’s children and other people.

    If I give my child a sense of security, a sense of agency, show it how to cope, share everything I have, these are the patterns of behavior I will pass on.

    In the same way, if I give a sense of helplessness, blame, undermine faith, and share anger and frustration, I will form a crippled human being who is unlikely to avoid repeating the same mistakes.

    Countless times I have made a mistake, stumbled and fallen, but I get up, shake myself off and take my child by the hand. It is still not too late. There is always time for love. There is always time to learn love.

    I also wish you success.

  • Occidental language

    Now that I have submitted my newly created gemlog to the aggregators, I would like to present you Occidental which is a brilliant auxiliary language very easy to learn. One of the benefits of studying Occidental is that, similar to Latin, you will also learn a lot about your native language (provided that it is European). Please have a look at my capsule for more information:

  • wee blog project: let's evaluate "relevant" advertising

    I have to say: in the forty-plus years I too have been here, I'm not sure I can name a single ad I found "relevant" either.

    I've worked in marketing or marketing-adjacent for a while now, so I know what marketers think a "relevant" ad is. By their standards, I've been inundated with them since I was old enough to sit in front of a TV on my own.

    I want to spend the next week exploring the question: Are any of the ads I encounter "relevant" - not from a marketing standpoint, but from a personal one?

  • 📚 the stranger - albert camus (8/10): mar 31, 2025

    this is the second book i'm reading that i've associated with limbus company characters, who are based on their literary sources :0 the first one was hell screen!! i'll try to read these books before any of their in-game chapters release in the future... but no promises!!

    anyway!! enough about me nerding out!! i will outright say now that i'm no camus scholar. i don't know about his works apart from this, or his absurdist essays. i'm not even that good at philosophy, so when reading discussions about this book online, i found myself a bit lost at all these terms being thrown around... i knew them on a surface level, of course, but nothing deeper. as a side note, i am pretty interested in learning more about it... it's one of those things i have in the back of my mind BUT given how i'm interested in 900 other things, i can't guarantee i'll be able to dedicate more time into the idea.

  • X-Filesposting: Now all in one place

    This blog is going to get very cluttered very quickly if I keep writing my mini-reviews of old X-Files episodes on it. So here's a single page with all of them: [...]

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABSDNOC Wordo: LOGIN

• Politics and World Events

  • An offline sun time calculator

    On the final day of eligibility, here's a quick post introducing my project for OFFLFIRSOCH 2025. I kind of liked the extremely understated and utilitarian feel of naming my 2024 project `city`, and so I stuck to that theme and this year's entry is called `day`[1].

  • An offline sun time calculator

    `day` is a simple tool for calculating when the sun rises, reaches it's highest point in the sky (solar noon), and sets in your location and in your local time, as well as telling you how long the day is (defined here as the time between sunrise and sunset). It can, optionally, tell you a few extra things, like the times when the three different kinds of twilight (civil, nautical and astronomical) begin and end, and the duration of "usable light" in the day (you can still see well enough to get around and do things outside without artificial light for a little while before/after the sun itself has become (in)visible), how many degrees above the horizon the sun it at its highest point that day, as well as the solstice and equinox dates for the year. By default it shows you all this information for today, but you can use command line arguments like +5d or -1m to calculate it for, e.g., 5 days in the future or 1 month in the past.

• Science

  • A single "why?" for a thousand "how?": hand cipher threat models

    Before even considering using any cryptosystem, regardless of its level of security, one must answer a very important question: what and whom exactly are we protecting our data or communication against? Improper threat modeling may lead to underestimation of the adversaries' resources or overprotection of one area while neglecting some other no less critical ones. And when the main "why?" is answered, it might seem that, in the modern age, pen and paper ciphers just cannot be the answer to the "how?". Surprisingly, this is not always true, and I can show some scenarios such ciphers still are very useful in.

• Technology and Free Software

  • I'm losing my love of tech...

    Okay, so that date above is a slight lie. I'm starting to write this on the 30th, but meh... Thing is, after a lot of bullshit going on in the tech world, I'm starting to lose my love for it. That is, anything involving "modern" tech has lost my interest. I still love my older OSes and machines, but the non-stop fighting and smug asshatery from the FOSS world, the AI witch hunts, the ruins brought by AI scrapers... I'm sick of it.

    It's honestly no wonder so many devs have turned to farming and the like, given how much burnout and trauma they've likely had to face. Not just from the flamewars and asshole users, but from the management hell of various distros, other devs who give a "my way or no way" attitude, and just... The whole thing has kinda started going to shit. AI-loving "bounty seekers" haven't helped much in that area, nor have the attention seeking parts of the security industry.

  • Sunsetting openSNP - a personal retrospective

    As this blog post is being published, we are sending out emails to all _openSNP_ users with some news: _OpenSNP_[1] will be turned off – and with that also delete all the data stored on it – on April 30, 2025.

  • Programming

    • Cursed Indentation Styles

      What follows are a collection of cursed programming indentation code styles, because nothing is sacred.

      [...]

      Start at 1 space in the sequence. Double the depth with each level of indentation.

      This will naturally discourages nesting indentation too deeply.