Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: ABCEGKM Wordo: DEPTH

  • First Fermentation of 2025

    I started some sauerkraut about 2 days ago. By this point last year, I had made 3 batches of sauerkraut, but I also got bit by mosquitos in March last year... soooooo... It was also 70F+ the first week of January last year, so things were quite weird last year.

    The sauerkraut is fermenting! Maybe not as quickly as I'd like, as it still does get decently cold at night, so the average temperature during the day is probably about 40-45F instead of 55F+, but the fermentation is certainly going.

    I'm excited for sauerkraut after dealing with nearly a dozen polar vortexes this year, each bringing the temperature down to around -30F to -40F and bringing a lot of wind...

  • The 2010s Are Calling

    I've been getting back to some old hobbies and making the conscious effort to avoid subreddits. Reddit is honestly not bad the nicher you get - the front page stuff is all low-effort replies and riffing, but the specialist stuff can actually be pretty good.

    But I deleted my account when they partnered with Google to allow API access for AI training on posts, and have tried not to look back. Lately, I've been getting back into some old musical interests on guitar. But instead of going to particular subreddits, I've been trying instead to use forums.

    They're not wholly dead, somehow - if you were a guitar player on the internet in the 2000s, you were probably aware of Ultimate Guitar (for tabs) and Harmony Central (for forums). Harmony Central kept getting bought and sold and eventually was I think sold to Musician's Friend and given some sort of terrible UI makeover. That combined with new, aggressive moderation (the site was not, uhhhh, particularly couth) drove a lot of people away. For me personally, instead of finding another place to post, I just focused on Facebook. Which, yeah, in retrospect, maybe not the greatest decision. Looking at it dispassionately, I think Facebook's best strength is as a community resource for the place you currently live in. I was using it as a way to keep up with old friends in the city I'd moved away from. But it felt increasingly strange, like I was this ghost haunting their posts with little reactions. Like. Love. Care. And so on.

  • el gran tarot esoterico pt1?

    i've been looking into el gran tarot esoterico. not sure how much of what i've found is eudes picard and how much is maritxu guler's synthesizing of the 19th century occultists overall.

• Politics and World Events

  • 16 April 2025

    Man, the current news cycle is making my brain hurt... every other day you either hear about some astoundingly stupid idea Trump comes up with, new ways of our politicians to invade our privacy our the simple fact that the climate is breaking down around us and simply nobody seems to care. At least nobody that could drive CHANGES is caring. Yesterday evening was one of those moments:

    While with junior at my parents, the TV running in the background i could follow the weather forecast: While the weatherman told the audience that it is now FINALLY raining after a much, much too long dry period the main host of the show told the audience simply "Well... whatever, i was really enjoying the warm weather and hope the rain won't stay too long". I had to really constrain myself to refrain from the urge of slamming my head into the next wall.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Tools will not liberate us

    In our work as practitioners of libre and experimental methods for design, a question arises often. It pertains to our loyalty towards the values we ascribe to libre, open, shared or community software. This doesn't mean we question our loyalty to specific pieces of software or specific tools, but rather the steadfastness and consistency with which we practice design in a "libre" approach. The community formed around *PPP* seems to find in libre software the embodiment of the means of some form of liberation. I specifically say libre, as opposed to "open source" because indeed in the energy we put into using those types of tools, we ascribe solidarity, openness, equality in some shape or form, and resistance towards oppressive and predatory practices that surround our everyday use of digital tools. If I say "we", it's because I too do this, and firmly believe in it.

    The oft-quoted Audrey Lorde sentence is "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." We've heard it being applied to the digital realm as well, and I have to agree to some extent, while cautioning that the context in which it was written is very different from that of libre software. Besides, maybe a fuller look at the quote should include the sentence following it. "They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change."

  • Four questions: tech

    Ben Colliver invited me to answer these questions. Every month I miss the five questions Christina used to ask us gopher scribblers. It's nice to have a shared prompt!

    1. When did you first get interested in technology?

    I learned to type, made zines on copy machines and an offset press, wrote a website for my zine in the '90s on my dad's desktop, but I wasn't interested in the tech, just using it.

    2011-ish my win xp netbook broke. The new one came with win 7 starter edition, which was just an ad for an os. I wiped it, installed my first linux (crunchbang, openbox on debian), and learned how to use it.

    I had fun with basic phreaking learned from text files when I was a girl. Stole long distance with a homemade lineman's handset to chatter with my penpal and map what houses wires served, called ranges of 800 numbers to explore. Penpal and I sent mail art that tested the postal service's limits.

    2. What's your favorite technology?

    Hard to say. Sundial? Offset press? Dip pen with steno nib? Wristwatch? Boots? Playing cards? Bicycle? Train? Sewing needle? Photo- copier? Slide rule? Books? Inter-library loan? The postal service?

  • Take 4

    Make your writing accessible: concise, bland and simple. Write enough -don't avoid explaining. The aim is to convey a message and there is a difference between avoiding clutter and lack of clarity. The former helps, the latter doesnt.

    There must be flexibility when writing the first draft. Even if it looks and sounds childish and makes you hate yourself for having written it. This is essential to enable a flow state and make sure that every idea is laid on paper. Some of the apparently bad ideas might turn out great. Also, everything written can be revised and most of it must be revised.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Hello geminauts!

      I am very excited to write this first post on my fresh, new gemlog. A bit late to the party, I know. I've been meaning to set up a capsule for a while now but the list of things I've been meaning to do was (and still is) long. But apparently, the time was ripe, and I installed vger and stunnel on my server infrastructure and voila, here I am!

      It sure feels refreshing to be here. A refuge from the surveillance and abuse on the world-wide web. Exploring this space will be fun, and I hope to find my place within it.

      [...]

      This capsule is hosted on a FreeBSD server. Incoming connections are handled within a jail, where an stunnel daemon terminates the SSL connection and forwards it to vger, a simplistic Gemini server that supports virtual hosting. Together with the SNI (Server Name Indication) capability of stunnel, this allows me to host multiple capsules on different domain names. For now, there is only this one, but I have plans to convert many of my web sites to capsules as well.