Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: EHLMYTN Wordo: FLUNG

  • Your Advice Doesn't Work For Me

    When I was younger, I was scolded probably hundreds of times for "not paying enough attention". No matter how hard I paid attention though, it didn't help, but people still kept insisting that I wasn't paying enough attention anyways. Eventually, I got to the bottom of my "attention" problem. Surprise surprise, it had nothing to do with a lack of attention. I found out that I'm autistic, and other factors were at play.

    One of which was a distracting environment which caused me to undergo sensory overload and miss what was said. The issue wasn't a lack of attention, but rather an inability to keep my attention narrowly focused on the current conversation instead of all the background noise that was overwhelming me. No one ever suggested that an overstimulating environment could be the problem though.

    Another was people communicating too quickly. I can't process new information as quickly as most people, so sometimes I need to ask people to repeat things more slowly, or write them down for me. No one ever suggested that to me either.

    And being told to pay more attention is but a single example. I've been assigned so many harmful, innacurate labels¹ by cocksure neurotypicals who thought they knew me. For example, they've told me that I'm dramatic when reacting to loud noises. But how would they know if I'm being dramatic? They can't climb inside my head and see what it's like for me. It's incredibly frustrating when someone who doesn't have autistic noise sensitivity and hasn't done any research on the topic won't listen to someone who has dealt with it their whole life.

• Politics and World Events

  • Iorist ethics

    I believe good intentions IOR good results is okay. I’m calling it iorist ethics. Ior for the logical gate of inclusive or, and, it’s an initialism for intentions or results.

    [...]

    But Sandra, haven’t you pledged allegiance to existentialist ethics before? Yup! Like deontologists, they are all about intentions; unlike deontologists (who are rules-based), the existentialists are all about using your own head & heart and case-by-casing it. I still love that approach over consequentialism. I’m just adding some celebration for the accidental heroes who mean ill but end up doing good by mistake.

• Finance

  • For a fistful of crowns

    When Swedish people talk about their currency SEK in English, informally and causally they are more likely to call it crowns as I grew up doing than “krona” which I see native anglophones do.

    In Swedish, sure, it’s called derivations of “krona” (most often the plural, "kronor", we'd only write "krona" when it's exactly one. 0.9 kronor, 1.1 kronor, 1 krona.); here, I’m musing about what it’s called in English.

    I only see krona in US/UK media and it weirds me out so much. Swedes would more formally write “SEK” once they’re too posh and too educated to translate it “crowns”. Writing “krona” in English is like a reverse shibboleth.

    Now this doesn’t translate to calling ören “ears” though, that’s just me being playful if you see me doing that. “Ören” has nothing etymologically to do with ears (“öron”), the true origin is unknown but thought to be from the latin for gold.

    Unlike krona which really is tied up to the idea of a king’s crown. It’s a polyseme most Swedes wouldn’t even think of as a polyseme, it just feels like one word. Some crowns you can pay with, other crowns you can wear.

• Technology and Free Software

  • HP's sole survivor among the touchscreen madness

    For a bit, let's diverge from the tiny VM topic (I promise I have something to return to that topic with in the next post) and talk about another piece of nice hardware. In my story about the TI-74S, I already told you about the calculator I grew with: Elektronika MK-52. Nowadays, I also have a full-kit MK-61, but it still is too large to carry around in a pocket and too battery-hungry. So, for all these years, I've been continuously looking for a pocketable enough RPN-only programmable calculator that would have a longer battery life and, most importantly, would be realistic to get where I live (which, unfortunately, is not the case for SwissMicros models). Last week, I finally found one on a local eBay-like platform for a more than humane price of around $16, in a mint condition, with a stock pouch and a printed instruction manual. And couldn't be happier about this find. Partially because it still is one of the original architectures that comes from the inventors of the RPN calculator concept themselves: Hewlett-Packard.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Three different modes of restricting discussions

      The RA for the neighbourhood has been run down, leaving us with the online and face-to-face commercial and governmental -mediated forums.

      Needless to say, the Facebook group is an absolute sewer, dominated by advertising and delusional witterings that just would never occur face-to-face.

      The three differences as I see it arise from the online discussion being unchaired, unmoderated and partly pseudonymous. So you have people talking past and over each other. But specifically, the absence of a chair means no enforcement of:

      * when people can talk (making sure people take turns)

      * what subjects people can talk about (staying on topic)

      * what they can say about those subjects (potential for censorship)