Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • superwomen

  • My first actual post

    As it would seem, I am now roaming the tidleverse. I have never used a pubnix before, but I do like the idea.

    Also, creating blog posts here is much faster and much less hassle than my personal website (1), lol. I dunno if that will result in me making more blog posts though.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — BCDEHOW Wordo: SLAWS

  • stream zed

    funny how the british say zed instead of z. like its just z bro chill out. been watching taskmaster lately. and black mirror. and listening to random tracks from this weird album shared by my friend. i think the artist is headaches or something. got a lotta spoken word british. and he says i know that love is the only thought and pain is the only feeling.

  • At Loon Lake

    I had to step away from our makeshift camp for a while. He was playing guitar, and normally that would be great, but I know that often when I am on psychedelics, I desire nothing other than total silence. I need peace, and nature, and space to allow it to come to me unperturbed. The guitar, the voice, all of it grounds me back into my ego, pulls me back into my modern self, draws me away from the experience, and maybe this is just a weakness or a lack of experience in me, but I know that I need to take the time away and let this spirit come out of me. I almost feel like I am being dragged by my pupils to the two dead trees, the Sentries, north of camp.

  • People need joy, intimacy, and meaning

    People need joy, intimacy, and meaning as much as they need food and shelter, and they will often choose to go without material comforts to obtain them. It is only possible to forget this in the midst of the most vulgar sort of materialism.

  • quiet

    Not having an abundance of local libraries, the next best thing is our local bookshop. I walk down there with one child on their bike or else both of them in the stroller. They are currently two and four and its just over a kilometer each way. Wheels of some sort ensure a more enjoyable journey. Both do the walk singly with me, but the probability of disaster increases exponentially when number of children increases and mode of transport is not chosen carefully.

• Farm Life

  • Composting

    Ever since we jumped into gardening in 2024, I've wanted to start a compost pile, and last month we decided to finally do it. We staked four metal poles into the ground near the back of our yard, wrapped chicken wire around three sides, and began dumping grass clippings and there.

    I know relatively little able composting; my parents dumped their cut grass in a pile in the backyard when I was a kid, but they did nothing to maintain it, and I never paid attention to it. Their "compost" pile eventually turned into straw. But now, I hope to make a thriving compost pile full of nutrients and bacteria that can feed our future gardens.

  • Stasis

    Modern society is obsessed with the idea of preserving things. There is utility in trying to maintain things and maximize their usable lifetimes, but today's culture goes too far: it tries to keep things in precisely the same state they came in, with zero alterations or wear of any kind, for weeks or even decades.

    We add chemicals to our foods to make them shelf-stable. We archive videos and photos. We make countless backups of our data (or cloud providers do it for us). We endlessly replay old movies and music. We strive for as many nines of uptime as we can provide. We even capture ephemeral moments, like the magic of a marriage proposal or a birthday party, and store it on social media indefinitely.

  • [Old] The Blunting of Life

    A few days ago I saw an unsettling video about ultra-processed foods. A doctor in the UK who had a diet of about 20% ultra-processed foods switched to an 80% diet for one month and recorded the changes he experienced.

    One immediate change he noticed was that he had a desire to eat much more often. He practiced intuitive eating for the duration and would simply continue to eat when he felt he wanted food. At the end of the month, a study of his hormones confirmed that his body was making much more of the hormone ghrelin, which increases appetite, and less of the hormone peptide YY, which reduces appetite. Further, a scan of his brain after 30 days revealed that new neural paths were being created, specifically linking reward centers of his brain with simple, repetitive activities such as eating.

    His body quite literally told him to eat more and feel good for doing it. He gained 6.5 kg (14 lbs) of weight that month alone.

  • neither cop nor cow can stop me now

    The rotating cow mental image still makes me giggle. But I let this tweet hang around because, in a sense, it does pay rent: The more I think about it, the more useful it becomes.

    In the original draft of this post, this was where I started quoting Viktor Frankl and Bessel van der Kolk. Instead, try this: picture the space in your mind. Just sit with it for a second. Close your eyes, if that helps.

    Maybe there's a cow in there. Maybe it's rotating. Maybe there are many cows, or no cows; many rotations or no rotations. Maybe you are aggressively imagining an octopus because fuck your sterns and fuck your prows, I won't imagine your fuckin' cows.

    Whichever response you're having, it's valid. Because it's yours. That space in your mind is *yours.* And within that space, the police cannot stop you.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Programming

    • Using Nitride - Parsing Markdown

      Yesterday, I created an over-engineered program to copy a single file from one directory to another. Now, time to make it less overkill by transforming that Markdown file into simple HTML.

    • Implementing DOES> in Forth, the entire reason I started this mess

      The issue [1] I had with DOES> isn't that it's hard to use—it's just that I had no idea how one would go about implementing it, much like Javascript programmers use closures without having to think about how they're implemented (even if they're aware of closures in the first place). So, before going into how it works, a sample from _Starting Forth_ [2] is in order.

    • DOES> RECURSE doesn't DOES> RECURSE does't DOES> RECURSE …

      Recursion in Forth isn't as straitforward as you would think. The obvious:

      : FOO   ... FOO .. ;
      

      doesn't work. It will either error out as FOO isn't found, or it will call the previous definition of FOO if it exists. This is a quirk of Forth, and it one reason why globals aren't as much of an issue as they are in other languages—if you define the word REPEAT it won't break existing code that called REPEAT, they will just keep using the old version of REPEAT while new words will use the new version. In fact, the ANS Forth standard says as much [1]: “The current definition shall not be findable in the dictionary until [colon] is ended.” Thus the reason for the word RECURSE, an immedate word (which is run durring compilation, not compiled) to exist in Forth—to do recursion.