Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • skinny dipping

  • Pinewood Derby

    I was in Boy Scouts as a kid. I still recall my first Pinewood Derby. My older brother was the one that did all the projects, built all the models, took apart all the old toasters; in short, he was the handy one. In my mind, building a car out of a block of wood wasn't something I was capable of. So when it came time, I went to him and asked him to help me. And by help, I meant do it for me.

    He refused. He handed me his coping saw and told me to go do it myself. I begged a little, but he was firm, and so I went off and got started. My design was poor, and my execution was poor, and at the end I had a thin wedge with what I thought looked like a spoiler.

  • Life

    Life's generally been good. I have been in my job for a bit over a month and no friction has occured at all, the courses in my masters are almost over so I will only have my thesis (and a couple other minor stuff) to take care of and everything feels like a breeze, currently. I am even thinking of continuing to a PhD right after my masters, and I think I have found a professor I would love to supervise me over.

  • Thoughts on Labubus

    I was quite vulnerable to consumerist hype back when I spent my days on Reddit and Facebook. Once I quit social media in 2020, my interest waned significantly. However, I still like to buy things as a treat every now and then, such as UMPCs or arcade equipment. I don't consider myself a collector per se, but like everyone else, the thought of having a new toy to play with is always fun.

    Today I am almost exclusively a denizen of the small Web, with the single exception being YouTube. As a result, I don't hear much about modern trends. Then a few weeks ago my sister told me about Labubus, and more recently a video popped up in my YouTube recommendations, explaining what Labubus are and showing some of the crazy events that have been happening around them.

  • More or fewer, many or less

    At Chez Boca, Bunny is the prescriptivist in the household, and I the descriptivist. So while “Grammar rules you can stop sticking to [1]” meshed with my biases, Bunny remained unconvinced with a small exception towards not ending a sentence with a preposition.

    But the majority of our discussion centered around the use of “fewer” and “less.” The rule Bunny was taught was to use “fewer” for a countable number of items and “less” for uncountable or fungible items. For example, we have fewer cookies around here because we had less flour to make them (I originally ended this sentence with “to work with” but I wanted to avoid ending with a preposition). I always say “less” but I suspect this has less to do with my descriptivism and more to do with programming, where x < 3 is translated to “x is **less** than three.” It just seems weird to say “x is **fewer** than three,” despite most numbers on a computer system being countable, if potentially large (the only exceptions would be ±inifinty and NaN (Not A Number)).

• Politics and World Events

  • Trump Has Only Got Balls for Brains

    (Sung to the tune of "Hitler has Only Got One Ball")

    Trump has...only got balls for brains,

    JD...has something quite the same,

    Elon...has horribly gone wrong,

    And poor RFK ain't ok at all.

  • Greedy so-and-so 🍽️

    I've noticed recently that I eat faster than other people. This isn't an issue for me directly, but I suspect that other people may be judging me. It's not polite if you shovel the food in as fast as possible. Of course, politeness is a social convention, and social conventions are largely nonsense. They're a way for some people to feel themselves superior, and that's laughable. But at the same time, I don't want people thinking badly of me because I'm getting them wrong.

    I lost a pretty huge filling from a tooth, so one half of my mouth is currently not much use for eating, and I'm currently forced to go slower. It's surprisingly hard to go slow, even when I have to.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thoughts on Video Game Diegesis | Part 1

    REALISM is a perceived closeness to our reality. When we want to hydrate we are required to physically manipulate a drinking recepticle and place it in the path of flowing water until said recepticle becomes sufficiently full. While this sort of action is elementary (and mostly subconscious) when using our real bodies, it quickly becomes tiresome in a gaming format, not to mention nightmarish in implementation.

    IMMERSION is a perceived closeness to any reality. Most succintly, it's consistency. You can be immersed in a fantasy novel when its world obeys persistent rules even though said rules are often unrealistic.

  • Steam Next Fest (June 2025) — Day 3

    Soft wishlist. I definitely enjoyed this demo, but I currently don't have an appetite for this type of game.

  • Programming

    • Using Nitride - Front Matter

      Being able to associated metadata for a page is a very useful thing. It can be used to group pages into categories, control how it is styled, or to simply provide internal notes. To do that, we use something called a YAML front matter to describe the details.