Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: BCSKLOH Wordo: SWORD

  • on free lunches

    "There's no such thing as a free lunch."

    Maybe you've heard that one too. I have. Maybe, like me, you heard it most often from people trying to dissuade you from believing that we, as a society, can have nice things. Maybe, like me, you heard it most from people who wanted to short-circuit your thought process about social services.

    I am taking a break from Kitchen Things to ask: Oh really?

    "Kitchen Things," this morning, consist of two main tasks: make broth and clean greens.

    "Make broth" involves me pulling a half-dozen roast chicken carcasses out of the freezer, along with a bag of vegetable scraps, and throwing it all in my pressure cooker. Set for two hours, walk away, voila: A couple gallons of chicken broth, ready to be eaten, cooked into other meals, or frozen. (I see no reason I couldn't pressure-can broth; I simply haven't tried it yet.)

  • Six months

    Six months may sound like a long time. After all, it represents the passage of half an entire year. Still, time (and math) can be weird: while 182 days (approximated half of 365.25 days) can mean the entirety of the existence from a 2025 newborn, to me, it's just 1.65% from my entire biological lingering. As time slips by me, this percentage decreases: after 1.65% of my existence passed by me, 182 days now represent 1.62%, and it'll keep shrinking. It'll never reach 0%: it'll be my biological existence that will reach the Zero Threshold first, when I am (hopefully and finally) harvested by the cosmic entropy.

    So, 182 days didn't just pass by me: 182 days *flew* over me. I was ran over by time itself, like a dry leaf lost amidst a highway, bearing the massive weight of endless, transient vehicles, incapable of running away from the highway as drivers are unaware of its existence.

  • How to wake up frustrated and angry

    You might occasionally wake up in the middle of the night feeling frustrated and angry.

    The “proximate cause” for these emotions could be anything. Did you read upsetting news before bed? Did you have a negative interaction during the day — which, even if it was resolved, still weighs on your mind? Honestly it doesn’t matter. You woke up In A Mood.

    The difficult thing about being awoken by a mood is that your brain is working against you right now. Memories are linked in your mind by the features they share. You might be frustrated and angry about something which you rationally understand to be a small matter, but now frustration and anger are “activated”, so in comes a flood of angry thoughts and memories. Something your boss did, two jobs ago. Fascism at home. Genocide abroad. A specific interaction with police five years ago. Something (so many things) that you read on the internet. Any of a million vignettes recalled from childhood.

  • help me breathe

    will you pick me up if I fall
    as I stand in the crossroads 
    and decide
    if I pick the wrong path
    or the right one
    and still crumble
    will you hold out your hand
    even if I don't ask
    and I won't 
    when all goes horribly wrong 
    if instead of finding peace
    I lose myself
    will you be there 
    will you pull me out of the darkness
    and help me breathe
    

• Politics and World Events

  • A solution to leasehold forfeiture

    Forfeiture allows the landlord to regain ownership of the property. Where the rent payments are month-to-month or year-to-year, with no up-front premium or deposit, this is less of a big deal. But in practice, the generality of flats in England are sold on the basis of an un-front premium of hundreds of thousands of pounds, followed by annual rent of *less* than a thousand pounds. To lose ownership of the property is therefore generally to lose hundreds of thousands of pounds.

    This is *not* like a mortgageee repossessing a property, as under those circumstances the debtor gets the balance of the value of the property when it is sold. Under forfeiture, the debtor gets nothing.

• Science

  • The hunt for an optimal sine

    First, I've got an announcement to make. I'm setting up a Nex station and its contents will not duplicate or mirror this Gopherhole in general, and updates are going to be irregular there (no scheduled posting like here). The station is self-hosted on my Orange Pi Zero (tunneled from this VPS) and you can access it via nex://hoi.st, nex://piratezeppel.in or nex://luxferre.top, whatever fits your preference. Foo the Gopher postings, I'm taking a break until the next month, I think. Don't worry, I'll still be here. Just a bit tired again.

    Second, I've got a promise to keep: tell you about calculating transcendental functions on an abacus or adding machines in general. To start with something, let's talk about sine. I've already mentioned one of the formulas in the previous post and it gets you rather good results. But what if we can do better?

• Technology and Free Software

  • Steam Next Fest (June 2025) — Day 7

    The last full day of Next Fest! I'll have to leave some of my original list off because I can't get to it all.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Bookmarklet for Mastodon

      I was a bit annoyed at using Mastodon on the web while logged out.

      Specifically, if you visit a user's web page, you naturally start at the top of the page. But, the most recent post will be below their profile information and below any pinned posts. So, you have to scroll before any new information shows.

      I tried looking for an HTML anchor that I could save to a bookmark. But, I did not find one.

      Instead, I asked a large language model to write some JavaScript that would scroll to the first post. And, I put that into a bookmarklet.