Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Past puzzle: 2025-07-08 | Crostic Nine

  • Past puzzle: 2025-07-06 | Crostic Nines

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CGHIUNM Wordo: HAILS

  • Extreme Testing

    So does anyone remember XP - or extreme programming? The rough idea being that you write some code and then push it live, learn some stuff, and then throw away what you wrote and then write it again given you have learned more things

  • We need to change the rules

    There’s this card game “Pairs” that I love playing and we’ve been playing a lot lately. You flip up one card at a time and if you get a pair you lose that many points and first to lose twenty one points loses the game. (Or sixteen points at four players, thirteen points at five players and so on.) You only have two choices in the game: fold, which definitively loses you a small amount of points and helps everyone else by clearing their boards, or to flip up a new card in the hope of not blowing up yet and hope someone else folds before you do.

  • Against “approaches” in TRPG

    Atomic Robo has a great skill list too, yes. Short, in my sweetspot of two through seven skills. I like them a lot better than the approaches. Apocalypse World also has a good list. Hot sharp hard weird. And I liked Air Fire Earth Water too. Calling it modes or abilities or capabilities or possibilites or trainings or nature or elements is semiotics since they all work just like skills. All of these that I like have skills based on what you do, not how you approach it.

    Street Fighter II on the Genesis (Mega Drive) three button controller was approach based. You could fight hard or fast or medium. What you actually did (punches vs kicks) you had to toggle with the start button. To me that is completely backwards and a constant uphill struggle. Does it have advantages? Yes. Is it possible or even somewhat easy to get around the drawbacks? Also yes. But are the advantages worth the drawbacks? For me no.

    When using approaches you’re saying everyone is equally good at everything. C-3PO can make the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs. You’re saying that Fate thanks to the aspects and invocations and boosts already provide enough granularity that you don’t need skills on top of it. Everyone is doing everything at +0. Skill-less Fate. A completely workable idea if you want to simplify. You removed something that had some value but you gained simplicity. Fair enough.

  • i wanna roc

    hi there, back again with another blog post. i didn't die, i didn't quit, i'm just not done with anything.

    i haven't even changed the major vision, if anything i'm more set than i was a couple years ago. i've had little time to work on it, life has been busy and i've been researching because i was disatisfied with the results of some of my earlier proof-of-concepts.

    unfortunately, 3d printing as a business has been a failure for the company and so we've backed away from offering this service-- there just aren't that many local people interested in printing 3d models that won't buy their own 3d printer or go to the library, bug a friend, etc. in a similar vein, i've had issues finding a market for software contracting in the local area. i'm not prepared to push contracting to be very big or taking projects outside the local area, but i'm not quite ready to stop offering contract work in general. we'll basically stop investing in 3d printing as a service, there will be some hardware work that could use 3d printed cases/parts-- the printers may still be useful for the company, but not as a service publicized and offered. for contracting, we'll offer light aws/backend/sre/software work when people are looking for it but we won't be pushing this as a major service for now. back to research, maybe publishing some software/games/services, maybe working on some embedded projects to demo but not quite ready for anything outside proof-of-concept or demo/internal use.

  • ice cream

    There's a theme in life, when it comes to making things, especially food, but most things. That if you do it yourself, you find that it's not only doable, the results also surpass what is available for purchase. I assume this wasn't always the case, but consumer enshitification; engineering products to maximize profits e.g. shelf life over taste and quality, mean its not hard to out do anything you can buy.

    I tend to lean towards bitter things, dark chocolate (>= 85%), coffee with a small amount of oat milk, etc. And as I don't buy any manufactured food, I don't passively consume the amounts of sugar many do. If I am going to consume sugar I want it to really count, I want it in cake or ice cream or something else that is clearly desert.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Gemini Scripting Revisited

      First off, this works with any Gemini client. It's an experiment but it's also a way for someone with a capsule on a static server to add dynamic content - even games - to their pages.

    • go docs

      Following yesterdays conversation about the demise of geminispace, one of the mentioned issues was the disappearance of the go documentation service. So I rectified that by spinning up gemini://godocs.8by3.net/