Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Home (sickness)

    As a child in elementary school, I -- much like most kids -- went on holidays with my parents. My classmates of course did the same, and afterwards, when school started back up again, we would share stories. One concept which often came up in these stories was homesickness.

    As a child, I didn't understand homesickness. After all, what is so great about being home? And why would you miss it when there is so much to see.

    Later in life, we would go on class trips over weekends. There would always be kids who missed home (particularly their parents) so much that they cried for hours. Once, again, I didn't really understand their sadness. I got along fine with my parents, but the trip was fun and -- all things considered -- rather short.

• Politics and World Events

  • A Neoplatonist interpretation of post-christian vitalism

    A phenomenon I have seen going around the internet is so-called post-Christian vitalism [1]. PCR is based on Nietzschian moral philosophy, specifically the `master-mentality' towards ethics. I believe this view is incredibly misguided, and will argue so from a Neoplatonist [2] perspective.

    Let us begin by exploring Nietzsche's master-morality and the specific interpretations of the post-christian vitalists. Nietzsche distinguishes between two types of morality, master-morality and slave-morality. Master morality -- he asserts -- is the classical form of morality, where virtuous and noble were interchangeable terms. Masters are courageous and follow their own agenda, like Odysseus. Slave-morality instead celebrates weakness by promoting `virtues' such as humility and charity. Slave morality originated from... well slaves, and non-nobles generally to give themselves some access to the morality which the nobility had. Indeed, slave-moralists assert that their form of morality is the only one, and that the masters such as Odysseus are not virtuous at all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Internet/Gemini

    • More Smolweb: Nightfall Express

      Lots of space related names, lots of partial specs and even more overlap. Oddly enough the most simple protocol listed actually caught my eye as it fills the one feature missing in: large file transfer with a single request.

      While there are things like anonymous ftp, a protocol like nex is nice because the server can be created in a few lines of shell code and `socat`, and the client is `telnet` or `nc` which every system has. On my lunch break I implemented a server.

    • Alhena 5.1.7 and Zoe in Scriptonite

      I released a new version of the Alhena gemini client. This one has a lot of changes to the built-in html to gemtext converter including table support and HTTP redirects. There are a few other useful enhancements to the bookmarking system.