Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Where is the Subtext?

    I'll have two fingers of Highland Park 12. Neat.

    I have this consistent issue with contemporary novels, movies and television shows, where I feel like the writers/directors don't trust (or respect) the audience enough to understand subtext. Last night I finished a horror series that was an excruciatingly slow burn, that took the time to explore the character's motivations, to unravel the compelling mystery, all to just burst at the seams near the final act, resulting in a series of drawn out monologues that over-explained any subtext that was painstakingly crafted at a snail's pace from the opening scene. It felt like the director had just told me a joke, and before I was able to laugh, quickly explained to me why the joke was funny.

    A lot has been made of the "show, don't tell" advice that is often conveyed to writers and filmmakers. Some think it's bad advice because it leads to the dreaded "purple prose" and obfuscation, and others think it's the best advice, because nobody wants to read prose that lists events like a grocery list. These days it seems we have met somewhere in the middle, where creatives are capable of showing their audience cleverly crafted subtext, only to dispel those ideas by explaining the joke.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: HIMNYSP Wordo: ERROR

  • iNaturalist Animals and Plants

  • 22 July 2025

    Sigh... again some mess to clear up... it turned out that my dad during his time with his heart condition clouding his mind about two years ago did some rather... unlucky financial decission that lead to two rather hefty bills not getting settled which manifested itself now in the garnishment of my parents bank account.

    Well, luckily my mom's name showed up nowhere on the papers so she was able to get her own bank account quickly so that she will be able to have her pension paid out. This will give us time to sort everything out and get the bank account of my dad turned into something that is called here in germany a "Pfaendungsschutzkonto", an account that is protected from garnishment (its a bit more complicated, but what is not in germany?) so that he will be able to at least pay for the retirement home he is now living in.

• Politics and World Events

  • I cannot ignore politics

• Technology and Free Software

  • Thinkpad again

    Let's start with the bad: Since saturday, my DevTerm is somewhat dead. It simply refuses to start regardless if its plugged into power, regardless if i enter the Risc-V core or the CM4, its just... dead. I will investigate this further but i needed a working system, so i grabbed my R60 (which i had last used for my FreeDOS experiments), switched out the harddisk (i didn't trust the SSD's i had lying around, so i put a 320 GB HDD with 7200 RPM in it - good old spinning rust!)

    I could have gone the sane route and put something normal and common like Linux Mint on it... but i am not someone who likes "common" systems following the current "industry standard". I decided to download Devuan 5.0 via my wifes computer, put in on a stick and started the installation. Setting it up is quiet easy if you have been around the Linux sphere for a while and there are no real traps... but you have to read what the menus say and nothing prevents you to shoot yourself in the foot. I liked it from the start. After about 20 minutes the system booted into a Xfce session and i could check if everything worked the way i wanted it to...

  • sxmo

    I don't recall the last time I talked about my Pinephone. But anyway, I finally got annoyed with PostmarketOS (Phosh) saying I should upgrade but not having a simple upgrade path that I decided to reimage it completely.

    I am very much a Debian fan, so I looked at Mobian. Biggest "hurdle" was it REQUIRED Tow-Boot. No shade at the dev(s) of that, but it's ridiculous that you need to download extra software just to flash a mobile OS. Shame on Mobian devs for not being able to "escape" Tow-Boot. (Maybe a bit hypocritical of me since I use Jumpdrive and rpi-imager to flash to the Pinephone).

    With that down, I decided to go back with Postmarket, but this time I was going to use a different DE. Plasma seemed OK. On my distros, I try not to have any DEs at all, although some tasks are much simpler with a DE. Anyway, I install it; relatively straightforward. Now is a good time to remind readers that the Pinephone has 2 whole GBs of RAM. With 99% of DEs/OSes developed in the past 10 years, it's going to suck. Surprise, surprise: KDE Touch sucks ass on it. Not totally KDE's fault, but I do find it a bit irritating that this is an "official" PMOS image created for it...and it runs like shit.