Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Replacing a Pocket Watch

    Last year I bought a mechanical pocket watch to use as a daily-driver timepiece. I had been using quartz wristwatches, which are naturally more reliable and consistent, but I wanted something that required no electricity at all and could last forever with proper maintenance.

    I already owned a mechanical watch made by Ingersoll. However, it was a cheap watch even in its time, and I bought it from an estate sale for $10 with a missing crystal and intermittent mechanism stops. Aside from replacing the crystal, I've had trouble finding any repair shop that considers it worth their time. Someday I'd like to take it apart and clean it myself, but I need tools to do that, and tools are expensive.

    Fortunately, I found a relatively cheap watch at a local seller and immediately purchased it. It carried the brand name "Shuhang," a name I'd never heard of before, and it was difficult to find information about the watch online. It had a half-hunter case, a open face, and a transparent back showing off the mechanism. I uploaded a picture of the watch as a photo of the week on my capsule.

  • BULK ANNOYANCE

    I noted that I'd bulk-bought toothpaste. My idea was that this would be the start of bulk-buying lots of non-perishable groceries to save money and generally have more control over the supply.

    I've failed miserably. Time and again I've looked through the web thinking I must be missing some bulk food/grocery supplier that isn't expecting you to sign up for regular deliveries to your business. My latest attempt was with flour. I buy 2Kg bags fortnightly for $1.32/Kg at the small supermarket in the nearest town. Surely they sell bigger bags at the 'real' supermarkets in bigger towns for a cheaper price per Kg? Nope! In the Australian supermarket duopoly: Coles sell their cheapest 2Kg bags for $1.30/Kg, and Woolworths only have 1Kg bags at the largest, but also $1.30 for the cheapest of those.

    Why does nobody sell 20Kg bags of flour and pass on the saving from not needing to package and handle ten or twenty little bags? Well there are some "whole foods" businesses where you even supply your own bag to avoid waste, so what do they charge? $3-7/Kg! You have to pay more than twice the price _not_ to buy your flour in a bag!

  • blog 1

    haii, long time no write.. been a minute, huh? sorry, been busy and tired from work and really just overwhelmed in general lately.. [...] killing me lowkey... being overwhelmed about my future and what's happening with work and other life shit, like grandma's alzheimers rapidly declining and getting to the point where she's trying to wander the streets... ugh.

  • blog 2

    hmm what else is like. happening or will happen..... oh, i figured out how to randomize 3ds pokemon games and play them on my console, its been so fun :3 replaying pokemon y like this has been really cool, i turned it into a nuzlocke bc i wanted to use obscure pokemon i never would have otherwise + i wanted a bit of a challenge.

  • blog 3

    hey again, wanted to blog again just cus. i got sick since the last blog, i havent gotten sick since like. pre-covid i wanna say, maybe even further back then that, so its been annoying to deal with lol. right now i just have congestion and a cough, it was a lot worse a few days ago though. glad the worst of it is over at least. honestly within the last like 15 minutes i realized im not who i thought i was lol, its one of those things where at first you're just like "oh my mood is different, thats normal" but then you realize your brain is different too.. not sure who i am, might figure that out after i'm done with this.

  • A Stream In The Forest

    ~bartender, a honey whiskey please, neat.

    I sit, on a rock, near a stream.

    This stream is a familiar stream, but one that I arrive at in a different way every time.

    The winding paths in the forest, shifting, changing, playing tricks.

    Right now the foliage is lush, green, overgrown, teeming with life.

    Other times it is wilting, in a last flame, of mellow brown and fiery orange.

  • roommate

    K wrote me a sorry for being a crazy roommate note and put a little puffy sticker of a lamb on it :~)

  • the drowning

    the one I wanted to drown in the lake 
    was myself
    it takes determination and rage
    this burning red anger
    to drown someone else
    and all I have is sadness
    

  • books

    I don't really remember why, but a few weeks ago, I just started reading some of the books on my shelf. They've been sitting there for ... a few decades. They aren't tech books but, well, novels.

    I didn't enjoy reading novels in the past. But somehow this has changed. Now it's pretty relaxing and lets me unwind.

  • Dream: Old Friends

    Wandering around downtown. Night or just dream-dark. Some women playing pickup baseball under undefined lights in an empty lot. Three with red hair, one very tall, one short, details of the other lost after I woke. I recognize one. It's [old friend]. The tall one, I think. I keep walking. In an out of buildings, a crowd, a 7-11. I'm carrying an instrument in a case and it's heavy. I stash it in an abandoned building. I come back to the pickup game, sneak glances through the chain link fence. They're all three of them lovely, and I feel like I'm young again. Wander away, back to the building with my instrument, sit down at a picnic table near the lot, and talk to someone off-dream. The case is open. My instrument is out, in pieces. The women finish the game, wander over, sit at the table. We try making sounds on the instrument, which isn't a real instrument, but looks like some sort of awkward French horn: five or ten interlocking pieces (a bell, a mouthpiece, bits of tubing), none of which seem to fit particularly well. I can't make a sound. I look over at the woman who I think is my old friend. She isn't looking at me. The small redhead sitting next to me is, though, intently. I understand via dream-logic that I've had it wrong, that the tall woman is not who I think she is, that the tall woman is actually no one at all.

• Technology and Free Software

  • A brief history

    Is it just me who scrolls back 30, 40, even 50 items in their shell history... rather than using search or just retyping the command?