Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Sundial Created - Oaths Update 3

    Back in October of last year for Winter Nights, I made a some oaths to be kept by this coming Winter Nights this next full moon.

  • call to frolic

  • Smart Phone Recidivisim

    I'm not sure yet. I will have to consider more. I've been using my Kyocera dumbphone for the past two weeks or so. And I am reconsidering it. It is instinctual. A part of me wants to go back, but there is clarity here that I have easily obtained that I am not sure that I can part with.

  • What even are music genres, anyway?

    Talking about music is hard when you have to describe what it sounds like using only a few words.

    The music-listening world calls these words “genres”, but I sometimes struggle to identify and distinguish the genres of a song. The broadest genre categories are generally really obvious: rock, electronic, folk, hip-hop, and so on. But what’s pop? Stuff that’s “popular”? Music of one genre can adopt elements of other genres or develop on a new path. If pop is what’s popular, then it has to change as mainstream tastes change. In that case, we can’t really define pop by a specific sound.

    These large genres function as obvious boundaries dividing the world of music, but they’re large enough that a very “wide” domain of sounds can still fit. For example, Weezer and Slipknot are both in the “rock” supergenre but it’s clear they’re still very different. So it’s reasonable to want to divide them further.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Akademy 2025

    Once again, all KDE[1] nerds had their yearly gathering around somewhere in the world. We call this gathering Akademy[2] and this year it was in Berlin.

  • Invisible Networks

    On SDF the wires show.

    For readers who haven’t used it: SDF - short for “Super Dimension Fortress” - is a long-running, community-run public access UNIX system. You get a shell on a shared machine, plus old-and-new internet services: email, IRC, gopher and web hosting, bboards, file space. Think community center meets timesharing: a place where strangers share resources and, somehow, it works.

    You log in and see it: the login banner that’s been edited by a hundred hands; the bboard threads with dates from last week and last decade; someone’s .plan quietly updating from a cron job. None of it asks for your attention, but it’s all working—small gears turning in the dark.

    People think “public unix” and picture a museum exhibit. But what keeps SDF alive isn’t nostalgia. It’s the hidden connections that form when strangers share a machine and decide not to step on each other’s toes. Etiquette becomes engineering. Patience becomes infrastructure.

  • I'm done being mad about computer science majors

    Over the last two years I've written many articles critical of computer science as an academic discipline, the tech industry and the culture that forms it, and I really like to think the focus of all these articles was to critique the material conditions and social forces making it problematic. But like, I'd be lying if I didn't say it came from a place of personal resentment. If I wasn't personally so wrapped up in this world then I wouldn't care, just like most people don't care.