Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Rest in peace, Toby

    He was my grampa’s dog, a chihuahua. He lived in a piece of land my grampa had, half of it covered, but with an opening to a yard. My grampa would visit him, bring him food, let him free to walk around the village, and be with him for a while. Then, almost ten years ago, my grampa died.

    That piece of land has a well, and it is perhaps a ten minute drive from where we live. We would every other day go, fill a jug of water, bring him (and apparently, a cat from the area that seemed to share quarters with him) food, and such.

    As life goes, my grampa’s brother inherited my great grampa’s house, across the street from Toby’s quarters, and his daughter’s family would come on weekends and whatnot, and let Toby roam free all over the village. It was thus how Toby fathered many pups in that area.

  • A queer atheist in church

    As a queer atheist I'm wary of organised religion, but in recent weeks I've been wondering, 'should I become a member of the Swedish Church?'

    The Swedish Church ('Svenska Kyrkan') is weird. For one, it seems tightly integrated with the government. They're also supporting queer rights, have rainbow tapestries in their churches and join pride parades. But what's been most peculiar to me is the democratic nature of their organisation, and for the past week or so they had their four-yearly elections. I won't pretend to understand exactly how their organisation functions, but each four years it's members get to vote who represents them in the organisations governing institutions.

  • Money for nothing 💶

    In F1, sonetimes you get paid a huge amount to do nothing. This seems particularly true if you're at Red Bull.

    They're effectively paying him his (astronomical) salary for the next 5 years to make him go away. Another option would have been to decide that the allegations against him were justified. Then he could have been dismissed immediately. But he would have contested that, so they've paid him a shit-ton of cash to go quietly. If someone offered me my next 5 years pay to go quietly, I'd take it, even though that would be a little bit less than €60m.

  • Esperanto Music History

    In last month’s post, I considered the question of what was the first song in Esperanto. Today I want to expand on early Esperanto musical culture, before recordings were common, and to look at printed Esperanto music, using the 1920s Internacia Kantaro as an example.

    In the modern world, music is undoubtably a larger part of our daily experience than at any previous time in history, but the way in which we experience it has completely changed in the last hundred years or so. These days, the word “music” generally implies recorded music - and perhaps more specifically recorded popular music - that we listen to somewhat passively and in many cases individually and privately. For many people, their active participation in making music is limited to singing along with their favourite recordings. “Music” is something that professionals create using mysterious processes in an anonymous and far-off studio, that we then listen to at our own convenience, often using it as background sound rather than actively listening with our full attention.

  • 🔤SpellBinding — ADEURSQ Wordo: FAWNS

• Technology and Free Software

  • Update: Help Me Find These Apps For Android?

    I've received a couple of tips, but nobody really endorsed any alternative. RCS appears to only work in the Google messaging app, and the text selection is more or less the same in most. Someone did point me to a texting app in F-Droid that had better text selection, iirc, but said that this messaging app had other issues instead that felt like deal breakers for me.