Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • No stories

    A lot of my articles start with the phrase "I remember," or something like it. That's because a lot of my articles are my recounting of things that literally happened to me, at some point in time, and what I've learned about myself and the world in the time since they happened.

    Here's one: I remember a time all the way back in middle school, when I was maybe 12 or so, when my French teacher asked us to write a story (in French) about our family history. So, I went home, booted up my laptop, and I wrote the story of my great-great-great-great grandfather who fled the Iberian peninsula at the onset of the Napoleonic war for the so-called New World, where he married an Acadian woman, starting my branch of the family tree.

  • 🔤SpellBinding: CIJRUTS Wordo: BREAD

  • Take My Hand: Chapter 1

    The market was lagging towards the end of the afternoon and Douxie was starting to think of packing up when he heard a commotion. As he and the other pedlars on the edge of the market lifted their heads to look, he felt more than saw a small form duck under his hand-cart. Dark hair, a green tunic, and a fearful look on a small face was all he registered before the commotion came into sight.

  • Take My Hand: Chapter 14

    Douxie had tied his lute to his back and was well into another juggling routine, this time using both of Walt's new knives and his own throwing knife for the third piece, when some shouting overtook his patter. His audience were all turning away, so he caught Walt's knives in one hand and his own in the other. A quick glance at the crowd showed that Walt wasn't back yet, from wherever he'd wandered off to an hour before. Having a kid collecting just as he ended a song or story had brought in more than usual, but he'd got bored, took his cut, and wandered off.

    The shouting moved closer, and it looked like someone he couldn't see was being chased, and by quite a mob, too.

    Then, briefly, he saw who was being chased. Walt.

    He sighed, braced himself, and hoped Walt knew better than to lead the mob to him. They had talked about scattering, after all.

• Politics and World Events

  • It is starting

    Yesterday we, the entire state of Minnesota, went on strike to protest the unlawful actions of the Trump administration by sending ICE to kidnap, assault and murder people in the streets of the Twin Cities. The national news networks chose to minimize their reporting, either out of fear or greed.

    This morning a man was executed ìn the streets by ICE. The administration was quick to make a statement defaming the murder victim. But thankfully the community has been vigilent, taking to the streets these last few months following and recording ICE's actions. From multiple angles of video, and witness reporting it is undeniable that this man was executed being shot multiple times by multiple agents even after his body stopped moving.

    The Federal government is trying to silence anyone talking about this, pulling down videos and comments that go against their narative. If you live in the United States you need to start listening. If people do not step up now this will spread to the rest of the country.

    "The Federal government is trying to silence anyone talking about this, pulling down videos and comments that go against their narative. If you live in the United States you need to start listening. If people do not step up now this will spread to the rest of the country."

• Technology and Free Software

  • NPC AI

    The friendly NPC AI sucks in a lot of games. On the roguelike front in Brogue your NPC will quite happily get into fights they cannot win and wake up all sorts of problematic monsters. They will also navigate onto spider webs, and have trouble navigating out of poison gas clouds. Healers will step next to an Ogre to get past it instead of retreating to support you. They will get stuck on non-threatening machine room poles and fail to keep up with you. They will not hang around in healing clouds even if they really need healing. There are limited options for controlling your allies, beyond actions such as "jump down to the next level" though your allies may then plummet to their death, or to move elsewhere to hopefully drag them after you. In CDDA meanwhile (at least as of version 0.F, the current versions may be less bad?) NPC may circle around packs of monsters to attack something random and thus activate a hordes of zombies on you, fail to path out of poison gas clouds, etc. CDDA does give more options for controlling how NPC behave, such as "keep close to me" and "hold the line" and "only attack what you can reach without moving" and "do not use grenades". They will throw their only combat knife, then resort to beating on zombies with their bare hands. Can you, like, not do that? Sorry boss, knife is throwable so away it goes.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • The subtle ways in which "Expert in a Dying Field" by The Beths has changed me as a person

      Recently a friend introduced me to The Beths, an alternative rock band from New Zealand. I picked "Expert in a Dying Field" out of their discography at random and gave it a listen while I was picking up groceries. When I was in high school and surrounded by people who were very serious about listening to music, it was almost like I had music homework every week if I wanted to be able to keep up with the stuff they were talking about. I got very serious about "listening to music" as a critical and reflective process for the first time, and in the years since, I feel like I've atrophied a bit on that front.

      As a very serious person who likes to take things very seriously, I wanted to spend my time drowning out the experience of being in a grocery store to seriously listen to this band a friend recommended to me. And having given the album a serious listen… I think they're pretty cool. And it's got me thinking about the way I talk about the things I like.

      Once upon a time, someone told me that I should put a "links" page on my website, where I essentially just link to a whole bunch of other stuff I like on the internet.

  • Programming

    • Global Commands

      Yet more vi learnin', or maybe also ed as that's where the g or global command came from. That which became the g in grep because historical reasons has some surprises, notably that the command or commands that follow may do things unrelated to the lines selected. That is, the ex command

      ex command
      global /foo/ write >> bar
      

      will append slightly more than the lines matching foo into the file bar, where slightly depends on how large the file is, multiplied by how many times foo matches in the file. The "write" command knows nothing of whatever line limits "global" has been given, and writes the entire file by default.