Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • The other wind - calm

    I once wrote a post about Ursula K. Le Guin's book “The Other Wind,” the volume that concludes the Earthsea cycle. I never published it because I intended to return to the subject, explore it further, reflect on it, perhaps change my mind, perhaps gain new perspectives. I didn't do it immediately after reading it and too much time had passed for me to remember everything clearly. Now, leafing through the book, I decided that although I had focused on one aspect that had unfortunately overshadowed my reading experience, it was still worth leaving a trace, a short note on the subject.

    Another Wind disappointed me as the ending of a beloved series from my youth, and it disappointed me because of the feeling of powerlessness, stagnation, and inability to act that dominated the entire volume. Ged is a symbol of this powerlessness. Ged, for whom I fell in love with the series in my youth, who underwent all possible transformations and sufferings, who integrated his Jungian shadow, liberated his anima (or future wife depending on how we want to see the story), and paid for the continued existence of the world with everything he had and was, was imprisoned in Tehanu (book) in a prison of powerlessness and passivity, only so that we could observe him throughout Another Wind, every few pages, as he remains stuck in it. His and Tenar's old age fatigue, but above all his ossification in immobility, while Tenar participates in the story to the best of her ability, spread seemingly over the entire world presented, and tired me.

  • Headcanon: the Pokémon typechart is a model, not absolute truth

    This article spoils the climaxes of the base Pokémon Scarlet/Violet games, and the climax of the Indigo Disk DLC.

  • Already midway February

    Already midway February, time surely flies!

    Last year I declared February is my personal Pareto Month [1]. Which means that it is time to pick that up again.

    So many things to do, it wouldn't indeed hurt to do some retrospective on "focusing on the vital few and dropping a big chunk of the rest".

    I haven't been on IRC for ages, I think the last time was about November last year, something that brings the risk of loosing the connection with the outside world.

  • FEMALE INTERESTS

    I've succeeded fairly well with cutting down how much time I waste writing posts for here, though it still seems like I never get things done. More time to spend getting nowhere in other ways. Partly by idly thinking about women all the time. It's an endless dilemma, most people busy themselves with all sorts of silly behaviours I don't really want to try and understand, and the few general topics/activities I do enjoy aren't things women are interested in. But then do any couples I know (heavily skewed to people over fifty, mainly relatives) have real shared interests anyway? Real, I mean, as in not effectively faked in order to attract the other. Cases like my grandmother (who died last year), adopting an interest in military history from/for my grandfather, with her own twist of army nursing history. Or was it always a mutual interest, not adopted as part of her general role as a loyal wife? Others go to classes for topics of whatever whim they choose, meet a partner, then afterwards both people seem to drop the topic entirely. Are most couples actually compatible at all on an intellectual level? Is at least one of them just obliged to fake a shared interest at least up until the point they start having sex?

• Programming

  • Loadbars resurrected: From Perl to Go after 15 years

    Who remembers Loadbars? The small, humble server load monitoring tool I wrote back in November 2010 as a Perl+SDL project during my first job after graduating from university as a Linux Sysadmin. That was over 15 years ago. After being effectively dead for more than a decade, Loadbars is working again -- rewritten in Go from Perl with the help of AI (Claude Code), and it even works on macOS now (as a client).