Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • My Imperfect Journal

    If you're like me, you occasionally get the urge to trash your old projects and start over from scratch. The thinking goes "With what I know now, I could do better the next time around." Sometimes that's a good idea. Other times you're just suffering from an unhealthy unattainable desire for perfection like me.

    I've spent more hours writing and rewriting text messages than I'd ever like to admit, in an effort to make them "perfect". I know it makes no sense to waste my time that way, but I still do it anyway as if I'm being graded.

    The same drive that causes me to obsess over my texts has caused me to consider remaking this journal from scratch as well. There are things I'd do differently if I started over. But I'm not going to start over, because a few thoughts have convinced me that it's better to just make peace with its imperfections.

    One of those thoughts is that, in 2031, future me may look back on recent entries the same way current me sees the entries I wrote back in 2021—I'll want to delete them and start over from scratch. I'd be restarting every few years, and it would still never be good enough. I'd be very put off by any other online content creator doing that, so it makes no sense to do it myself.

  • K&R

    You approach the system core that radiates a most omnious power...

• Politics and World Events

  • Evil strikes through pride

    It is impossible to completely seal off one's spirit from evil, impossible to fence it off, stem it, deny it access. Human reality always involves maintaining balance and vigilance, rather than the certainty of perfect defense, fortifications that nothing can penetrate. In fact, it is exactly the opposite: The more we believe in the tightness of our defense, the more we trust our carefully constructed spiritual fortress, our acquired knowledge, our trained body and spirit, the easier, lower, and more painful our fall will be when evil penetrates our walls and comes out of us through our actions and words. Every lack of humility will become a stumbling block on our path.

• Science

  • Progress Goes Boing!

    Left to their own devices corporations will innovate and progress well beyond what otherwise would be possible under onerous regulations. A fine example of this is the Boeing CST-100 Starliner, and the "Type A mishap" recently declared by NASA, who continues in the somewhat optimistic vein that they would "ensure leadership accountability so situations like this never reoccur", until the next time it inevitably does. NASA of course is no stranger to such challenging issues, and, spoiler alert, O-rings may have once again been involved.

    [...]

    Eh, well, NASA's technical rigor was somewhat absent or shot down by NASA management during the Challenger thing, so if NASA has a technical rigor now it's because the body count was yea high and for many humans it usually requires that the body count be yea high before a move is made to start thinking about fixes. Those wonderful intersections designed to move cars where the traffic engineers won't look at it until there are enough dead pedestrians to warrant a revisit are another example, and doubtless one can think of more examples without too much trouble?