Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • About a Missing Symbol

    Sava has a post, dating to a day ago, in which said author totally avoids any word containing a particular glyph.^ (I won't say which it is, but its omission just might jump out at you.) I found his log at a location that hosts "transmissions," popular among this "smol" protocol that Sava and I inhabit. I want to follow along and try it too, so I'm doing so in this post right now.

    I go crazy for tricky linguistic trials such as this. I should point out, though, that Sava's thought is not original to his post. I know of a book that took on such a task "to a T," if you'll pardon my pun, and did so with aplomb: "A Void." Wright's "Gadsby" also pulls it off. I put a bit of my thoughts about "A Void" into a prior post on my own log many, many months ago,^^ but alas, it's still not in my library. I still want to study it raptly, but at what point will I do so? I don't know. "Gadsby" is also missing.

  • Goodness and good manners

    Too many people confuse goodness with good manners or, as we used to say in England, "good breeding".

    I am, for the most part, a well-mannered person. I say "please" and "thank you"; I don't elbow other people out of my way at the bar; I pay my taxes on time without much complaint; and so on.

    I like to associate with other well-mannered people. That's why I shop in a town twenty miles from my home, and not in the supermarket just down the road. In the shops I visit, everybody is polite. If somebody bumps into me, he apologises, even if it's my fault. The shops I patronize sell the same stuff, for the same price, as the ones down the road, but I don't normally have to walk around men fighting in the car park, or women screeching at each other about what your Baz said to our Gaz. It's an altogether nicer experience.

  • I'm back!

    Kamakura was just alright. I went on a holiday weekend and the main street (Komachi-dori) was just packed. Sort of wall-to-wall people. I was excited about riding the enoden train, though. Unfortunately the enoden was packed too! But it was still really interesting. The enoden is this older train line that runs right through alleys between houses. Sort of like a street car? I took the enoden and got off at the stop for Enoshima, which is an island off the coast. Enoshima was fantastic. There's a huge shrine there, and a botanical garden, and something called the "Sky Candle." I took a lot of pictures this day, which I will upload to this site as soon as I finish my own gemini server, which is something I've been playing around with in Haskell.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Pure ASCII Please

    Please keep the old style output.
    Please keep it black and white.
    
    
    ANSI colors are beautiful, I know.
    Bold texts are standout, I know.
    Clickable link are convenient, I know.
    Unicode are nice, I know.
    But, do you really need them?
    Do you really NEED them? I repeat.
    
    
    Don't try to be smart.
    Don't try to be helpfull.
    Don't try to guess user expectation.
    Don't try to control piped output. [1]
    Don't wrap it in less.
    Just do what user told you.