Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • atrial fibrillation

    Am I getting too happy so the universe
    Must even out the good 
    By making the wiring in your heart fuck everything 
    Up
    Late 
    At
    Night
    Can't there be peace
    Even for a moment
    

  • Status Update 03-31-2026 | 🏷 status

    Today is March 31st, 2026 and I haven't made a blog post in five months. I know, that's a long time and I should be making more frequent updates. That's why I'm making this one. Here's what's happened since October. My condition has quite quickly declined to the point where even I recognize it. I said in the last post that they said I had schizoaffective but I didn't think I did and now I'm here to say I was wrong, I most definitely have it. Everything got so bad to the point I had to go to a mental hospital and that sucked. They gave me meds and they help but also they don't help as much as I wish they would. Even with them I can't go more than a few hours without horrible hallucinations.

  • Bogeywoman

    That's not as frightening as bogeyman, is it? Bogeywoman sounds like she'd wear a slick yellow jacket, have a solid dealer on speed dial and know the best late night diners.

    No, we need a bogeyman, dragging away women and children. Big bad bogeyman with stringy hair and stained camisoles. Bargain bin bogeyman with chipped nails and too much eyeliner. Brash bitty bogeyman trying too hard or not hard enough, failing too hard or not hard enough.

  • Stitching

    I inherited my Mom's sewing machine, as her retinitis pigmetosa has progressed to the point that she can no longer sew. I have no history of sewing, but I'm trying some odd projects to see if I can accumulate a bit of skill. I should probably have started with hand sewing, as I'm finding machine sewing a very difficult and fussy thing.

    There's just no room for error in machine sewing--a slight misadjustment of top-thread tension or poor seam choice and doom is upon you. Why does backstitching make the bobbin thread jam so hard I have to unscrew the throat plate to get it free?

• Science

  • SPACE SPACE SPACE

    I know I'm not supposed to get too excited about space launches. I know things could be delayed or postponed up to the last second (almost literally). I know that today's weather briefing put the chances of launching tomorrow at only 80 percent.

    But SPACE. SPACE SPACE SPACE.

    Watching NASA launches and reentries is the closest thing I have ever known to a transcendental experience. Watching a NASA launch is, I imagine, how 12th century peasants felt when they entered a cathedral for the first time. We fling HUMANS into SPACE using MATH and we BRING THEM BACK.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Typical BNL spiel on AI and capital

    I think one of the most important questions that AI brings to light is one that could actually be asked about virtually any world-consuming technology: How was it possible that it could come to dominate everything and no one seemingly had any say in the matter?

    Another way of asking the same question: Why do we continue to labor under the illusion of democracy while capitol still exists?

    How is it possible that a technology which produces inconsistent and unpredictable results; which uses absurd amounts of energy to produce such results; which literally drives people crazy; which is by definition a black box; which relies on theft at its foundation; which many of its own creators fear will destroy society; how could this become an entire new industry, become a part of every new program, be integrated into every new service, be threatening the livelihoods of millions of workers? Who would let this happen?

  • Did you ever go to a key signing party?

    The 90s (ish) popularised the idea that, to protect yourself against spies, you could meet your trusted associates in real life and physically verify their identity as you digitally signed each others’ PGP keys. Thanks to the magic of mathematics, your Quake serialz could be exchanged in peace and your super-important IRC logs could be assuredly untampered-with.

  • Type Systems

    So someone tried to graft a new type system onto Perl (which by the by is a "closed, strong and statically typed language") with perhaps predictable results.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I'm giving up on the Brazilian SYN attacks

      For the past few months I've been slowly building up a list of Brazilian networks to block [1], and if the theory of why it's happening is true [2], then it's going to be a long slog of banning Brazilian networks for, if not months, then years (with a reported 21,000+ ISPs in Brazil … yeah). Just yesterday, I ended up blocking somewhere around 10 networks before I stopped and asked myself, Myself, how did I get here [3]?

      On the one hand, I don't want to participate in a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. On the other hand, I don't like the idea of blocking an entire country. But the attacks just keep on coming. I could write a program that runs every n minutes, scans for excessive TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) connections in the SYN_RECV state, identify the ASN (Autonomous System Number) of the offending IP address and block it, retiring out older blocks to keep from overwhelming the firewall. It's just that it adds another cog on the server to keep greased, and the attacks aren't that distruptive on the server—they're just annoying.

    • An offline Maidenhead grid converter

      This post is an announcement, with about 2 hours and 11 minutes to spare (minus however long it takes to write!), of my project for OFFLFIRSOCH 2026. If you've emailed me in the past day and a half or so to let me know about your own project and you haven't heard back yet, please accept my apologies and rest assured I've seen your mail and your submission *will* be included in the round up! I haven't replied yet because I've needed every spare minute to get my own project finished this year due to having a bunch of other stuff on in March. I tried to compensate for this by keeping the project simpler than in earlier years, and yet, here we are...