Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • the birds outside

    I still catch myself
    wanting to change
    for someone else
    the voice inside
    screaming louder
    than the birds outside
    every morning now 
    when all I need
    is silence
    

  • my most and least favorite people: examples

    A student invited me to their improv class "final exam," which is a show at a downtown venue known for student/avant-garde work. Of course I said yes.

    I asked two kids if they'd help me reclaim a couple wandered library chairs from a classroom. They were EXCITED for this and turned it into an ADVENTURE.

    Another student stopped by the library solely to inform me that the robotics team won their district championship and was headed to state. No other reason. Just needed me to know.

    Common Denominator: People who get SUPER EXCITED about whatever it is they are DOING and NEED YOU TO KNOW ABOUT IT so you can be EXCITED TOO.

  • Extreme Liminal Spaces, Boynton Beach, Florida edition

    Bunny and I found ourselves at the Boynton Beach Mall [1]. While Bunny shopped at Jock Pennet [2], I decided to wander the mall to see what wonderful and delightful stores awaited me there.

    Um … not much.

    [An empty section of the mall that is otherwise open] This isn't an abandoned mall! It's open to the public! No, really! It is! Visit us! Please? [3] [4] [A section of the mall with actual open stores.] See! We have stores! Some of which are open! You don't have to worry about the crowds! [5] [6] [A non-operating carousel] No lights. No lines. No operator. No music. It's just sitting here, unused, and unloved. [7] [8] [The food court at the mall, empty with only a few stores open] Nothing sadder than an empty food court, but the Jamaican food stall smelled wonderful. [9] [10]

    I would say that, at best, 50% of the stores were occupied, with two of the five anchor stores open for business. It wasn't hard for me to get these pictures without people, as there weren't many there to begin with. Yes, there were some people wandering around, but I think at most I had to wait maybe a minute or so before the area was clear of anyone.

  • Binary thinking about hobbies

    I'm wrestling with that again. I've been dissociating my way through my last couple band practices for one of my groups, including a particularly bad instance of derealization in the one two weeks ago where I suddenly returned to my body after a period of being on autopilot. I've been a bit dissatisfied with my band leader, since she tends to need time to remember how to play her own songs, which ideally she'd be ready for before rehearsal.

    I'm also continuing to struggle with the location issue. Bars are hard for me. Particularly with groups, where I can't supplement my hearing with lip-reading very well, I have to spend so much time parsing what is being said that the conversation moves on before I've had time to add anything to it. The result is that I'm often pretty quiet. It's not a very satisfying means of socializing. I've had the thought that while gaming didn't satisfy from the in-person socializing perspective, the use of voice chat apps allowed me to manually set volumes that made it easy for me to follow everyone in the group conversation. Thus, it was easier to participate in the chat.

    So, I'm thinking of quitting music.

• Politics and World Events

  • Good Answer

    We have heard a good questions, I don't know how to describe what is a `good question`, I only know that it is a good question when it been asked. Maybe good question is the question that asking for the answer that nobody ever think of, or for a answer that not easily be answered.

    But what about `good answer`?. What good answer should be?

  • There Is No Poetry in the Land of Sparta

    Jews have a large, inflated ego—until the antisemites come with their holocausts and pogroms and return the Jews to their original, small size.

    How is this sentence connected to the title about poetry in this land and its absence? In fact, the title should have been “There Is No Culture in the Land of Sparta.” Perhaps I am bitter, because consuming culture, poetry, and art is a matter of age, not of effort.

    I grew up on Israeli popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s. In my youth and childhood, I consumed all the Israeli and global music on the radio, and later on MTV via cable. I also watched an endless number of TV series and Hollywood films, as well as Israeli films, and I read books from the public library—mostly classic science fiction. You could say that science fiction was my favorite genre as a teenager.

    But no more. At my age, nearing fifty, I stopped consuming culture and art about a decade ago. I don’t listen to new music, I don’t watch new movies, and it’s been twenty years since I opened a book. There’s a limit to how much culture one can consume—especially when you’ve already seen and heard all the genres and formulas.

  • That flat management control issue in England

    There's a new article on Leasehold Knowledge Partnerhip's website, by Alexander Hamilton, a civil servant at the Foreign Office.

    [...]

    It's hard to describe any of these clearly without loads of parenthesis and caveating. What it amounts to is that some leaseholders are exposed to significant economic detriment if they can't obtain Right To Manage or better, and Hamilton's article puts forward the economic theory for why this would be. Could benefits similar to RTM be made available to groups that can't obtain RTM, and would this require legislation? The answer to both is yes.

    Much has been written, too much of it by me, about expanding access to RTM.

• Literature

  • Book vow

    Now that I have video game mania, books are piling up at an even faster rate than normal. Therefore it’s time for some “Compulsive Vowing”:

    It’s gonna be five-out-one-in until I have read twelve physical books. I.e. I can only get two more physical books until I have read twelve; and the first of those two has to wait until I have read at least five and the second has to wait until I have read at least ten. Once I’ve read twelve books I’m released from the vow. I’m gonna try to make some sort of page in my Techo that I can fill in with stamps or something to track my progress towards the vow with those three milestones at five, ten, and twelve.

    My FOMO around books (most of my ways to get books are time-limited, for example in the freeshop there's only one of each of a handful of books and the first person who gets it gets it) is usually stronger than my ability to keep vows so I’m really going to have to put effort into keeping the vow.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Use Oddμ to watch over a directory

    I was wondering how to expand on the use of Oddμ as a static site generator. Here's an idea.

    To implement a static site that gets updated whenever the page files are updated, use a Makefile to produce a HTML file for every Markdown file and then use a directory watcher such as `entr` to run `make` whenever Markdown files change or get added.

  • Getting competent in NixOS

    This gemlog was left in draft for quite a while. I'm not expert enough on Nix to do all I want to showcase here. So I think I'll abridge a bit.

    I'm using NixOS for a while now (I think a year... I'm not sure). I found my way with Nix in projects and into my main system. I am surviving with this system, but the amount of knowledge to get expert is huge and I don't want to dedicate that time right now. So here what I got.

  • Darkness in roleplay

    A couple of years ago I mastered a homebrew adventure as part of our campaign. At the time I was interested on House of Leaves and how the concept of space is managed into a session.

    The concept was simple: The party was searching for their past mission handler, her who betrayed the group and made arson of their HQ for unknown reasons. The party searched on the handler's home city, last place she was seen. They started sneaking into her house, searching around for letters, objects of interest and that sort of stuff, but without success.

    The only thing the party found was ivy, a lot of ivy. This plant was itself magic, but the property of this magic was unknown, like a secret project of their handler, and possibly of the people working with her.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Alhena 5.5.6

      Alhena 5.5.6 is available. The big feature is Gemlog and atom subscriptions. I also added Markdown support. Beyond that, a number of corner case bugs have been squashed. Well worth updating.

      The Markdown stuff is interesting. There's a libary called commonmark which can convert Markdown to HTML. Alhena can take that converted Markdown and run it through its HTML to Gemtext converter. Not everything translates but those things (bold and italics, etc) are quietly ignored. It works well!