Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Past Perfect

    And in exploring eternalism I came up with this paradoxical concept where the present can affect the past. It's particularly helpful in dealing with grief, at least for me.

    It's a simple concept. Let me explain it with two real examples.

    [...]

    My sister passed away last year, having just turned 45.

    She is survived by two amazing boys. When she found out that her cancer was back, my partner and I moved to a condo 3 blocks away from her. I wanted her to know that we were here for her, but also that her kids would have someone they could count on, in the event that she passed.

    We played board games with the boys every week, traveled with them, took them on trips. I like to think she knew that we would be here for them when she passed, because she was able to see how much we loved all of them.

    This means that, when I take care of my nephews today I'm also taking care of my sister in the past. Because she knew I would be here for them, and my actions prove her right.

  • blog 9

    hiya! this blog wont be anything crazy, i just wanna write something :) lately i've been playing a ton of tomodachi life living the dream and it's been so fun! all my miis are system members, and ive made sure every member there has personally contributed to their own mii. it's been silly and fun checking on my miis and making them happy and become friends with each other -- its all very simple but i find a lot of joy in it, its fun to quickly check on my creatures before and/or after i come home from work..... speaking of work, i finally got moved from dishwashing (which as a reminder, has been causing chemical allergic reactions to my hands and arms because of the strong dish detergent) to prep cooking, and its been a lot better for me! i enjoy prep cooking more, its been nice being in a kitchen again just chopping fruits/veggies and shit lol. my skin has been healing nicely too! and since i work during the day instead of at night, i feel like i have more room in my days to do things for myself, since before when i worked at nights, id sleep in, wake up, go to work, come home, laze about for a few hours, go to sleep, and repeat... but now its more like i wake up, go to work, go out to do chores/something fun and/or do my hobbies, then go to bed and repeat, which is a lot more bearable for me!

  • Homeworlds Update

    I've continued on with my energetic interest in Homeworlds. So far, I've mainly been playing against Micah. I'm grateful that he so often wants to play with me, but the experience tends to be a little disappointing because Micah gets bored easily. As soon as the game progresses to a point where it is difficult to figure out what to do next, he will just quit playing. Or, alternatively, he will make himself lose on purpose, just so he can see his own pieces get blown up in a catastrophe. He is an interesting seven-year-old, for sure!

    My sister played one game with me. She said she liked the game, which was encouraging. But we don't live very close to each other, so it is likely we won't be playing together very often.

    One of my cousins also played a game with me. He is heavy into board games and table top games. He complained some about the mechanics of the game — specifically, that he did not like the economy mechanics, i.e., the complexities of getting pieces out of the bank. But he was playing intensely, and our game time lasted about 1.5 hours, so I have some hopes I'll get a few more games out of him.

  • A Dispatch from the Salton Sea

    Signage noted the presence of millions of migratory birds in spring and fall, but I saw almost none, except a handful at the southern tip, near Niland. The only flying things I saw in quantity were gigantic horse-flies. Beaches, covered with several inches of mollusk shells and painful to walk on, stretched unnaturally far from the sea, a sign of the shoreline's retreat. I saw no sign of living fish; the numbers of tilapia have reportedly cratered from approximately a hundred million at the turn of the 21st century to nearly zero now. Well-cared-for campgrounds, once beachside before the sea receded, lay empty.

• Politics and World Events

  • Dossier: The USA as an "Experiment" - The Federalist Papers as a Blueprint (ENG)

    The “Articles of Confederation” were the first constitutional order of the United States. From 1781 onward, they created not a strong federal state but a loose union of sovereign individual states. The common Congress, which met once a year, had only limited means at its disposal: it could wage war, conduct diplomacy, and make requests - but it could hardly levy taxes directly or enforce laws against individual citizens.

    Many problems of the 1780s - debt, trade, domestic unrest, and blockades between the states - made the weaknesses of this system visible. The Constitution of 1787 was the answer to them.

    The guiding question was this: Could freedom be organized across a large territory - without ending either in chaos or in centralized rule?

    Against this background, a convention assembled in Philadelphia. Originally, it was supposed to revise the existing order. Yet from deliberations about reform, something far greater emerged: the draft of an entirely new Constitution.

• Technology and Free Software

  • JBL Cinema SB510 via Bluetooth on Ubuntu

    This guide describes a reliable method for pairing and connecting a JBL Cinema SB510 soundbar via Bluetooth on Ubuntu 25.10.

    The procedure was tested after the soundbar repeatedly appeared in the graphical Bluetooth tool, briefly connected, and then disappeared again with an "Unknown error" message.

  • Ubuntu Update: Repair NVIDIA When an External Monitor Disappears

    After a kernel update, Ubuntu may boot into a new kernel while the matching NVIDIA kernel module is missing.

    On some laptops with Intel/NVIDIA hybrid graphics, the internal display may continue to work through the Intel GPU. External HDMI or DisplayPort outputs may be connected through the NVIDIA GPU. If the NVIDIA driver is not available for the running kernel, the external monitor may no longer be detected.

  • Clu-Clu Land’s strobe effect

    On the NES version of Clu-Clu Land, Bubbles goes to a rave between levels as the background screen rapidly cycles. That might’ve looked okay on CRT but does not look good on OLED or LCD.

    Clu-Clu Land is my favorite game but I never heard of it back in the day (go figure; we played Devil World, Ice Climber, Little Sampson, all kinds of deep cuts but not this). The version I fell in love with was the 2DS Virtual Console release. It features a much slower and more pleasant background color pulse between levels.

    TL;DR: Look for a sequence of A9 04 85 55 A9 01 at address 0x435 (that offset is for a file that does include the header) and change the $04 to $0f if you want to make the backgrounds cycle more slowly the way modern VC and AC releases of Clu-Clu Land do.