Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • To Serve Man

    Spoilers, it's about eating humans. This may fall under the horror or alien invasion genres, possibly with variations where the humans are kept alive for some reason, perhaps to amuse an electronic overlord. However there are several problems with the notion, besides hand-waving the cost and complications of intrastellar travel, to say less of interstellar travel. First is that there are plenty of things that already eat humans, so aliens eating humans would just be more competition for the already efficient bacteria, fungi, insects, worms, etc. A related concern is that larger organisms tend to bio-accumulate toxins, so it may make sense to nibble at some other portion of the food web. Finally there is the problem that there are not many humans compared to the biomass of all the little things: sure a flower or the tip of the iceberg may be the most visible to those looking, but most of the object is elsewhere. A refreshing change might be to have aliens who ignore the humans, though this has already been done in "The Colour Out of Space" by H. P. Lovecraft.

  • Updates: Tanana River, etc.

    These last two weeks have been pretty crazy due to moving to a new apartment, and the craziness continues as we try to get our stuff sorted out in the new place. Nevertheless, I did manage to make it out for a few lunch break walks by the Tanana River.

    Last Tuesday (2026-06-02) I made it out there and observed my first wild flowers this year, mainly purple vetch and dandelion. I also noticed some of those small plants that have little white, bell shaped flowers hanging down — four petals each. I forget the name of those and will have to look it up later. I did some quick sketches of willow and aspen leaves.

  • I am feeling very normal about Cassette Beasts 2002 (spoilerfree version)

    In late 2025, Bytten Studio, the dev studio who made Lenna's Inception (highly recommend!) and Cassette Beasts (also highly recommend, that's my favorite game!) said they've been working on their next game, and that they'd tell us more at some point in 2026. Said point was yesterday, during the PC Gaming Show. Now, I expected a brand new IP that may or may not reference their previous ones (like Cassette Beasts did for Lenna's Inception), since I was pretty sure they said they weren't really interested in sequels and-

  • I am feeling very normal about Cassette Beasts 2002 (spoilery version)

  • jump

    jump, says one version of me
    while the other
    tears apart the parachute
    

  • Waves of sorrow

    Waves of sorrow punctuate my days Fueled by the lingering vapors of alcohol

    Was that it? Was these the most exciting months of my life?

• Technology and Free Software

  • It's impossible not to miss Emacs

    Even as I sit with Skiff ready to act upon my every request it's impossible to not feel like something is missing. The joke goes that Emacs is a great operating system lacking a good editor. I wouldn't call Skiff an operating system or great, but one thing it's missing is a good editor. Good editor can only mean one thing to me; Emacs.

  • The Tauon's Repeated Demise

    Last year I bought a Tauon PC-1, a computer built into a keyboard case in a similar style to personal computers of the 1980s.^ The Tauon uses an AllWinner computer board running Android 7.1 Nougat, RCA and HDMI video output, a single USB port, and an SD card slot for expandable storage. The specs are extremely limited, but it's fun to tinker with.

    About six months after I bought it, I ran into a strange issue. The Tauon would boot and run normally until it came to a memory-intensive task, such as syncing large amounts of data over Syncthing or loading a resource-heavy Web page. The device would then hard freeze and require me to cut the power. Afterward, if I tried to boot again, the boot screen would appear, disappear, appear a second time, then hang on a black or green screen. The only way to get functionality back was to leave the device off and unplugged for several days up to a few weeks. Naturally, that makes it a little hard to use the Tauon as a personal computer of any description.