Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Small healthy habits

    It's been a rough week, but in some ways things are starting to look up. I'm doing a slightly better job saying "no" at work, and have managed to scale back my hours slightly. Granted, things are still not where I'd like them to be, but this week has been a vast improvement over the last couple months where my balance has been seriously out of wack for reasons that are neither interesting nor justifiable.

    The end of summer always presents a certain amount of added stress, as back to school preparations are already underway. The number of emails I've been receiving from school several weeks out already borders on unconscionable. Being informed, engaged, supportive, and available are all good and necessary things. However, there is such a thing as too much communication.

  • 7 of wands

    I see this guy a lot recently. Normally I think: being singled out, being defensive, on the back foot. Standing your ground, not falling in line, maintaining your individuality, protecting your project from outside influences. Maintenance work, anything that’s ongoing and a bit of a drain, looks like he’s fighting off weeds.

• Poetry/Similar

  • motion sickness

    my body is refusing 
    to cooperate 
    again
    it must know
    of the storm in my heart
    

  • Where it all began (tun/en)

    Create Machines
    Who's Got the Keys to my Strimmer?
    Calling for You
    Eldorado 2022
    

  • 2 Furries, hardcore and... blues? (tun/en)

    The Queenstons
    Bandetto
    Mayhem
    The Quick Brown Fox
    RQ
    Greenhouse
    hyi
    Darius & Rotteen
    

• Science

  • Partial Eclipse Sketches

    A solar eclipse took place this morning (2026-08-12 AKDT). As far as I can tell, nobody I knew personally was even aware that the eclipse was going to take place. Doubtless this was due to the fact that the eclipse was not visible at all in most of the United States, and here in Fairbanks we had only a partial eclipse, with about 36% obscuration. Such eclipses don't get a lot of press attention, I suspect, here in the USA.

    I might have overlooked it myself, but I had been tracking the status of the moon in relation to some studies I am doing in the Hebrew lunar calendar, which are in connection with a study I am doing in a book called "The Feasts of Israel" by Bruce Scott. Once I worked out the particular timing of the eclipse — using Stellarium — I decided the best approach would be to use a few hours of PTO and come in late to work. So I was able to sleep in a bit and then had plenty of time to set up an observation station out in the front yard.

• Technology and Free Software

  • Studying computer science in a world of infinite possibility

    But that wouldn't have been as special. There's something ineffably magical about doing the real thing. What I think makes analog video interesting at all is that it's shaped by the limitations of its time. We aren't in the analog video era anymore, but it still exists. It still bears the imprints of those limitations, and that's interesting. When people talk about how modern technology feels "soulless," "sterile," I have to imagine that's an artifact of our current era of everything, unlimited, all the time. Nowadays you can do whatever you want. There are endless possibilities for how we can make things, but rather than explore that possibility space, most of our media seems to fall into one of two categories: either simulating old technological limitations to capture a feeling of nostalgia, or embracing the limitlessness of modern digital technology to converge on an aesthetic point, the point I believe underpins this soullessness people are trying to escape.

  • I was wrong - Guilelessness is stupidity

    As I said in an earlier post, it really seems, I've too much time to think. Today I want to write about my guilelessness mainly in my youth. I'm nearly always guileless (still) and I always was. But I had a lot of trouble with some of my fellow humans - probably because of that.

    No matter where I was, if it was for a longer time, I've always had an unwanted rivalry going on. And I never took care about it properly and never really learned how to deal with such things. Instead I even showed these rivals, who I never really regarded as such *because* of my guilelessness, how to do things, they didn't know or wanted to learn. Then those people could be very nice.

    I always liked to show people how to do for example Assembler with the C64 in my youth, while the other people, lets face it, were more clever. They jealously hid their knowledge, and won't show you anything, for their own benefit against you. And if they had the right chance in the right moment they gave you a kick. And that really struck me, because I was too stupid to understand it or why this was necessary.

  • Notes for a 13-year-old DOS sysadmin

    My best friend's oldest child is working with me to make a bootable DOS system for their little brother. The rest of this diary entry is addressed to them, as I work out my initial thoughts on how we'll collaborate long-distance.