Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 10 of swords

    interesting that it’s the third card I’ve done and it’s all been kind of difficult cards. I wonder if we’ll get the tower next, or more of the swords…

    I think in this deck (marseille-waite) it is more clear to me that that’s not a sunrise, better times coming ahead. If it were a sunrise, wouldn’t it be more intuitive to have it on the left? I mean I know east is the “right” side of the compass, but looking at images and reading them in a western, linear, left to right fashion, the right is the sunset… so this is Finished.

  • Not a Stress Dream

    I'm on a bit of a mini-break, just taking a couple days and making a four-day weekend out of an otherwise unremarkable weekend in August. My partner's father turned 80 last week, so she baked him a cake, froze it, and we drove out and assembled it last night. Black forest, with the cherry filling homemade. Delicious. Yesterday was a very wet day (very needed), and we spent most of the day indoors, playing games (I won Swoosh; lost Snowbird, 31 [2x], Ticket to Ride: Europe). I took the dogs for a walk in the drizzle once the rain slowed a bit. They got howled at by a basset hound watching from its living room window.

    We watched the Jays beat the Yankees. We watched the Blue Bombers beat the Redblacks. It was still raining before bed. I let the dogs out to do their business, and they did it quickly.

• Politics and World Events

  • USA

    I am back in the US for some R&R. I haven't overcome my jetlag yet, so of course I wake up around 2 or 3am each day, and I'm exhausted by early afternoon.

    Despite my bad fear of flying, I actually enjoyed most of the flight coming over. And I would say we were extremely lucky with Typhoon #15: it was just east of Chiba prefecture when we left and so we got around it. I saw on the news afterwards though, that it dumped an unprecedented amount of rain on Chiba prefecture stranding many, many people at Narita airport due to flooding.

• Technology and Free Software

  • GPU computing sucks, I'll tell you why

    As a systems administrator (I'm a gray beard now), I've seen hardware come and go, some of it good, and some of it utterly hot garbage. It's also the same with trends and hype cycles for the latest "thing", whether it's useful or not. Some of this hardware, as with medicine, finds a purpose it wasn't originally designed to do, and as a result gets a go around. Other hardware serves its purpose for a little while until it's long forgotten because something else did its job better; progress.

    When GPU's first started going mainstream enough to be sold at electronics stores vs. "computer" only stores, it was pretty awesome. A simple addition to your PC would make your (then nascent) 3D games run and look so much better. I witnessed this around 1997 when Half Life had been released and a friend of a friend had borrowed their computer. The computer was a Pentium, some RAM (in MB...), probably a small hard drive, a CDROM, and 2(!) 3dfx Voodoo 2 cards configured via SLI; when the game was loading, you'd hear the "click" sound as both cards synchronized. This was pure eye candy - the game ran perfectly as it offloaded work on the CPU. Of course, I got a 3dfx voodoo 3 card about a year later, and then got a 3dfx voodoo 4 card about another year after. At this point, GPU's did their thing (handle graphics) and CPU's did their thing (everything else), a perfect harmony. I don't ever recall a GPU hanging a machine when it only handled graphics.

  • 868-BACK by Michael Brough

    868-HACK was the archetypal "broughlike". It condensed key elements of traditional roguelikes (such as the original "hack") to a constrained concentrated form of tactical movement and judicious resource use on a 6x6 grid. This sequel, released in May 2026, starts from that tight pearl of a design, repeated here almost unmodified, but builds a strategic layer on top with dense connections to that base, resulting in a much deeper and more replayable whole.

    Many roguelikes feature an "overmap", as in ADOM, Angband, Omega, or Qud, which you travel across to choose which dungeon or town to handle next. BACK adds something similar, which with its Neuromantic cyberpunk theme becomes a network map where you choose which server from an expanding range of possibilities to hack next. After 15 iterations or 3ish deaths, it's game over, and your total score goes on the leaderboard. This is still primarily a high-score game, with your main goal being to make and take opportunities to get points, always with some risk associated. The strategy comes in judging the right level of risk and finding ways to mitigate it. Every server gives you a power-up "device" to use on that and future servers, as well as opportunities to gain resources which survive to the next server. Valuable servers offer more score and better devices, but sport bevies of game-changing modifiers which can drastically increase the difficulty.