Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • Photography is dead - not

    And it sucked for 150 years already. Every few decades, some technological advancement made it suck a little less though. From an early death due to mercury poisoning, over the rush of having to coat, expose and develop your wet plate within minutes without it drying, towards roll film and commercial development services.

    When I started to learn the craft as a pre-teen ca. 25 years ago, everything about film was annoying. Digital cameras weren't really there yet and modern, computerized SLRs with electronic shutters, autofocus and sphisticated automatic modes that were actually good did exist but for a 12 yo kid starting making her way through photography books, those were unobtainable. So what I learned on was a Nikon Nikkormat FTN. A fully mechanical, manual SLR with the TTL lightmeter being the only creature comfort. Developing my own film, and more importantly darkroom printing, was simply what you did when you were even half serious about artistic photography as well. There were no affordable ways to scan a negative to edit and print digitally.

    Rationally, this really sucked. It made learning photography expensive and time consuming. At the time I had a sidegig as an event photographer and that barely payed for my own photography.

  • Why I like paper books

    It's no secret that I, like many others, have been on a kick to reduce screen time lately. I don't discriminate about the nature of the screen, either. Computer, tablet, phone, eReader, TV - these are all devices that I'm looking to spend less time with.

    Tablet is the easiest - years back, I decided I didn't really want one, and gave mine away to someone who actually needed it. No tablet, no problem. TV is also not a problem. I watch very little TV (here I am counting streaming services as well), and very few movies. It's just not particularly a medium I'm very interested in, and consequently it gets reduced to a tool to help me get through boring treadmill walks in the winter.

    The eReader is an interesting one, because I used to have a Kindle, and I liked it quite a bit. What changed? During the pandemic years, I got quite bought in to the idea of the benefits of re-connecting with physical media. As it applies to music will be the subject of another post, but this is when the idea of reading physical (paper) books re-entered my awareness as a thing that might be worth doing.

  • darling town

    I would take you to the spot by the lake
    where I used to sit smoking as a teenager 
    hiding from the world
    and on the walk back to town
    I would show you
    my favourite playground
    

  • am i finally close to the finality of this ultrahollowing? can i ever be myself again..?

    i am kinda exhausted, i have been tending to a group of about 3-5 crack smoking paranoid degenerates for the past few weeks, and my anhedonia/executive dysfunction and general numb feeling of being dead inside has returned with a flaming intensity- i genuinely feel sometimes as if my life is not one continuous contingent string of memories, but rather a few bursts of lucidity amongst these vast and unknown gaps of time. every once in a while- if i am lucky enough to be so fucking broke that i cant even manage to get enough to buy the bare minimum of a 20a day- i begin.... to re emerge. it is like waking from a dream. a bad one....

    sorry. i hope this isnt like, absolutely impossible to comprehend. maybe someone will feel it/relate. i dont really understand what is so extremely and essentially compelling that causes me to so erratically and desperately send out these sos signals and errant lonely and hopeful transmissions, all to ever so slightly move the line over ever so slightly, towards my being recognized, if only for a day, if only for a little while. if only for a fleeting second of time. it somehow satisfies my reality. my sense of existential dread is somehow comforted a bit by this 'hit' of recognition.

• Politics and World Events

  • The Language of hope

    In the second half of the nineteenth century, a young Polish optician was troubled by the lack of understanding between the various communities in and around his hometown of Białystok. At that time, Białystok was part of the Russian Empire, and there was frequent violence between ethnic Poles, Russians and Germans and religiously-motivated violence between Jews and Christians.

    Zamenhof believed that the root of this violence was the mistrust borne of misunderstanding between the communities. Each community had its own language which provided a barrier to mutual comprehension. His conclusion was that a common, neutral language was needed to bridge this divide.

• Technology and Free Software

  • FreeBSD 15.1 install on Dell Precision 5690

    I'm documenting my initial foray into using FreeBSD on a laptop as a daily driver. Given all the revelations lately regarding the Linux kernel and the Debian project permitting LLM-slop as "valid" contributions, I decided that it was time to try it, especially given my recent move to text-only/minimal graphic user interfaces. Additionally, I've seen a lot of positive reviews online for those that are using (Free)BSD as a "daily driver".