Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • A Good Idea Gathering Dust: From Named Gap to Workable Innovation

    Diagnosis is the easy half. Once you have named the place where current practice fails a real problem, a harder demand follows: propose something that would close it. I will argue that the move from gap to innovation is disciplined rather than inspired, by running a proposal through Everett Rogers on how practices spread, Atul Gawande on how they get encoded, Michael Fullan on how they survive an organization, and Michael Polanyi on what is being made explicit.

    Rogers first, because a brilliant idea nobody adopts is not best practice; it is a good idea gathering dust. Studying the spread of new seed corn among farmers and new drugs among physicians, he found that adoption follows a pattern. Five attributes decide it: relative advantage (is it visibly better than what it replaces?), compatibility (does it fit existing values and workflows?), complexity (the simpler, the faster), trialability (can people test it small first?), and observability (can others see the results?). He adds the adoption curve, innovators and early adopters ahead of the early majority, the late majority, and the laggards, which tells you who to design for and who to persuade. Put your proposal to those five questions out loud. If it turns out complex, incompatible, and invisible in its effects, you have quietly predicted its failure.

  • Theorizing the Human Sciences in the Age of Absolute Disruption: Historical Criticism and Its Remainders

    Jason Ānanda Josephson-Storm’s trilogy, The Myth of Disenchantment (2017), Metamodernism (2021), and The Genealogy of Genealogy (2026), can be read as standalone theoretical interventions or as parts of a singular project. In this essay, I argue that when read together, the books explore four questions: whether a thing exists, how it arose and why it persists, what grounds our claims about it, and whether it is desirable. I will argue that the project is strongest where its concrete analyses keep those questions distinct (the Frazer and Crowley chapters of Myth, the social-kinds ontology of Metamodernism, the Nietzsche and Jean Wahl reception history of Genealogy) and at its most interesting when doing a careful reading of Weber and about genealogy’s institutional hegemony along with its eugenic inheritance. Its proposals do not stand or fall as a system; they work as nodes in the network of humanities theory after critique, and I follow each into its reception. Moving beyond the glib sort of relativism, of to every person their own truth, the books defend fallible inquiry after critique without treating historical situatedness as a condemnation of knowledge.

  • First Fishleather Done

    Finished the first of the two fish leather attempts.

    The oil lacquered one had dried up well and thus it was time to re-hydrate and rinse and then re-oil in a mixture on slightly less disgusting as the first. (I did not touch it this time, gloves straight away.)

    Afterwards, it was time to knead and pull and twist and stretch, stretch, stretch. Redampened it a few times and it's still a little too stiff for my liking. ◜However◞, my hands didn't want to continue, my left index finger has three spots on it's back where I rubbed off some skin. Ouchie.

  • Darn Tough

    I've got a pair of Darn Tough Vermont socks that are about 7 years old and they finally have holes in the bottom.

    This is the company that promises an unconditional lifetime warranty:

    If these aren’t the longest lasting socks you’ve ever owned, you can return them to us for another pair. No receipt needed, just the pair in question.

    Ah, but is that not a condition? There's an if. Despite the holes, these probably are the longest lasting socks I've ever owned. I think they've kept up their end of the bargain.

  • that hot librarian content you crave: conspiracy theories

    During lunch, I had half a dozen students here in the library, trying to solve a mystery. One of them had received some post in his locker this morning: an image of him, drawn to look like a femboy.

    (n.b. I did not see this image and have no idea what my students are identifying as "femboy" characteristics here. it did not sound scandalous, just bemusing.)

    The conversation is amusing me so much I'm jotting down my favorite quotes. Names changed to protect the minors, as usual.

• Poetry

  • tiny lines

    a sense of security 
    by something small
    I wasn't going to ask for
    

• Technology and Free Software

  • Sunday afternoon: listen to the radio

    I'm making an effort to use digital technology more intentionally, and that needs to include periods when I don't use it at all. The rest of the time I have a range of tools to support my intention, including Minimalist Phone launcher, application scheduling, turning off notifications, all the things the self-help books would tell you to do. Of course I'm not on social media, unless Geminispace is that.

    Yesterday I had a digital sabbath in the afternoon and sat down to do just one thing, to listen to the radio. Not to have the radio on in the background while I browsed here or on Wikipedia, nor to allow my mind to wander and to immediately search anything that popped into my head, but to sit with no digital devices within reach and really listen to programmes I'd picked out.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • Started a GemCapsule

      While hanging out with friends at a game server, I expressed my desire to have a website. One of them asked, "what is it about?"

      Honestly, I don't know. I haven't settled on a topic. I'm a non-technical person in a strict sense. I'm interested in tech, but I don't have a career in tech. But the values touted by the Gemini protocol gave me a strong urge to start publishing online again.

  • Software Releases/Announcements

    • Sterrenkijker releases — 1.1.0

      New release! This contains mostly UI & visual updates, along with some small bug fixes.

      * You can now select the color algorithm used for styling the UI from the seed color

      * On linux, the system accent color is now properly used instead of always picking a blue color

      (somehow nobody ever properly implemented this for flutter, neither the official package or any third party thing. what the hell !! i had to figure out DBus myself for this!!)

      * Gemtext headings now have more horizontal space than the document body, making them stand out more and making the document more readable at a glance

      * Quotes are now styled slightly differently, making them more obvious, though this may be changed further in a future version