Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • abandoned

    I browse catalogue after catalogue 
    of home decor
    new bed, new sheets, new everything 
    a silly item on my bookshelf 
    new bookshelves too
    and I know why I always leave the shopping cart 
    full and abandoned
    

  • I stopped pretending.

    I realised that I just don't give a shit anymore.

    I also noticed that I am now extremely aware and repulsed when people lie or try and manipulate me. The combination of these things probably makes me rather unlikable to those that go about their life putting on airs and pretending to agree with the other persons lies, and then doing the same to the other person and they reciprocate in kind.

    I can't stand that shit now. It is so patently fake it makes me physically ill to be around it.

  • Katabasis 19

    Part three of a hazy and mazy philosophical dungeon crawl about progressive but haunted political theory and praxis and bottom-up process ontologies for the End Times that emerged out of conversations with The Others on Discord.

    In the first part we mapped out the Gnostic Kenoma of Capitalist Realism and the Gnosis of Acid Communism. In the second part we pulled the red thread through digital acceleration and hypostitional collapse toward the pull of the Outside Attractor. Now, let's descend into the liminal void of the pandemic, where time warped, and something terrifying, tender, and possible tried to emerge.

  • Metrovision

    The new giant ad screens are up now (It’s called Metrovision) and they are also incredibly bright. So that’s the silver lining, I thought it was gonna be hard to look away from them but I can’t even look at them, they’re too bright. They’re everywhere in both directions so it’s not possible to look away from them either, without holding my hands up around my face while I’m looking at the ground (which makes me look like a weirdo).

  • Boat

    Continents as boats may stretch the definition of boat a bit. Some will claim that a boat must float on water. Does a boat unboat itself when in baby oil, or even just lifted out of water? Others may claim that boats are small, but the subsequent point in at least one dictionary for boat is "a ship of any size", and if you look at ship it's "a vessel larger than a boat", but then says "any boat, especially a racing boat". Some boats, like their definitions, are circular. A smaller boat, the Indian plate, is reputed to have recently raced northwards and ended up with a hell of a headbender. How? Well, there's some debate over slab push versus rug pull but—look!—Squirrel!

• Science

  • Product rule and reverse of product rule

    This post uses AsciiMath with the arbitrary delimiter U+23B5 BOTTOM SQUARE BRACKET surrounding all AsciiMath blocks.

• Technology and Free Software

  • An Address, a Key and a Message

    The SMTP (RFC 821) mail protocol is over forty years old, has been through a lot and it won't go anywhere. But so do I! In recent months I had been asking myself what if we just remade it from scratch? But why, you ask?

    Let's be honest: email is a trust issue pretending to be a transport protocol. Every address needs a certificate authority somewhere behind it, every inbox needs spam filtering that reads your mail to decide whether to deliver it, and the identity you have used for twenty years was never really yours: it is a record in somebody else's database.

    smolmail is my remake attempt and it throws most of that out. An address, a key and a message, and nothing between them that has to be trusted. One 32-byte master key is the only secret: back it up, and everything else, the signing key, the encryption key, the key that lets someone send you mail at all, can be rebuilt from it. Five operations, four cryptographic primitives created for entirely different reasons, zero extensibility mechanisms. No certificates. No expiry. No CA.

  • Brief thought on smartwatches

    I find myself pursuing activity not as a means to the end of health but as a means of generating health data on a smartwatch. Wack.

  • Internet/Gemini

    • rekindled love for geminispace

      The last days I've been reading gemlogs again. Something I haven't done in quite a while. All the gemlogs linked to others which kept me reading for hours. This motivated me to update my capsule again. To be honest, I almost forgot that I run one. It wasn't because of Gemini, I love this place.

      My attention works in waves, one hyperfocus at a time and I'm gonna ride this one until it ebbs away again. Last time I made the mistake of only checking Antenna from time to time. Not much stuck so I lost interest. But there's so much more to discover beyond Antenna.

• Programming

  • this self

    In particular, spawns of Simula use "this", leading to such train wrecks as C++, Java, etc. Meanwhile Smalltalk used "self" and followers of that path include Objective C, Perl, Ruby, etc.