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● 06.22.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 22/06/2023: Cool Capsules of the Week and What Dystopia?

Posted in News Roundup at 1:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ Absinth make the beer taste fonder.

• Finally! Some time to blog!

• Man, it has been crazy over here. I have two part time jobs, recently moved and had covid last week. It was pretty brutal all round.

• So let me summarize all things related to me.

=> ↺ What the Hell Can I Do? (translation)

• I posted this to my blog-blog (on write.as), but realized that I had not done so here.

• This is my translation of a poem (of this name) by Jaime Sabines.

=> ↺ Scarlet Heroes Character Creation Thoughts

• After looking through a lot of OSR systems, I finally settled on trying out Scarlet Heroes. It looked like it offers the best balance between what I wanted out of a system.

• For the first game, I am a player, and someone else kind enough to be the GM. It’s going to be a duet game, which Scarlet Heroes is designed for. The first step for me in this is to create a character.

=> ↺ Can cities be sustainable?

• I’ve been reading an old-ish book on sustainable city planning this morning

• Newman & Jennings (2008) Cities as sustainable ecosystems: principles and practices, Island press.

• And like I’m not criticizing the book per se I’m just kinda stuck thinking about whether we actually can make cities as we think of them, which are primarily—for lack of a better word— endothermic entities that have to take in energy and resources to function rather than generate them and turn them into entities that can more efficiently provide for their own needs

=> ↺ There Is Only Power

• There is only wrath and what it lays waste to in its wake!

• There is no justice, no law, and no right or wrong, except for the one that replaces them!

• All can change, and most will…

• He who has the power will shape the reality of the world…

=> ↺ Beyond Dream’s Door

• I had some friends over and got drunk and laughed until I cried at these two fuckin things.

• Beyond Dream’s Door is a late-80s horror film with a student-film vibe; that is, wildly inventive and completely undisciplined. The acting, the cinematography, and frankly the script all conspire to make you think you’re watching the leadup to a porno. It feels like it’s already uploaded to Everything is Terrible.

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ What Dystopia?

• There have been a few posts recently about the state of the Free Software movement.

• I was a member of the FSF for quite a few years, but gave back my badge and hung up my coat—because I think we’re pretty much done. The big battles are over, and freedom won.

• As a child I grew up in Microsoft land—first DOS, then Windows 3, 95, 98. Then I discovered Linux, and that I had been using junk: cheap consumer products aimed at control, when there was a world of high quality software for the sake of software that had been denied to me. I was deeply unhappy about this.

• The battles, then: that you had to buy a computer with a Microsoft operating system; that you had to use closed source software, and pay money for it; and that you had to trade files in proprietary formats that required that for-pay software. Oh, and you had to use Internet Explorer to browse the web, because so many pages were made specifically for it.

• [...]

• The are new problems that we didn’t have twenty years ago: the rise of social media, the dominance of algorithm-optimized information feeds.

=> ↺ 1 Bit Lifestyle, Beepberry, Playdate, Watchy

• I am slowly descending into madness…or actually color is being drained from my computing devices. Ok, maybe both of these things can be true. In addition to the monochrome (though it’s 4-bit grayscale not 1-bit :-P) PDA I use everyday I should soon* finally have my Playdate handheld that uses a 1-bit monochrome sharp memory lcd. But that’s not all. A few weeks back SQFMI, the folks behind the Watchy epaper smartwatch (yes I have one of these), unveiled a really neat little pocket computer called the Beepberry that uses the same sharp memory lcd. You can probably guess whether I ordered one. Yes, yes I did.

=> ↺ To anyone who’s followed me from elsewhere

• So I recently made a post on my Tumblr that since I won’t be using it anymore, you can find updates on my life and coding progress on here. If anyone is from there, I’ll reiterate that it won’t be Tumblr content and that’s kind of the point, so I’m not expecting many people will keep up with this. I think I’ll add a curious cat link so people can send me messages if they want, but the intention is definitely to not be doing what I was on Tumblr. You can subscribe to my RSS feed or bookmark my blog if you like, but I don’t know if many people will, so if I get no engagement that’s perfectly fine. I’m doing this for me.

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Cool Capsule Of The Week

• Each week, I will decide on a cool Gemini capsule to focus on, and write a short article about what makes it cool. This is basically the Gemini version of the early Web’s Cool Site Of The Day.

Programming

=> ↺ activity pub

• I’ve done a lot of changes to my code. Can’t remember them all. Actually ran into the request verification recursively causing more verification requests problem. It was my server actor requesting its own public key from itself because it didn’t bother to recognize itself and short circuit the logic. I disabled signature verification for now.

=> ↺ Webdev seemed so easy, but now it seems so hard…

• Just last week, it seemed like all I was going to need was a webserver and something to run TypeScript, now there’s all this stuff about tech stacks and databases and endless tools to run frameworks to manage tools for running frameworks, then I’ve gotta figure out how to deploy all of it…

• It seems like full-stack web development is a lot harder than it probably should be. I’m starting to understand why out of the 4ish billion people on the internet, there are only a few thousand developers actively making cool things on the net.

=> ↺ Sublime Text snippets

• Unfortunately, each snippet must be placed in its own separate file. If multiple snippets are in the same file, only the first one will work.

=> ↺ Rogue

• rogue, or at least the oldest version I could find at the time on the Internet, did not compile on modern systems.

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