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● 07.21.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 21/07/2023: Gemtexter 2.1.0 Released, Birth and Death of the Yesterweb

Posted in News Roundup at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

=> ↺ 🔤SpellBinding: APEFLMC Wordo: BUILD

Politics and World Events

=> ↺ Neoliberalism, Co-Production, and the Social Factory

• Understanding the problems around care requires us to look back and more nationally than just Maine. Many of the other elders I interviewed seemed to agree with Emma [pseudonym] about the importance of community and “care networks,” sharing a nostalgia for times when local communities and extended families cared for each other over and above both state welfare and corporate market consumption. 69-year-old Lucy (pseudonym), a core organizer in the Hour Exchange project and one of my interviewees, spoke to me about how “society used to work very much on this kind of basis of mutual aid but since modern capitalism and especially globalization, people are more isolated from one another.” Similarly, 64-year-old Peter (pseudonym), a long-time member of Hour Exchange I also interviewed, outlined how

Technology and Free Software

=> ↺ Automatically checking for new iris messages on ^C – 2023-07-21

• One of the unique features of ^C is iris, the message base written by calamitous. It’s relatively low-traffic, and while I could keep it open in interactive mode and issue the ‘f’ or ‘freshen’ command occasionally to check for new messages, I don’t want to.

=> ↺ Using AI to Generate Images for Articles

• Let’s start with the basics. You might be asking yourself “what is a meta image?”. It’s the image that shows up on LinkedIn, Facebook and other sites when you post a URL. It’s usually accompanied by the title and a summary of the website being posted. These images are defined in the code of a webpage using a “meta tag”. This might be an OpenGraph tag (Facebook) or a Twitter card tag.

=> ↺ can i say something mean?

• disclaimer upfront: i have no qualms with synthetic images themselves. quite the contrary lmao i’ve been interested on “ai art” for a couple years now. i’ve used a lot of digital ink on it. also physical ink and acrylic paint and stuff on my thesis. i am critical of several things, yes, but that’s just what art is like. not gonna go into it rn.

• anyway all this to say i don’t mean this as an attack or whatever it’s nothing personal i’m literally just being annoying online because i hate the ubiquity of useless stock images <3

• anyway i find meta images (and hero images and stock images within articles in general) fascinating. they’re so so useless but also not? what does a stock photo of a guy in a suit communicate? it’s just filler, a waste of everyone’s time and bandwidth. but also it communicates very well that you’re not really trying to say anything. like brightly colored poisonous animals. [1]

Internet/Gemini

=> ↺ Gemtexter 2.1.0 – Let’s Gemtext again³

• I proudly announce that I’ve released Gemtexter version 2.1.0. What is Gemtexter? It’s my minimalist static site generator for Gemini Gemtext, HTML and Markdown, written in GNU Bash.

=> ↺ The Birth and Death of the Yesterweb

• When I started out, I was looking for some HTML resources. I wanted to make a simple, clean site – pleasant colours, a little CSS to make things easier to read, that sort of thing. And around then, poking around neocities and seeing what Google would give me that wasn’t outright SEO bait or spam, I found sadness’ site.

• There’s a particular segment of people for whom personal webpages imply a particular aesthetic. Pixelated images, garish, dithering artifacts, that sort of thing. And sadness, the alias of a woman now in her thirties, seemed to be someone around to whom the adherents of this aesthetic flocked. Her site is retro, in a way that carefully hews to expectation. It has all the right accoutrements of a particular kind of 90s website: shrines, a webring, an About page, a chatbox. Themes. In a way, her site represents a distillation of the GeoCities aesthetic. And while there are a lot of aesthetics from that era (the unstyled, text-only academic web; the magazine layout-style web; the artsy, made-in-Paint Shop Pro web; the “Apple ][ green text/Tandy orange text” web; …), people always seem to come back to GeoCities. I mean, I get it. I had a page there, for a couple of years. But I never quite got the allure because the vast majority of GeoCities pages were kinda dreck, and I absolutely include my own in this.

Programming

=> ↺ Strings in Bash

• $ STR=”0123Linux9″ $ echo ${STR:4:5} Linux

=> ↺ Redefined

• Forth is a bit unusual in terms of word redefinition, which are something like subroutines in other languages. In most languages the previous definition is clobbered, and sometimes you’ll get a warning to that effect.

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