● 06.23.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 23/06/2023: Amiga Archaeology and How to Kill a Decentralised Network

Posted in News Roundup at 10:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• A sauce made from lemongrass leaves, ginger root, and a frozen chive flower, all crushed together, then covered with warmed sesame seed oil was pretty good. It probably needed either more lemongrass or an actual shallot, or maybe not to pre-heat the oil so the ginger would be sharper.

• Probably lemongrass makes for a good tea (or herbal infusion or vegetable soup, if you prefer) unless you’re allergic or otherwise cannot partake. It is probably not a morning tea.

• Somehow I find this LitRPG-but-it’s-about-sports-simulation weirdly compelling. Sort of in the same neighborhood as Jon Bois’ 17776/20020, but not at all the same genre or writing style. Maybe I just have a thing for “sports fiction” despite not being into sports IRL.

• It’s not perfect; the MC is written as being clumsy about stuff like gender and race and it seems like that’s on purpose, and yet he still manages to seduce every beautiful woman he encounters because this is a litRPG. Despite that flaw I still find the story engaging.

• For the first time since I started these monthly updates, I will do this for a two months periods since I’ve been pretty busy lately. Next week I’m traveling so I don’t want to defer more the update.

• [...]

• Things got more hectic by the end of the month with the collision of several things: me going to Madrid for an event (more later), having our apartment occupied for a few days by the installation of AC, and the delivery of the news on our first assignment for Bernat’s pre and primary school. That eventually was confirmed and now we know the school for Bernat until he’s 12! 🤯

• My partner seems to have developed an intolerance for gluten. She can still eat it, but feels bloated, gets headaches. So for shared meals, we do gluten free. For the two decades prior, I made homemade pancakes every Sunday. This recipe isn’t written down anywhere; it’s just in muscle memory. I’m writing it down here so I don’t forget.

Politics and World Events

• Let’s talk about exclusivity in leftist activist circles.

• i’ve been doing leftist activism for roughly three decades, but have had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for most of that, around 25 years. i’ve also been living with unrecognised / unacknowledged autism and adhd for most of my life, only getting diagnosed only a couple of years ago.

• Over the years, i’ve continued to try to do activist work where i could – often educational stuff, sometimes organisational and infrastructure stuff, but all too regularly dealing with things like transphobia, biphobia, whorephobia etc. from other leftists.

• Keep in mind that everything self indulges in is self-indulgent by definition, and the notion of self tends to be considered pathetic from points of view suggesting self is merely a conceptual blind spot obscuring a vast, ineffable underlying reality.

• [...]

• It’s liberalism gone fundamentalist, and it’s several orders of magnitude worse than what past liberals referred to as “born agains” (amongst other things) in the 1980s.

• For me, topspace involves an incredible feeling of power – a power constrained, yet one that could be overwhelming were it to be unleashed. It’s a power that comes from not only having a substantial amount of control, but also being very aware of that, and typically involves a sense of strength within a centred calm, rooted in knowing that one can dictate that things will be _thus_. More generally, it feels like being in ‘flow’[b], like being very present and “in the moment”.

• [...]

• For me, there are two aspects of topdrop: the sense of power and/or superiority draining away of its own accord, and actively working to ground oneself.

• Feeling the sense of power-over[c] drain away can feel depressing, to greater or lesser extents, due to a sense of loss. There might be an active internal resistance to letting this happen, for whatever reason, and this can in turn lead to the sort of social issues described above.

Technology and Free Software

• This toolstack works well enough in most cases. The Greaseweazle is normally connected to a small Linux computer I have in my workshop, and I have both a 3,5″ and 5,25″ drive connected to it. In the case of this Amiga disk-box I’m currently going through, I naturally only use the 3,5″ drive.

• HXC’s software is a bit clunky and I have to run it through wine since I don’t run Windows, but it’s what I’m used to from before. I have realized that I could probably replace it with the disk-utilities by keirf, since I mostly use it to analyze the disk and convert from scp to different formats.

• My initial commit to the repository that manages this capsule is dated 9/7/2020.

• Solderpunk says that Gemini dates back from 6/20/2019, assuming I’m subtracting by 4 properly.

• I came for the Calm™ and stayed for the low-friction publishing with a workflow that I’m used to (edit text file, git commit text file, upload text file somewhere, let automated backups do their thing when they get around to it).

• In which I discuss my thoughts on the Playdate console and the games I’ve played on it.

• [...]

• What is funny is for a month or two before I first heard about the Playdate, I was earnestly looking for a device that was more pocketable than my original model Game Boy Advance but was more capable and/or cheaper than however much GBA Micros are now. I had decided on getting a Miyoo Mini and was just waiting for them to get back in stock when someone on the Fediverse posted about the Playdate, and literally the instant I saw it I knew I had to get one.

• I haven’t posted in a long time here, this is actually the first entry of the 2023… woops!

• Truth to be told, there are various things I’d like to write about but not enough time, so I thought to copy the big guys and write a “Status Update” post myself. It’s more like sending a message in a bottle though.

• So, lots of stuff, right? Let’s go!

• [...]

• Last month I started to help in the OpenSMTPD-portable repository. It was starting to rot a bit, lagging behind what we have in base on OpenBSD and accumulating cruft.

Internet/Gemini

• A preface: I’m severely out of practice wrt writing. This feels kinda meandering, the ideas don’t seem to flow that well and I’m not even sure it makes that much sense. It’s also uncomfortably woe-is-me and humourless. So… sorry, I guess?

• Year is 2023. The whole Internet is under the control of the GAFAM empire. All? No. Because a few small villages are resisting the oppression. And some of those villages started to agregate, forming the “Fediverse”.

• With debates around Twitter and Reddit, the Fediverse started to gain fame and attention. People started to use it for real. The empire started to notice.

• As Peter Thiel, one of Facebook’s prominent investor, put it: “Competition is for losers.” Yep, those pseudo “market is always right” people don’t want a market when they are in it. They want a monopoly. Since its inception, Facebook have been very careful to kill every competition. The easiest way of doing it being by buying companies that could, one day, become competitors. Instagram, WhatsApp to name a few, were bought only because their product attracted users and could cast a shadow on Facebook.

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