● 07.24.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 24/07/2023: Goodbyes to the Web

Posted in News Roundup at 12:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• I only have vague memories of Mega Man… Mega Man *anything* (X, Zero, one, forty-two etc.). I admit I never played through any of them, but I must have played one or two levels on friends’ consoles in the 1990′s. Apparently this means I’m not the best to judge Gravity Circuit for its roots… I am probably similarly familiar with 2 other games that Gravity Circuit reminds me of – Shovel Knight (I think of it when using downwards attacks with Kai) and Steel Assault (surprised I haven’t heard more mention of the similarities with this recent title).

• As of the time of writing, I have played through the initial stage, and then the one with the steel factory or whatever the one is where you can hop in something like a mech… And I’m definitely planning to play more! I’m not very good at it – I play on Easy and I still die pretty often. Part of it is the controls for me. Maybe I’m slower at internalizing control schemes than I was in my teens, now that those are a couple of decades behind me.

• Heavy rain this morning, the trip to the lake postponed. Instead we watched the Blue Jays squeak past the Mariners, then headed to our friends’ place for supper. Pasta for the main course, chocolate peanut butter pie for dessert (I told you she was a good baker).

• In the reclaimed time this afternoon we gave one of the dogs a bath and I spent a few hours hacking on my forever project. I’ve put well over a thousand hours into it, over the years. Probably several multiples of that. I give it away on my website, offer it for free (with optional donation) on itch. I’ve made a few hundred bucks in a few years. Enough to cover my domain and hosting, break even, and that’s enough.

Technology and Free Software

• Hello there! I’m a decade Linux veteran here to spread some information about the scene.

Internet/Gemini

• The title is a bit melodramatic, I know. I can’t realistically abandon the web since I work in web technologies, and a lot of the stuff I have to do day-to-day requires the web. I guess I just feel tired. Something about the recent collapse of Twitter and the subsequent clamour of wannabe replacements has soured me to the “web” and the impossibility of wresting it away from greedy hands.

• The web was (at one point) an exciting place to me. Lots of interesting people writing about the things that fascinated them for no other reason than they wanted to write about it. They could potentially find a new community of people who share their passion, but equally they may be shouting into the void alone. It didn’t matter. People just wrote and drew and shared.

• D Moonfire is organized in such a way that you can actually explore it. Its index isn’t a large list of everything on the capsule. Instead, it has links to some recent gemlog posts, short excerpts describing some locations with links scattered throughout, and a footer that appears on every page with links to even more locations. Because of this, it can be easy to lose your bearing after exploring and not know whether you’re reading the end of a random page, Dylan Moonfire’s gemlog, his biography, or the index. Surprisingly, this isn’t really a problem because you can always just go the the parent directory, the capsule index, or use one of the links in the footer to get around.

• Oh wow, Gemini just got an order of magnitude better for me:

• Doctor Who Zone

• It was on the order of something like three decades ago that I started plowing through Doctor Who, a journey lasting through the first seven Doctors. Much of it was on good ‘ole (public) broadcast TV, but I’m pretty sure I’ve some DVD’s laying around somewhere.

Programming

• Sometimes there is a need to run only one instance of a script. Additionally, one may want to know when the script last ran or if the script is running how long ago it started. Various implementations of this pattern have various problems: the lock could fail, allowing multiple instances to start, or a stale lock could prevent any instances from starting. Failures involve manual intervention, and there may be additional cleanup work depending on exactly what went awry. Another thing to worry about is a script simply not running because 02:30 AM on a particular Sunday does not exist, or exists twice—thanks, daylight saving time!

• As I’ve mentioned probably n+1 times too many, my beef with liberals began in the 1990s, when I started increasingly reading that “old white males” were the cause of all the world’s ills. I was quite liberal up to that point, complete with irregularly-scheduled vehement arguments with my birth family. I still remember how great I felt when Clinton/Gore announced balancing the budget. I also remember thinking Joe Biden was a vile asshole back then.

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.