● 08.02.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 02/08/2023: Mostly Personal Gemlogs

Posted in News Roundup at 6:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Some of those passing by this gopher hole and unix_surrealists alike must already be aware that I adore this protocol. Plain text in itself is a powerful anti-distractor, when it comes to composing texts. All one needs is a blank terminal and some way of recording input.

• I imagine it’s as close to the USENET I so loved as I’ll likely ever see again.

• Much gratitude to idiomdrottning for helping me understand the preferred Gemini inline quoting style in order to avoid “hardwrapping” issues I’ve likely been causing others.

• Fun day! Lunch out, a hunt for fresh veggies and eggs, brief casino visit, dinner out, sipping some “apple brandy” on ice.

• Hello barkeep, can I get a gin and tonic? Thanks. It’ll be my first time having a stroll inside the pub after many a months of lurking.

• One of the most interesting thing I read about as a teen was an article on how human memory can be very unreliable about specifics; that sometimes our brain just makes stuff up that never happened. This I found absurd. I reasoned with myself that there’s no way This could be true in the case of anyone except perhaps the elderly. Still, to test it out I wrote down a few entries in a journal and forgot about it until earlier this year nearly 9 years later.

• I have an old French car that I no longer drive, slowly abandoned and partially in ruins. At the weekend I got a puncture repaired so it has 4 good tyres.

• Looks like the middle school across the street is slowly coming to life as the new school year approaches – an additional car or two in the employee parking lot each visit of ours this way.

• Lousy sleep experience last night, entirely due to my should-know-better stupidity. Got maybe four broken up hours total. That ain’t enough for someone whose birth predated the Beatles’ arrival in America.

• It was part staying up too late, part drinking too much alcohol (which slowly seems to be coming to mean “at all”), part sorely needed coffee (to avoid the neck ache addiction response) too late in the day, and part not being able to flush The Police’s “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” from mind.

• If you sometimes wonder whether life is a simulation, I recommend the short story “They” by Heinlein.

• First article and I’m ready to ramble on human nature. I can’t decide between Rousseau and Hobbes, are people intrinsically good or evil? Despite my overall mostly pessimistic outlook, I can’t let go of the hope that seemingly random chance that people would do good. I think enough people have been asking themselves that question since the dawn of time, so I doubt I could come up with a satifying enough answer by myself.

• However, what I’ve noticed is that people often seem to take the path of least resistance when they don’t have a significant enough reason to do otherwise. Since I don’t have the opportunity, nor the desire, to throw people into life and death situations to see how they react, I usually limit my observation to the little things – everyday occurrences. What I’ve noticed is that people aren’t really nice to each other, or phrased differently: the path of least resistence rarely leads to good.

• I have quite a few things to write about, and photos to upload, but I haven’t had that time to do it lately. Mostly the only free time I have right now is during my lunch break. But the weather has been too beautiful lately for me to want to stay inside and write, so instead I continue to go on walks and collect photos. But I can’t go outside today, so here are a few photos from the collection.

• It’s past 2 A.M. A young wanderer stands at the entrance, hesitate to come in. Exhausted from the vibrant journey, they seek quiet routes to recharge. And something to drink. This place seems like a weird detour, and they already forget who point them here.

Politics and World Events

• In the following essay, first published in Woodbine’s new print-only journal, **The Reservoir**, Adrian Wohlleben argues that we ought to make room for a third sense of the term “autonomy.” Whereas its two traditional meanings refer variously to material independence or self-legislation, what Wohlleben calls “strategic autonomy” is only thinkable from within a dynamic of active and ongoing struggle. As the author puts it, what is in question is “the capacity to break the frame of a conflict while fighting it, to change the problem around which the intelligibility of the clash depends, and thereby to seize the initiative.”

• In his commentary on the cruel repression of Italian anarchist Alfredo Cospito, Giorgio Agamben argued that anarchy “is first and foremost the radical disavowal not so much of the state or simply of administration, but rather of power’s claim to make the state and administration coincide in the government of men.” How does this coincidence of two poles within a single machine function, and why is it so essential to the operation of power? What does it mean to say that the state of exception under which we live today is “not only anomic but also anarchic”?

• The following text, first published in four installments on the **Quodlibet** website in March 2023, traces the binary machine of Western politics from Aristotle to the present day, passing through St. Thomas Aquinas, Napoleon, and Carl Schmitt, among others. In it, the philosopher highlights the relation between the anarchy of power and its everyday operation in the form of laws, constitutions, and governments. “The time has come,” he argues, “to ask whether the fractured political machine of the West has not reached a threshold in recent years beyond which it can no longer function.”

Games

• I want to talk about how I like to communicate maps to players. I try to do this as a referee, and I would like the referees I play with to do the same. Sometimes I’m trying to map and it’s not possible because they’re skipping essential details, or deferring essential details, or losing time talking about non-essential details. So this is what I want to talk about: what I think are essential details, what I think is the best order to mention them, and what to skip and why.

Technology and Free Software

• Recently I started running an Arden Vul campaign. You know the one: 1122 pages of PDF + maps. For my Stonehell game, I let players map and they’re using Gridmapper, at the moment. I need to be precise when communicating the dungeon map to players and they need to draw it correctly. Sometimes there are questions and there is some back and forth. And I start wondering. Should I switch and do the “slow reveal of the published map”?

• All I know is that I don’t want to use a resource intensive web app to do it. When I start Discord, Roll20 or Jitsi, my laptop’s fans start going crazy and the thing gets hot. I don’t like that. So if I can get around Roll20, I’ll try it.

• Over the last months I developed the features that was necessary from a freelancer perspective. Last developments concern bill style customization, brand logos URLs, and minor workflow simplification.

• The installation and update workflows are spotless, and I wrote a documentation companion website to help newcomers. The first stable versions had been released, the test coverage please me and will help me for a long time maintenance, the database migration process is simple.

• Just a few minutes ago, my fried sent me an encrypted ZIP file and says “This ZIP file contains some artwork, but the password is distributed in a past, live event. And it’s the birthday of the artist. 8 digits. Can you crack it?” Apprantly he can’t find the password. “Sure” I said. I’ve learned in my cryptography and security class that 8 digit passwords are really easy to crack. Worst case I can iterate through all the possible combinations with BASH within a day. But I’ve heard this John the Ripper thing is really good at cracking passwords. So I decided to give it a try.

• I dumped the hash with `zip2john file.zip > password.hash` and started cracking it with `john password.hash`. Firs I saw john decided to use the CPU only and to myself said, well I’ll have to go to bed and see what happens tomorrow.

• The last job I worked at, I did some web development. It wasn’t my choice. I got re-org’d away from my previous team, lead a web team where a lot of my responsibilities were webapp development. Older stuff (Java and Struts), newer stuff (React, node.js), plus traditional stuff – HTML, CSS, JavaScript. I administered servers, worked with our automation, learned the ins and outs of a CMS that is, to be polite, not exactly in a Gartner Magic Quadrant.

Internet/Gemini

• I’m not dead, I’m just suddenly really fucking busy.

• I have a long-form post about AI menu planners in the works, but school has to take precedence at the moment.

• Lately I’ve been updating the gwit specification to fix several issues that have surfaced during private mail exchanges and discussions with people who I consider relevant in the fields of Gemini and decentralized publishing. First, I want to thank each of them for their help and the time and effort that they have devoted to this, and for their very valuable input! 🖖 Also note that the “gwit-spec” mailing list is always open for further public discussion.

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