● 09.17.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Gemini Links 17/09/2023: PineTime Six Months Later and Sympathy for the Copyright Devil

Posted in News Roundup at 10:37 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal/Opinions

• Ten days till my first full-time faculty term starts.

• I’m not going to lie I’m scared shitless that I’m going to fuck all of this up.

• I mean that’s a normal feeling, right, when you’ve got a new job that’s potentially a Big Career, right?

• Like I can get tenure in just a couple of years if I’m not terribly bad at my job, at which point I’m going to have stability for the first time, well, ever.

• Tastes of fall: orange custardy persimmons, sweet slick muscadine grapes plucked from among pine needles where they fell in the Georgia hills, rich meaty pecans from my aunt’s house in the North Carolina piedmont. Soon persimmons will fall here, too, in Kentucky.

• Sound of fall: rain that fell in puffs of cool in Georgia, rain falling steady outside my window.

• Turkeys are getting bigger and bolder. On a social ride last week I spotted four of them by the unfinished bypass road, still used only by bicycles. I thought they were deer in tall grass til we got closer.

Games

• Often we see rules-light RPGs (like Fudge, Risus, the Window, Everway, or Cthulhu Dark) coupled with an improv-heavy, “hold your ideas loosely”, “build on your players ideas” super quantum-y GMing style.

• Most people say CYOA when they mean gamebook. Some say solo adventures (hello fans of Tunnels & Trolls). Swedes call them soloäventyr. Numbered sections that you read and then follow references to other sections. A game in the shape of a book. If they are digital only they are often referred to as choice-based interactive fiction (hello Twine fans) and usually do away with the section numbers.

• I didn’t know there was a remake, so thank you for both the posts on the original and for letting us know about the new one.

• I never got very far in these games (I’m like three floors into a game inspired by it, The Dark Spire, but my DS is broken) but they’ve had a huge impact on tabletop RPGs.

• D&D 5e’s spell casting system goes away from the Dying Earth “vancian” mechanics and instead uses a system 100 isomorphic with Wizardry’s spell points, confusingly renamed “spell slots”. Maybe the exact distribution of slots per level is changed but it’s the same mechanic where the different point levels aren’t exactly interchangable—wizards can’t use two level 1 slots to make one level 2 slot.

The States

• I am now back in The States, for the first time in three years. It is currently 42 minutes past 1 in the morning and I woke up a little over an hour ago. I see lights slowing blinking on top of the tall buildings in the distance, and the city is silent.

• The flight was very unpleasant, for reasons I will explain another time.

Technology and Free Software

• Figured I’d write a quick update about my PineTime since I still refer people to my older posts about it and there are some things that have changed since then.

• [...]

• At first I was worried that getting phone notifications on my wrist would be a distraction, but over time I’ve actually noticed that it helps me get distracted by my phone less often. A quick glance at my wrist is all it takes to see if a notification is worth unlocking my phone for. When it isn’t, it saves me a phone unlock and the potential to get distracted by something I see on it.

• [...]

• I’ve been wearing my PineTime every day since I got it over six months ago. It’s a really neat gadget that’s frankly a steal at the price it’s sold at. The fact that it’s open source and so easy to tinker on is just a cherry on top.

• Someone replied railing against the movement (or “brigade”) of artists opposed to ML art, as if they were the only problem, ignoring both the two problems I had just brought up, so I elaborated and it got a li’l long:

• As a writer and painter, I’ve long been opposed to copyright and have been releasing stuff under Creative Commons licenses for over a decade. So don’t misinterpret me as agreeing with the brigade.

• Livelyhood for artists is important but so is a livelyhood for everyone, and I’ve been arguing against the flawed “copyright is good for artists” position for decades—we’ve been having this exact same fight against copyright since Napster or even the cassette era. Gates’ infamous “Open letter to hobbyists” was in 1976, and that hasn’t changed.

• Want to quickly document how I got my PineTab 2 to play 1080p videos smooth(-ish) with hardware acceleration.

• With the defaul DanctNIX image, it was quite easy. Simply install `mpv` and ` ffmpeg-v4l2-request-git` from the AUR. Then, pass pass `–hwdec=drm` to `mpv` and you’re good to go. This will replace replace the system’s `ffmpeg` with your custom build. If you run into ABI issues (random crashes), you can try building MPV from source.

Programming

• Typically, I develop on a feature branch, and when the feature is ready, there is an obvious branch into which I want to merge the branch. This branch is often called `master’,`main’ or `develop’. During development, I will occasionally rebase my feature branch on top of this branch, to reduce future merge conflicts, and to avoid falling behind on changes merged by other developers. I will call this branch the default branch from here on.

• To make common operations consistent across repositories, I want to use a `git default-branch’ command that returns the name of the default branch, so that I can use commands like

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