"Use the Best Tools You Have for the Current Environment"

The title a quote that's stuck in my head for some unknowable amount of years. At least a dozen. Probably fifteen. Maybe more?

The context being, when I was a junior developer at my first job after university, I remember talking with one of the architects, a nice and smart guy who shared a few interests with me (primarily, roguelikes, and specifically nethack). I remember talking to him about doing some compilation on Windows and getting cygwin going there, and he sort of shook his head, and said, just use Visual Studio: use gcc for Linux, Visual Studio on Windows, but always use the best tools available for whatever environment you're in.

I think about that quote a lot (he was right, by the way), and especially in the context of the web and gemini and gopher, all different technologies that nudge you towards different outcomes. For the web's original vision of an interconnected series of documents, the presentation of the document is just as important as the actual content of it. Whereas on gemini, as for gopher, it's just text and links, presentation being largely out of your control. If you use something like amfora or bombadillo, things look the way they did when I was browsing the web with Lynx in 1996. Use something like lagrange and it's noticeably nicer, but the display still isn't under the control of you, the page-writer.

And I think this is good, maybe even ideal! It works to create a space in which, freed of the distraction and endless possibilities of display, you can sit down and just worry about what it is you want to write. When I was journalling on the web decades ago, we were always fucking around with our sites, trying to make them deep and artistic, using cracked copies of Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop to mess with images just as much (or more) as we were doing the actual work of updating our journals. And I still keep a journal on a dusty corner of the web, but it's fairly minimal, design-wise. And crucially, the community I was a part of decades ago has of course long since vanished, swallowed up by social media as were were all trained to post, rather than write. Oops.

In dazlab's gemlog, they write,

Unlike Hans, I will not be leaving Gemspace behind. True to its founding principle, it can quite happily exist alongside the Web. A different space for different things.

Agreed. Geminispace is something different. Neither better nor worse, but different, and at least a space that by its own design pushes against the corporatization of the commons.

I will be making my statement by producing a very Web 1.0 HTTPS site that not only acts as a pointer to this space, but exists entirely on its own merit.

Mm, well, not me. I guess nothing can stop this capsule's information being proxied over HTTP(S), but I've never been actively interested in mirroring this gemlog over the web. What's the point? Most people aren't going to find it, anyway. Google has tragically stopped being useful for finding interesting things, having abandoned that in the last decade for being a way of finding things to buy. Thinking of that conversation with the architect, I find it a little weird to mirror Gemini content on the web. It looks wrong and "off" because you're not creating in a form meant for that medium. No, I'll keep writing here, publishing on antenna. It's quiet, but that's point. No tracking, no analytics, do I get visitors?, who cares. Just text and links, however lagrange gives it to me.