<?xml version="1.0"?><rss version="2.0"><channel>
<title>gopher.black</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/</link>
<description>Tomasino's Gopher Hole</description>
<item>
<title>Circumlunar Updates</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20241003-circumlunar-updates/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 03 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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circumlunar updates
October 03rd, 2024
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I fixed solderpunk's circumlunar address a little while back
because I noticed the top level domain info wasn't updating
anymore, but the zaibatsu side was. Today dokuja pointed out the
same thing was happening to him. So I just went through and
updated all the phlogs that were at circumlunar.space to now be at
zaibatsu.circumlunar.space, and lo! so many updates. Enjoy!
moku-pona
gopher://gopher.black/1/moku-pona
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>Roophloch 2024</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240921-roophloch-2024/</link>
<pubdate>Sat, 21 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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ROOPHLOCH 2024
September 21st, 2024
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It's ROOPHLOCH time, right? I'm pretty sure that's in september.
Well, I hope so, cause this is a ROOPHLOCH post!
I recently bought a cabin [0] and this weekend is the first the
family is spending in it. My wife is up on the mountain behind us
right now exploring some of the sheep trails that lead through the
saddle. We hear there's a rumor of a mountain lake back there.
Below me sits the valley lake and river. Off in the far distance
to the south is Esja, the largest mountain in the capital region
here in Iceland.
[0] we bought a cabin
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240829-we-bought-a-cabin
I'm on mobile internet here. I think that, together with the
remoteness of the place warrants a ROOPHLOCH post. We have
electricity and clean water utilities, but I also have a cistern
fed by the mountain creek that runs through the property which is
used to handle all the outside water needs: garden, mostly.
It's a super cozy place, and very quiet. I took an 8 second
exposure photo last night of the valley and still saw nothing but
darkness. It gets proper dark here, which is going to be excellent
for aurora viewing. It's also really great and inspiring for
writing. The remoteness gives a quietude that lets the mind race
with ideas. I'm going to put it some effort on the Solarpunk
Prompts podcast [1] in a little bit.
[1] Solarpunk Prompts
https://podcast.tomasino.org
That series is coming to a close soon. I've got 7 or 8 more
prompts lined up to write about and then record, and then I'll
close it down as complete. But I'm not done talking about
Solarpunk. I want to do something new on the subject. Maybe
a discussion piece where I can interview people. Ideas are still
percolating. I think the place I can be most helpful to the cause
is in awareness, so interviews that amplify the voices of people
making Solarpunk a reality today would be the best. But ideas are
cheap. It's the doing that's hard. So lets see if I actually get
this one off the ground.
I think my track record for "getting stuff done" is pretty good.
I'm not perfect at it. I had a zine idea that never really got
anywhere, after all. But cosmic still exists, and tilde black had
a good run. The podcast is real, and CYOA ran until a legal
take-down. That's all in my favor. Sometimes I feel like I'm not
really doing anything, though. I guess it's that whole comparison
as the death of joy thingy. We can't all stand up in the face of
cat's creations. :)
Oh, non-sequitor: do you all know a good way to cut down on flies?
The cabin has a lot of water sources nearby and a pretty large
amount of native plants surrounding. The sunroom attracts flies
and they eventually make their way inside. It's not at problem
levels, but I'd like to minimize it. The former owner has a bug
zapper and some fly paper out there, but I'm not sure if that
helps or just attracts more. Isn't there something you can pour
into stagnant water? or is that for mosquitos? We don't have those
here (yay). Anyway, advice welcome.
That's it for now. I'm gonna go use this fancy-ass espresso maker
that came with the place and make a cappucino and sit on the deck
with my Dashiell Hammett book. Enjoy, gophs.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>We Bought A Cabin</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240829-we-bought-a-cabin/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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We bought a cabin
August 29th, 2024
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Hey! I bought a cabin. Well, it finalizes in a week or two. But
it's just about ours!
It's 40 minutes to my north, in a mountain valley well away from
any city lights. It's called a summer cabin here in Iceland, but
the name is a misnomer. It's accessible year round and commonly
used in winter. This one has 3 bedrooms, sleeps 6 comfortably, has
a big deck, play house for a kiddo, sand pit, yard, garden, and
all the comfortable utilities of home.
I can't wait to have TTRPG getaway weekends with my gaming group!
We're also going to rent it out a bit, but not a ton. The fees
aren't very high to keep it up, but we want to make the place make
enough income so it's self sufficient.
More to come!
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>Wegovy</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240604-wegovy/</link>
<pubdate>Tue, 04 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Wegovy
June 04th, 2024
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I reached my heaviest weight ever last month and it coincided with
some health stuff that led me to a cardiologist. I'm going to
a follow-up today, in fact. Good news is that I'm not in danger
right now. Bad news is I have heart disease. I've got a family
history of it, and I'm overweight with borderline pre-diabetes,
high blood pressure, and low fitness level. All not great.
I've got some things in the works, though. I bought a desk
treadmill about a month back and that's been really good for
stepping me up in activity instead of sitting all day. My
cardiologist prescribed me regular swimming as well. And finally,
thanks to some info from a friend, I started Wegovy.
It's one of those weight loss drugs, like Ozempic, but indicated
specifically for weight loss, not diabetes. I'm in my fourth week
now and I've been shedding weight steadily. The first week was
awkward with some GI issues. It was so easy for my habits to have
me overeat and then wretch. I've adapted well and will step up in
dose size next week.
So far so good. I've a long way to go, but shedding the weight
will also help me as I increase my activity level again. Wish me
luck.
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>Shitposting</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240522-shitposting/</link>
<pubdate>Wed, 22 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Shitposting
May 22nd, 2024
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Don't forget to wet your dries, then dry your wets. That's the
secret.
</pre>]]></description>
</item>
<item>
<title>Birthdays</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240425-birthdays/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 25 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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birthdays
April 25th, 2024
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Today is my wife's birthday. We're heading into the city to find
tacos, some vinyl, and see some art installations for Design
March. Is Design March[0] a thing in other places? I'm really not
sure if it's a local-only or if it's world-wide. It's pretty neat:
art installations in March all over the city. Except it's April,
almost May, but they didn't change the name. No idea why.
[0] Design March
https://visitreykjavik.is/see-and-do/reykjavik-festival-city/design-march
My friends Lejla and Natalia built an installation called
InStability[1] which is about the earthquakes and detection systems
in the Reykjanes penninusla where we live. The piece is a giant
tactile map of the penninsula. You can touch the land anywhere
with your finger to create an earthquake there. As you do so
you'll see all of the earthquake detection sensors around the
country light up as your shockwaves move across the surface. It's
really cool and immersive, and I got to help a little bit!
[1] InStability
https://www.honnunarmidstod.is/en/honnunarmars/dagskra/2024/o-stodugleiki-reykjanes-rumskar-102
Assembly required a lot of textile work, and I'm apparently the
local sewer. Over the course of a few nights we stitched a lot of
capacitive and pressure-sensitive fabrics together in patches.
I can't wait to see the final product on display later today.
Today is also the first day of summer in Iceland, so it's a school
holiday. We'll go see some parades and there will probably be
pop-up concerts. I have a holiday vacation day today, so it's
going to be Fun Family Time™.
Here we go!
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>The Endless Sick</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240325-the-endless-sick/</link>
<pubdate>Mon, 25 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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The endless sick
March 25th, 2024
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Ugh, I'm so tired of being sick. I took a trip to the US for
a weekend and brought back the flu. It raged for a few days and
then settled into my lungs. Now it's nearly a month later and I'm
still working up all the crap inside me.
Cough Cough Cough
I felt like an extra big dummy on Wednesday, though. I was talking
to someone about the shakuhachi [0] and I sent them a link to some
practice I had recorded a couple years ago [1]. The name of the
recording was Breathing Exercises 2. And that's when it hit me!
I used shakuhachi practice to strengthen my lungs and recover
after covid. Why haven't I been doing it after this stupid flu?
Complete idiot, this guy right here.
[0] shakuhachi
gopher://gopher.black/1/explorations/shakuhachi
[1] Breathing Exercises 2
https://soundcloud.com/jamestomasino/breathing-exercises-2
Well, I've been good about putting in practice every day since
then and while I'm still coughing my chest has started feeling
more in control. The amount of phlegm I'm working up in
increasing. Hopefully I'll feel good again in time for whatever
next trip I need to take so I can get sick again.
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>Home Alone</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240216-home-alone/</link>
<pubdate>Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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Home Alone
February 16th, 2024
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My wife and son are off to visit my mother-in-law in the states.
I am home alone for the next week. It's been so long since I've
been solo, I wonder if I'll forget how to do it.
I started by making the environment feel more like my choice. I've
pulled all the blinds closed and turned off all the lights. It's
dark and cozy. I won't keep it this way, but for tonight we're
going full hermit mode.
I think I'll cook something slow, maybe with lentils. Something
stew-like, warm, cozy. And in a few I'm going to put on a movie on
my projector. And then another. And maybe another.
Cozy-hermit-solo-mode Activate!
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>New Hire</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240208-new-hire/</link>
<pubdate>Thu, 08 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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new hire
February 08th, 2024
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This week I hired a second guy for my team. The company is now
about 30 full time employees so it was time to have a second
person in the tech department. I got really lucky. I've got some
really awesome guys that help us out with contract work but
they're happy with that setup. They have full time gigs that leave
them some room to dabble, so freelance brings in a sweet bonus. If
they came on full time they'd be eating their own bonus money. No
me gusta.
Lucky for me I got a note from a fabulous person I used to work
with way back when I lived in Atlanta. He was stuck between jobs
and struggling and was looking for some contract help. I was more
than happy to do that. Once we started working together I realized
he was looking for a full time position still, had a fantastic set
of skills that could help us, and I already knew he was grade-A
awesome. We worked the numbers and stars aligned and he started
full time with us this past Monday.
Already it's been wonderful and he's still just beginning to come
up to speed on all the various ins and outs of our architecture
for all our different clients. He's inquisitive and approachable
and all the rest of the company is excited to work with him. I'm
overjoyed.
We last worked together in 2008. Now we're on the team again after
all this time. I guess if there's a lesson to share with you all
about this it's that you should strive to always be awesome
humans. Maybe it'll land you a job 16 years later!
</pre>]]></description>
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<item>
<title>Re The State Of Gopher</title>
<link>gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240205-re-the-state-of-gopher/</link>
<pubdate>Mon, 05 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000</pubdate>
<description><![CDATA[<pre>
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re: The state of gopher
February 05th, 2024
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IanJ of gopher.icu wrote a quick rant on things that bother him
about the current state of gopher[0]. In short, line length,
misuse of type i, and escape codes for things like color
deccoration. We run into this sort of gopher purism a lot in the
bitreich community. It's not new, and it's also a perfectly fine
opinion. I just don't share it.
[0] The state of gopher
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/The-state-of-gopher.md
Lets talk about the three mentioned things in turn:
First: Lines should be 70 charactes or fewer.
This is indeed in the spec, and it was the impetus for my choosing
sixty-seven as the line length I use here on gopher.black. But in
general a line length of 80 or fewer characters won't cause
problems for anyone on a desktop and a line length of 67 is still
far too wide to be useful on mobile. So what are we to do?
Some people forgo wrapping at all, assuming clients are capable of
wrapping if they're sosphisticated. Others pick a comfortable
middle-ground (often 80) and stick with it half out of convenience
and half because it's good enough. Still others who use gopher on
mobile choose to go crazy and use very narrow posts that fit those
screens.
To the spec it's wrong, but the spec doesn't have feelings. The
spec doesn't use gopher. If someone is on their phone and very
narrow lines make their use case better then that's absolutely the
right call. At the end of the day it just isn't very important.
Second: misuse of type-i
From a historical perspective type i wasn't even in the spec, but
it was already in widespread use in gopherspace within the first
year of its launch. Clients adjusted, use adjusted. RFC-1436[1]
never learned to time travel, though, and remains sadly silent on
the topic.
[1] RFC-1436
gopher://gopher.black/0/archive/rfc/1436.txt
Why use type i gophermaps for things like this phlog? It makes it
easy to link to things, like the RFC above. I could drop in
a gopher URL instead, but wait... those didn't exist when RFC-1436
came out either. So should I instead list a selector, server, and
port? Oh, I better indicate a type as well. No, that's silly. Even
though the URL scheme came later it's a useful convention. It
makes it easier for other people. See where I'm going?
So why NOT use type i in this way? Well, two reasons. First, it's
harder to lay out. Working in gophermaps is nasty business.
I wrote a tool[2] to do it for me. Without that I wouldn't do it.
It's easy to screw up and awful to edit later. Easier just to
write plain text, and plain text is sufficient.
[2] Burrow
https://github.com/jamestomasino/burrow
And the second reason? Very old clients like the original UMN
gopher client don't work well with them.
Thankfully very few people use that client anynmore because it's
pretty janky and has barely been maintained. Last I heard it was
in search of a new maintainer, actually. And these days we have
a wealth of new clients that are simply fantastic. We have the
near-ubiquitous lynx which does a fair job, though notably is
converting to HTML under the hood. But the bitreich community
mentioned earlier has led to the creation of at least two gopher
clients I know of that match that gopher purist philosophy. We
also have VF-1, a lovely python client that inspired a fork for
offline browsing of the whole small internet, and another fork for
gemini. Bombadillo is fun, and there's my most recent favorite,
phetch. Lots of options all with better features and better
handling of gopherspace.
For me, the benifits of being able to link within the documents
outweighs the negatives. The format is subverted with my tooling,
and I don't feel the need to lower my gopher content to an ancient
client when there's so many easy alternatives available.
Third: escape codes
Here's I'll agree partially. gopherspace shouldn't assume terminal
environments. Remember the phone users earlier? Generally speaking
it's safer not to do so. But that being said, some places in
gopher space are not just gopher holes. They're not just phlogs.
They are art installations. They are pushing the boundaries of
what's possible and what's decent because that's what art does.
I am of course thinking primarily of cat's baud.baby[3] here, but
there are some other gems around as well. They blow my mind when
I see what can be created in this long forgotten corner of the
internet.
[3] baud.baby
gopher://baud.baby/1/
But it's only visible in certain ways! Yeah, that's true. You
might stumble on there and go, "AHH! What a mess!" and miss out on
the awesome. That'd be too bad. If that's the case you should grab
phetch and try again. It's worth it. Maybe not for all of gopher,
but for this particular thing. Keep doing what you're doing, cat.
Gopher is a pretty cool thing. It's got limits that make it
awesome because it forces us to focus on content most of the time.
Those limits aren't the point, though. The place it leads us to
are the point. If we disagree on some of the details getting
there, so be it. After all, this is in UTF-8, not Latin-1 as the
spec calls for which lets me do some great things, like share
music for the shakuhachi[4].
[4] Shakuhachi Music Guide
gopher://gopher.black/1/explorations/shakuhachi
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