No ROOPHLOCH, and my October Gothic Just a general status update. I didn’t manage to do ROOPHLOCH this year. Partly, I was busy, but a bigger part is maybe just that I didn’t have anything new to do. Post from my phone, post from a modern but obsolete computer tethered to my phone, post in a park, post in a nature reserve. It just feels like I’ve done the easy levels, but the next level up is unreachable for me.| jfm.carcosa.net
I am an over-educated and under-certified worker living in Columbia, South Carolina. My formal education is in anthropology and computer science. My informal education is a mile wide and an inch deep. I have worked mainly as a web application developer, and formerly as a Linux systems administrator. Most of my work experience has been in the public sector, particularly state government. I am currently employed, but if you are looking for a developer and think I might be a good fit, I have a r...| jfm.carcosa.net
This site is statically generated using Hugo, using a template that started as Black & Light, but has accumulated some changes. It is designed to push back against the current aesthetic of web design, while emphasizing good typography. As of late 2022, I have dropped the background image and switched to a native font stack to further reduce page size.| jfm.carcosa.net
Weather and things I am, as usual for me and ROOPHLOCH, sneaking things in at the end of the month. One reason has been that it has been too damn hot here! It doesn’t normally start cooling down for autumn here until October, but this year it has been especially bad. Temperatures in the mid 80s F, with heat indices in the 90s. We’ve finally started to have cool evenings and mornings as of last week, and now after the equinox, I had been hoping the days would start being tolerable.| jfm.carcosa.net
This list is necessarily incomplete, partly due to the complexity of modern HTTP and HTML, but it hits the high points. If you think there is something critical missing, please contact me by email.| jfm.carcosa.net
Today’s the last day to submit entries to ROOPHLOCH, the outdoor, off-grid Gopher logging event. I’ve submitted one the last two years, but I’m going to skip it this year. My main reason is that I want to move my Gopher hole to mirror my Gemini capsule rather than my website, but I haven’t got around to making that conversion. If I were going to post ROOPHLOCH this year, I’d rather it be on Gopher and Gemini rather than Gopher and the WWW.| jfm.carcosa.net
I’d like to announce a new website I’ve created, called Gemini Quickstart!. It’s a guide to getting started on Gemini for non-technical users with no experience with Gemini, Gopher, or other alternative internet protocols. It walks you through installing a Gemini client, finding things you’re interested in to read, and creating your own space in the Geminiverse. If you’re reading this, and you’re not on Gemini yet, check it out!| jfm.carcosa.net
As is the tradition, I am writing this blog outdoors, for Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH 2020 challenge. I’m in a picnic shelter at Dreher Island State Park, where my family has been camping for the last two days. As an offline exercise, this is not especially successful, because there is WiFi in the campground. In fact, that’s why we’re camping. With COVID-19 distancing measures in effect, I’m able to work remotely, and the kids are able to do school.| jfm.carcosa.net
After I decided to give KOReader another try, I knew that I needed some way of getting news articles onto my Kobo. The methods that KOReader supports are RSS feeds, Send2Ebook, and Wallabag. I investigated each of these methods at least briefly. I ruled out Send2Ebook because it involves the client app sending your documents to an FTP server, and I’m not willing to run an FTP server in the year 2019 CE.| jfm.carcosa.net
Protein pancakes are kind of a trend now, and you can buy pre-made mixes. It makes sense, because pancakes are a comforting breakfast food, but people want to have more protein in their diet, and fewer carbohydrates. This is my own recipe for making them from scratch. It is not low carb, but it should be a complete protein, since it includes a legume and a grain. The secret ingredient is chickpea flour, which you can buy at an Indian grocery store, where it is sold as “besan” or “gram f...| jfm.carcosa.net
Gray Area responded to my Kobo post, pointing out, among other things, that you can actually save settings application-wide in KOReader, and not only for a particular book. That motivated me to give it another try, mainly for the sake of better font rendering, and hypenation (the lack of hyphenation in Nickel drives me batty). So far, so good. I’ve got the defaults the way I want them now. I mitigated the issue of Calibre making it hard to browse books in KOReader by configuring Calibre to ...| jfm.carcosa.net
This is a recipe that’s actually 100% my own, though there’s nothing very original or creative about it. This is a soup that is optimized for being easy and fast to make, while still being filling and having a reasonable amount of protein. Ingredients 2 Tbs vegetable oil 1 large sweet onion, diced 2 carrots, quartered lengthwise and diced 8 cups vegetable stock (I use Not-Chick’n Bouillon Cubes). 3 cans different canned beans (e.| jfm.carcosa.net
Finished upgrading all of the computers in my home from Fedora 30 to Fedora 31 over the long weekend. It was pretty uneventful! My own laptop went smoothly, though slowly, because it has a mechanical hard drive. All of the packaged software upgraded correctly and with no intervention, including the stuff installed from RPMFusion. I had quite a bit of self-compiled stuff, mostly relating to sway, and some of that had to be re-linked.| jfm.carcosa.net
This little note is both a continuation of my ROOPHLOCH post, and a response to a pair of phlog entries: Ode to my Ebook Reader from Lambda Lab, and Bubbles and Baubles from Gray Area. Note: these are both on gopher; if your web browser does not support gopher, install the Overbite extension (Firefox or Chrome) or go to the Floodgap Gopher proxy and paste the URLs. Like both phloggers, I have a Kobo e-reader.| jfm.carcosa.net
I’m writing this blog outdoors, in accordance with the rules of Solderpunk’s ROOPHLOCH challenge. I’m also offline… there’s no Wifi here, and I have tethering turned off for my phone; I’ll turn it on for a minute when I’m done writing in order to publish it. I’m sitting in a park or greenway that may or may not be closed to the public. This sign blocking the stairs to the boardwalk suggests that it is, but the corresponding wheelchair ramp isn’t blocked.| jfm.carcosa.net
Some terminal-focused links I’ve been working in Cool-Retro-Term again, and craving a real green-screen glass tty, so here are some terminal-related links. jwz: export TERM=aaa-60 jwz tells a story about an interesting terminal and its even more interesting termcap file. The pictures and video in this article are what gave me terminal envy again this time. WiFi232 - An Internet Hayes Modem for your Retro Computer Of course, once you have your glass TTY, you need to be able to connect it to ...| jfm.carcosa.net
Haven’t linkblogged for months, and the little blogging I’ve done has mostly been about and on Gemini. Very busy summer. Here are a few recent links in no particular order, without much commentary. How Many Books does Richland SC Library Recycle, and Where Do They Go? I love my library, and you have to get rid of some books somehow in order as new books come in. But it’s disheartening to hear that the old books that no one buys at the annual Friends of the Library book sale probably end...| jfm.carcosa.net
Minor germinal update: link syntax So, the Gemini link syntax was finalized: Link Syntax Finalized The one place this affects Germinal is in the generation of directory indexes. Germinal’s directory indexing code has been updated accordingly. I have also updated the links on my Gemini site. Unless there are changes coming to the response header line format, this is probably the last Gemini change that actually affects Germinal. Pretty much everything else is client-side.| jfm.carcosa.net
Where next for brutaldon? Over the last couple of evenings and lunch breaks, I added basic polling support to brutaldon. You can view polls and vote in them, without needing JavaScript, though some support for the HTML5| jfm.carcosa.net
Germinal is a server for the Gemini Protocol that I’ve been writing in Common Lisp during my lunches and some evenings. It is named after the early 20th century Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper Germinal. I wanted to name it after an anarchist publication to convey the idea of people sharing information and ideas with each other, in contrast to the way the web is used to push advertising from corporations to people.| jfm.carcosa.net
Good netizen solderpunk has been writing about the design of a protocol that is slightly more complex than gopher, but significantly simpler than http; while at the same time being significantly more powerful than gopher. I have thoughts about this, as I’ve posted about before, and I’m interested in contributing to this project and the conversation around it. These are the main documents where they discuss it. If you only have time for one, read just the FAQ, but they are all worthwhile a...| jfm.carcosa.net
This is a recipe I got from somewhere online, but I’ve adapted it to my own preferences and general lack of willingness to measure ingredients, so now it’s mine. I make it a bit less than once a week, whenever we have black bean burritos. This is a very simple, minimalist guacamole, I think. If you’re quick at chopping vegetables, it only takes about 5-10 minutes to make. Ingredients 1 small sweet onion (Vidalia or Palmetto Sweet), minced.| jfm.carcosa.net
Since I’ve started reading gopher logs, I’ve noticed that a lot of people write very personal journals on their phlogs, where they are perhaps pseudonymous. I really want to write that kind of thing, but it wouldn’t work for me to have it on my blog or phlog. For one thing, my main online identities, like this blog, are tied to my public identity. And for another, I am a very private person.| jfm.carcosa.net
If you don’t have a gopher client handy, you can browse the gopherverse using the Floodgap Gopher-HTTP Gateway. It will proxy gopher pages to you over https, so you can read them in a browser that doesn’t support gopher. The OverbiteWX extension for Firefox uses it to handle gopher URLs. This is a very useful service, but the design is not very appealing to me. Gopher is supposed to be simple plain text, it’s true.| jfm.carcosa.net
Got quite a grab-bag of stuff this time. Been busy enough with life that what should be a simple evening habit one night a week has gone for…three weeks? I guess that’s not so bad. It’s long enough, though, that I can’t clearly remember all of the articles in my backlog. And there are too many topics to make a coherent theme. Let’s work through them, then. Music for this linkblog: Twin Black Lodges, a generative soundscape from mynoise.| jfm.carcosa.net
As part of the ongoing revitalization of gopher, there has been quite a bit of discussion about what, exactly, is good about gopher, and whether you can separate that from what’s bad about the world wide web. From another angle: are there good things about the web that we can import to alleviate gopher’s shortcomings? The discourse A recent thread of that conversation has been an exchange between ~solderpunk and ~enkiv2.| jfm.carcosa.net
Retro web, simple web, and alternatives to the web A simple gopher client for Gnome, written in Vala This is in early stages, but it works fine for most gopher sites. I would like to find time to help out with it. Shizaru, an opinionated web server This is a web server written in golang that attempts to “serve no evil” by imposing strong opinions on pages that it serves. The default opinions focus strongly on a “fast, safe, simple, clean, respectful” web.| jfm.carcosa.net
I had way too many links to share this week, and I had to cut it down a lot to be able to handle all of it. That said, here’s what’s left. Social Media We Built a Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground The author argues that the state of social media, especially of Twitter, where harassment is baked into the platform, are a result of white cis men building a platform for themselves and not really thinking about other users.| jfm.carcosa.net
Technology and adjacent politics Gadgets, Power, and the New Modes of Political Consciousness This article is a good antidote to the standard kind of moral panic article over mobile devices. It takes a Marxist perspective on devices, and how the dominant narrative about them treats people (device users) as isolated economic units. Memex(browser) This is the main page for the Memex browser, a browser engine that is being developed. Here’s what the developer has to say about it:| jfm.carcosa.net
Going to try to do this whole link blog entry from emacs. Normally I have a workflow that involves dragging links from Firefox into emacs, where, by a bit of emacs magic, they are automatically converted into Markdown links. But I’m trying to live in the terminal (with Cool Retro Term) this week, so I’m using pinboard-list.el to give me my list of links to share. Hopefully I’ll have a macro or something that is almost as easy as my drag-and-drop hack…| jfm.carcosa.net
Web A JavaScript-Free Frontend This has some neat tricks that I hadn’t thought of for doing “live” front-end without JavaScript. The checkbox/label trick is really cool, though it’s a little over-complicated for my taste, and besides, doesn’t degrade well in browsers that don’t support CSS. The fact that you can use it to build a modal dialog is crash, though. I’m using details/summary for subject/Content Warning in brutaldon. It degrades okay.| jfm.carcosa.net
Mercifully short today. A feminist’s guide to raising boys A lot of this rings true. The article mentions that little boys are different from little girls because even parents treat them differently, even when they don’t mean to. One thing it doesn’t mention is what they pick up from peers, even as toddlers and preschoolers. Medical benefits of dental floss unproven I feel vindicated. Nothing is a greater waste of time than the planned debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Žižek T...| jfm.carcosa.net
I didn’t accumulate as many links this week, because while I was sick with the flu, I felt too bad to read as much as usual. AI won’t relieve the misery of Facebook’s human moderators - The Verge It might allow Facebook to pay less for moderators, though… The Climate Change Paper So Depressing It’s Sending People to Therapy - VICE There will be no new normal. What “Knight Fight” Gets Dead Wrong about Medieval Men | The Public Medievalist I knew as soon as I saw the name “John ...| jfm.carcosa.net
Strap in, it’s a little depressing this time. Why US cities are becoming more dangerous for cyclists and pedestrians Mostly the answer is a good thing — more people are biking and walking. Unfortunately, that brings more people into danger, given that our cities are designed for cars, and not for people. Pee, not chlorine, causes red eyes from swimming pools: CDC | CBC News The article overstates it a little bit.| jfm.carcosa.net
Architecture Over the last five years or so, maybe a little bit more, downtown Columbia has been sprouting these student apartments everywhere there’s space for them and a lot of places there isn’t (displacing existing local businesses). One thing about them is that they all look alike – basically they’re long boxes, four or five stories tall, with various superficial architectural features that don’t really do anything to hide the fact that they’re long boxes.| jfm.carcosa.net
A properly short linkblog today! Web development Designing for the web ought to mean making HTML and CSS - Signal v. Noise One of a couple of recent articles that talks about how web design has turned into front-end development, which has turned into JavaScript development. The conclusion is good: Designing for the modern web in a way that pleases users with great, fast designs needn’t be this maze of impenetrable complexity.| jfm.carcosa.net
Got behind again, and have to drop a lot of things I was going to note here. Fewer is better. Web topics The Web is Made of Edge Cases by Taylor Hunt on CodePen Designers and front-end developers tend to treat web rendering as a pixel-perfect graphics runtime; it’s not. How to design website layouts for screen readers – freeCodeCamp.org Facebook pays teens to install VPN that spies on them | TechCrunch This is pretty extreme even by the standards of surveillance capitalism.| jfm.carcosa.net
Introduction A year and a half ago, I wrote about what a federated replacement for Facebook would look like. Part of that was differences from Facebook, and another part was differences from Mastodon, the leading federated social network software. Since then, I’ve used Mastodon a lot more, Mastodon has added and changed features, and my thinking has evolved, so I feel like it’s time to write an update to that article.| jfm.carcosa.net
US Politics It’s Bernie, Bitch | Amber A’Lee Frost Amber from Chapo Trap House explains why Bernie is the only viable candidate for 2020, even if he dies on the campaign trail and his corpse has to be operated like a Muppet. The Border Patrol Has Been a Cult of Brutality Since 1924 Even among law enforcement agencies, the Border Patrol has always been notably racist. How Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Allies Supplanted the Obama Generation | The New Yorker In brief: the Green New Deal compl...| jfm.carcosa.net
Facebook Facebook rolls out AI to detect suicidal posts before they’re reported | TechCrunch This could actually increase deaths as armed police are dispatched to “check in” on reportedly suicidal people. And that’s not counting the opportunities for algorithmic cruelty, like notifying someone’s domestic abuser that they’re suicidal. Goodbye Facebook This was the last straw for the fediverse’s jjg, who reports on the previous techcrunch post in his goodbye letter to Facebook.| jfm.carcosa.net
It has come to my attention that some people I interact with do not know how to cook grits. This is a matter of the greatest seriousness, which must be remedied immediately. This is a recipe, or more just guidelines or instructions on how to properly cook grits. It will assume you are lacto-ovo-vegetarian, but will offer vegan substitutions where possible. If you do not like grits, it is probably because you have never had them properly prepared; you may be familiar only with instant grits, o...| jfm.carcosa.net
Brutaldon is a brutalist web client for Mastodon and Pleroma. It supports text-mode browsers such as Lynx and w3m, as well as older graphical browsers. Newer graphical browsers such as Firefox are supported with progressive enhancement. At this point, it is largely complete — the features it does not have are also not planned. It is possible to use it as your primary interface for reading and posting on the fediverse.| jfm.carcosa.net
Computing, emacs dengste/org-caldav: Caldav sync for Emacs orgmode I’ve started to use this, to go along with my resolution to start using calendars more, and to-do lists less. More emacs configuration tweaks (multiple-cursor on click, minimap, code folding, ensime eval overlays) There were some useful hints in here for me. I tend not to use multiple-cursor-mode, because I have trouble remembering how it selects things, and it’s easier for me to use iedit-mode or just macros to do multipl...| jfm.carcosa.net
Why Calendars are More Effective Than To Do Lists - Srinivas Rao - Pocket Thinking about the link on org-mode use I posted a little while ago that suggested giving every TODO headline a SCHEDULED property. Pleroma, LitePub, ActivityPub and JSON-LD — kaniini’s blog! Gets at one of the reasons that ActivityPub is problematic — the LinkedData aspect is useful for Big Social (advertising targeting, business intelligence), but not for the actual use of sharing that we want to enable.| jfm.carcosa.net
Merry Christmas Edition Free Software and Adjacent Topics What does a private communicator look like? – Aral Balkan There’s a pretty wide potential space, both hardware and software, for what a personal communicator could look like. Free software and the revolt against transactionality John Ohno (Modernist Microfiche Minotaur on the fediverse) writes (on Medium, unfortunately) an excellent article on saving the gift economy of Free Software from the way Big Software builds an industry on ...| jfm.carcosa.net
Facebook imploding What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace? - The New York Times Even after no one is really using Facebook, everyone’s residual data will still be valuable (and dangerous). As Facebook Raised a Privacy Wall, It Carved an Opening for Tech Giants - The New York Times Summary: Facebook gave complete access to its customer data, including “private” messages, and including not only reading them, but writing or deleting them, to its “partners”, including Apple,...| jfm.carcosa.net
Newsy/politicky The Snowden Legacy, part one: What’s changed, really? | Ars Technica Article gives maybe too much credit to Snowden’s opponents, but does give a good overview of what the impacts have been. Finally, some good news: the ERG has been aggressively made love to by an ass | Marina Hyde | Opinion | The Guardian Apparently, Brexit has gotten bad enough that mainstream newspaper columnists are invoking our Dread Lord Cthulhu.| jfm.carcosa.net
I aten’t dead. Stuff that I saw actually this month microformats2-experimental-properties · Microformats Wiki How to use microformats to tag your pronouns in your blog’s metadata Web Design is 95% Typography: How to Use Type on the Web This is why my hate for JavaScript and the modern web does not extend, as some people’s does, to CSS. CSS is what lets us have reasonably good typography on the web.| jfm.carcosa.net
I’m very behind on link blogging (over a month! And the last one was very minimal!), so I’m just going to dump some things. Politics Threat Modeling For Activists: Tips For Secure Organizing & Activism An intro to protecting what you need to protect. Trump Administration Eyes Defining Transgender Out of Existence - The New York Times Another case where the cruelty is the only point. What duelling can teach us about taking offence | Aeon Essays The right is currently using a model of “of...| jfm.carcosa.net
So, it appears that I’ve (accidentally?) written a Mastodon client! It’s been public for long enough that I probably ought to write about it. Brutaldon is a brutalist (mostly) web client for Mastodon and Pleroma. You can use it to connect to most instances from almost any web browser — I commonly use it from Lynx and w3m, as well as my day-to-day Firefox, and I’ve seen others use it on retro browsers on 1990s and early 2000s hardware.| jfm.carcosa.net
Web The Web is still a DARPA weapon. – Giacomo Tesio – Medium A good article on a few loosely connected points. How centralization of the web tends to promote US government/business interests, as against those of internet users and other countries. A lot of it is nothing you haven’t heard before, especially about DNS. But the better part is the discussion of how JavaScript is fundamentally a weapon, aimed against users, because it is basically designed to execute untrusted code.| jfm.carcosa.net
Links for the past few days, no unifying theme. The continuing crisis This is fine. Democrats break with left on ICE | TheHill This is expected behavior for the Democrats right now — avoid doing something that is both right and popular, because it would be disruptive. Beto O’Rourke’s position (abolish ICE through a reorganization of DHS, and moving their responsibilities elsewhere) should be the base position of Democrats, allowing progressives to stake out more radical positions.| jfm.carcosa.net
What is Prosody? Prosody is an XMPP server; for most people and most uses, that means it’s an instant messaging server that anyone can run, and talk to anyone with an account on any other XMPP server. So unlike centralized chat platforms like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, you don’t have to trust a single big company to run it and to not misuse your data. I’m focusing on Prosody here because I run a Prosody server, and in my experience it’s easier to set up and run than others.| jfm.carcosa.net
Links for the last couple of days, focusing on the US police state, and companies that are complicit with it. Microsoft tldr; Microsoft is providing cloud services to ICE. They claim that this support is not going directly to supporting child detention, but services are fungible, and the ethical thing would be to refuse to accept the contract. Microsoft needs to pick a side in the ICE debate. The world is watching| jfm.carcosa.net
This is a quick update to my article on Firefox Focus for Android, which is to say that I’ve, at least temporarily, stopped using Firefox Focus. But the reason is good for Firefox! Most people know by now that Firefox Quantum has landed in mobile, and brings the same speed improvements as on desktop. What’s even newer (I think) is that at least Firefox Beta for Android includes a Custom Tabs implementation, compatible with Chrome Custom Tabs.| jfm.carcosa.net
Links for the last couple of days. Things on clean energy, cults, and horrible, horrible Christmas music.| jfm.carcosa.net
Here’s another long one, since I’ve been too busy/tired to collect my links for a few days. DRM, social media, indieweb, and, as usual, tons of bad news. Sorry about that.| jfm.carcosa.net
This one is pretty dark, sorry. Turn back if you need to protect yourself, I’ll understand. The basic theme: our institutions are not capable of dealing with the threats we are faced with today, and we don’t have any other solutions waiting in the wings. Let’s get started.| jfm.carcosa.net
There’s a big link roundup today. Nazis in the New York Times, Net Neutrality, global warming killing our shrimp, snaketits, bitcoin, and more.| jfm.carcosa.net
Back on track, sort-of. Links from just two days, lots of stuff left out.| jfm.carcosa.net
Well, my idea of doing daily link posts hasn’t quite worked out. But I’ve been collecting things nonetheless, so here are a few days worth of links.| jfm.carcosa.net
The Super Wealthy Oxycontin Family Supports School Privatization With Tactics Similar to Those That Fueled the Opioid Epidemic Reporting by Sara Darer Littman about the Sackler family, who allegedly have used ethically questionable tactics to push oxycontin through FDA approval and onto doctors and patients. They are using the same forms of aggressive advertising to push a pro-charter-school agenda. IBM Type IBM releases a set of fonts (Serif, Sans, and Mono) in a variety of weights.| jfm.carcosa.net
I had an entirely remarkable cup of coffee this past weekend while I was on the road. It was a cheap cup of medium-roast that had been sitting in a Bunn-O-Matic at a highway-exit gas station for hours. It tasted exactly like the coffee I drank with friends in high school, sitting in the smoking section of Shoneys and talking for hours. The taste immediately took me back over 25 years.| jfm.carcosa.net
On a lot of blogs and QA sites, you’ll find the recommendation to, if you have a low-RAM Linux desktop or laptop, to reduce vm.swappiness, the tuning knob that tells the kernel how much to prioritize moving unused application memory to swap to free up memory for the cache. It’s commonly recommended to reduce it to 10, and many guides recommend reducing it to extreme values like 0 (disable swap) or 1 (swap only when the only other option would be to OOM-kill processes).| jfm.carcosa.net
Based on about six months away from Facebook and on Mastodon, I’ve had some thoughts on improving your social media experience. There are a lot of common pieces of advice (turn off notifications, disable Facebook timeline with a browser extension) which I am not going to repeat. I hope the advice I’m offering is more novel (if not totally).| jfm.carcosa.net
Defend the Archive! is the latest novella by radical author Saab Lofton. It is a far-future space opera set principally on a space station, the Archive of the title. I want to avoid spoilers at this point, and hope to do a more in-depth review later. What I want to emphasize at this point is that Defend the Archive! will be of interest to fans of Star Trek, and to people with an interest in anti-racism, freedom of speech, and non-violence.| jfm.carcosa.net
This is a quick review/blurb about Firefox Focus for Android, which really does solve all of your web browsing problems on Android. Or at least mine, which may or may not be similar to yours. What it is: Firefox Focus is a tiny, fast-loading browser comparable to Chrome Custom Tabs. Unlike Chrome Custom Tabs, it is privacy focused, and includes an ad-blocker. My main problem with browsing on Android is that, while I love Firefox on Android, I have to admit that it uses a lot of RAM relative t...| jfm.carcosa.net
The trend in thinking about social networking is pretty negative, and to an extent this is justified. The usual complaints are that social networking substitutes superficial interactions for more meaningful ones, and that commercial social networking (the only kind most people use) manipulate your emotions for monetizing them. But I want to highlight an under-appreciated benefit. We are often encouraged to use direct communications rather than social media: phone calls, text messages, email.| jfm.carcosa.net
I am now offering Conscience-as-a-Service to select clients. This service is intended to allow conscience-free individuals to interact on a moral basis with normal human beings. Here’s how it works: We sign a contract putting me on retainer as your conscience; you agree to disclose all of your major business and life decisions to me before you make them. You may, at your discretion, disclose minor business and life decisions to me either before or after the fact.| jfm.carcosa.net
One issue that is unfortunately contentious these days is whether denying Nazis a platform to organize and recruit by banning them from online spaces and university campuses (hereafter “No Platform”) is a violation of free speech principles. I say “unfortunately”, because it is hard to believe that we are actually having this discussion: of course it is not a violation of free speech principles to prevent evil people from organizing to commit genocide.| jfm.carcosa.net
About this post I meant to be writing a couple of blog posts on Mastodon. But a thread on Mastodon led me to start thinking about Mastodon:Twitter::X:Facebook. There have been a few alternatives that haven’t really gone anywhere, which is kind of unfortunate, but perhaps they were just too early. And I was thinking about what we’d want today. I want to write a full article on this, but I started by outlining it, and I think the outline is pretty readable, and I’m just going to post it o...| jfm.carcosa.net
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman! Since his creation by Siegel and Schuster in 1933 and his debut in Action Comics in 1938, Superman has become the most widely-known superhero of all, and possibly the world’s best-known fictional character. Along the way, he has been interpreted in many ways by different writers, from the rough socialist crusader of his early Golden Age appearances, to the Silver Age’s protector of “Truth, Justice, and the American Way...| jfm.carcosa.net
This blog is produced with hugo, a static site generator, and the articles are written in Markdown, a plain text markup format. Since the articles are fundamentally plain text, for some time I’ve been wanting to make them available over gopher, a simple protocol that was created around the same time as the first versions of the World Wide Web. I used gopher before I used the WWW in Lynx and Mosaic, and even after the web was dominant, I used GNOFN’s free dial-up gopher as my access point ...| jfm.carcosa.net
Is the gemini map format intended to be reflowed? One question that hasn’t been addressed in the Gemini speculative specification is whether the Gemini map file format text/gemini is intended to be reflowed. By reflowed, I mean mainly that the line-length of the file itself is not intended to be mapped exactly to the output device, which should instead lay out the text with appropriate line lengths. This is what HTML renderers do, and what MarkDown renderers do, usually by way of conversion...| jfm.carcosa.net
A little while ago, I wrote a thread on glitch.social about ephemerality of posting on social media as compared to Usenet. It got a little bit of traction, and one person asked if I could post more about Usenet clients. I haven’t gotten to it until today, and I thought I would post on my blog instead of on glitch. The original thread wasn’t really about Usenet clients; it was mainly about how posts on Usenet expired, which is contrary to people’s current expectations about social media,...| jfm.carcosa.net
