2019-08-01 - Goings on in Gopherland
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After the slight ranting in my last post, I took the time today to
look around and read more of what everyones been saying or doing in
Gopherland. Its nice to look and read about people's lives and
feelings, even if this is all a small self-selecting group.

First off, I'm sad that kvothe has gone. I enjoyed their posts and
the wisdom they brought to the slow, patient conversation.

I learned that visiblink has joined the fediverse [1], but they
didn't give a link to their account. I currently inhabit the
fediverse on a server of my own, [email protected], but I have
an `alt` on tilde.zone. It seems pretty quiet there most days, but
I think my ennui about inhabiting online web-spaces has infected my
enjoyment of that space as much as anywhere else.

Fallingknife seems to be in the same summertime rut as I [2],
albeit (i'm sure) for very different reasons. With my daughter's
ongoing recovery, we had to cancel all tentative plans to get away
this summer. The knock-on effects of mean that everything else
this seems somewhat pointless. I sit here now, looking at my lawn,
rationalising why I'm not cutting it. Its a failing effort, I'll
get to it at some point. I haven't been walking, or doing much of
anything. Self care these days is limited to not drinking.

The slower pace of development in Solderpunk's gemini continues.
I'm delighted to see my tiny contributions on link syntax being
both adopted and accepted by the community [3]. I had a worthwhile
and interesting email conversation with Sean on the topic, and I
was happy that, after some intial confusion (and a little hurt) we
acknowledged some commonality of both reference and preference.

One thing I'd be interested in seeing is more reference-servers.
Not servers, per se, just exemplars of _serving_ a gemini site. I
don't know lisp, and the only reference-server currently in
existence uses it, so I can't use it as a base to try (ha!) my own
version in the limited languages I am familiar with.

Finally, I wanted to give a particular shout out to cdmnky. I read
their post on identity [4] with something like tears in my eyes.
I'm a cisgendered hetero man, but I understand the difficulties and
confusion centred on the whole question of identity. Just because
it seems that the entire world is designed for people like me
doesn't mean I can't see that for the load of horseshit that it is.
The things which come so easily to people like me should come
easily to those who aren't. Even though I don't know who cdmnky is,
or even much about them, other than the post, I'm delighted that
they're beginning to be comfortable in knowing who they want to be.

Oh, and one small correction, "Hugh", the Borg character played by
Jonathan del Arco, *is* in the trailer for Star Trek: Picard. He's
on screen for a second or so, lying on an operating table which is
surrounded by what I am told is a group of Romulan scientists. Its
weird, but, given that I am pretty face blind, I have a strange
ability to identify actors based on small cues in their
expressions, in this case Hugh's slightly blank expression when he
meets the Enterprise crew in "Descent". I'm 90% certain that's him
on the table, though.

Anyway, I guess this post has been my equivalent of a series of
posts disappearing into the æther on your social network of
choice. I hope I'm not being too self indulgent with these, but I'm
enjoying the experience nonetheless.

____References____________________________________________________

[1]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~visiblink/phlog/20190730
[2]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/fallingknife/phlog/20190730-summer.txt
[3]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/gemini/link-syntax-finalised.txt
[4]: gopher://seedy.xyz/1/phlog/2019/07-30/