Some circumlunar responses
--------------------------

Sundog semioticrobotic is getting engaged[1]!  Congratulations and
all the best to him and Amy.

My wife and I celebrated our 17th wedding anniversary last year.
This is a length of time that I genuinely struggle to process the
reality of.  It doesn't feel like it could possibly have been this
long.  17 years is not an awful lot less than half the time I've
been alive, and that seems unreal.  I don't think this feeling has
anything to do with what it's been like to be married all this time
at all.  Rather, it's the fact that it highlights that everything
that happened before we met, highschool and my entire time as
an undergraduate student, experiences which still feel at least
somewhat "foundational" to me in terms of who I am, are in fact,
by now, a relatively small and relatively distant parts of my life.
"Objects in temporal mirror are further than they appear", so to
speak.  Guess I'm just old.  Insert obligatory Pink Floyd "Time"
quotation here...

Zaibatsu old timer yargo is on a quest to free up time and lighten
his mind by using Gopher and friends and a weekly printed newspaper
as his only source of news until the end of February at least.
He's calling it GOWNPONIE[2], for the Gopher-Or-Weekly-News-Paper-Only
News Ingestion Experiment.  Where on Earth did he get the idea to
use such a ridiculous name?

I wrote a few years back about how I myself used to refrain from
ingesting news on purpose on principle, but how the Ukraine war
finally jolted me out of this.  I even admitted that I didn't really
hate it[3].

I am still reading the news daily but have to admit its hold over
me is weakening.  I grant that this is unusual timing, perhaps, as
a lot of people are probably paying closer attention than ever to
watch the United States' descent into, well, I'm not even sure what.
I don't think I'm going to tune out entirely any time soon, but
maybe I should also make a concerted effort to check in less often.

Meanwhile, Republic sundog spring has announced "On Foot Standard 1"
(of N?), a 100 day walking goal[4].

One million steps in one hundred days is ten thousand steps per day.
I've certainly done that many steps in a day before, even twice
that many and I think occasionally even as many as thirty thousand.
But on an average day I'm not even close to that, though in my
defence on an average day I will cycle to and from work, so I'm
hardly inactive.  My wife and I do a standard walk most weekend
days, through the forest near our house and along a river, which
is about six and a half thousand.

Soviet sundog durtal has embarked upon an ambitious self-study course
with a long term goal for the end of 2027 to be able to reimplement
ed (the standard editor, if you haven't heard) and the Zim wiki in
multiple programming languages[5].

As somebody who has only just started fruitfully experimenting with
planning goals on a timescale of one year, I can only be impressed
at the amount of dedication involved in planning so far in advance!
It's something I might give some thought to, I guess, if I manage
to keep the yearly planning thing up for a little longer, and
especially if in doing so I end up having a much clearer plate with
time for new undertakings.  I'm cautiously optimistic that state
might arrive sooner rather than later.  The release of VF-1 1.0.0
in December has proven energising.  I'm expecting to do releases
of AV-98 and Agena by the end of this month (it'll be Agena's first
actual official release).  February will be devoted to Molly Brown
and Shizaru.  VF-1, AV-98, Molly Brown and Shizaru constitute, in my
head, my "big four" projects.  Molly is the only one still hosted at
Tildegit, due to a large number of open Issues that I wanna close
before bringing it to Sourcehut with everything else, something
I had intended to manage next year.  Then March is OFFLFIRSOCH,
which I genuinely can't wait for.  By April the weather will be
nice enough that I'll be wanting to spend most of my free time
outdoors and not computering, but I'll pick things up again in the
winter, after ROOPHLOCH.  I kind of hope that maybe by the end of
the year, VF-1, Molly and Shizaru will be more or less declared
"feature complete" and just maintained against bugs and bit rot
going forward.  VF-1 is essentially already there, there is one
tiny itch I've had for years I want to try scratching, i fit works
I'll do another release and that'll be that, forever.

[1] gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~semioticrobotic/lifelog.gmi
[2] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~yargo/clog/xg-GOWNPONIE.txt
[3] gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/talking-about-the-weather.txt
[4] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2025-01-16__On_Foot_1.txt
[5] gopher://soviet.circumlunar.space:70/0/durtal/phlogs/2025_phlog/20250101_as_i_begin_a_new_year.txt