Retrace 0x0008 -- Morgana's Log Tags: Sep 30 2024 09:24 PM (CDT) (day 529) ------------------------------------
Hey, y'all! I almost completely missed it as I haven't been online much, but in the last few minutes (almost literally) of September, I managed to write a valid ROOPHLOCH 2024 submission! I shalln't bother repeating everything the announcement page says, but long story short this is a challenge to write and upload a gopher (or gemini) post without mains power, and without being under a permanent roof. The effort and creativity put into this project by others is honestly quite inspiring to me -- I'm not doing it justice, see the main announcement here:
Anyways, I think this qualifies -- It's sadly not super impressive, given that I completely forgot until the last moment and only had 24 hours to prepare (which was entirely my fault, whoops), but here I am, writing this entry at a quarter to ten on my back porch. I'm writing this entry in JSON from my Thinkpad laptop, which as soon as I'm done writing will be uploaded to my archive server through the new store feature (which kind of broke 50% of the rest of the program, whoops). If all goes as planned, next time the Gemini server restarts it should pull down the new copy and y'all should be able to read this!
I would take a picture of the scene around me -- I'm usually not outside this late at night, and it's actually quite beautiful. Unfortunately, the new server software doesn't yet support images (I'll need to figure out how to reasonably include them in JSON, but evem Base64 is looking rather unwieldly -- at best I'm going to get 512x512 images, I think), so instead of attaching a picture I'm just going to go ahead and describe it for future me (and anyone else wandering by this gemlog). [lots of amateur rambling incoming, feel free to skip if that's not your thing.] Most obviously, it's almost pitch black out here -- Everything nearby was just a black silhouette against the sky, which took on a dark dusty red color -- I'm sure due to the light pollution from the nearby city. Only a single star (or perhaps a satillite?) flickers in the sky, while the sounds of various wildlife surround me. I thought it would be silent out here, with most of the world around me going to sleep, but there's so many frogs, crickets, and other various bugs making a racket -- it's almost louder than it is during the day. There's even still what sounds to me like some kind of birdsong, although I have a hard time believing that songbirds are still up at this hour -- I'll need to do more research later. Whenever things do end up quieting down, I can hear the breeze against the dry fall leaves -- it feels quite pleasant, although I'm quite glad I wore a scarf. Looking back up at the sky, I realize now I was mistaken -- either my eyes have adjusted to the dark, or the sky has darkened some more, but now I can see additional stars. Still only about fifteen, scattered in what I can't help but see as various triangles in the night sky. There's also not as many bugs out here as I would've thought -- I was worried I'd be swarmed, constantly hearing buzzing around me, but I've only seen two or three fly by, off doing some unknown task. I do think I'll have to wrap up this post shortly (don't want to miss the deadline!), but I am glad the ROOPHLOCH convinced me to come out here -- the best way I can think to describe this is peaceful -- at this hour and in this environment, it feels like nothing would ever interupt me.
I'll mostly leave this for a future post, but I figure I ought to write about what is going on with the server and myself. About five months ago, college finals and life in general got fairly chaotic, demanding pretty much all of my attention (and even then, I just barely passed -- I'm so very glad I'm effectively done.) This all led to me taking a bit of a hiatus from pretty much any form of online communication, whether that be email, social media, or (unfortunately) gemini. This somewhat led to the poor state the server is in (plus I had to upgrade it to allow for remote posting so I could participate in the ROOPHLOCH, which due to the new formatting kind of broke stuff -- it should be fixed soon!), so at least half the server is currently broken in some way. Thankfully, I'm finally starting to come back online and am not feeling burnt out anymore, so I do hope I can get everything up and running again. I ought to cut this here, it's already 10:30 so I better upload this to the server and make sure everything's in order there. I'll (hopefully) see y'all around -- good luck out there!