💾 Archived View for perplexing.space › 2020 › streaming-gemcasts-conlangs.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 00:53:54. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
2020-08-30
Before listening to Ben's latest gemcast about _Gaming on Linux_⁰ earlier I had to muddle my way through streaming on a system without the requisite packages to run diohsc. The ability to pipe directly to mpv is a pretty neat feature, but I have only got Haskell and cabal setup on my Linux machine and not on another OpenBSD system.
Rather than trying to do that I tried achieving something similar using only what I have available:
echo -en "C:gemini://kwiecien.us/gemcast/20200828.ogg\r\n" | \ openssl s_client -quiet -connect kwiecien.us:1965 | \ tail -c +30 | mpv --cache-secs=10 -
I was frankly a little surprised that it ended up working but pleased nonetheless. There were two surprising pieces involved -- first, the Unix "tail" command can take a byte-wise offset from the start rather than the end of an input. This is necessary to strip the gemini response from the server, leaving only the .ogg file:
20 application/octet-stream\r\n
Secondly, and a little confusing is the server at kwiecien.us requires the gemini protocol be supplied as part of the request (as expected) -- but this is different than a server like gemini.circumlunar.space, which rejects the explicit protocol instructions. I'm more surprised at the behavior in Solderpunk's molly-brown but it makes me think I should dig into the specification and find out how geminid differs.
$ echo -en "C:gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/\r\n" | \ openssl s_client -quiet -connect gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 53 No proxying to non-Gemini content! $ echo -en "gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/\r\n" | \ openssl s_client -quiet -connect gemini.circumlunar.space:1965 20 text/gemini # Project Gemini ## Overview Gemini is a new internet protocol which: ...
Email me and tell me I'm being dense if you know the cause of this difference in behavior.
I was pleasantly surprised to read that Alex had started up a Toki Pona wiki¹, but to hear that Ben was also going to talk about conlangs feels serendipitous. I am continually surprised at the overlap between my own interests and thing happening in gemini-space.
I don't remember where I first heard about Toki Pona, but I bought Sonja Lang's book a couple of years ago when I decided it would be fun to learn. The language is hugely contextual, operating like a pidgin more than a full language. I think a big part of the fun comes from the necessary interpretation in both writing and reading (I've yet to actually hear it spoken in person). In the same way that people in relationships can build a shorthand when speaking to each other, Toki Pona requires callbacks to the conversational context to make much sense. More than anything it feels to me like the kind of nonsense languages that children can sometimes invent together.
I am nothing like an expert on the subject but Toki Pona feels more like a natural language than some conlangs due to the lack of "place" (for lack of a better word) in its making. Where Klingon or Elvish or Dothraki is rooted in an imagined cultural context, Toki Pona has grown and adapted (a little) with its use over the last 20 years.
Toki Pona: Useful? Probably not. Intellectually interesting: Yes!