It's been a while (an understatement) from my last post. There are two things that attracted me to Gemini:
I have always loved writing, and sometimes (I think) I have something to say; or at least feel the _need_ to express myself. And I feel writing is a good medium to put those thoughts and feelings out there, or at least I am comfortable doing it.
In that regard, having the gemlog was a mixed success. Curiously, I wrote some more before and after being unemployed than during that period.
I started looking more and more for standard web content that is purely text-based. A regular reader :) (or more likely, someone going over the archives after the fact LOL) would know that it is very easy for me to lose focus. As part of my efforts to thwart distractions and temptations, I gravitate to EWW, the built-in Emacs browser: text only, austere, far from any social media, etc.
And what I found in the last few months, is that there's a whole network of sites, blogs, and tools that work perfectly fine in EWW. And in looking at some of these sites, I found out that I didn't need Wordpress or any fancy frameworks to create pages. Some of these people were _handcrafting their HTML_. The exact same thing I do with Gemtext, and I assumed would be crazy for a regular site. There are even WEB RINGS (remember those?) and a whole network of people linking these plain sites, so you can avoid as much as possible of the modern web.
I had toyed with the idea of hosting a website in my Fastmail account, which supports only static websites. Thinking of what I built in this capsule (a space to express myself, publishing tools) and the hosting I already have access to, an idea grew: wouldn't it be more anti-modern web to host another one of these plainly-looking websites? In the "public" web, where it is more accessible?
In this regard, Gemini feels like disliking the city you live in, and moving to a farm, or an island. Versus staying and being a contrarian and (idealistically, truth is no one cares) attempting to change things in your city from the inside: leading by example, and also showing that something different is possible.
No one cares, yet all those other sites inspired me...so here we are. Maybe I inspire others? Or at the very least make some friends along the way :)
The site is live, as of the date of publishing this entry, it will be more of a skeleton. I will start by pushing an edited version of this post over there.
(typed 09:22:48 PM~10:03 PM)