Meta(
    title: "Is Gemini boring and is that even bad?",
    summary: None,
    published: Some(Time(
        year: 2023,
        month: 4,
        day: 11,
        hour: 4,
        minute: 6,
        second: 31,
    )),
    tags: [
        "gemini",
        "tech",
        "writing",
    ],
)
---
I'm sure you've all seen the thread so I won't re-hash. But I disagree with the fundamental premise on several grounds.

* There is actually a pretty wide variety of content here
* Even if the subject matter is weighted towards tech, I don't see that as bad. Or boring.
* On a less rational note, it bothers me to see someone I've come to appreciate and respect in distress.

Ok, so gemini is largely dominated by technically minded people and a lot of their posts are technically oriented. I can't argue with that. But there really is other stuff here. I've seen it. Once in a while, I've posted it. But I think that a common belief that sets the average long term Gemini resident apart from the average technically oriented person is some combination of the beliefs that small can be beautiful, sustainability is important, uncontrolled growth is bad, and slow thoughtful communication via longer form writing is preferable to jingoism and sound bytes. I consider myself to be a thoughtful person, someone who tries to find a balanced point of view. That said, I've been challenged and called out here when my thinking wasn't truly acknowledging the depth of certain subjects, and I'm better for it. Gemini tends to collect people who want to not only express things on a little deeper level, but those who are ok with having their views challenged so that they can learn and grow. Some of those interactions have been in the many Re: threads, while some have been in email comments. What they all have in common is that they feel more meaningful than anything I've found on the world wide web in a very long time.

Even when tech is the subject, I find the sort of technologies and computing that are discussed here to be more interesting than what gets written about elsewhere. On any given day Antenna probably has someone talking about Forth, installing OpenBSD, explaining the `Pledge` system call, or giving an update on their massive web crawler which is designed to rank individual and personal sites above corporate trash. Go back to the web (even the better parts such as Fedi) and most of the talk is centered around how bad crypto/llm/next_fad is. I am fascinated reading about someone's ground up Forth implementation. I already know llm's are being put to bad use, and frankly -that- is boring.

But in the end, there's an old piece of advice that is always good advice. Be the change that you want in the world. So if you want to have more varied subject matter on Gemini, a good start is to begin creating it.

### So what's going on in my world?
Well my truck finally got to the point a few weeks ago that I can't justify keeping it on the read until it's had some real work done on it. I've been taking the bus to work in the afternoon. Unfortunately, in the US public transportation tends to suck, and in smaller cities or towns it's really hit or miss whether it exists at all. In our town the bus doesn't run on Sundays and the last route runs an hour and a half before the end of my work shift. So I'm stuck walking home five miles. It isn't as bad as it might sound to some. I really needed the exercise, for one, and I'm down ten pounds so far.

Spring is definitely here in the last couple of weeks, and tomorrow morning on my day off I'll be tuning up the lawn mower and installing a dog run rather than being inside typing on my laptop. My dog, Spock, has been going really stir crazy this winter. He wants to be outside running and playing and hunting smaller (and sometimes larger) animals. I'm going to try to get out and get both our lawn and the neighbor's lawn done before he has a chance. The guy just turned 71, literally a few days after my own father did, and since my dad is too far away for me to watch out for I'm going to do what I can for my neighbor as a proxy.

Most of my coding projects have slowed down due to the extra time I'm taking walking everywhere. I've caught up on a lot of podcasts and a few audiobooks. Almost done with "John Dies at the End" and I'm planning to start "Dungeon Crawler Carl" after that. But I do have a few things brewing, and have chipped away slowly at some of the longer running projects. HitchHiker is getting it's own package manager that has a few novel ideas. But I won't go too far into that just now because I want to get a bit more of it working before I talk about it much.

I suppose the biggest thing coming down the pike, and I can get away with saying this here because my partner is never going to read it, is that I've picked out an engagement ring. We've been together seven years now, and living together for six of those years. It's time. My daughter is actually nagging me about it because I'm pretty sure she likes my SO more than she likes me and wants it to be official. Anyway, she (my SO, not my daughter) is really into astronomy and follows the goings on with Nasa, the ISS and even Mars weather. So the ring is platinum, inlaid with meteor.

Anyway, I guess I figured there was something in that original post about Gemini being so tech centric. Even if I spent the first half of this post arguing the fact. It definitely could have been presented more delicately, but I'm OK with being challenged. So I figured I'd wind the post down by writing on a more personal note to change things up a bit. Like I said, be the change you want to see.