It's just me.
dolfins are vaper wave
Written 28 JAN 2026
One reason to read my gemlog is that I'll never use it to shill the Gemini protocol (unlike this blog and this very post, mwahaha). Everyone reading it would already be at least convinced enough to use a web proxy to try it out.
I initially thought about having one blog separated into categories or tags so I'd feel better about posting wildly different things in succession. (Not interested? Just wait for an entry in a category you like.) Separating using a whole protocol would be wonderfully excessive if that was the only reason to do it. It's more that I don't need to go on about how great digital minimalism is to a crowd that already gets it. I get it and want it enough that I continue to seek out more ways to find that elusive balance between staying connected to AFK-world and having fun computing again. Gemini is niche enough that I can be reasonably sure someone reading my gemlog is also thinking in that direction. Just that bit of (imagined, hypothesized) commonality is enough to open different avenues of conversation.
Not that I'll be evangelizing out in HTTP.
Written 25 JAN 2026
Remember when I suggested I was sticking purely to HTML because I know more about it than Gemini and Gopher? Well, I have a Gemini capsule now. tilde.town made it rather easy to set up, and gemtext is basically Markdown-lite.
gemini://tilde.town/~dolfin/ (requires a Gemini client or a browser that can view Gemini pages)
I'm planning on putting different stuff in the gemlog and weblog. If I ever get a gopherhole, that'll have different stuff, too.
Written 15 JAN 2026
I'll tell people I got a phone that can't load apps on purpose, and if that person doesn't just respond with an absent but polite "oh, ok," then it's "why?" The actual most important answer to that question to me has to do with taking back control of my attention and executive function, which I can't properly express to anyone who hasn't had issues with those things. Forget about privacy and security concerns, forget about intentionality, forget about minimalism for its own sake. Every cycle the reptile brain spends on instant gratification and consumption is both a cycle I could've used for literally anything else (including enjoying something genuinely enjoyable) and further reinforcement to keep chasing dopamine buttons and to keep thinking about dopamine buttons. I'm clawing back my headspace by the parcel starting with my phone, that's fucking why.
What comes out is something like, "oh, you know, I just think smartphones are distracting lol."
Written 10 JAN 2026
There was someone over on Agora Road who said this was the goal of the forum, of being a member of it. It was a joke--there's just a lot of talk about internet privacy between tech-savvy folks who know by now how impossible that is. Same with digital soverignty. True self-hosting is pretty risky unless you know exactly what you're doing. ("True self-hosting" = hosting a server on physical hardware you own on your own internet connection as opposed to having a hosting provider do it. Absolutely zero shade to hosting providers and their users. I, too, like keeping my ports closed.) There's also pessimism about the fight for privacy being lost piece-by-piece, not just on Agora; I think the GDPR is the last big win we've had there for a while, and I'm in the US and only get the incidental benefits. That's before we add the flood of genAI slop that just makes it harder to find what I'm actually looking for.
That environment actually helped steer me towards the collection of hobbies I've been exploring: fountain pens and handwriting letters, film photography, retrocomputing, Gopher and Gemini, typewriters. There's two types of hobbies there, the first being to create physical media. AI could imitate it, yeah, but I have this physical artifact and everything used to produce it, I can tell you where I was when I was making this, what intentions I had. Eventually, I think people will realize that's what's unconsciously putting them off from AI art: there's human context missing there.
Retrocomputing and Gopher/Gemini are part of this desire to be more intentional with how I'm computing and getting away from algorithms and mindless consumption. I was never big on social media, anyway. The algo stuff just gave me retroactive justification for not being on it! But then, when you're working with systems and protocols that are simple enough to completely understand (contrast Windows and how no one person can hold all of it in their head), there's something cozy about it even when you're still learning. The end's in reach, and when you get there, you can push the boundaries further or simply use the computer to the fullest.
I'm not so much "leaving the internet" as just remembering what it actually is and what doesn't have to use it. Not everything needs to be online and up-to-date and built with huge frameworks.
Originally written ??/??/20XX
Gemini is cool, Gopher is cool, but I know HTML. It only takes a small amount of friction to stop me from writing, and supposedly, just writing is good for you, so I'm doing it in HTML until I figure out the other things.
To that end, I've revived an old netbook as The Little Debian Machine That Could, capable of writing and browsing some non-JS smolweb sites as well as Gopher and Gemini. Not a daily driver, but that's fine. It's there for an escape from the things I need to drive daily.