[23:55] A while ago I was pointed to this blog entry regarding comments which made me want to formulate my own stand on comments. Because, obviously, there is no option to write any on gmb.
I have two main reasons not to offer this option but to rely on my contact page: hijacking on one hand and on the other the pest web 2.0 brought us: hatred and flame wars.
When scrolling through comments (which I try to do seldom) I often find people write trivial comments with the obvious sole purpose of posting a link to their own blog or website, which is terribly annoying. Even sites like lobsters or hacker news, though moderated, tend to give the impression that they are just glorified centralized comment sections. The content is of way higher quality than on any blog I've ever seen, but especially on HN I often see people just dropping in to promote their own products.
These cases are not the rule, though. Moderation seems to help, I guess.
I don't want to get into detail on the flame wars, as you likely have seen those going on. Instead, in this matter, I'd like to quote Stephen Fry:
"Whenever I read a blog I do not let my eye drop below half the screen in case I accidentally hit the bit where the comments reside. Of all the stinking, sliding, scuttling, weird, entomological creatures that inhabit the floor of the internet those comments on blogs are the most unbearable, almost beyond imagining."
So I really had no motivation to implement a comment system on gmb. And, of course, embedding third party scripts like disqus is completely out of question.
So, no comments here. I do however receive the occasional email or get approached on IRC, so that option seems to work just fine.
Update: I slightly changed my tone with regards to HN and lobsters. It appears I was a bit more annoyed at the whole topic than I should have been and wronged these sites a bit.
[21:40] Gemini is a newish internet protocol somewhere between http and gopher that I wanted to try for a while now. I'm not a huge fan of gopher, but gemini might just be that little bit closer to http for me to like it. And since I just noticed there is a public_gemini folder in my home directory on ctrl-c.club I have no excuse for not trying it out this weekend.
I came across gemini via the Castor browser, by the way, which had managed to draw my attention right away.
[23:19] Sad to see soup.io die. This microblog actually has its origins over there, I used the service from May 2015 to mid-July 2016, before I began writing my own microblogging script and moved over to ctrl-c.club and then finally here.
I found a lot of cool stuff over there, followed the rabbit hole of reposts to many interesting accounts and spent way too much time scrolling.
Thanks, soup, and farewell!
[22:32] How many cores do you need to play Pong? No less than 896. (see also)
[19:19] If you find yourself with a broken keyboard on your laptop and need to write something, you can still use your laptop lid to send Morse code.