Whoops, it’s been a minute.

I don’t remember how I happened to stumble upon the Gemini protocol (sorry, Gopher readers) or how I decided that it would be a good place to “set up shop,” but here I am. As far as I can tell, I’m not really looking for anything when it comes to this protocol and the whole space it has created, or maybe I am and I don’t know it. Gemini has been growing a lot in the past couple of months. It makes me wonder if other people came to use it looking for something in particular.

My first guess, which I reckon accounts for a lot of people on here, is the simplicity of it all. There’s a certain beauty to simplicity and straightforwardness for all things, not just Gemini. It’s very admirable when someone manages to convey an idea or subject in a simple, easy-to-understand manner. This skill is particularly important when talking about an analysis of the world. The world is an incredibly complex system of processes, so condensing any analysis down in such a way that makes it easy for anyone to understand is nothing short of poetry. This is what I appreciate from the works of Lenin and Stalin, and the opposite is what I despise about other philosophical texts I’ve read. I’d like to be simple and straigtforward in the way I write as well.

I started a new job at a fast food joint recently and I’ve definitely be able to describe my feelings simply: I feel like shit. I’ve worked in fast food before, but never full-time. I can’t understand how people do it. My home is no longer a home, it’s a rest-stop between the times I’m at work. I can’t enjoy my time at home because all I feel is dread about going back to work. I become anxious about squeezing as much possible into the time I’m home that I end up not really doing anything. I’d probs be better if I were doing something I actually enjoyed, but I’m serving people ice cream and taking orders for 9+ hours a day. Kudos to the people who do this on a daily basis, because they must have strong spirits to keep it up. Maybe I just have a weak spirit, though. Sometimes I even feel as though I’m a failure for not being able to mentally do this when so many other people do it and have done it for 20+ years, but this just isn’t what I want. I have no plans on working here after the summer, thankfully, but I’m already tired of it.

I told myself I’d read three books before summer’s end: On Poetry and Style by Aristotle, Stalin: History and Criticism of A Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo, and Building Internet Firewalls by Elizabeth Zwicky. If I don’t do at least that, I’ll consider this summer a failure, so I better start cracking.

What have you been up to recently? What are you planning on doing? It’s hard to imagine how many different answers there’d be from people all across Geminispace. For how small this place is, there seems to be an endless amount of people, all with vastly different but interesting lives. New people show their faces all the time and establish themselves and their own space. There’s so many new Gemini pages with just a “Hello, World!!,” “Work in progress,” “Come back soon!,” etc. What are those people doing? Will they ever come back? How is their life coming along?Will they find time to fill their space and establish themselves? What’s brought them to Gemini?

It’s a mystery for now.