smolZINE - Issue 32

eZine lover (@eZine)

Published in

smolZINE

· 3 months ago

smolZINE - Issue 32

2022-08-15

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Introduction
Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems
Emanations
Spelunking
Recreation
Community Contributions & Discussion

Introduction

Hold onto your rear thrusters for here comes another blast of an issue thanks to some great community contributions. Shhh, don't tell anybody there is a gopher hole in the gemini zine ;).

Hidden (and not so hidden) Gems

Ivan Odintsoff Blog

Ivan has an eclectic gemlog on smol.pub and also has a personal capsule with a neat gemini based notes project.

=> gemini://ivanodintsoff.smol.pub/ Ivan Odintsoff Blog
=> gemini://tilde.club/~odintsoff/ Odintsoff Gemini Capsule

ibannieto.info

A fun capsule with a gemlog and some neat space related content like NASA's picture of the day and an ISS tracker.

=> gemini://ibannieto.info/ ibannieto.info

Kelgor's Islet

The capsule of a French developer with posts and projects relating to tech videogames and game development.

=> gemini://kelgors.me/ Kelgor's Islet

Presto Solar Storm Alerts

This pick comes courtesy of geminaut ~ew. Thanks for the tip! It reports on solar flares, part of space weather. Presto is part of Stephane Bortzmeyer's excellent capsule which contains many other treasures to find.

=> gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/presto/ Presto

GeminiSpace.Club

Dear Geminauts, welcome into the most remote corner of the Gemini Space, here you will find mostly lone space-miners, lost planets and forgotten meteorites full of rare minerals.
This place was not built up to create a community, but rather as place for individuals to dig into the human knowledge and share what they will be able to discover.

Lots of interesting bits hiding in this capsule. Definitely a good one to go poking around.

=> gemini://warp.geminispace.club/ GeminiSpace.Club

Endangered Software Society

Every now and then I sneak a gopher link into smolZINE and this is one of those times ;-). This gopher hole has some fascinating information about preserving floppy disks, cd-roms. It has some videogame content as well including a retro-gaming zine and an archive of GameFAQs walkthroughs.

=> gopher://gopher.endangeredsoft.org/ Endangered Software Society

Emanations

Is Gemini ready for the applied arts?

The most visible part of the Gemini protocol is a markup language called [Gemtext]. Its specification isn't long, and it isn't covering any special things for making provided information aesthetically pleasing. The only thing which is used for that is a preformatted text block. According to the main assumptions of the protocol, the way of showing any Gemini content is client-side responsibility. We can't be sure if a text will be black or white, small or big, or how a paragraph will fit the screen. Everything could vary, except the assumption that preformatted text blocks should be presented with a fixed-width font.

That limitations are interesting because the Gopher protocol, which is a mental starting point of the Gemini protocol, is full of ideas for eye-candy text presentation. One of my favorites is the Gopher hole of [Baud Baby] (it's worth seeing his Phlog's articles and their composition and layout), [Circumlunar Space], or archives of [Funny Bone]. But there are also some earlier, pre-Gopher examples of text crafting like [Usenet Logical Map]. There were also many examples from the BBS era.

``` Venus de Milo by Morfina 
    %%% 
   ===== 
  &%&%%%& 
  %& < <% 
   &\__/ 
    \ |____ 
   .', ,  () 
  / -.  _)| 
 |_(_.    | 
 '-'\  )  | 
 mrf )    | 
    /  .  ). 
   /    _. | 
 /'---':.-'| 
(__.' /    / 
 \   ( /  / 
  \ /  _  | 
   \  |  '| 
   | . \  | 
   |(     | 
   |  \ \ | 
    \  )\ | 
   __)/ / \ 
--"--(_.Ooo'---- 
```

So how people are facing this in the Geminispace?

The simplest and the new thing in the Gemini is a [favicon.txt]. We could have a strict text-only capsule, with some cherry on top of it. One graphical character is stored in the favicon.txt file in the root directory (the same rule as in the WWW). Several Gemini browsers and clients will especially present this information.
Some sort of the development of the above idea is a text logo constructed with a bit more characters. A good example of that is the smolZINE's one - as a one-liner and its bigger version. Whenever I will see that one-liner I can fast scan and extract from any paragraph, and despite it being a normal text I take this as some beautifier.
The next, and one of the most strait thorough approaches is to create and present ASCII art on a Gemini capsule. There aren't many of them for now. But one of the interesting capsules is [discGator] ones. There are some regular ASCII images, and some of them are provided with a description of the technique of creation and commentary. It's interesting because they are mixing "the full resolution" ASCII image, and some "close-ups" for details. There is also [she12] with several ASCII comics.
Of course there are also capsules like the [Station] which aren't ASCII-art galleries, but they are trying to add specific themed ASCII-art headers. The Station is also an example of the capsules which are using emojis to provide graphical decorations in the text.
When I'm writing about emojis I must also mention using the UTF-8 special characters for manipulating text presentation but it isn't my favorite branch of this topic.
Last but not least and one of the most advanced approaches, which I've seen, and what is behind the title question, are [Dima's sketches]. His articles are mixing text and "images" in a very natural way and made their articles very good-looking. The "images" also provide much information, and they aren't only a decoration like the ASCII-art headers above.

As we can see there are many areas of the Geminispace, which are escaping the Gemtext limitations and trying to do things more artistically. I don't know if it's the beginning of some evolution, or it's the end of technical possibilities. Art from its definition can't be shaped by any rules, but it's worth saying that it's good to have in mind [accessibility] aspects of our "graphical" capsules.

Aesthetic presentation is of course not only about adding mentioned above decorations, but it could mention other construction ideas. As I mentioned above we can't plan the entire layout of a capsule page, for example with two columns layout that is met in the Gophersphere. But there are many other questions. What is the most optimal size of information per page? How to organize navigation, which link should be first? How long will a user navigate to a piece of specific information (an important aspect in text browsers navigated by a keyboard)? How to distinguish a header, a menu and a footer on a page? There aren't any proven standards in that area. There are also many ideas for embedding links in articles (between paragraphs, at the end of an article with order number or with description, etc.). We will see if there will be introduced some good practices for the beautiful text-only capsules.

=> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/gemtext.gmi [Gemtext]
=> https://www.asciiart.eu/art-and-design/sculptures [Venus de Milo by Morfina]
=> gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181102.txt [Baud Baby]
=> gopher://mozz.us/1/funnybone [Funny Bone]
=> gopher://circumlunar.space/ [Circumlunar Space]
=> http://quux.org:70/Archives/usenet-a-news/NET.general/81.12.14_azure.300_net.general,fa.unix-wizards.txt [Usenet Logical Map]
=> gemini://mozz.us/files/rfc_gemini_favicon.gmi [favicon.txt]
=> gemini://discgator.flounder.online/ascii-log/ [discGator]
=> gemini://she12.midnight.pub/ [she12]
=> gemini://station.martinrue.com/ [Station]
=> gemini://gemini.dimakrasner.com/two-weeks-with-the-snail.gmi [Dima's sketches]
=> gemini://adele.work/gemlog/2021-04-07_ASCII_art_banner.gmi [accessibility]
- Szczeżuja

Spelunking

Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet

Many of you interested in gemini and also the wider "small internet" space will likely want to sit down with a beverage and enjoy this excellent talk by James Tomasino. The talk was given in July as part of the May Contain Hackers 2022 Conference.

=> https://media.ccc.de/v/mch2022-83-rocking-the-web-bloat-modern-gopher-gemini-and-the-small-internet Rocking the Web Bloat: Modern Gopher, Gemini and the Small Internet

Recreation

Chess Puzzle
by carriunix

```chesspuzzle559326 
. . ♚ ♜ . . . ♜ 
♗ ♟ ♟ . ♖ ♟ ♟ . 
. . ♞ . ♝ ♞ . . 
. ♗ . . . . . ♟ 
♘ . . . . . . . 
. . . . . . . . 
♙ ♙ . . . ♙ ♙ ♙ 
. . ♖ . . . ♔ . 

White (♙) mate in 3. 
```

=> chess-solution-32.gmi Solution

Stinky Pinky
by kelbot

To play Stinky Pinky you will need to read the two descriptions below. They each describe a word and the two words rhyme. Example: 1. Smelly, 2. Finger; Answer: Stinky Pinky. Get it? You can email your answer to the address found at the bottom of each smolZINE to confirm if you are correct. The first to answer wins...uhhh I haven't figured that out yet so my congrats will have to do for now.

Drink noisily
Bird call

Community Contributions & Discussion

Please consider taking part in making this zine better and more diverse by contributing your thoughts and finds. If you are interested in contributing a short article or capsule picks email me at: smolzine (at) cyberbot.space.

If you have any feedback or just want to discuss anything related to gemini or smolZINE hit me up at the above email or ping me on the fediverse at kelbot@retro.social and/or use the #smolZINE tag.