I have largely been adverse to oaking my experiments until now for the simple reason that the "white lightning" I made is pretty good on its own with mixers. Another reason is that oak is harder to source in the tropics -- not even as sticks, let alone barrels. But I've finally dipped my toes into the water of oaking, a/k/a aging spirits.

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Reading philosophy is an activity that can benefit all people. I enjoy this pasttime so much that I spent many years in university developing my skill in it. Along the way, I learned a few things, not just about the world and the mind, but also how to learn.

Reading philosophy is important, not because it gives us values and truths to accept, but because it exposes us to the process of developing understanding. Difficult works that develop our abstract reasoning help us to understand complex issues that arise in the course of daily life - and can also help us explain our reasoning to others when facing complex issues.

It is unfortunately necessary to be somewhat well-read in philosophy to keep up in more formal philosophical discourse. What follows is my attempt to collect noteworthy classical, modern, and contempotary works on a number of topics, with special focuses on the nature of mind, reality, the limits of knowledge, & moral teachings in a roughly chronological order. When reading philosophy like this, you can follow chains of thought through the centuries. After reading the texts I suggest, you should be able to begin participating in more serious philosophical discussion - not to mention developing more nuanced positions - and it shouldn't be hard to find people or resources to help understand the texts along the way.

After my list of suggested texts, more general notes on actually reading philosopy follow.

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Are you overwhelmed about the state of your media directories -- particularly your music and videos? I was for a long time, too. But we are in the 2020s and going through the effort of manually organizing personal media collections should be a thing of the past.

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I am a huge fan of a proper gin. If you don't know where to start with gin, try Bombay Sapphire as a reference.

Decided to get back into the game, recipe and testimonials follow.

I don't feel like photos are necessary for this post because the process begins with bottles of clear liquid, followed by bottles of dark liquid, concluded with bottles of clear liquid. What can be gained from these photos?

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As of May 1st, 2025, I've now been here for 3 years.

I'm not sure what exactly I expected before coming. For most of our long-distance relationship, my wife lived deep in the jungle, several hours drive away from a not-great city. So I saw a side of the world very different from my home, but also different from where I live now.

I came here during lockdown. Spent 2 weeks in Jakarta. I got the feeling that even if things weren't locked down, it's not the kind of tourist destination Seoul or New York City may be. Large, dirty, gray water sewers ran along the streets, constant traffic jams, heavy smog. The only things that really were appealing were the malls but they sold the same kinds of things you can find at every mall in the world.

Converted to Islam over Whatsapp, got mailed a certificate, brought that to the department of religious affairs, got married, got a marriage visa. The bureacracy was really straightforward and easy. The first Islamic wedding I attended was my own. I don't really have strong memories of it aside from thinking the ritual was a little strange, but it really made my wife's parents happy. I had to repeat the Arabic phrase three times before the priest accepted the marriage declaration as valid -- Arabic is not my strong suit.

My life is pretty comfortable. There are frequent blackouts and my city is underdeveloped, but I've made a ton of great friends. My city is safe. People are very friendly and laid back.

If you're tired of life in the West, you may enjoy life here. The language is pretty easy to pick up. Adjusting to a less developed city hasn't been hard for me -- the only thing I still struggle with on a regular basis is the oppressive heat.

Here's hoping the next 3 years are great, too...

As it stands, if I notice minor errors in blog entries, I will update the files and the site will update. However, the atom feed will not inform subscribers that blog entries have been updated. This seems like it would be more annoying than useful for most people.

I may later update the atom feed, so that pages have published and updated fields, that update to reflect the nature of the website, but as it stands, I feel very few people would benefit from this code change.

Die-hard blog people are encouraged to follow the blog via their feed reader. If something feels funny to you, follow the link and see if you still have that funny feeling. If I've made a mistake in drafting a blog post that needs significant addressing, I'll probably make a follow up blog entry. You can let me know via the contact page if you think I've overseen a serious problem.

Thanks for tagging along on my blogging journey....

A rare but persistant gikopoi bug has been troubling me for years, and today, I finally found the cause.

Gikopoi is a free chat game with streaming options. 99.9% of the time it functions perfectly well. But once in a blue moon, people attempting to stream video/audio results in a strange bug: others are unable to grab the problematic stream and attempting to grab the stream results in a silent failure. Additional open streams also become broken once this bug is triggered. The streams are not broken from the start but become broken within a few minutes of beginning.

• Restarting the Giko server doesn't fix it
• Restarting the Nginx web server doesn't fix it
• Restarting the Janus media server doesn't fix it

I still don't know exactly what triggers the bug. It seemed like only certain players trigger the bug, and I couldn't find any useful data in logs to fully understand the problem. But today, I found how to resolve it:

In the Gikopoi server directory, a file "persisted-state" exists that keeps a json of all users with data like their ID, name, last message, character, etc. This is useful for cases when the server resets -- everyone active resumes playing like nothing happens.

For some reason, when streams break on gikopoi, shutting down the server and clearing out this file makes it work again. So I'm suspecting that streams may break if users fail to exit the game properly... or maybe players being logged on for too long triggers the bug... I honestly don't know. I have a saved copy of persisted-state I can compare against a new copy of persisted-state the next time streams break.

I really enjoyed playing an old Flash game known as Gikopoi. However, circa 2021, when Adobe pulled the plug on Flash, Gikopoi's days were numbered. What happened between then and now is a long story, but long story short, I now host the most active Gikopoi international server, and I set up some services to support the community, even writing a few from scratch.

This post will look at the various services that are not the actual game/chat of Gikopoi.

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Three weeks into the season! As always, I grab at least 5 currently airing shows and see them through. Most are usually crap but at least one or two end up being decent.

Here's a list of anime I'm watching this spring. I'll share a brief progress report. Usually my conclusions at the end of the season end up with my thoughts at this point, but who knows.

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A hobby I've been getting into over the past year or so is chemistry, and part of that involves playing around with distilling machines for purifying water and essential oils and so on.

This is a bit of a longer article so I'm also using it for a chance to test a "read more" function when scrolling the indexes on my new blog soft...

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