I recently had a friend end up in the hospital, and he was able to bring a phone with him. He didn't have XMPP on his phone and I didn't want to install Discord.

The solution? Email!

I have plenty of old email addresses from friends. We've left Facebook and we've changed numbers but our email addresses are here to stay. The only kind of person who is unable to keep an email address is so mentally unwell, they probably aren't worth conversing with anyway.

Outside of work or school, I don't think anyone uses email. It's a damn shame. Not everyone has Telegram/Xmpp/Discord/Instagram, and not everyone wants to share their phone number (for Whatsapp/Signal). But I think virtually everyone has at least one email address. Making a new email address takes minutes and after it gets added to your phone or desktop it's as easy to use it as any other account.

Emails can be as long or short as you want, much like a blog post. And, generally speaking, there is no expectation to answer an email immediately.

One way to categorize the modern internet channels is by speed, where

• "fast" web - discord, tiktok, livestreaming
• "moderate" web - xmpp, irc, fediverse, reddit
• "slow" web - discussion forums, RSS, wikis, email

Probably the most controversial categorization would be calling fediverse a moderate-speed channel despite the fact that posts are often coming in at the rate of 30 an hour or more. But the tendency of the network is to post and contribute mindfully. The typical fediverse post will be shorter than a typical blog post, but will be more meaningful than a chat blurb on Discord or shitpost on 4chan. In the same way, emails generally are more pleasant and meaningful to engage with than fediverse discourse.

This is an open invitation for people to email me. Fediverse and Gikopoi may be faster ways to get ahold of me, but maybe you'd enjoy getting back into writing email. I always enjoy receiving and sending emails. You can find my email address on the contact page.

Related discussion: It's good to send emails to friends, Pohon BBS, 2024-01-12.

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.

Continue reading...

This is just a brief review of known Gikopoi blogs that exist on the internet. If this post hurts your feelings, then I hope it motivates you to improve.

Akai.gikopoi.com

This is a really great blog. There is a strong focus on text and the headers & footers don't take up a disgusting amount of space. Frequent updates, open source, cute icons, and there's even an Atom feed. Tying the blog into the author's game and including trackers for life milestones make it even better.

The design will be polarizing -- my wife, who is not a "techy" finds the design frightening and unpleasant. I think it's a breath of fresh air.

Verdict: 9.2/10 -- just docking points so you have motivation to work harder -- I believe in your potential!

Shaddox.neocities.org

If akai.gikopoi is extremely web 1.0, Shaddox.neocities is extremely web 2.0: there are lots of gradients, animations, advanced CSS, and JS enhancements in play here. Both sites are iconiful but Shaddox's modern presentation gives off a more professional smell.

In contrast to akai's blog which covers a bit of everything, Shaddox's blog focuses more strictly on "otaku culture". The use of images in articles such as in his tutorial on "general streaming" are delivered to strong effect. Waifus and radio improve the reading experience.

Despite the slow release schedule, every article so far is quite high quality, and it's easy to get alerted to new posts thanks to the built in RSS feed.

Verdict: ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐ -- open sourcing the code would be an easy fix towards improving this blog's rating. A favicon could also add some more personality to this already quite delightful blog.

Temple-moss.neocities.org

A different kind of web 1.0 blog than the akai project. Text and background colors clash, the date format is European for some reason, and the only image is way too big. Updates are few and far between and there is no way to subscribe to new posts. This guy could spend a bit more time on his blog.

Verdict: 👎 -- you have a lot of soul, invest more of it into your work!