Short status updates regarding this capsule and my ongoing research.
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My capsule has been fully ported to Codeberg. For now I'll manage two repos just in case I should find a way to stay on Gemini.
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I've started to migrate my capsule to Codeberg to make it fully accessible again. It's hosted on jevel.codeberg.page.
I'm still in contact with tsvety and will update my Nekoweb blog post soon. For now I'm busy converting roughly 158 gemtexts to HTML.
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First a new allergy, then the Yesterweb hacker that deleted every single gemtext, now an arsonist setting Zone I on fire.
On 02 March, at least one arsonist set multiple fires right next to my monitoring area. The local fire department responded quickly and the police are investigating, however there's not been a single mention of it in my local newspaper nor my fire department's website.
Other than that, I'm allergic to hazel pollen now and was in bed when my capsule got wiped. I've posted about the Yesterweb Hack on my Nekoweb site. Right now I don't feel like doing anything else, not even looking for an alternative to get my capsule back online.
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his winter took a great toll on my heating system and while I'm waiting for the technician the only thing keeping me warm is a tiny oil radiator, tons of blankets and my Acer Aspire.
I', currently working on a Gemtext addressing the sheer rich people politics behind climata politics and "renewable energy" because the German press still hasn't caught up to it fully (and won't even report about it unless there are "official numbers"). Utterly pathetic.
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New year, same old stuff. Due to some necessary repairs starting in spring, I'm forced to reduce the amount of individual trips again. At this time I can't tell how many days I need to cut and reschedule since those usually cannot be planned in advance. I'm currently preparing my docs and gemtexts for the upcoming season to get the mundane out of the way before things get hectic again.
At least Yesterweb finally issued a new cert during my absence.
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Happy Boxing Day to everyone! I decided to publish this year's summary a week before NYE to make up for my growing lack of interest in my research and to highlight that I'm not going to abandon Geminispace despite currently putting more effort into my Nekoweb site. Please keep in mind that last year's additional comments merely marked the "half time" of my research that had to be delayed by a year due to the 2022 drought heavily skewing one season – an extensive analysis of all records from 2022 to 2026 will mark the 5th anniversary in late 2026 to early 2027.
As of right now I'm not planning to mirror my research to the HTTP(S) web due to the lack of solid Gemtext/HTML converters. I'm also uncertain regarding my stay on Yesterweb (consdering its abandoned state) AND my amateur research past 2026. I do have some plans for the latter that boil down to just not publicizing any future data – I currently keep track of everything in two separate branches, with the private one also including detailed location data and handy maps with satellite imagery – but in case Yesterweb remains in this state...well, no idea, I guess. Self-hosting currently is not an option.
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I'm still in a slump but I've been distracting myself from it by slowly moving my paper.wf blog to my own site on Nekoweb. It's still a WIP but feel free to check it out anyway:
(This site also serves as a fallback in case Yesterweb shuts down. Its cert hasn't been updated since January and so it's safe to regard it as abandoned. While I won't mirror my research to Nekoweb it might serve as a link dump for zipped Gemtexts hosted somewhere else in the future.)
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I apologize for not announcing my rather spontaneous break from the internet as whole on here. It turns out that I overworked myself and currently happen to be close to burnout regarding my research... Not due to a lack of positive feedback, which I do receive from locals in particular, but rather due to the fact that I'm effectively working more against conservation organizations than money-driven farmers. It's getting soul-crushing how those claiming to protect "nature" so far have done even more harm than some of my local farmers who can't stop bragging about the millions of subsidies they receive – all whilst ignoring that illegal wildlife trade is increasing sharply due to bloody Etsy girls and their growing obsession with dead animals (most of which are portected species) glued into IKEA frames. There's ZERO awareness or even interest among the people claiming to know better while those actually doing something that DOES help got no voice whatsoever and receive nothing but condenscending remarks and hostility from "professionals" and law-oriented people (and generally those that proclaim that their damages justify the end goal of "stopping climate change / extinctions etc." because they do "science" or whatever).
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Working with QGIS so far has been more enjoyable than anticipated, so roughly 1/3 of my dedicated base maps already have been completed and just the zone-specific maps missing. One complete overview with satellite imagery and three OSM-based 1:7000 overviews will supplement my private notes.
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During the lunar eclipse, I got to chat a bit with "David" who let me know that he saw a black dragonfly a few years ago. This prompted me to review my own shots again and forced me to correct a minor misidentification from 2023. Upon closer inspection (and my phone's brightness turned to the max), the suspected S. sanguinem from Z III turned out to be a rather young S. vulgatum. Funny enough, the Meisel observation from 2024 has been re-confirmed to have been a male S. sanguinem, thus only resulting in a small change in distribution.
Speaking of odonata: I've been quietly working on some private documentation, currently focusing on C. mercuriale. Those notes also includes handy maps which so far had been lazily drawn on Google Maps screenshots. While they aren't bad per se, my Austrian friend's about to attend two GIS courses and recommended QGIS to me, already having produced a test map of my country and just finished installing some fitting satellite basemaps. This off-season period will be used to work on my own basemaps with custom labels, consisting of largely unknown names for certain locations and those locations with multiple names, to better keep track of my local odonata for now (and perhaps even import my Flora Incognita data at a later point).
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A low amount of potatoes, rotting fodder beet and fruits that mostly are sour, contain little to no worms and start to mold after just three days pretty much confirm that this summer was particularly poor in nearly all aspects, except in terms of harvested wheat, which technically shouldn't have performed this well after such a cool and wet summer.
Meanwhile, another suspect likely being (partially) responsible for the fast wilting and disappearance of stinging nettles outside of my yard has been identified after my district analyzed our largest river situated roughly ten kilometers west of my main zones. The bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum, causing bacterial wilt on cultivated plants such as potatoes and tomatoes, also successfully infects stinging nettles and not only spreads via water but also via contaminated machineries such as tractors. The river, alongside all of it arms, have been classified as contaminated.
Due to being poorly studied among wild plants, it's likely that it also infects more plants besides stinging nettles and I personally noticed a similar "early wilt" among numerous other "weeds", including herb-robert (geranium robertianum), common columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris), fringed willowherb (Epilobium cillatum) and rosebay willowherb (Epilobium augustifolium), plus a nearly total collapse of all dead-nettles and wild clovers. Obviously, I cannot test this hypothesis due to lack of necessary equipment – there equally could be multiple pathogens responsible for this drastic decline in nectar plants ON TOP of the terrible mowing regime, the ridiculous amount of thirsty wheat and barley that was cultivated this year, and April-like weather. I may get deeper into this in a longer entry at some point.
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With all signs pointing to an early start of autumn, I'll be shifting to my afternoon schedule for my upcoming field trips. Judging by the state at my workplace, however, most insects already have decided to go into hibernation.
I also finally invested in a minor setup upgrade. My aging Medion tower now runs on 16 GB RAM and no longer crashes randomly when booting Windows just to edit my shots. Since upgrading OEM setups usually is frowned upon among tinkerers, I first have to work on a list of fitting (used) CPU's and GPU's for my mainboard to later invest in some spare parts and maybe even another minor upgrade to still get the most out of this tower and while parts for such old machines remain relatively cheap and available.
And of course, the Meisel now is fully accessible again but the third section of the blocked road remains under construction until 5 September.
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My district came up with the wondeful idea to block a road from today to (allegedly) the end of August, with the announcement being made... today. Details are conflicting, as well: local news, which are largely paywalled, report the first part to be blocked to be on the other side of this section, whereas I just saw a bunch of trucks blocking my last remaining alternative route (the southern part of the bike path). A sign in my town states that the road will only be blocked for seven hours. All traffic now abuses the remaining paths, including the bike path and in spite of none being legal for cars to use. It's getting so bad that both streets to my home were entirely blocked for several minutes; one farmer blocked the village street with his large machinery, a single dumb driver blocked the path connecting "Mixed Field", village street and Zone I with each other.
Not only does this mean that I will have to drastically limit any future field trips in my main study area, with "Mixed Field", Zone I and II being the most affected by this change (unless those idiots will discover the grassy path to Zone III and start to abuse it, too), but also puts my pending Meisel trip in jeopardy. It cannot be accessed via car at all and, thanks to the traffic on the mostly-shadeless bike path where every driver pushes cyclists and pedestrians off the track, even going by bike will be difficult. In all cases I'd be without an assistant and with limited equipment – just my 700D and my EF-S 55-250mm; no tripod, no EF 70-200. And even then I'm not sure I'd be able to handle it, given how quickly I ended up with a moderately large kidney stone after a shorter trip last year.
I'm truly pissed at this level of fucking stupidity of my district and it's not even time for work, yet. Fantastic.
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Things are getting worse and now start to affect one of my main zones before I could even start to work on my private but more detailed notes on my local population of C. splendens. The bridge of the bike path which already sees half of its surrounding vegetation destroyed on a somewhat-regular basis in May and then again around July lost its only safe spot where all C. splendens would flee to when that regularly-destroyed half gets mowed down to the naked soil. All vegetation in and around the stream has been removed, including the small trees that were starting to grow out of the stream. The trees also weren't simply cut; their roots got digged out and the soil above and under water now is left completely bare, meaning that all damselfly eggs (those of C. splendens and possibly C. mercuriale as well) within this area also got wiped out.
It appears that because my mother was speaking on my behalf while I couldn't attend a local "village meeting" and already defended the Salix sp. at the main street bridge against some local rich farmer with too much political power, the same farmer now is likely going out of its way to remove any spot hosting damselflies that isn't located on the private properties of locals like Odrich Jr. (Z III) and David (Z II), both of which hold quite negative views on this particular farmer.
I actually had a quite enlightening chat with Odrich Jr. just a few days ago but the sheer amount of new information he was pretty much spitting out left my brain fried for some time. Right before I wanted to start to sort my notes I learn about this bullshit.
And if the weather continues to stay dry, we also might be in for out third drought since 2018. Some areas north of me already saw a series of fires due to the sudden spike in reckless behavior by the people from my neighboring district and my own (no shit, just two days ago a woman that was just a little older than me and parked next to me at our local Netto threw a half-smoked cigarette that still was lit right next to her own car's left tyre with absolutely zero care or awareness in the world and she walked so fast towards the store that I couldn't even call her out anymore without causing a massive scene in the store). I'm getting to a point where I don't just want to quit my studies but move to a different state.
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I can't deny that the recent developments within and around my village are frustrating. Four zones will be seeing their final (more or less) regular monitoring this year due to drastically declining conditions. I kind of saw them coming, hence the classification as "Additional Zones", but I was not expecting such a drastic decline within a single winter.
My state has also decided to visit "Bog Hill" again and update its "outdated" database but considering the last guys that came over did not track dragon-/damselflies and thus advocated for intentional overgrazing which largely wiped them out, PLUS their inability to rely on up-to-date literature regaring butterflies and hilariously misidentify M. athalia as M. aurelia across the entire district (!), I'm not looking forward to it. They likely just will advocate for some more overgrazing to keep species composition (both flora and fauna) at dangerous lows and keep this area drastically more vulnerable to droughts.
(I'm pissed, to say the least, and this is the first time I'm NOT excited for the upcoming start of this observation season.)
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Out of sheer luck, someone shared an invite for Vernissage that remained unclaimed for five hours since it was first posted. Because Pixelfed is so broken that it borked not one but two accounts of mine, I have to manually search for my old mutuals. Feel free to give it a follow in the meantime:
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I finally added my capsule to the Space Elevator orbit. I kind of forgot about for a while but better late than never.
No news besides a tiny butterfly necklace I ordered last weekend.
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Fixed a bunch of typos that made its way into my summaries. I also began to work on my repo with games rejected by the Internet Archive and I still got approximately 80 DOS/Windows 9x games to briefly document before getting into the other game discs that largely include games for Windows XP in particular.
Right now I don't feel like writing about anything. There just isn't anything interesting to talk about, unless some people really would be interested in me praising my new hand and body lotions and gossiping about a guy working at my favorite car repair that was curious about "a young woman going to pick that Audi 80 up" and began to smile shyly when he saw me entering the shop (it was cute, seriously).
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This year's summaries have been published and, for the first time, include one additional commentary gemtext for butterflies and, as the amount of species is too low to justify yearly summaries similar to those of my butterfly lists, an additional commentary gemtext for dragon- and damslflies. Despite some rough three weeks in-between and wetter conditions, this season was incredible and offered quite an amount of surprises and new observations. As 2024 was the best year since my research kicked off in 2022, it'd be interesting to see what 2025 will bring.
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I began to restore two old PC I've been owning for decades and started to donate parts of my CD-ROM collection to the Internet Archive. All alongside my usual research, of course.
Speaking of my research, due to a sudden decision by my local district to demolish a ruin in my village, the minor zone "Front Yard Meadow", which is located just a few meters from said ruin, likely will be excluded from future research, as the owners of the two buildings right next to the ruin were told to move out immediately, meaning that the area currently blocked from entering/passing will be extended and border the tiny meadow.
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Not only did I manage to identify the unidentified Sympetrum sp. that was a source of annoyance, I also voided my kidney stone roughly an hour ago, after my second and last colic since yesterday. While the weather remains too poor for my already-cancelled field trip, I will spend the rest of the day celebrating this.
In other news: Happy 26th Birthday to me!
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I got out of hospital at around 10:30 AM due to a kindey stone giving me a huge amount of abdominal pain and nausea. While I got advised to take pain killers, drink more water and stay physically active, I barely can focus on writing this status and eating a bloody yoghourt is quite cumbersome, as well. I hope this stone gets out of my body soon, preferably... today.
Luckily, no further field trips were planned and I still got plenty of time to work on this month's summary. Now I'll tak my time to properly hydrate myself for once and bombard my body with painkillers.
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After comparing Lepiwiki's entries for T. sylvestris and T. lineola with the information provided by Ulmer, I have decided to re-evaluate all observations of th genus "Thymelicus". Supplementary photos partually contradict each other and common descriptions, plus virtually nothing is being documented on each Thymelicus' hybridization/aberration possibilities. For now, all observations of species belonging to this genus should be taken with a grain of salt until I'm done reworking my lists.
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First some sweet news: My capsule got picked up by DiscoGem on 11 April.
Now some not-so-sweet news: I wanted to visit this year's "special area" but was greeted by too many clouds, mowed wastelands and groups of cyclists. Additionally, this year's Eurovision is set to be a catastrophy and the current amount of clouds will make it difficult to watch the ongoing aurora this evening. I'm torn between watching Malmö going up in flames and waiting hours just to capture a glimpse of my very first northern lights.
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Because of the new format of the complete list of butterflies, the complete list of all dragon- and damselflies finally has been updated, too. This list also includes two locations previously undocumented.
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The list of all butterflies ever observed has been rewritten from scratch and now consists of two tables similar to those already used in the yearly summaries. If anyone should notice any typos, please keep in mind that I don't use autocorrect and thus will only correct typos when I come across them myself. Feel free to submit any corrections and tips on how I can further improve the readability of this sub-capsule via any address listed on the Contact page!
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This year's ecological summary finally is online! This will be the only yearly review as this file grew way too big, hence next year's summaries will be divided by its respective months. The "all" lists currently look a little stale and incomplete, so I'll start working on specific tables summarizing all years in which an individual species has been seen. Due to my studies at this moment only encompassing two years, those lists won't be added until the end of 2024.
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The shop is opening its doors earlier than expected. While both my personal gemlog and the observation log still are empty, they will be filled with logs over time. One observation log already is in the making.
The only thing I'm still considering, though, is the inclusion of a tiny selection of my photos. All of them already have been compressed but they're hosted on my Medion Akoya and its archive hard-drive only – and I'm currently typing this on my tiny Acer that is incompatible with this HDD's proprietary port (and I lost its tiny USB cable).
Anyway, this is not the most important issue at the moment, in fact all of my shots currently include some metadata that is meant to come in handy in case of copyright violations. While I don't think Gemini would be vulnerable to this, I'm not exactly comfortable with leaking my full name. Not that many people on here would care, though, but I already had some interesting experiences on the WWW that got... rather risky, to say the least. But I disgress.
For now, this capsule is open to visitors that don't mind the lack of photos, despite my camera being listed in my setup gemtext. Once I decided whether or not to create more pages, I might add my capsule to either LEO or the Space Elevator.
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One more list to go and one post in need of some tiny adjustments. Still need to figure out what to do with my index page, though.
Considering that I'm growing to love Gemini more and more, it's no longer unlikely that my capsule won't just host some ecological observations. For now, however, this shall be enough until I'm fully comfortable with Gemtext.
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Still working on a bunch of gemtexts that may be ready for publishing near the end of the year, given that some involve some basic info regarding the ongoing research I'm working on. Due to the lack of support for tables, I have to get a little more creative, which consumes additional time.
Meanwhile I ditched Tumblr. I don't miss that junk in the slightest, yet I couldn't use this new free time to work on the writing part of my research, so far. First a messed-up sleeeping schedule due to partying neighbours, then an appointment I didn't expect to take half a day, closely followed – just two days after the appointment – by a serious family matter that will keep me on alert for quite some time until everything's settled.
At least I already got the toughest stuff done prior to this. One description needs a minor correction and some addtional information, while two location descriptions still need to be written and one list needs a new addition. But for now I need to collect a little more data and clean my car.
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Joined Yesterweb.