The Postmodern Terminal: An Experiment with Gemini

Last week I started a second place to write. It's called The Postmodern Terminal, and it lives on the small web, served over the Gemini protocol. It holds 77 posts so far. I'm linking each one from this blog so they have a home here too, but the canonical copy of each lives on the capsule.

What Gemini is #

Gemini is a small internet protocol that sits somewhere between Gopher and the web. A Gemini site is called a capsule. Its pages are written in gemtext, which allows a heading, a paragraph, a link, a list, and a quote, and nothing else. There are no scripts, no stylesheets, no images inline, no cookies, and no tracking. You read it in a Gemini client like Lagrange or Amfora. My host, smol.pub, also serves every capsule over HTTPS, so a browser works too.

Why I tried it #

That constraint is the point. A post in gemtext cannot hide behind formatting, so the argument has to carry the line. I also like what isn't there: no comments section, and nothing that moves on the page. If a post provokes a thought, you have to write to me, and I would rather have that than a comment box.

The name is a pun I couldn't resist. A terminal is where you type, and it is also where a line ends. I like holding both senses open (a Derridean habit I never shook).

What's on it #

Most posts began as lectures for the doctoral seminars I teach. Each one tries to distill a lecture into something you can read in five minutes. The series so far:

• Why Theory? A toolbox of lenses, from critical theory and affect theory to ethnoautobiography, cybernetic capitalism, and Yuk Hui on AI.
• Accelerationism, a nine-part field guide to the wager and its thinkers.
• Critical Pedagogy, from Freire and Rancière to bell hooks and Henry Giroux.
• Craft and Method: embodied wisdom, what counts as best practice, and how a scholarly article gets finished.
• Scholarly Postscript: the tools and habits (Zotero, kanban, writing groups) that keep a project moving.

How I publish #

The posts live in a small git repository as .gmi files, one per post, named posts/YYYY-MM-DD-slug.gmi. I wrote a short shell script that sends each file to the same endpoints smol.pub's web form uses. It reads the title from the first line, posts the rest as the body, and falls back to the update endpoint if the post already exists.

./publish.sh            # only files changed since the last publish
./publish.sh --all      # everything
./publish.sh FILE...    # just those files

It knows what changed by keeping a git tag, smolpub-published, pointed at a snapshot of the tree from the last successful publish. It doesn't need a commit, only git stash create and a tag. If any file fails, it doesn't move the tag, so the next run tries again. A 302 from smol.pub means the post was accepted. A 403 means my token expired and I need to copy a new one from the settings page.

Where this goes #

The capsule's index calls these posts drafts toward a public commonplace blog on theory, method, and the craft of scholarly writing. That is still how I think of them. Some will come back here in longer form. Some will stay small.

If you run a capsule on theory, religion, or method, send me the address. And if you read one of these posts and want to argue with it, write to me at [email protected]. I read everything and answer most of it, slowly.