Spell check & make filenames uniform

Did a basic spell check on files, and corrected obvious
typos. Also renamed submitted files for neatness.

submissions/sloum_playlist.gmi

@@ -2,9 +2,9 @@
 
 Circumlunar Mixtape is an ongoing series for Circumlunar Transmissions where one user per issue shares 10 tracks they have been listening to. Y'all have all kinds of ways to stream or otherwise find and listen to music, so tracks are just listed and it is on the reader to locate them. As a courtesy, when a weblink to streaming is available playlist curators may choose to supply it.
 
-## sloum's covid year playlist
+## sloum's covid-year playlist
 
-These are songs I have listened to at various points throughout the last year. Some are old some are new. It has been a weird year and this is a kind of weird mix. I provided bandcamp weblinks for each track except the Charlie Parr, which is a youtube link because I like this song live and this is my favorite performance recording of it and the recording doesn't appear on any of his albums.
+These are songs I have listened to at various points throughout the last year. Some are old some are new. It has been a weird year and this is a kind of weird mix. I provided Bandcamp weblinks for each track except the Charlie Parr, which is a Youtube link because I like this song live and this is my favorite performance recording of it and the recording doesn't appear on any of his albums.
 
 Enjoy!
 
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@ Format: [track name] by [artist name] from [album name]
 
 => https://adriannelenker.bandcamp.com/track/forwards-beckon-rebound Forwards Beckon Rebound by Adrianne Lenker from Songs
 => https://talons.bandcamp.com/track/catamaran Catamaran by talons' from Songs for Boats
-=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46hGYUycoE Possessed By the Devil by Charlie Parr from N/A (live video on youtube)
+=> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P46hGYUycoE Possessed By the Devil by Charlie Parr from N/A (live video on Youtube)
 => https://pinback.bandcamp.com/track/some-voices Some Voices by Pinback from Some Voices e.p.
 => https://tomomusic.bandcamp.com/track/get-to-know-you Get To Know You by Tomo Nakayama from Melonday
 => https://lusine.bandcamp.com/track/just-a-cloud-feat-vilja-larjosto Just a Cloud by Lusine from Sensorimotor

submissions/solderpunk_whats-the-deal-with-leapseconds.gmi

@@ -36,7 +36,7 @@ So far, there have been 27 leap seconds defined, although UTC and ATI are today
 
 Leap seconds have always had their critics, but at the time they were adopted, their benefits arguably balanced their associated hassle.  50 years later, this hack is starting to show its age.  The advent of cheap and reliable GPS technology means that celestial navigation at sea is now rarely a matter of life or death (although some sailors still appreciate the relative simplicity of the technology it relies on), removing some of the argument for making sure UTC stays in lock step with the Earth's rotation.  At the same time, the internet has come along: a massive network of computers talking to each other, with the frequent need for activity on one to be synchronised with activity on another (hence tools like the Network Time Protocol, NTP).  Computer programmers *hate* leap seconds, for the same reason they hate Daylight Saving Time: they complicate time calculations (you can't accurately calculate the number of seconds between two UTC timestamps without consulting a table of when previous leap seconds were inserted) and are a frequent cause of confusion and errors, when one system implements them differently from another its trying to interoperate with.
 
-Affordances for leap years are often added to software as an afterthought - if they are added at all.  Some systems represent the extra second using the timestamp 23:59:60, but others instead repeat the timestamp 23:59:59 twice (since some software will fail to parse a timestamp ending in :60).  Other systems "smear" the leap second out over longer time periods, like 24 hours, to avoid problems associated with sudden discontinuities.  This just leads to a whole day of small, slowly varying errors compared to non-smearing systems.  Some systems, of course, forget to do anything at all.  Because all the leap years to date have been insertions rather than removals, it's a safe bet that there's plenty of software out there which has worked correctly so far but will fail the first time a second is removed.  And the Earth's rotation is going through a bit of a fast phase right now, so the first negative leap second might be looming on the horizon.
+Affordances for leap seconds are often added to software as an afterthought - if they are added at all.  Some systems represent the extra second using the timestamp 23:59:60, but others instead repeat the timestamp 23:59:59 twice (since some software will fail to parse a timestamp ending in :60).  Other systems "smear" the leap second out over longer time periods, like 24 hours, to avoid problems associated with sudden discontinuities.  This just leads to a whole day of small, slowly varying errors compared to non-smearing systems.  Some systems, of course, forget to do anything at all.  Because all the leap seconds to date have been insertions rather than removals, it's a safe bet that there's plenty of software out there which has worked correctly so far but will fail the first time a second is removed.  And the Earth's rotation is going through a bit of a fast phase right now, so the first negative leap second might be looming on the horizon.
 
 The software interoperability situation at the time of a leap second is bad enough that several major stock exchanges simply agreed to voluntarily shut down for an hour around midnight UTC in 2016, rather than risk problems by continuing to trade during the leap second.  Given that a number of major web services, including Amazon, Instagram, Netflix and Twitter, experienced outages around this time, this was probably not a bad idea.  Of course, simply shutting time critical services off for every leap second isn't always an option.  It's one thing to shut down the New York Stock Exchange for an hour, but Air Traffic Control has to stay up 24/7.  It's no surprise that increasingly many voices in the tech industry are calling for leap seconds to be abolished.  Plenty of people are very unhappy with that idea, of course, not to mention there's no consensus on what to do instead.
 

submissions/tfurrows_granular-ideologue.gmi

@@ -19,21 +19,21 @@ of making the problem worse, I proffer:
 
 ## From a Message in a Bottle, Sitting Atop the Dam of Manifestos
 
-* Let your mind move freely, become a seeker
-* Accept that knowledge is scattered broadly
-* Find kernels of truth and germinate thoughts
-
-* Take something from every ideology, fear nothing
-* Subscribe to that which you find value in
-* Mistrust labels, they carry unimaginable baggage
-
-* Acknowledge all that came before, but accept the utility of your journey
-* Never believe that you have the best vision for the world
-* Don't try to fashion the world to your ideals; your ideals are cursory
-
-* Be a maximal minimalist, distill purity from immensity
-* Find, purify, share, repeat
-* To conclude means to cease to grow
+> Let your mind move freely, become a seeker
+> Accept that knowledge is scattered broadly
+> Find kernels of truth and germinate thoughts
+>
+> Take something from every ideology, fear nothing
+> Subscribe to that which you find value in
+> Mistrust labels, they carry unimaginable baggage
+>
+> Acknowledge all that came before, but accept the utility of your journey
+> Never believe that you have the best vision for the world
+> Don't try to fashion the world to your ideals; your ideals are cursory
+>
+> Be a maximal minimalist, distill purity from immensity
+> Find, purify, share, repeat
+> To conclude means to cease to grow
 
 <tfurrows@circumlunar.space>
 <tfurrows@sdf.org>

submissions/wholesomedonut_why-i-still-game-proprietary.gmi

@@ -5,11 +5,11 @@ date: Sun Mar  18 19:52:38 PM UTC 2021
 author: wholesomedonut
 
 ## Proprietary gaming isn't all bad
-Since getting into the FOSS community, I see a lot of pushback towards the gaming industry as a whole. I can see why: DRM runs rampant, terrible business practices regulary conflagrate internet forums, anti-cheat programs are basically consensual (and mandatory for official online play in some cases) trojans, and to make it all worse it costs a mint to get into the hobby nowadays due to scalpers and crypto miners running rampant in the market.
+Since getting into the FOSS community, I see a lot of pushback towards the gaming industry as a whole. I can see why: DRM runs rampant, terrible business practices regularly conflagrate internet forums, anti-cheat programs are basically consensual (and mandatory for official online play in some cases) trojans, and to make it all worse it costs a mint to get into the hobby nowadays due to scalpers and crypto miners running rampant in the market.
 
-I agree with all of those observations. They tire me. They concern me. They frustate me daily.
+I agree with all of those observations. They tire me. They concern me. They frustrate me daily.
 
-However! There are still reasons -not- to go the route of some I see in the FOSS world and eschew gaming altogether on anything but a FOSS platform, with FOSS games, because.... FOSS. That argument is just as dumb in practice, because it's an artificial limitation that stands on somewhat subjective, opinionated reasoning. "But wholesomedonut, thou angereth me!" I hear in the imaginary comments section because this is gemini and you can't do that. I am certain you will find peace through measured contemplation and a cup of whatever warm or cold liquid you enjoy.
+However! There are still reasons -not- to go the route of some I see in the FOSS world and eschew gaming altogether on anything but a FOSS platform, with FOSS games, because.... FOSS. That argument is just as dumb in practice, because it's an artificial limitation that stands on somewhat subjective, opinionated reasoning. "But wholesomedonut, thou angereth me!" I hear in the imaginary comments section because this is Gemini and you can't do that. I am certain you will find peace through measured contemplation and a cup of whatever warm or cold liquid you enjoy.
 
 ## Why do I use Steam?
 Well.... everyone else that isn't a computer nerd usually does too. And the overhead for getting people of minimum technical understanding (that like playing video games) into FOSS gaming generally is much more costly in terms of mental and social capacity than the clout I usually have with my friends or family on such matters.
@@ -20,18 +20,18 @@ King's English: If I have to instruct them to download the latest version of the
 People are intelligent, generally. They're very skilled in a multitude of things that aren't computers. But asking someone who -isn't- tech savvy to figure out how to pull down the right version of a FOSS game from a code repo (or heaven forbid build it themselves with cmake or whatever) is like asking ME to diagnose a car's problems using nothing but a flashlight and a screwdriver. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing anyway in that department. Without the proper tools and education too? I'm screwed. Therefore I urge empathy and patience in introducing others to FOSS gaming. It's a bit more finicky than the plug-and-play mentality commercial systems have fostered.
 
 ## Enter the Mech Man
-A good example of a FOSS game that has plenty of good and bad would be MegaMek. It's basically a fully computerized version of the Classic Battletech rules, which is a board game that's existed since the 1980's and is going on 40 years of conniving, number-crunching tomfoolery that only a particular subset of people even enjoy. All in the name of combined-arms strategy on a hex board that involves groups of multi-ton robots, tanks, airplanes and infantry taking and giving damage to individual components, weapons and armor locations in a somewhat realistic and highly detailed simulation of 31st-century warfare.
+A good example of a FOSS game that has plenty of good and bad would be MegaMek. It's basically a fully computerized version of the Classic Battletech rules, which is a board game that's existed since the 1980s and is going on 40 years of conniving, number-crunching tomfoolery that only a particular subset of people even enjoy. All in the name of combined-arms strategy on a hex board that involves groups of multi-ton robots, tanks, airplanes and infantry taking and giving damage to individual components, weapons and armor locations in a somewhat realistic and highly detailed simulation of 31st-century warfare.
 
 To alleviate the issue of significant calculational overhead for every-single-action-attack-or-damage-roll-ever, this program does all of the math, calculations, and rules proofing for you. So you can enjoy the game with others, wherever they may be, instead of reaching for your G.A.T.O.R. card for the tenth time to show the newbie of the group what happens when an SRM-6 missile spread hits a light vehicle whose armor is already exposed on its' left flank. There are plenty of grognards out there who know these rules well and can do half the game in their head: they're obviously not the target of this article.
 
-I shiver at the thought of doing all that stuff manually if I don't have to. That kind of tedium takes away from the moment-by-moment gameplay, forcing everybody to get ox-in-the-mire'd over details that don't matter overall instead of letting their big stompy robots blow each other up.
+I shiver at the thought of doing all that stuff manually if I don't have to. That kind of tedium takes away from the moment-by-moment gameplay, forcing everybody to get ox-in-the-mired over details that don't matter overall instead of letting their big stompy robots blow each other up.
 
 Megamek works wonders in that regard. A game of Classic Battletech that could easily take 5 or 6 hours in person without any sort of calculator apps or an otherwise breakneck pace of gameplay and rules-lawyering will only take an hour or two maximum with Megamek. It's a godsend for a hobby that would otherwise be relegated to local play over predetermined days, not a "Hey want to play a match? Sure!" kind of casual pickup on a boring afternoon.
 
 ### But it isn't all sunshine and rainbows.
 Nope! Megamek is, in my humble and donut-shaped opinion, a terrible example of UI and UX. I played a round recently, and another aficionado of the series played against me. Quoth my opponent: "This program looks like something out of Windows 95." Neither of us had played the most recent version of the game. I hadn't touched it in a year at least.
 
-Some changes were welcome, and the development progresses smoothly. But it's still just as much a spaghetti plate in terms of user experience: configuration options laid out in long lists of checkboxes organized by multiple top-window tabs; a decidedly 15-years-old design language that clashes with modern perceptions of UI and UX (which is bad considering that taking in new blood is crucial for both userbase and developer contribution reasons); and the final nail in the coffin is the fact that the much easier and more recent Alpha Strike ruleset isn't included at all by default, to my knowledge. You might be able to configure something like that using plugins, but we're already putting the cart before the horse at that point.
+Some changes were welcome, and the development progresses smoothly. But it's still just as much a spaghetti plate in terms of user experience: configuration options laid out in long lists of check boxes organized by multiple top-window tabs; a decidedly 15-years-old design language that clashes with modern perceptions of UI and UX (which is bad considering that taking in new blood is crucial for both userbase and developer contribution reasons); and the final nail in the coffin is the fact that the much easier and more recent Alpha Strike ruleset isn't included at all by default, to my knowledge. You might be able to configure something like that using plugins, but we're already putting the cart before the horse at that point.
 
 ### To be fair,
 The project started in 2000. It's 21 years old in some places, if only in logic and not literal syntax. It's written in Java. And it's been a community effort by dozens of talented people over the decades. The fact that it's alive at all is impressive, but so's the fact that the franchise whose boardgame it emulates even has a fanbase still. BT fans aren't quitters, certainly. And this is all considering the fact that trying to automate, obfuscate and de-FUBAR the mountain of minutiae that Battletech's rulesets and technical data (on a per unit and per variant basis no less) is a monumental task. I can hardly think of a video-game adaptation of a more complex board game that does a better job, in proportion to the complexity of the physical source material and gameplay flow.