commit d81c7eed6292171a516d119d4ead469fde88d69f
Author: Bùi Thành Nhân <hi@imnhan.com>
Date:   Sat Jun 13 18:26:25 2020 +0700

    mcross: shave off the edge a bit

diff --git a/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md b/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md
index aae9464..e9c758f 100644
--- a/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md
+++ b/content/posts/introducing-mcross.md
@@ -10,12 +10,11 @@
 
 Personally I'm skeptical if this thing will take off any time soon (or ever).
 Sure I agree the web is [comically bloated][4], [openly user-hostile][5], and
-tech's knight in shining armor of yesteryear has somehow managed to become both
-a [creepy big brother][6] and a shameless [snake oil][7] peddler at the same
-time, so on and so forth... But the fact remains that the web is the most
-convenient thing there is, both from a user's and developer's perspective.
-Gemini is a fun experiment. It may even be a hit among <strike>nerds</strike>
-power users and the overly privacy-concious, but that's it.
+the big players are only [adding to the problem][7], but the fact remains that
+the web is the most convenient thing there is, both from a user's and
+developer's perspective. Gemini is a fun experiment. It may even be a hit among
+<strike>nerds</strike> power users and the overly privacy-concious, but that's
+it.
 
 But then again, I consider myself among the "<strike>nerds</strike> power users
 and the overly privacy-concious" demographic, so I naturally want to see what
@@ -34,9 +33,10 @@
 
 Why not use one of the existing browsers you ask? Sure enough there are a bunch
 of existing browsers, with [Castor][8] appearing to be the furthest along in
-development, but it didn't work _quite_ the way I would like. Moreover, I've
-always wanted an excuse to try GUI & socket programming in python. Anyway, the
-following are what I disagree with in the Castor browser:
+development, but it didn't work _quite_ the way I would like. This made me want
+to find out for myself just how hard it is to build a reasonably user-friendly
+desktop GUI application. For the rest of this blog post I try to elaborate on
+my idea of a _user-friendly desktop GUI application_.
 
 ### Visual feedback:
 
@@ -54,8 +54,8 @@ ### Visual feedback:
 
 ### Aesthetics:
 
-Call me picky but I don't like how links are presented as buttons and they
-don't even have breathing room between them:
+Call me picky but I don't like how in Castor links are presented as buttons and
+they don't even have breathing room between them:
 
 ![Castor links](/images/mcross_02_castor.png)
 
@@ -69,8 +69,9 @@ ### Aesthetics:
 not automatically but it takes trivial work anyway). Linux however doesn't have
 such a thing, but the bundled `clam` theme looks pleasing enough for me. Yes, I
 do think a retro looking theme fares better than the gtk-on-kde look, and its
-simple scrollbar looks and _works_ way better than those nigh-unclickable
-abominations that KDE and GTK call their "modern scrollbar", fight me.
+simple scrollbar looks and, more importantly, _works_ way better than those
+nigh-unclickable abominations that KDE and GTK call their "modern scrollbar",
+fight me.
 
 Another explicit design decision in McRoss is that while custom styling is
 applied to special lines (heading, list, code block...), their textual content
@@ -95,9 +96,8 @@ ### Installation:
 
 # Closing thoughts
 
-To me the whole gemini ecosystem represents the long-lost naive optimism, not
-necessarily of the early web, but of my younger self when I first hopped on the
-relatively early iteration of the web. It was not even as far as the "good old
+To me the whole gemini ecosystem represents the long-lost naive optimism of an
+earlier web ecosystem. It was not even as far as the "good old
 gopher/bbs days" those boomers keep ranting about - it was the days of early
 MMORPGs, of crappy Yahoo! 360 blogs riced up with copy-pasted html/css all over
 the place, of numerous Vietnamese warez forums powered by pirated vBulletin
@@ -115,7 +115,8 @@ # Closing thoughts
 I make a living out of building webstuff), but it is undeniably a sad thing.
 Gemini may be a spark that begins a push back against unjustified complexity,
 or it may end up being just another niche tech curiosity. I'm leaning towards
-the latter but hey at least with McRoss it's a halfway usable tech curiosity.
+the latter, but in the meantime, I'll keep peaking at the geminiverse with my
+comfy trusty browser.
 
 [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
 [2]: https://lobste.rs/s/79pu7o/gemini_protocol_inbetween_gopher_web