Removed the scrote

blog/2021/december/copywrong.html

@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
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-				<p>Since <a href="../november/nft.html">my post on non-fungible tokens last month</a>, I've come to the radical and totally shocking conclusion that I personally don't care if corporations start using NFTs as a Digital Restrictions Management scheme to further lock down their products. Actually, I take that back: I <em>hope</em> they do, and quickly, because the more restricted their products are, whether software or music or games, the less appealing said products will be for the end consumer and thus the less money said companies will make.</p>
+				<p>I've come to the radical and totally shocking conclusion that I personally don't care if corporations start using NFTs as a Digital Restrictions Management scheme to further lock down their products. Actually, I take that back: I <em>hope</em> they do, and quickly, because the more restricted their products are, whether software or music or games, the less appealing said products will be for the end consumer and thus the less money said companies will make.</p>
 				<p>I follow a great deal of Tumblr accounts without having an account myself due to this funny little thing called RSS. Over the past month, one of them, which I followed for the occult memes, has been throwing a shitfit over <a href="https://archive.md/6rYq7#selection-517.0-517.8">the public backlash from their planned NFT collection</a>. It turns out that almost nobody actually wants to pony up large chunks of money for the privilege of... accessing a full-quality GIF in a digital locker.</p>
 				<p>And why should they? It's not as if the art, from what the preview GIFs show me, is of high artistic merit. Why would someone go through the hassle of setting up a crypto wallet, paying the money, and figuring out what convoluted authentication scheme the digital locker uses to access the art just to... claim ownership over a chunk of ones and zeros? Thanks to the analog hole, either the value would tank when the buyer tried to show off the GIF they'd bought as it would be the full-quality one and now available to everyone to see and steal, or whatever site they uploaded it to would compress it, in which case there would be no point to having bought it as they could have just used the preview one to get the same end quality.</p>
 				<p>This person losing a large chunk of their followers from what they perceived to be as "selling out" is, to me, a microcosm of what is to come if corporations start trying to use NFTs as a DRM mechanism. Any PC gamer knows what a hassle existing DRM methods like Denuvo are, especially when trying to get games working on any operating system that isn't Microshaft Wangblows. There comes a point where the software's attempts to ensure it isn't an "unauthorized" copy are so intrusive- remember the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal">Sony rootkit</a>?- that it becomes more of a hassle to tolerate it than to learn how to use a less-restrictive alternative. Even the most dedicated <a href="../../2020/february/consumeproduct.html">"bugman"</a> has a limit. (That is, when one is aware an alternative exists...) I originally learned how to use Linux because my Windows install had found a way to break itself, and fixing it every day would have been more effort than just learning how to run Ubuntu, even though I was terrified of breaking my computer at the time due to my then-incompetence. <strong>The more opaque and DRM-ridden a product is, the closer to "path of least resistance" a pirated version of said product with the DRM removed or an alternative that never had the DRM becomes.</strong></p>

blog/2021/march/harmful.html

@@ -18,7 +18,7 @@
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 				<p>Today (or yesterday, if I black out from sleep deprivation before I manage to publish this post), I officially withdrew from my college composition class. I'll get a big fat "W" on my transcript, and my class completion percentage will go down by a small but statistically significant amount, but my GPA won't get fucked over by the pitiful excuse for a human being that was my professor, which is the most important thing.</p>
 				<p>I have had a long-standing distaste for academic writing, going back all the way to first grade when I wrote my first ever "essay" (it was about deer). In quotes because it wasn't an essay so much as it was a vague collection of notes arranged into paragraphs by topics like "foods they like to eat" and "parts of their bodies". The schools I attended in my youth were always teetering on the edge of being underfunded, and, compounded with missing large swaths of class to "speech therapy", meant that I didn't really have a good grasp on what the hell it was that teachers wanted until high school- although this was completely accidental, since that was also when I began taking writing books seriously, and being one of the only students in my English classes who could write legibly without an ocean of spelling and grammar errors meant I most likely would have gotten a good grade only from the sheer relief of being comprehensible and not from any argument I could have made.</p>
-				<p>Now, free from the confines of the public school system backed by state coercion, if I so choose, I never have to interact with academic-style writing ever again. Having abandoned my asshole professor will only make this sweeter. So, in true <a href="https://kill-9.xyz">kill-9</a> fashion: academic writing considered harmful.</p>
+				<p>Now, free from the confines of the public school system backed by state coercion, if I so choose, I never have to interact with academic-style writing ever again. Having abandoned my asshole professor will only make this sweeter. So, in true hacker fashion: academic writing considered harmful.</p>
 				<p>Disclaimer: I neither have the patience nor the knowledge to argue about big-boy academic journals, which take all this to an <em>extreme</em> degree. Obviously all this applies to them as well. But this post is about my own experience.</p>
 				<h2 id="emphasis-on-presentation-over-content">Emphasis on presentation over content</h2>
 				<p>Imagine, if you will, a college assignment. You are to write an essay comparing two short stories with the same plot but slightly different writing styles. The thesis can be about anything, so long as it relates the two stories with the theme of "communication" in mind. Not the layman's definition, but the professor's definition, which involves a complicated flow chart made in an ancient version of PowerPoint; <em>all</em> the parts must be followed to a T, or else it is Not True Communication. (In truth, anything that reminds me of the "static mindset versus growth mindset" videos I was forced to watch in Advisory class in high school instantly makes me tune out.)</p><p>Already you are saddled with a subject you have little to no emotional investment in. But you paid good money for the course (or, in my case, you didn't because your state's vocational rehabilitation program covers your whole tuition), and so you take a deep breath and just wade through the shit to get it over with. You follow all the formatting guidelines and cite everything properly and get at least two of your classmates to "peer review" it. And when everything is complete, you turn it in.</p>
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@
 				<p>Quotes are contentious. Take the following snippet of text:</p>
 				<blockquote>Characters are now addressed by their names: "Howard drove home from the hospital" (A Small Good Thing, 7) gives the reader the name of the father, "Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes" (A Small Good Thing, 9) the name of the doctor, "Ann stood there a little while longer" (A Small Good Thing, 11) the name of the mother.</blockquote>
 				<p>Some of these quotes, in the original text, end in periods (as most sentences do). However, <strong>I did not include the periods because they would break the flow of the sentence</strong>; reading the quotes with one's internal voice would expect the sentence to end at the period and thus adjust its inflection accordingly, inducing mental confusion when a new sentence does not start immediately after. Similarly, if I quote something at the end of the sentence, but the quote was in the middle of a sentence in the original text, <strong>I am not going to put the period in the quotation marks because the period is not part of the quote.</strong></p>
-				<h2 id="citations-orange-man-bad-37-break-immersion">Citations (Orange Man Bad, 37) break immersion</h2>
+				<h2>Citations (Orange Man Bad, 37) break immersion</h2>
 				<p>Refer to the above snippet of text. At the beginning, I could have just stated that all the quotes were from "A Small Good Thing" (Your Mom, 26) and trusted the reader to be intelligent enough to remember this (Penis, 12) as they read the sentence. But <em>every single damn thing</em> has to be individually cited (Karl Marx, 69) for some reason. I can understand making it obvious what one's citing (Anime Tiddy Waifu, 97), but does it have to be so intrusive? Can't it be worked into the natural flow (Onion Man, 64) of the sentence, thus sparing the reader the mental pain of swerving around so many literary potholes? If I were cooking and the recipe called for salt (Cannibal, 42), I'd put in a pinch here and there, not dump the whole goddamn (Stalin, 19) salt shaker in.</p>
 				<h2 id="alternatives">Alternatives</h2>
 				<p>If you go to <a href="https://z-lib.org">Z-Lib</a> and search "A Very Short Introduction", you will find lots of books from an academic source (Oxford University Press) that manage to escape the above plague of unreadability and inform the reader without making said reader want to self-lobotomize. Citations are melded into the natural flow of sentences, giving credit without giving brain damage. While the authors understandably rarely talk about themselves, the language used leans layman without sacrificing its authoritative viewpoint. And being ebooks, formatting serves the purpose of making the text as readable as possible on the widest variety of devices.</p>

blog/2021/november/nft.html

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-		<title>Analog Hole - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
-		<link href="../../../style.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="all">
-		<meta name="author" content="Vane Vander">
-		<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
-	</head>
-	<body class="mayvaneday">
-		<script src="../../../checktor.js"></script>
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-			<div class="box">
-				<h1>Analog Hole</h1>
-				<p>published: 2021-11-05</p>
-			</div>
-			<hr>
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-				<p>The <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20211104135513/https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole">"analog hole"</a> is the last inevitable loophole in DRM. We humans (or those stuck in human bodies) are analog creatures whose brains cannot run DRM, and so anything digital must be somehow converted into analog signals- music to soundwaves, pictures to an array of pixels on a screen- before it can be experienced. And as long as we remain analog without computer chips in our brains, this hole will never be patched, meaning any (noninterative) piece of media can be copied in some form. Maybe it means plugging a phone playing Spotify or some other streaming service into an aux cord and that into a computer's microphone port. Maybe it means pulling out a cheap old point-and-shoot camera and taking a picture or video of one's screen. There may be some loss of fidelity or quality along the way, but <em>something</em> can always be extracted beyond the reach of DRM.</p>
-				<p>This is the main problem with NFTs as they stand today. Because an NFT is essentially a line in a blockchain somewhere that says that a particular wallet holds a particular integer. And someone, somewhere, one day decided to make this integer represent the hash of a file, because blockchains usually don't have the capacity to hold the raw image data in a single entry. This means the file has to be hosted elsewhere in order for anyone to see or care about it. And, to be seen, the file has to be converted into an... <em>analog</em> format. Meaning, if I don't give a shit about the "ownership" of an NFT, I can just <a href="https://archive.md/4efyo">right-click the image</a> or video or whatever, or take a screenshot or recording of it, and have a copy of it on my hard drive without having to spend any money.</p>
-				<p>The value of an NFT isn't in the JPEG or whatever in and of itself because of the analog hole. They're just JPEGs on a screen. And no sane person is going to buy an image that they can right-click and reproduce to infinity. <a href="https://archive.md/https://jole.xyz/nft.html">The "value" comes from what the NFT represents</a>: a tradeable asset. However, almost all of the NFTs I've ever seen don't actually seem to have any... function beyond being a reference to an image that one can waste Ethereum gas money moving around to other people. And I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, don't put any monetary value on a JPEG in and of itself. But what about a JPEG that was a token, a proof of ownership, of... <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed">an account slot in an online game?</a> A <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.reddit.com/r/sadcringe/comments/qhcuem/nft_dude_thinks_he_can_stop_people_from/hidryi9/.compact">tradeable item</a> in an MMORPG? <strong>Because games are interactive, they are immune to the analog hole, and thus an online game would be a perfect medium for using NFTs to supplant its in-game economy.</strong> Due to the append-only nature of every blockchain I've ever seen, the NFTs would be nigh-immune to hacks to duplicate items or save editing or other methods of cheating.</p>
-				<p>The uses of NFTs could extend well beyond the gaming sphere. What about proof of holding a ticket to a conference or concert? An alternative to traditional notaries for real-world contracts between people? Land deeds or other proof of purchases that would benefit from being publicly auditable? Anything that needs artificial scarcity or cryptographic proof of having happened or being owned by a person in a transferrable format could theoretically be made into an NFT. Only once more applications of NFT technology like this are made as accessible to the average layperson as "JPEG trading platforms" like OpenSea are will NFTs grow beyond their reputation of <a href="https://archive.md/https://kill-9.xyz/harmful/society/cryptocurrency%23nfts">blatant ape-themed Picrew knockoffs</a>.</p>
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-				<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
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blog/index.html

@@ -33,7 +33,6 @@
 			<ul>
 				<li>December 17 - <a href="./2021/december/exhausted.html">exhausted</a></li>
 				<li>December 4 - <a href="./2021/december/copywrong.html">Copyright Accelerationism</a></li>
-				<li>November 5 - <a href="./2021/november/nft.html">Analog Hole</a></li>
 				<li>September 28 - <a href="./2021/september/nosimp.html">No Simp September</a></li>
 				<li>September 26 - <a href="./2021/september/not-harmful.html">Considering software harmful considered harmful</a></li>
 				<li>September 19 - <a href="./2021/september/fire.html">Fire Walk With Me</a></li>

index.gph

@@ -16,7 +16,5 @@ ijust remember how there's a world only you can perceive
 1Poetry	poetry
 1Tutorials	tutorials
 
-1phd gopher server testing	phd
-
 0Identity & Contact	identity.txt
 0My GPG key	public.gpg

index.html

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-		<h3>Announcement Box</h3><!-- https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57907979/javascript-shuffle-table-rows -->
+		<h3>Announcement Box</h3>
 		<ul>
+			<li>2022-05-09: The only website not made by me that I endorse is <a href="https://cheapskatesguide.org">Cheapskate's Guide</a>. Anybody else parading around fake quotes or other endorsements under my name is lying to you, and I do not give my approval to the content of said sites or their webmasters.</li>
 			<li>2022-05-01: You can tell when a "Hidden Wiki" or other Tor link list is ran by a pedo because they're seemingly incapable of correctly stylizing this website's name as "MayVaneDay", proper capitals and no spaces. If you think running banner ads to CSAM/CP sites is an ethically okay action, please consult <a href="./img/hidden/hades.png">this image</a> for further advice.</li>
 		</ul>
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@@ -58,7 +59,7 @@
 		<a href="http://yggdrasil.mayvaneday.art">[Yggdrasil]</a>
 		<a href="http://127.0.0.1:8888/USK@Up0ipQCQjyY2PaGofU-P63kJMb54E0~2xZiUnyxPypM,rGmJhPDVou6DwS6Eh23sZ93hVbDaA6v4D5l3vWsN-oY,AQACAAE/mayvaneday/-1/">[Freenet]</a>
 		<a href="http://meynethaffeecapsvfphrcnfrx44w2nskgls2juwitibvqctk2plvhqd.onion">[Tor]</a>
-		<a href="https://git.letsdecentralize.org/lethe/mayvaneday">[Git]</a>
+		<a href="https://codeberg.org/lethe/mayvaneday">[Git]</a>
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phd/neofetch.gph

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-#!/bin/bash
-neofetch