fuck your AI and fuck your scrapers

blog/2020/august/endgame.html

@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@
 				<p>It feels like there is no viable middle ground anymore, even though intellectually I know there still is (for the time being). Either one is actively heading away from bloat or towards it. Either one is actively cutting corporations out of their life or exalting their virtues while sucking on the cock of VC money. Either one is desperately holding back the tide of aging and obsolescence or keeping up with the Joneses.</p>
 				<p>But will those picking the latter run to keep up with them when the tsunami comes? I am looking at two lifeboats and debating which one will be less likely to sink.</p>
 				<p>The Goddess-as-muse argues with me as the long night wears on, as I grow more and more weary. <strong>"What is the endgame?"</strong> she asks me. What is the point of expending all this effort on optimizing my writing for the web at large when what I write, who I write for, already excludes 90% of its inhabitants from the get-go? Am I really doing myself a favor by leaving myself available to be picked apart, criticized without context, <em>ravaged</em>, by any old "used" from the silos? Would I really be doing myself a favor by hiding from them instead, marking the used off as a lost cause when maybe, by doing nothing, I could still convert <em>maybe one</em>?</p>
-				<p>She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">the end of my life.</a> Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I <em>might</em> submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.</p>
+				<p>She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing <a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">the end of my life.</a> Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I <em>might</em> submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.</p>
 				<p>When I read books on one of my devices, rarely do custom typography or CSS styles add any value to the book. I always immediately disable embedded fonts and adjust the line height and paragraph padding to my liking. When the book is in EPUB format, I strip those annoying publisher's ads from the ends of books, sometimes even convert chapter headings hardwritten as images into their textual equivalent. (<em>Feed</em> by M. T. Anderson, which I recently finished, has chapter heading images in a font so tiny I have to squint to read what each one says. And my eyes are still decent!) If the publisher has put the table of contents in the back of the book for whatever reason, I move it to the front of the book or delete it altogether with Calibre's tools.</p>
 				<p>I sound like one of the people slobbering all over the Gemini specification, writing scrolls' worth of screeds about "user sovereignty". Maybe this is what they meant. They know gussying up their words will mean nothing in the end, so they don't even <em>try</em>, just shove the duty of beautification onto the reader.</p>
 				<p>But doesn't a publisher at least have the duty of making the words <i>readable</i>?</p>