A New Masthead
diff --git a/blog/2019/november/other-world.html b/blog/2019/november/other-world.html index 601ffcf..fa77cc2 100755 --- a/blog/2019/november/other-world.html +++ b/blog/2019/november/other-world.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ +A World Just Beyond My Grasp
diff --git a/blog/2019/november/possession.html b/blog/2019/november/possession.html index ea603f2..61d0c1a 100755 --- a/blog/2019/november/possession.html +++ b/blog/2019/november/possession.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ +Possession
diff --git a/blog/2019/october/cameras.html b/blog/2019/october/cameras.html index 04c11c3..3cf65fc 100755 --- a/blog/2019/october/cameras.html +++ b/blog/2019/october/cameras.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ +Cameras
diff --git a/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html b/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html index 2b3f456..63e065b 100755 --- a/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html +++ b/blog/2019/september/roophloch.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ +Neurodiversity (ROOPHLOCH 2019)
diff --git a/blog/2019/september/sign-of-life.html b/blog/2019/september/sign-of-life.html index 36ad6f7..0badbaf 100755 --- a/blog/2019/september/sign-of-life.html +++ b/blog/2019/september/sign-of-life.html @@ -8,6 +8,7 @@ +Sign of Life
diff --git a/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html b/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..64df91d --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html @@ -0,0 +1,43 @@ + + + + +exhausted
+published: 2021-12-17
++
I've taken up drinking lately.
+It's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not crumpled over my kitchen counter at three in the morning, chugging tequila straight out of the bottle to try to cope with my life. Just a splash of rum- I've tried all sorts of kinds of alcohol, courtesy of my mother, and I've found rum is the only one I can tolerate- in a wine glass of fruit juice mixed with ice to mask the rubbing-alcohol-esque scent. The proverbial kitchen counter is instead the dining room table, cleared of paperwork to be littered with weekly crafting supplies, and it's early evening instead of the middle of the night. The neighbors that live in the house behind us are over for craft night, and, even if not actually making anything myself, I'm sitting with them, with my mother, talking about life instead of holing up in my room finding new and creative ways to self-harm via the internet.
+One time I mentioned, the day after a huge wind storm, that I'd found their trampoline a block over on the way to work, and we spent ten minutes rolling it back to their yard in the pitch-black dark.
+One time we were playing with the neighbor lady's Cricut machine (a computerized vinyl cutter) and my mother, unprompted, cut out a heart with some of the spare golden iron-on vinyl and stuck it to the pocket of my black hoodie, the one she'd embroidered a small pixel art of my girlfriend on half a year ago, and giggled, "Someone must love you very much."
+Some times I even laugh.
+For a campaign of trying to reconcile with my parents, a last-ditch attempt to create a life I don't want to run away from, a buying of time for Jett to get done as much of her own college studies as possible before my eventual inevitable death and arrival in Sablade, it's not as painful as I thought it would be. Some part of me is beginning to believe that maybe I deserve a happy life after all.
+I'm exhausted.
+I'm tired of strangers on the internet calling me pathetic for not being able to convince my youngest brother to not be a misogynistic piece of shit. (Yes, because someone would totally listen to a person from a demographic they hate.) I'm tired of males on the internet acting homophobic or sexually predatory or otherwise uncomfortably "close" towards me and then not taking my resulting discomfort seriously. (There's a certain IRC channel, and its ringleader, I'm thinking of right now.) I'm tired of strangers on the internet emailing me in the middle of the night to ask me to do free labor for them, whether that's writing articles for them or helping shill their cryptobro-esque "web3" project using what little reputation I've managed to garner or consulting them on programming matters when I can barely hack together a Bash script myself without looking up every little thing on whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off Google that week.
+I'm exhausted.
+As I write this, I've finally made it to winter break in college. The semester will be over the minute before midnight tomorrow, and two of my classes end tonight. Unless I've somehow managed to bomb my research essay- I got an almost perfect score on the first two essays in the class, although they weren't weighted as heavily as this one will be- I've successfully finished what I hope is the last formal English class of my life. The months of my body waking me up at three in the morning on Mondays, where that week's English assignments had been published online right after midnight, to write in ways I never would have done unprompted, are finally behind me. I have two weeks to relax at home before I do the last two classes of my college career, one of them not even required for my degree: I needed six credits in spring semester to stay eligible for work-study, and the mandatory class was only three, so I took another one on. No working hectic business hours in a shitty retail store like I was a year ago, no dealing with entitled customers using essential workers as emotional punching bags, no obligations beyond what I put on myself and... whatever curveballs my family members throw my way come Christmas Day.
+And I'm exhausted.
+I've been trying to move as much as I can offline to give myself less and less incentive to flip the wireless switch on my ThinkPad to "on". (Well, if it wasn't half-disassembled in the corner of my room, its parts in a different laptop for the time being. I took a few tumbles off my bike one day on the way home from work, and the screen shattered. I'm waiting for a sale to order a replacement part, because I'm not spending ninety dollars on a new screen.) The last week I've spent several hours a day moving my, ah, "datasets" from Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest, to Hydrus, a desktop application, since Pinry takes around ten minutes to reload a page of thumbnails after editing one pin due to the sheer amount of "data" I have in there. Hydrus, in comparison, takes about two seconds to load six times the amount of thumbnails on a page. As for other data, I've always preferred OsmAnd to Google Maps, and Kiwix is good... when the wikis I want are packaged for download or play nice with website scrapers to package my own .zim archives, and all of the games I want to play nowadays are offline anyway. I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my setup like so many other tech bloggers out there. This site a friend runs details it all better than I care to anyway.
Once my USB-to-SATA cable comes in the mail, I can resurrect my Raspberry Pi that's been languishing behind the family router and pull some more stuff off my server as well. I don't need RSS Bridge running with a public IP if I'm the only one using it. (I'd probably be rate-limited less on a residential IP, too.) I'd feel safer with my Tor/I2P/Yggdrasil/IPFS private keys physically at home, especially if I'm trying to force my way to a home life where I don't feel like I'm three steps from being made homeless at any given moment.
+And while I'm downsizing, I'd like to reduce my email addresses to one domain for both private and "public" life and just have everything else forward to it. Disroot's "donate once and get email hosting for life" offer looks pretty attractive compared to a subscription. Codeberg now supports custom domains for their static Git-based web hosting. It's all ultimately someone else's computer in the end, unless it's on my Raspberry Pi...
+Ah, maybe I have become one of those annoying tech bloggers after all.
+The less I am online and venturing outside my local WLAN, I've found, the more stable my mental health. Not because of "muh screen time!!1!" or any other reason you'll find on minimalist-worshipping blogs, but because, well, I have a tendency to self-harm using the unsolicited opinions of strangers who only know me in short bites of sound and disembodied snippets of text, if at all. I keep forgetting that the internet will continue to churn in a mass of gore and blood without me, that I don't have to pay attention to it, to any of it, to even care. I don't have to pay attention to drama between celebrities and obvious scams disguised as donation posts from strangers who've never created anything in their lives and Twitter's outrage of the week.
+I don't want to pay attention to it. But it's there everywhere I turn, unless I turn to the offline, unless I take drastic measures to keep myself offline as long as possible. I could continue working on The Eschaton Eminence, which will be my last book ever if I end up failing my mission to repair my home life and dying shortly after I graduate next year... or I could doomscroll on social media and have misogynists dogpile me in my notifications for daring to exist.
+I'm exhausted.
++
CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander
+2021
-
+
- December 17 - exhausted
- December 4 - Copyright Accelerationism
- November 5 - Analog Hole
- September 28 - No Simp September diff --git a/checktor.js b/checktor.js index aafeb71..b0f2da9 100644 --- a/checktor.js +++ b/checktor.js @@ -9,6 +9,7 @@ let pet = text.includes("onion.pet"); let ws = text.includes("onion.ws"); let search = text.includes("onionsearchengine.com"); let cyber = text.includes("cyber-hub.pw"); -if ((pet === true) || (ws === true) || (search === true) || (cyber === true)) { +let ly = text.includes("onion.ly"); +if ((pet === true) || (ws === true) || (search === true) || (cyber === true)) || (ly === true) { window.location.replace("https://theannoyingsite.com"); } diff --git a/feed.xml b/feed.xml index a4b8940..fffabb9 100755 --- a/feed.xml +++ b/feed.xml @@ -10,6 +10,34 @@
- complexity of the code -
- number of lines of code -
- using a programming language the person doesn't like -
- having not enough features -
- having too many features -
- making installation easy for the end user -
- it collects logs of all the system processes running, a MAJOR privacy concern -
- it is proprietary software, meaning it is nigh-impossible to verify it doesn't cause the end user harm -
- it often requires phone verification, which harms people who don't have phones or use cellular providers blacklisted or not supported by Discord -
- "servers" (a false term invented by Discord to mean a collection of related chatrooms) are often shut down without notice, meaning, since both Discord and Reddit have long supplanted the traditional internet forum, information is often lost to time -
- zeronet.link: clearnet to ZeroNet link redirector
- Gogs: Git hosting
- Port with self-signed certificate: Gopher/Gemini to HTTP proxy -
- Pinry: self-hosted image bookmarking
- RSS-Bridge: RSS feed creator +
- Linx: simple file upload and pastebin
I've taken up drinking lately.
+It's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not crumpled over my kitchen counter at three in the morning, chugging tequila straight out of the bottle to try to cope with my life. Just a splash of rum- I've tried all sorts of kinds of alcohol, courtesy of my mother, and I've found rum is the only one I can tolerate- in a wine glass of fruit juice mixed with ice to mask the rubbing-alcohol-esque scent. The proverbial kitchen counter is instead the dining room table, cleared of paperwork to be littered with weekly crafting supplies, and it's early evening instead of the middle of the night. The neighbors that live in the house behind us are over for craft night, and, even if not actually making anything myself, I'm sitting with them, with my mother, talking about life instead of holing up in my room finding new and creative ways to self-harm via the internet.
+One time I mentioned, the day after a huge wind storm, that I'd found their trampoline a block over on the way to work, and we spent ten minutes rolling it back to their yard in the pitch-black dark.
+One time we were playing with the neighbor lady's Cricut machine (a computerized vinyl cutter) and my mother, unprompted, cut out a heart with some of the spare golden iron-on vinyl and stuck it to the pocket of my black hoodie, the one she'd embroidered a small pixel art of my girlfriend on half a year ago, and giggled, "Someone must love you very much."
+Some times I even laugh.
+For a campaign of trying to reconcile with my parents, a last-ditch attempt to create a life I don't want to run away from, a buying of time for Jett to get done as much of her own college studies as possible before my eventual inevitable death and arrival in Sablade, it's not as painful as I thought it would be. Some part of me is beginning to believe that maybe I deserve a happy life after all.
+I'm exhausted.
+I'm tired of strangers on the internet calling me pathetic for not being able to convince my youngest brother to not be a misogynistic piece of shit. (Yes, because someone would totally listen to a person from a demographic they hate.) I'm tired of males on the internet acting homophobic or sexually predatory or otherwise uncomfortably "close" towards me and then not taking my resulting discomfort seriously. (There's a certain IRC channel, and its ringleader, I'm thinking of right now.) I'm tired of strangers on the internet emailing me in the middle of the night to ask me to do free labor for them, whether that's writing articles for them or helping shill their cryptobro-esque "web3" project using what little reputation I've managed to garner or consulting them on programming matters when I can barely hack together a Bash script myself without looking up every little thing on whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off Google that week.
+I'm exhausted.
+As I write this, I've finally made it to winter break in college. The semester will be over the minute before midnight tomorrow, and two of my classes end tonight. Unless I've somehow managed to bomb my research essay- I got an almost perfect score on the first two essays in the class, although they weren't weighted as heavily as this one will be- I've successfully finished what I hope is the last formal English class of my life. The months of my body waking me up at three in the morning on Mondays, where that week's English assignments had been published online right after midnight, to write in ways I never would have done unprompted, are finally behind me. I have two weeks to relax at home before I do the last two classes of my college career, one of them not even required for my degree: I needed six credits in spring semester to stay eligible for work-study, and the mandatory class was only three, so I took another one on. No working hectic business hours in a shitty retail store like I was a year ago, no dealing with entitled customers using essential workers as emotional punching bags, no obligations beyond what I put on myself and... whatever curveballs my family members throw my way come Christmas Day.
+And I'm exhausted.
+I've been trying to move as much as I can offline to give myself less and less incentive to flip the wireless switch on my ThinkPad to "on". (Well, if it wasn't half-disassembled in the corner of my room, its parts in a different laptop for the time being. I took a few tumbles off my bike one day on the way home from work, and the screen shattered. I'm waiting for a sale to order a replacement part, because I'm not spending ninety dollars on a new screen.) The last week I've spent several hours a day moving my, ah, "datasets" from Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest, to Hydrus, a desktop application, since Pinry takes around ten minutes to reload a page of thumbnails after editing one pin due to the sheer amount of "data" I have in there. Hydrus, in comparison, takes about two seconds to load six times the amount of thumbnails on a page. As for other data, I've always preferred OsmAnd to Google Maps, and Kiwix is good... when the wikis I want are packaged for download or play nice with website scrapers to package my own .zim archives, and all of the games I want to play nowadays are offline anyway. I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my setup like so many other tech bloggers out there. This site a friend runs details it all better than I care to anyway.
Once my USB-to-SATA cable comes in the mail, I can resurrect my Raspberry Pi that's been languishing behind the family router and pull some more stuff off my server as well. I don't need RSS Bridge running with a public IP if I'm the only one using it. (I'd probably be rate-limited less on a residential IP, too.) I'd feel safer with my Tor/I2P/Yggdrasil/IPFS private keys physically at home, especially if I'm trying to force my way to a home life where I don't feel like I'm three steps from being made homeless at any given moment.
+And while I'm downsizing, I'd like to reduce my email addresses to one domain for both private and "public" life and just have everything else forward to it. Disroot's "donate once and get email hosting for life" offer looks pretty attractive compared to a subscription. Codeberg now supports custom domains for their static Git-based web hosting. It's all ultimately someone else's computer in the end, unless it's on my Raspberry Pi...
+Ah, maybe I have become one of those annoying tech bloggers after all.
+The less I am online and venturing outside my local WLAN, I've found, the more stable my mental health. Not because of "muh screen time!!1!" or any other reason you'll find on minimalist-worshipping blogs, but because, well, I have a tendency to self-harm using the unsolicited opinions of strangers who only know me in short bites of sound and disembodied snippets of text, if at all. I keep forgetting that the internet will continue to churn in a mass of gore and blood without me, that I don't have to pay attention to it, to any of it, to even care. I don't have to pay attention to drama between celebrities and obvious scams disguised as donation posts from strangers who've never created anything in their lives and Twitter's outrage of the week.
+I don't want to pay attention to it. But it's there everywhere I turn, unless I turn to the offline, unless I take drastic measures to keep myself offline as long as possible. I could continue working on The Eschaton Eminence, which will be my last book ever if I end up failing my mission to repair my home life and dying shortly after I graduate next year... or I could doomscroll on social media and have misogynists dogpile me in my notifications for daring to exist.
+I'm exhausted.
+ ]]> +The phrase "considered harmful" in regards to computer science originated in a 1968 essay by Edsger W. Dijkstra, in which he argued that the "go to" statement was harmful because it too easily invited programmers to make an absolute mess of their code. That means, for more than fifty years, computer nerds have been arbitrarily deeming software they don't like, whether they can articulate a proper argument (like the above) or not, "harmful".
-But what does it mean to be "harmful", anyway? Let's open a dictionary (or just dictionary.com) and see:
-harmful: adj. causing or capable of causing harm; injurious: a harmful idea; a harmful habit.-
So a piece of "harmful" software would be one that caused the user harm or is capable of doing so. I specify the user because software meant to facilitate piracy might "harm" a corporation's profits, or a tool to break through firewalls might "harm" a control freak's attempt to filter the outside world, but I do not think a reasonable person would consider any of those programs harmful. The user in this sense must also be extended to the computer the user, well, uses, as impairing a person's tools would also impair their ability to complete whatever tasks they were using the tools for, thus harming the user albeit indirectly.
-Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's bloat and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:
--
-
systemd is widely considered harmful by much of the Linux community, and yet I find it worlds easier to write a service file to daemonize something for systemd than a startup script for any other init system. Much ado has been made about systemd's supposed myriad bugs, and yet I have never personally encountered any of them. systemd has never caused me any harm, so how could I honestly consider it "harmful"?
JavaScript is also similarly maligned. It is responsible for much of the corporatization of the internet, facilitating "rich user experiences" like being able to buy things without going into a physical store or at the expense of also making possible targeted advertisements, legion browser exploits, cryptocurrency miners, bloated "news" sites that refuse to show any text to, well, text-based browsers or those without JavaScript support... JavaScript demonstrably does the end user much harm when opening only a few tabs can slow their entire machine down to a crawl, but it also means I can run college-mandated software like Microsoft Office without having to actually install it on my computer. (Which, since Office is perennially allergic to WINE, would mean having to install Windows 10 as well.) If I can enable JavaScript when I need to do the aforementioned college tasks and keep it disabled the rest of the time, am I really harmed by it? Has my computing freedom really been damaged?
-However, I would consider Discord harmful because it demonstrably causes harm to the end user:
--
-
Both of my brothers and my one "real-life" friend use Discord. I have tried time and time again to explain why Discord is spyware meant to suck advertising data from them and that they should use software that respects them, but their response is only ever "but all my friends are on it".
-Discord is harming them, but they don't consider it harm because their values are different. A "starvingdev" (the opposite of a "soydev"; one who seeks minimalism at all costs) considers Python harmful because it's "slow" and "bloated", but I do not consider Python a harm to me as it enables me to write software I otherwise would not have as I don't have the attention span to learn a "real" programming language.
-I'd rather spend that time writing poetry, or watering my garden, or riding my bike...
-A Windows user is consistently harmed by Microsoft due to the constant telemetry that cannot be disabled and the updates that take forever to install and, well, Windows just being a pile of shit that crashes a lot. They might concede that having to sit through blue screen after blue screen or update after update is a harm as it prevents them from using their computer for what they bought it for, but I would argue that a Windows user happily making music or Photoshopping to their heart's content is doing them a lot less harm than forcing them to use Linux and forgo the programs they need for their hobbies due to no Linux support for them. In the same vein, I am much happier when my computer setup is Debian set to boot straight to a TTY (as opposed to a graphical session) and I can write in a Byobu session with no tray icons or notifications or other distractions (caused by the computer, anyway) and can startx into i3 for playing games than when I am forced to use a Windows computer for a program with no Linux equivalent, constantly nagged every five minutes with update popups and Cortana begging me to sign in. We have different values and different needs and are harmed when our computers prevent us from fulfilling these.
The purpose of a computer is to assist the user in completing the tasks they need to do in their life. For a computer program to obstruct the user in this pursuit, or to exploit them in the process, is to do the user harm. That is, I believe, what "considered harmful" should mean, not anything that falls outside of the cult of ultra-minimalism.
- ]]> -