diff --git a/2024_music.html b/2024_music.html index 30d1a15..1cbbf2d 100755 --- a/2024_music.html +++ b/2024_music.html @@ -103,6 +103,12 @@ Indigo Girls I like the harmony of their voices. + + 2024-W12 + Come On Now Social + Indigo Girls + Favorite track: Sister + diff --git a/blog/2019/april/run-every-day.html b/blog/2019/april/run-every-day.html index 9dbedea..34fe466 100755 --- a/blog/2019/april/run-every-day.html +++ b/blog/2019/april/run-every-day.html @@ -37,7 +37,7 @@
>>1038589
Don't try to be a minimalist. Minimalism is pure mental illness, depression to be specific. Don't fall for it. Instead you should aim to use the best tool for the job. If it turns out some tiny image viewer is the best then use that but make sure that's true. Don't start using some gimped piece of ass because some guy with a 16gb RAM 500gb SSD Ryzen 7 or some shit is installing gentoo and talking about how st is way more minimal than xterm.
-

While I don't agree with the extremism of the post, and the inverse- purposely using as bloated as possible software- isn't a good situation either, it's the core idea I like. Use the right tools for the job. Minimalism can be a fun experiment, or a way to squeeze as much life as possible out of old and aging hardware, or a strategy to leave one as little exposed as possible security-wise, but pursuing it for purely its own sake, it can leave one feeling rather... empty inside.

+

While I don't agree with the extremism of the post, and the inverse - purposely using as bloated as possible software - isn't a good situation either, it's the core idea I like. Use the right tools for the job. Minimalism can be a fun experiment, or a way to squeeze as much life as possible out of old and aging hardware, or a strategy to leave one as little exposed as possible security-wise, but pursuing it for purely its own sake, it can leave one feeling rather... empty inside.

So to Cat and the RPoD writer, I'd say: it's okay if you want to take a break. Moving on to something that leaves you feeling more fulfilled at the end of the day is a perfectly valid strategy. Hell, I should probably cut back on my own rampant Gopher usage as well. Four holes, one of which I don't even update anymore, all of which give me massive anxiety whenever it comes time to publish a post since I have to remember to keep everything the same on each and every one of them.

What I wouldn't give for my own server...

diff --git a/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html b/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html deleted file mode 100755 index 449d99e..0000000 --- a/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html +++ /dev/null @@ -1,44 +0,0 @@ - - - - - exhausted - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios - - - - - - -
-
-

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 an acquaintance 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

-
-
- - diff --git a/blog/2022/august/beres.html b/blog/2022/august/beres.html index b07dc79..2ecc330 100755 --- a/blog/2022/august/beres.html +++ b/blog/2022/august/beres.html @@ -24,7 +24,7 @@

It's a lovely little script. No database, barely any config, no requirement for a VPS. I'm quite proud of it, really. After reading an article, if I don't care about it anymore, I can just delete it instead of merely marking it read and hoping the RSS feed reader will eventually run garbage collection to prevent the database from growing obese and unusable from latency. However, since reading articles means manually opening every one with less and Beres doesn't fetch external resources like images, I've found that using it is incredibly frustrating for use with feeds that publish more than, say, two articles a day. Like social media feeds, for example. It soft-limits me to only subscribing to news and maybe a handful of personal sites I care about and can trust to put out high-quality articles... or, at least, ones I would want to expend the effort of typing in KOReader's terminal emulator to read.

Said social media feeds were the reason I originally went with Tiny Tiny RSS because of the "scroll to mark as read" feature to consume as many articles as quickly as possible. It probably also helped that I could just throw it inside Docker instead of having to deal with the monstrosity that is manually creating a database in Redis or PostgreSQL or installing seven kajillion PHP dependencies and hoping they'll run nicely with Caddy. (I hate you specifically, Miniflux. "MUH MINIMALISM!!1!" Okay then, where's SQLite support? What's more simple to handle than a single file? You're already a single file, being written in Golang. Can't you go one step further?) And technically I only deleted Newsboat and Tiny Tiny RSS; I kept Flym on my phone(s) to track a handful (an admittedly large handful, but still one) of artists on Twitter whose artwork I would rather not go without. I would have gone one step further and imported these onto desktop to fully cut off the ability to constantly swipe for updates on my phone like a dopamine slot machine, but none of the options for Linux that I know of really mesh well with my sneakernet setup and I often move among two or three devices for writing as I go about the day.

But nobody cares about these minor implementation details. What's more important is, why am I doing this to myself?

-

And the answer, paradoxically, is that I'm exhausted. I'm tired of dealing with Docker, so I wrote a program that would completely negate the need for it. I'm tired of eye strain from reading on my phone, so I wrote a program that would work on my e-reader. I'm tired of being exposed to the opinions of thousands of strangers on a daily basis, so I wrote a program that would keep me up-to-date on the current state of the apocalypse while being so unwieldy that it de facto excludes all those other strangers with ultimately nothing worthwhile to say.

+

And the answer, paradoxically, is that I'm exhausted. I'm tired of dealing with Docker, so I wrote a program that would completely negate the need for it. I'm tired of eye strain from reading on my phone, so I wrote a program that would work on my e-reader. I'm tired of being exposed to the opinions of thousands of strangers on a daily basis, so I wrote a program that would keep me up-to-date on the current state of the apocalypse while being so unwieldy that it de facto excludes all those other strangers with ultimately nothing worthwhile to say.

I'm tired of being online, so I gave myself one less reason to boot up my computer.

I wanted to retire from public life, I thought the night before I almost accidentally killed my Kobo. Leave only my books publically accessible and remove access to all the rest and delete all my other social accounts elsewhere. A woman I had never seen before had come up to me in a dream a few nights prior and demanded I stop being so neurotic about my website, to decide once and for all whether I was staying on the Internet or leaving.

I don't think I've made my choice yet. Some part of me thinks I may never. That's my response to everything that ever goes wrong in my life, isn't it, Jett? Do nothing and wait for the problem to get worse?

diff --git a/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html b/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html index 43f808e..2a3f2ac 100755 --- a/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html +++ b/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@

A week ago, throughout the course of a single day, I received a chain of bizarre emails from a "Yamato Kuribayashi". A cursory search through our least favorite search engine shows that this name does belong to a real person living in Japan, but I have no idea if he was the actual person emailing me, and I suppose I will never know. Although, if he was, he was exceptionally bad at OPSEC. Arriving in groups of two or three every few hours and with the message only in the subject line, message body solely composed of the Japanese equivalent of "sent from my iPhone", the first few said "die", "I'll kill you", and "death". Once I asked him why he was sending me these, both in English and in a poorly-translated copy-paste from Google Translate, the bundles of messages continued, but now instead of death threats they held "we are sorry for the inconvenience". He kept apologizing until evening, where he strangely offered to share his location over Find My iPhone and then said he would "change [his] behavior and become a true human being".

Was it an omen? A prank gone awry by a technologically inept person? A person so incensed after reading something on my website that he had felt compelled to try to push my paranoid buttons?

I suppose I will never know.

-

My prometida's birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on The Eschaton Eminence and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the "reconciling with my parents" thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.

+

My prometida's birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on The Eschaton Eminence and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the "reconciling with my parents" thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.

A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:

  1. the domain
    2. diff --git a/blog/2022/may/divide.html b/blog/2022/may/divide.html index ac8d292..a9be05c 100755 --- a/blog/2022/may/divide.html +++ b/blog/2022/may/divide.html @@ -282,7 +282,7 @@ done ), use to take down content and bring to justice those responsible. Not that I suddenly like the cops or trust them to do anything correctly in this hellworld. But something needs to be done.

    And what am I to do?

    I wrestled with this question for several weeks, but first with Freenet, which has a reputation for being a haven for pedophiles. When one requests content on Freenet, said content is cached partially on every node that it passes through on route to the person who requested it. This is how popular content lives longer and is faster to access. But this also means that one has no idea what is being stored on their node at any given time and there is a non-zero chance one is helping in the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.

    -

    There is a small child in my life. She lives in the house behind me and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers in a previous life? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.

    +

    There is a small child in my life. She lives in the house behind me and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers in a previous life? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.

    So it would logically follow that I would refuse to support technologies that I know enable others to harm children. Except... Tor and Freenet and other darknets aren't used by just pedophiles. They're used by activists and people under repressive regimes and those seeking to leave abusive households and students wanting to get around school firewalls and webmasters who don't want to pay for domains or cloud hosting or a static IP. Unfortunately I have no way of quantifying what goes on in exit nodes. (A study done by others estimates 98% of Tor traffic is through exit nodes and only 2% is to hidden services, but I have no data about what amount of that 98% was for non-illegal purposes.) The existence of that four to ten percent of Tor hidden services not dedicated to harm... does it outweigh the ninety-plus percent of abusive sites on the network?

    I mean, child molestation is far older than any darknet, or even the Internet. A theoretical shutdown of Freenet or Tor or whatever wouldn't stop the spread of CSAM, and the bot spam on imageboards proves that plenty of illicit material gets traded on the clearnet anyway, but it would harm those legitimate users seeking more computing freedom. Never mind that, with peer-to-peer systems, a shutdown wouldn't even work since the source code is already out there. (Tor could theoretically be shut down, though, given that the whole network is dependent on a small handful of hardcoded consensus nodes.)

    The genie is out of the bottle. The signal can't be stopped. There is no "universal backdoor" that would help law enforcement catch pedophiles without weakening legitimate and liberatory uses for the technology. All anyone can hope for, I guess, is that these scumbags mess up their OPSEC and get exposed whenever they pop up. The same tactics as always.

    diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index e4d8cda..733135b 100755 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -77,7 +77,6 @@

    2021

    -
    +

    [Blog] @@ -75,9 +79,9 @@ [Freenet] [Git]

    -

    HTTP over: [Tor] [I2P] [Yggdrasil]

    -

    Spartan over: [Tor] [Yggdrasil]

    - [Gemini over Tor] +

    HTTP over: [Tor] [I2P] [Yggdrasil]

    +

    Spartan over: [Tor] [Yggdrasil]

    + [Gemini over Tor] [Nex over Yggdrasil]