diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index a5d2d54..8a91659 100755 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -31,19 +31,49 @@

Vane reads one book by women every week of 2024

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Date finished readingWeek finished reading Book Title Author Comments / notes
2024-01-012024-W1 The Raven Boys Maggie Stiefvater Despite the insufferability of the average rich kid psyche, this book was actually a quite enjoyable romp through the Virginia countryside. Four boys, one of which is dead and pretending otherwise, and a kinda-not-really psychic girl try to wake up a ley line in search of a dead king and end up getting their Latin teacher trampled to death. Good times.
2024-W1City of the DeadJames Patterson and Mindy McGinnisIt still counts if it was co-written by a woman, right?... This moid needs to retire. I feel bad for the trees that died to produce this pigslop. Beating the corpse of a series I loved when I was a teenager (that's over a decade ago) - this is Star Wars-tier series sprawl. As Filthy Frank would say, "it's time to stop."
2024-W2The Dream ThievesMaggie StiefvaterOne hundred white Mitsubishis in an empty field.
2024-W3Strange the Dreamer and its sequel Muse of NightmaresLaini TaylorNot to go all Bigolas Dickolas on you, but you need to read this book. Don't look at any summaries or reviews or even the cover art for the paperback version (if that's what you get stuck with) - just jump in.
2024-W3On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America InsaneEmily Guendelsberger
2024-W4Fourth WingRebecca Yarros
- \ No newline at end of file + diff --git a/2024_music.html b/2024_music.html new file mode 100755 index 0000000..3ba44be --- /dev/null +++ b/2024_music.html @@ -0,0 +1,67 @@ + + + Vane listens to one music album by women every week of 2024 - MayVaneDay Studios + + + +

Vane listens to one music album by women every week of 2024

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WeekAlbum NameAlbum ArtistComments / notes
2024-W1Your Little SecretMelissa EtheridgeNice voice, but I'm not sure folk is my thing.
Favorite track: Nowhere To Go
2024-W2Big TimeAngel OlsenIs "farmhouse muzak" a thing?
Favorite track: Dream Thing
2023-W3Eternal BlueSpiritbox
2024-W4la lunaAlways Already
+ + \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/blog/2022/july/web3.html b/blog/2022/july/web3.html index bf4304e..1e8c3c4 100755 --- a/blog/2022/july/web3.html +++ b/blog/2022/july/web3.html @@ -43,7 +43,7 @@

One of the top posts in the subreddit is a "meme" about a USB stick that uses Siacoin for umlimited storage. The "meme" (in quotes because the only humor value is in how half-baked the ideas within are) claims it would require "no installing" and "no need to understand crypto". Only about one or two commenters stopped sucking the OP off for long enough to realize that such a device would require a persistent Internet connection and enough crypto knowledge to get a Sia wallet set up to actually buy whatever storage space ends up getting used and also for drivers to be preinstalled on every operating system in existence in order to require no installation of additional software and to appear just like any other flash drive.

The rest of the subreddit is just the standard crypto whining about Binance/Coinbase trading and praising the main devs for the "new Internet" they have supposedly created.

So what if I want to actually access and host content on Skynet? You know, the reason we're here?

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With IPFS, I just have a node on my computer running on localhost port 8082 (yours may differ) that exposes a web UI I can use to view and download content. My website is set up to use DNSLink, so you can just throw the regular domain into any IPFS portal, whether local or hosted by someone else. For people without domains, they can still use IPNS (which allows for updating content at the same hash), just by distributing the hash itself instead of linking it to a domain name. All of this can be done from a computer I already own that is powerful enough to run an IPFS node, which I've been able to successfully do from a toaster with 2 GB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive shared among the whole operating system, far lower than the requirements for a Skynet portal.

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With IPFS, I just have a node on my computer running on localhost port 8082 (yours may differ) that exposes a web UI I can use to view and download content. My website is set up to use DNSLink, so you can just throw the regular domain into any IPFS portal, whether local or hosted by someone else. For people without domains, they can still use IPNS (which allows for updating content at the same hash), just by distributing the hash itself instead of linking it to a domain name. All of this can be done from a computer I already own that is powerful enough to run an IPFS node, which I've been able to successfully do from a toaster with 2 GB of RAM and a 100 GB hard drive shared among the whole operating system, far lower than the requirements for a Skynet portal.

Skynet also has portals, which allow for free viewing of content... but unlike IPFS, where I can just run ipfs add -r /path/to/content and get a hash I can then throw into ipfs name publish MYEXTREMELYLONGHASHHERE, the design of Siacoin mandates that one pays for the storage space one uses. Prices are set by each individual portal, but portals often offer an extremely restricted free tier, which just throws those without money back into the sharecropping paradigm. And if a portal goes down, both free and paid users lose control of all their data on said portal. One could run their own portal to avoid shutdowns, but that costs money beyond the initial expense of the hardware and bandwidth and electricity to get a server in the first place.

Oopsies, looks like you need money to participate after all!

diff --git a/blog/2023/march/theatrhythm.html b/blog/2023/march/theatrhythm.html index 35a897c..43ba1e3 100755 --- a/blog/2023/march/theatrhythm.html +++ b/blog/2023/march/theatrhythm.html @@ -33,8 +33,8 @@
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  • "Field", which features overworld themes and music on the calmer end of the spectrum. In both versions, there is a single line that triggers travel on. In CURTAIN CALL, the first member of your party walks along a road, and the better you do on the stage, the faster they run. If you lose enough HP from missing triggers, that party member will stumble and fall and be replaced with the next character in your party. In FINAL BAR LINE, all four members of your party walk at once, and they often stop and fight a monster or two before continuing their journey. Airship themes no longer have you travel on an airship; they're just the same as every other Field-type stage now. FINAL BAR LINE also introduces double tap triggers where you have to hit both L and R (or ZL and ZR) at the same time; if one of these appear, the line that triggers travel on will temporarily split into two, and both taps will be judged individually. The up-and-down motion for hold triggers can be difficult for some controllers to follow, as my brother had issues with keeping his cursor on the track when we played in co-op mode.
  • "Event", which can have songs from either of the previous two categories. Event-type stages are similar to Battle-type stages, but instead of your party fighting a monster, a (muted) cutscene from the song's original game plays in the background. For the retro titles (FINAL FANTASY I-VI and Tactics) gameplay footage is used because of a lack of cutscenes, but strangely it's of the Japanese versions of those games, even though I made sure to specifically buy a USA-region cartridge. (Songs with lyrics are in English, though... And CURTAIN CALL had actual cutscenes for Tactics' Event-type stage. Why did they replace it with gameplay?) If you're photosensitive, do not play on Event-type stages: strobe effects, such as when characters cast spells or teleport on the overworld map, were not edited out and occur frequently. There are still four lines that triggers travel on, but they're rotated ninety degrees; the triggers start on the top and come down towards you, similar to Guitar Hero. This is much improved from CURTAIN CALL, where triggers just... appeared in a swirl? I could never get the timing right, but now I can.
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    Zack dying during the Event stage for FINAL FANTASY VII

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    Zack dying during the Event stage for FINAL FANTASY VII

    Speaking of timing, FINAL BAR LINE adds a number of quality-of-life features:

    1. Game sequels with only a few songs are now grouped together so you don't have to scroll as much: for example, Advent Children, Crisis Core, and Final Order are now grouped together under "FINAL FANTASY VII Series" instead of getting their own game (movie?) entries.
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    Playing online can unlock songs quicker than playing through the singleplayer mode. In CURTAIN CALL, if you weren't the type of person to play online, there wasn't much to do: after the tutorial, the game dumps you at the main menu, where most of the songs are already unlocked and free for you to play at your whim. There is a quest menu, but the main purpose of that is to earn "shards" that you can use to unlock characters. FINAL BAR LINE reverses this: you have no songs unlocked to start, and one key with which you can choose one of the original titles to unlock. You then have to play through one song at a time in that title's quest until you come across another treasure chest with a key in it a few songs in, at which point you can unlock another title.

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    I hadn't unlocked FINAL FANTASY VIII at the time of taking this screenshot

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    I hadn't unlocked FINAL FANTASY VIII at the time of taking this screenshot

    But if you play in online mode, and you beat a song you haven't already unlocked, you will unlock that song even if you haven't used a key to unlock that song's original title yet. After you unlock a song, you can replay it at any time at any difficulty by going to the main menu and selecting "Music Stages". Speaking of difficulty, in addition to the existing "Basic", "Expert", and "Ultimate" levels, you can now also play select songs in "Supreme".

    When you unlock a title, you get a few characters from that title to start, unless the title explicitly says there are no characters to unlock. Clearing a title's quest will (probably) unlock one or two additional characters, usually final bosses. As such, there are no shards to collect. Which is good, because FINAL BAR LINE adds a lot of new characters. Hell, you don't even need to grind ten gazillion hours to get eight black shards to unlock Sephiroth anymore: you just need to beat all fourteen of the FINAL FANTASY VII songs.

    Speaking of Sephiroth... if you're like my youngest brother and your only attachment to this game is because Cloud is a playable character, then you may want to stick with CURTAIN CALL because FINAL BAR LINE's version of "One-Winged Angel" omits the whole first half of the song. Truncating songs isn't new for the THEATRHYTHM series: to give two examples, "We Have Come" is also cut in half in CURTAIN CALL, although the new beginning is during a quiet part of the song, and "The Extreme" skips the long piano intro. There is no reason for "One-Winged Angel" to be cut in half, and so poorly at that: it drops you directly into a dramatic part of the song. The Advent Children version of the song remains intact and whole, which makes the original version's truncation even more bizarre.

    Speaking of taking creative liberties with the soundtrack, the names of a number of songs were changed as well, mostly to undo weird localizations from CURTAIN CALL. So don't feel bad if you have a hard time finding your favorite song before the timer runs out in online mode. Hey, at least people use online mode in FINAL BAR LINE. Nobody was online in CURTAIN CALL. My only point of reference for what the previous game's online mode would have looked like was a mockup mode, which pits you against computer players pretending to be other people online. FINAL BAR LINE doesn't have a mockup mode. It also doesn't have a cooldown for sending taunt messages in online lobbies, so you can just jam the arrow buttons on your controller to spam taunts and annoy the other players in your room. Or maybe they'll give up and join in. You never know!

    If you're sensitive to repetitive noises, be careful when switching between online and singleplayer mode: when online, in order to keep the flow of play moving, the game will not give out unlocked rewards for reaching certain levels of earned Rhythmia points. If you go a long period only playing online, next time you play singleplayer you'll get spammed with all the rewards you missed.

    diff --git a/blog/2024/february/diamond.html b/blog/2024/february/diamond.html new file mode 100755 index 0000000..48031e0 --- /dev/null +++ b/blog/2024/february/diamond.html @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ + + + + + Adamantium Hands - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios + + + + + +
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    Adamantium Hands

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    published: 2024-02-01

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    A little over a year ago, I wrote a post where I collected a list of web3 social media projects and ripped into each and every one of them. I went in expecting each one to be paywalled and their users to be more concerned about exploiting each other for tokens than actually interacting as human beings, but still hopeful that maybe, just maybe, someone would have figured out the "host an actual website on web3" thing. None of the projects I reviewed satisfied the latter, and most of them, at least from what I could see outside the paywalls, were accurately described by the former.

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    Last week (as of writing), out of pure curiosity, I decided to check in on all the projects again to see if my concerns from last year had been alleviated:

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    Metafora still resolves to a CloudFlare IP address. Users still can't post images.

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    Peepeth is still full of spam and cryptobro shit. Users still can't post images. (There is an upload button, but it spins forever.)

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    Share appears to no longer be a web3 project, as all the references to the Lens Protocol appear to have disappeared and you can only sign in/up with an email address. The change appears to have happened sometime after May of last year. The site is still effectively inaccessible to new users, as my attempts to sign up were met with an HTTP 403 Forbidden error.

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    gm.xyz doesn't exist anymore. Browsers and DNS lookups throw an NXDOMAIN error. The most recent snapshot of the homepage on the Wayback Machine just shows an infinite loading page, and the project's Twitter account has no indication why the project is now missing.

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    BEBverse now redirects to an entirely different web3 project that I have neither the time nor the interest to dig into. You'll understand once I get to the main point of this post.

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    Paragraph still functions like it did a year ago, but the Arweave transaction for the post I made still didn't exist nine months later. And you still have to cough up $50 to use a custom domain.

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    Twetch immediately threw this screen at me:

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    I don't know how being constrained by money and subscriptions is "freedom". Especially when the rest of the site is still paywalled.

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    Bastyon is still full of borderline-Christofascist bullshit.

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    Mirror still refuses to show you the post editor if the browser window is half of your monitor's width, but otherwise it still works.

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    Ten days after I originally checked on dArticle, they finally clarified that the NFTs it makes for articles are on the BNB blockchain. You're still forced to use the rich-text editor, but at least it functions properly now.

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    But you can't seem to add custom tags, only the premade options set by the site admins:

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    You can mint ten article NFTs on the Polygon chain for free, but if you want more, you're forced to join their Discord to beg for them. I was successfully able to make an NFT, at which point I was taken out behind the dArticle sheds by Nintendo's lawyers and summarily shot.

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    You'll notice that one project is missing from this list: Diamond. That's because, when I attempted to sign up again to see if it was still paywalled, I discovered that either

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    1. the site was no longer paywalled, or
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    2. I'd managed to glitch myself past it and get myself some $DESO airdropped to me with no regards to the lack of Ethereum in my MetaMask wallet.
      3. +
    +

    And thus I spent the next week in a haze trying to post as much as possible, convinced that I could repost enough Reddit memes to buy myself yet another e-reader. I was hopeful, as in the first few days I'd managed to accumulate a whole dollar, but after that the "diamonds" (superlikes) dried up. Much has been written about the negative effects of social media on one's brain processes, so I won't wax poetic here, but I will say that after only a day on Diamond living was no longer about making art; it was about "producing" "content" that could be easily monetized. I saw many posters claiming to be "artists" that were simply using AI models to pump out as many variations of the same colorful sludge as they could in order to saturate the timeline and catch as many accidental "diamond" donations as they could. To put the despair I felt more succinctly, I'll quote from the book I'm currently working on:

    +
    + Found myself all the next week
    + measuring all by how much I could squeeze
    + it for a few cents
    + in recompense.
    + I understood why so much "content"
    + was generated by computers, soulless:
    + when trying to be seen in a torrent
    + and unable to the waters drain,
    + why not further
    + dilute the rivers
    + but this time bearing your name?
    +
    +

    Diamond's mobile interface also has a horrible time comprehending scrolling, as you were more likely to accidentally hit the "diamond" button or angry-react a random post than actually scroll. The "diamond" button essentially serves as a microtransaction for when you really really like a post, but there's no confirmation button before the money gets drained out of your wallet. There are other frontends for the DeSo blockchain, such as Gemstori, that are nicer about scrolling and thus don't have this problem. Diamond also likes to notify you about the same notifications over and over again with no obvious way to clear out ones you've already seen, and the notification screen has an exploit that spammers really like to use where they can tag you in a post and then quickly remove the tag; the post remains in your notification list as a post you were tagged in even though the tag is now gone, effectively forcing you to view that post every time you check your notifications.

    +

    Now that I've finally been able to go and properly review Diamond, I can confidently say that it's a worse Twitter (a low bar to clear, as Twitter has been a shithole for at least a decade) with a profit motive attached to it. A profit motive that undermines the whole point of a "social" network, as it leads every user to look out for only themselves and see others solely as wallets to extract money from in increasingly ludicrous rent-seeking schemes. Everything becomes about increasing the value of your "Creator Coin" so that you and your followers can profit; piss off the wrong person, and they sell their coins, tanking your Creator Coin price and making the rest of your followers feel betrayed.

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    The profit motive is poisonous to both art and to true social connection. The latter because the prospect of making money through posts entices one to spend more and more hours of their day behind a screen, churning out content instead of using the platform merely as a means of arranging interactions offline and away from the keyboard. And the former because, in a world with a collapsing economy and the majority of the resources concentrated in a minuscule global elite, the only people who will have the time and energy to make art (with the exception of those in isolated societies outside of the industrialized world altogether) are those who can make enough money off their art to survive, which means appealing to the tastes of said elite and avoiding offending them for fear of having their revenue stream taken away.

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    To quote Ursula Le Guin:

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    Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.
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    This is not the kind of life I want to live. This is not the kind of world I want to help bring into being.

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    And besides, "DESO" was already Dead End Shrine Online to me. A swirling vortex of all the ugly things about capitalism, or a metal shed in the wilderness where I can make art without distractions and give away the things I make with no thought of profit in return. Which one do you think I'd prefer?

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    CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 © Vane Vander

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    + + diff --git a/blog/2024/january/web3-4.html b/blog/2024/january/web3-4.html old mode 100644 new mode 100755 diff --git a/img/diamond/darticle_tags.webm b/img/diamond/darticle_tags.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..33ec3b1 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/diamond/darticle_tags.webm differ diff --git a/img/diamond/share_error.png b/img/diamond/share_error.png new file mode 100755 index 0000000..0596160 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/diamond/share_error.png differ diff --git a/img/diamond/twetch_begging.png b/img/diamond/twetch_begging.png new file mode 100755 index 0000000..9f9e40a Binary files /dev/null and b/img/diamond/twetch_begging.png differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm_event.jpg b/img/theatrhythm/event.jpg similarity index 100% rename from img/theatrhythm_event.jpg rename to img/theatrhythm/event.jpg diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.mp4 b/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.mp4 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..c6eae68 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.mp4 differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.webm b/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..766f5b8 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/online_spam.webm differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/pause.mp4 b/img/theatrhythm/pause.mp4 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..9ae860a Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/pause.mp4 differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/pause.webm b/img/theatrhythm/pause.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..5e2fc4d Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/pause.webm differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.mp4 b/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.mp4 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..55794c8 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.mp4 differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.webm b/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..4b169e5 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/repetitive.webm differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/slow.mp4 b/img/theatrhythm/slow.mp4 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..0a39f97 Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/slow.mp4 differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/slow.webm b/img/theatrhythm/slow.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..25d28dd Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/slow.webm differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.mp4 b/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.mp4 new file mode 100755 index 0000000..73e951e Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.mp4 differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.webm b/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.webm new file mode 100755 index 0000000..ce23e0f Binary files /dev/null and b/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_item.webm differ diff --git a/img/theatrhythm_unlocks_title.jpg b/img/theatrhythm/unlocks_title.jpg similarity index 100% rename from img/theatrhythm_unlocks_title.jpg rename to img/theatrhythm/unlocks_title.jpg diff --git a/index.html b/index.html index 32f5308..9d7ef61 100755 --- a/index.html +++ b/index.html @@ -54,7 +54,7 @@

    Announcement Box

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    The big list of women who did things

    Vane reads one book by women every week of 2024

    +

    Vane listens to one music album by women every week of 2024

    Identity & Contact

    My GPG key

    Let's Decentralize

    diff --git a/push.sh b/push.sh new file mode 100755 index 0000000..4a10e93 --- /dev/null +++ b/push.sh @@ -0,0 +1,12 @@ +#!/bin/bash + +torsocks git push basedware +torsocks git push codeberg +torsocks git push darktea +torsocks git push disroot +torsocks git push lainla +torsocks git push notabug +torsocks git push phreedom +torsocks git push snw2 +torsocks git push torgit +torsocks git push yylov \ No newline at end of file diff --git a/robots.txt b/robots.txt index d2158e7..9ff128b 100755 --- a/robots.txt +++ b/robots.txt @@ -25,9 +25,6 @@ Disallow: / User-agent: Twingly Recon Disallow: / -User-agent: www.deadlinkchecker.com -Disallow: /rollcall.html - User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /identity/ Disallow: /webring.html @@ -36,6 +33,9 @@ Disallow: /blog/ User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: / +User-agent: Google-Extended +Disallow: / + User-agent: PageThing Disallow: / @@ -54,9 +54,6 @@ Disallow: / User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / -User-agent: Google-Extended -Disallow: / - User-agent: * Disallow: /