Gryphon's Nest

"Endgame" is a keyword I've used when members of my family have passed away. I may be using that for the fourth and final time before long. My mother was first (brain cancer), my grandmother second (cancer + heart failure), my step-grandfather third (congestive heart failure). Now my uncle is on the decline (breast cancer + congestive heart failure), and he's the last of those who raised me. We're looking to get him into advanced care/hospice when we can, since I'm in no shape to care for him (scoliosis), and my parter who lives with me works an evening job, and has knee problems of their own.

Right now, as I write this, I'm running on about 40 hours of sleep deprivation after my uncle came home from rehabilitation therapy. I was up watching over him all night, and while my partner offered to take over to let me sleep, things came up that cut that off for a bit.

When this all began in March (really February), I started working on what I dubbed my Spring Contingency, which are the plans I'm making with my partner for when the inevitable happens. My uncle has been supporting us with his fixed income in these difficult times, and quite frankly, despite his ideologies, he's been accepting of me and my partners, just like most of my family is. As my grandmother once said, she "didn't raise her kids to hate." They may complain, but we're family, and that matters a lot more to most of us.

So... I'm going to be running my plans across some of my partners to get their takes on things, but the biggest issue is going to be cutting off some of the outflow of cash as much as possible with the bills. The core pieces are:

• Changing to a cheaper prepaid phone for me
• Downgrading to a cheaper internet plan ($50/mo instead of $90/mo)
• Shutting off the natural gas and putting in a flash heater for the water line (saves us about $70-$90/mo)
• Using an air drying rack for the laundry instead of our aging electric dryer (my partner's been wanting that, and I just ordered one)
• Setting up rainwater collectors and a potential greywater/wastewater system (sewage has gone *up*, and is going up each year for the next 5 years)
• Solar panels and battery banks (Not for everything, but every bit helps)

Of course, I'll need to get some income as well, and given my condition and everything, I plan on getting back to writing ASAP with stories, novels, and interactive fiction. Something I might do is a writer vlog, with some potential livestreaming on top of it, and patreon/subscribestar if I can get myself into a groove again. Giving myself room to branch out a little and have some options open.

For now, I'm still trying to prepare and plan for everything. Between this, the weather, and my own health issues, it's going slowly. But it's going, and that's what counts.

In light of the recent controversy on the Fediverse surrounding Fosstodon, I ended up seeing a number of people I follow through other means (blogs and other communities) pretty much give up and leave the Fediverse as a whole. I think only one or two were on Fosstodon, but the rest were almost unanimously tired of the constant drama and "forced nomad" nature of things like Fediblock campaigns. Several said they moved to BlueSky, but a majority just stopped with social media as a whole, much like I did a year ago.

Personally, I wish them all the luck and peace of mind in their attempt to detox from that place. It's not easy in the slightest, as all social media (yes, even the Fediverse) is addictive. It hits buttons in your brain to keep you locked in on it, even without dark patterns or an algorithm, and peer pressure—whether FOMO or just the threat of being excluded—is what draws many back into doomscrolling hell.

Even a year later, I still feel the effects of that can honestly be considered trauma caused by people on Mastodon. I can't speak for everyone, but dumping all social media—Twitter, BlueSky, the Fediverse, and even Twtxt—was the right solution. Even with how bad my stress is now due to my personal life, I would be in a much darker place if I had stayed. I'm not even sure my loved ones would have been able to pull me out of that hole in such a situation, and the thought of that terrifies me enough to never go back.

So to those leaving the Fediverse, good luck, and may your skies become brighter out from under that cloud of doom.

So, first of all, a massive **** YOU to genAI scraperbots that've been slamming my VPS for the last several days. I've gotten around it with some URL redirects and other tricks, and I'm trying to shake off the damned malware botnet things, but fail2ban just isn't able to deal with the sheer amount of IP addresses sometimes. It's frustrating, and makes me want to see bad things happen to some of these developers.

Because of all of this, I had to take down a good portion of my website, and only my main page is left. My story archive is down, and nearly made me go over the 1TB/month data cap I have on my VPS because of how hard the AI bots were hitting that part in particular. It's ridiculous, but sending a 444 (no response) back has helped immensely. 

Meanwhile, the smolnet has started getting a bit more toxic as of late, so I'm going write-only there as well, and kinda not reading phlogs or gemlogs for the sake of my own mental health. That's all I'll say on that subject.

With all of that, I'm gonna keep working on my site, but not really upload much of anything for a while. At least until there are better ways to deal with the dumb.

I wish I had more positive stuff to post, but right now, this is what I have.

After a bit of a sleepless night and some rude wakeup calls from robots, I noticed NetNewsWire had pulled the latest RSS feeds. Looking through them, I came across a post by Netigen titled "Bear Blog's Blind Spot". I have to say... I'm honestly of three minds on their take about the problem mentioned, which can be boiled down to "abusive/hate speech showing up in a list of trending blog posts".

Part of me is slightly...irked by this mentality of imposing one's own morals onto another community as an outsider/external force. This is because I've experienced how abusive such actions can be, and how it can even tear apart some communities due to the drama introduced by such actions. It's also why, on several forums I was part of, there was a policy of "Outsiders don't have a say in our rules." They'd been stung by this particular issue themselves, one having watched multiple boards melt down after such a thing happened.

On the second side, I totally agree with why they did it. I believe misogyny should have no place in modern culture, and it should be called out and punished appropriately. That sort of hate speech is pretentious, toxic, and even potentially dangerous. Moderation and administrative actions are needed to stop it.

Then there's the third side to the situation: the fact that the blogger was shadow-banned, then had their account deleted, because of actions from an outsider. From someone who'll never have to worry about that issue, since they host their own blog on their own website. It shows that, even with smaller indie communities, you're still a renter on the internet. Unless you do everything yourself, you're pretty much at the mercy of whatever entity is in charge, be it a company, community staff, or a lone admin. You really aren't better off than using something like Blogger or Facebook when it comes down to it.

(Disclaimer: Yes, I know I'm saying this on DreamWidth, but the Dreamwidth staff are awesome, and I like it here. I also have my own website and VPS, and can easily move things over to it if I want, but at the moment, I'm happy here.)

This post has me torn between those mindsets. I'm fighting my own trauma from trolls and the like who abused communities I was in as insiders, but also those outsiders who tore apart communities I was part of. The whole independent web part of things is just how I've become as of late, and it factors into both other takes for me, because I want to see more freedom from digital landlords, but I also understand how communities like BearBlog bring people together, even with their potential downsides.

In the end, I don't think there are any good answers to the problem, just answers. I do wish BearBlog spelled out their lines and limits on content in an Acceptable Posting Policy of some sort, though. That way, staff can point to it definitively and say "No rules broken, no action taken," and remove the ambiguity to save everyone some time.

I've done three big things today:

1. I practically nuked all of the tech-oriented subscriptions from my YouTube sub list
2. I trimmed out a lot of tech-oriented blogs from my RSS feeds
3. I deleted a lot of tech-oriented bookmarks from my bookmark list

Why did I do any of this? Because I've become very disinterested in tech in general as of late. Between the doom-and-gloom, the LLM-centric content boom, the gatekeeping and toxicity, and the stress-inducing negativity, it's all kinda killed my enthusiasm for most of the topic. And while I have some interests still, those are very specific interests like vintage Mac (Classic and early-Intel) and Windows (Win7 and earlier), and oldweb/cozyweb/indieweb, all of which I'm keeping things like blog RSS feeds for while keeping it heavily curated.

This is what self-care looks like. This isn't trimming the fat or me following some sort of great plan I found online, but doing what I need to do for my own sake, to keep myself going. It's why I left social media over a year ago, and started keeping myself offline like I was back on dialup internet. I need to get myself sorted, and get back to what I love doing. And yes, I did love tech, and I still do to some degree—I wouldn't be keeping to vintage Mac and Windows stuff if I didn't— but it's not nearly as much of a focus in my life anymore.

I'm almost 40. I'm tired of things constantly breaking and devs/designers not giving a shit. "Move fast and break things" gives me no happiness, but that's where the tech world is going, and I want no part of it. Even Linux isn't free from it.

I need to focus myself on what makes me happy: green living, oldweb/cozyweb/indieweb, vintage Macs and Windows, arts and crafts (not 3D printing), music, writing, reading... The list keeps going, but those are the big ones. But those are what make me happy. I want to be learning how to make MOD music, and making pixel art/blinkies, not dipping myself into constant politics and drama like some 4chan anon. I want to post about happy topics, not constantly rant about things that I have no real control over.

That's something I just need to reinforce in myself at this point: "Stop ranting, and be the happiness you want to see. There's bound to be others who want the same."

Let's see how this goes.

Something that's starting to annoy me slightly with YouTubers talking about vintage machines is this idea that, if it can't do the modern web, it's not really a "useable" machine. They don't say it's that way for most people, or even for themselves. They say it as a blanket statement like it's just a mater of fact.

The problem is, that's like saying a 486 is "unusable" because it can't play Minecraft. The idea isn't even fair in the slightest, since it's often a miracle to get Minecraft running well on a modern non-gaming rig, and it's not uncommon for the modern web to make even gaming rigs become chugging puddles of overheated sadness. YouTube—one of the favored tests for many YouTubers—has made my modern Core-i7 machine with 32GB of DDR4 memory and GeForce 1660 Super get toasty just watching 1080p video. Not because of the video itself, but because the JavaScript running on the page is so horrible that it makes the OS start thrashing the CPU and GPU.

If I use Project VORAPIS to render the page, and yt-dlp with something like mpv or VLC to play the video, even my 2009 Core2Duo iMac with 6GB of DDR3 handles 1080p video like a champ. Hell, downloading an playing the 1080p video natively in Quicktime Player does nothing to the CPU or GPU. It's the website that's the problem, and not even a good browser can save it from that.

It's not even that big of a deal, since I usually ignore those comments anyway, but it can get on my nerves when someone tries to take something like a low-end machine and shove it through hell like it's a modern gaming rig, then judge it based on that alone. Like, get some benchmarks, look at how well it can handle things that make sense for a machine of its era, talk about workarounds you can do (like what I do with my iMac and MacBook Pro). Just don't make unfair judgements based on running terrible code, even if it is something a lot of us put up with.

I finally managed to finally re-paste the CPU and GPU on my Macbook Pro, which gets some of my worry off my shoulders. It means this thing isn't going to die from overheating any time soon, and I want this machine to last as long as it can. I've also ordered a new PSU brick for the poor thing after taking my partner's ratty 60w PSU and using it for so long. Thing's covered in insulating tape to replace the brittle white outer rubber that's been falling off of it, and the poor thing's been having issues with keeping a proper connection for a few weeks now. It charges, but it needs some jiggling to do so, and it's not the port or inner board that's the issue.

I'm happy with the setup I currently have for this thing: 2009 MacBook Pro (5,4) in the middle, with a 2008 20" Cinema display for a secondary monitor on the left when I need one, a first-gen iPad on an official dock brick on the right for reading PDFs and ePub books, a Japanese Magic Keyboard 1 for when I need to kick back, and a Magic Mouse 1 for when I need a mouse in place of the track pad. I also have the Apple Remote for this thing (the white one that the 1st-gen Apple TV used), for when I want to kick back with a movie or something. And sitting behind me, a 1TB 2nd-gen Apple Time Capsule for my backups, earmarked for an eventual SSD or 4TB+ HDD upgrade.

Admittedly, I'm tempted to get a 1st-gen Apple TV to go with the television that's currently going unused (along with my uncle's spare Roku). I also technically have a 2008 23" Cinema Display, but one of my partners is holding onto it for me until I move in with them eventually.

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One thing I'm not so happy with has been the state of the smolnet. More and more of what I see is just constantly political, bordering on doomscrolling, to the point that I've been avoiding both Gemini and Gopher for the most part. Getting told "Don't blog because you're just training the AI" hasn't helped that case either, since it's trivial for small tweaks to be made for their scrapers to grab stuff through proxies or over clients. I'm just really not wanting to be online for the most part these days. The same toxicity is why I don't use Linux anymore...or social media.

I'm already down to checking Gopher and Gemini once a day at most, and my RSS reader is set to refresh every 6 hours (its max setting). I hadn't really checked Gopher or Gemini for a couple days, looked in there, and quickly noped out. The oldweb/smolweb (Neocities and the like) is starting to grab my attention more again, but that's honestly because I've been wanting to do more than just plaintext. That, and I'm starting to lean more toward it being a one-way thing for me.

At this point, I'm honestly happier sitting at home doing my own thing, instead of dealing with endless drama that doesn't have any real bearing on my life.

(This was written a little before "Losing faith in Linux", but posted after.) 

https://basic.bearblog.dev/you-should-read-blogs-now

So yeah, this is a post I agree with, but I also wanna say a few other things as well. Like Jon, I've been spending more time offline, and it's been almost an entire year since I completely left social media. However, my RSS feed reader is currently packed with 55 blogs I follow, both from here on DreamWdith, and abroad on the greater web. To the point that I only have four non-blog feeds (outside of YouTube feeds that I wanna follow), and those four are just update feeds for sites I frequent.

Honestly, the best thing about blogs is that you have to actively click into the articles to read them, which means they're not being plastered into your face any time you want to look through the feeds. Well-structured posts tell you whether you want to read the piece in the first couple of paragraphs (usually the summary), or even in the title/subject of the post.

Also, I don't always agree with everything someone writes, but they may have very useful posts every so often that I wanna keep up with.  In most readers, you can delete articles from them so you never see them again, and trust me, I use it a lot. Not just to clear old articles from the cache, but to get rid of ones that I really don't wanna read. You can't do that with social media, really. Not without dropping the user from your follows.

And no, blogging isn't the "perfect" solution to everyone's problems, but it's a solution to my problems, and that's what I need. I'm not an influencer. I'm not trying to sell you on an idea being the "right" one, like so many do on social media and YouTube. I post things up here to share my thoughts, and chronicle things I do. That's it. And that's how I think it should be for me. 

Edit: I should also mention that I even left Twtxt for the most part, as I've found myself unable to deal with any social media. Even the mostly close-knit kind. It's not a them problem, but a me problem.

So, I was a little bored and pulled up Wiby, a search engine focused on the old web and old websites. I clicked the "surprise me..." option a couple of times for a random page, and this popped up: "Why The Web Sucks (You Just Don't Know It)" by Sean Barrett.

Even back in 2004, people had a lot of the same problems with the idea behind web apps as they do now. It's a really interesting time capsule of a read, but so are some of the links scattered throughout. You'll need the Wayback Machine for some of them to be in-context or working, but it can be worth it if you enjoy reading about tech history.