Smolnet, AI, and my site

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.