Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts Season 3

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So, this isn’t a spoilers post at all, it’s just some gushing about how amazing the final season of Kipo was. It’s a perfect ending to the series, and I’m glad that Kipo was able to tie everything up so well.

What’s frustrating about it was apparently the showrunners had to guess about Netflix’s intentions and, as such, they decided to make the first three seasons as a self-contained arc rather than risk cancellation in the middle. Which Netflix ended up doing anyway.

If Netflix would just like say “Hey, your show is great but we’re not going to keep it going past this next season, so please wrap it up,” like, okay, that still sucks, but at least it lets the shows end properly. Unlike so many of their other shows where they take a wait-and-see approach and then cancel it after leading the show creators along about whether there’s a future for it.

Anyway. Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts is not a show that’s going to disappoint by being cut off before it gets a chance to end. So, if you were enjoying it, please finish enjoying it.

Meanwhile, tthe creators' hope is that if the show gets enough attention, Netflix will bring it back for a second arc because they have many ideas for future stories in the setting, and that would be fabulous.

Also, I had no idea it was originally a webcomic; from the archive.org mirror it looks like it originally got two chapters before it was picked up by Dreamworks. And it was also rather different! I hope Sechrist picks it up again.

ADHD and fibromyalgia and nortriptyline

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Yesterday I finally met with a new psychiatrist (having lost access to my previous one back in, oh, March), with the intention of figuring out what to try next in terms of ADHD medication.

As a recap, the first medication I tried (Concerta) just made me irritable and gave me tachycardia, and the second one I tried (Adderall) worked really well for my brain but also made my blood pressure skyrocket.

Anyway, on Tuesday I had also met with my pain doc and the decision we came to was that we should try increasing the nortriptyline again, since 20mg is doing something but not enough, and I couldn’t really remember why I felt like 30 was too much. He wants me to target 40-50mg for my eventual long-term dosage.

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pain management update

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Today i had a followup appointment with the pain clinic. Unfortunately, as soon as I started working again my pain flareups came right back. But the doctor was able to pinpoint a few things which are probably the underlying causes, and gave me some more exercises to try. We also decided to try increasing my nortriptyline dose again; I’m on 30mg for the next week then going up to 35 after that (update: and mentioned an eventual target of 40-50, forgot to mention that).

It’s also pretty clear that stress is a huge factor, and boy howdy have I been under a lot of it. Fortunately my new workplace is hugely into giving generous vacation benefits and making sure people actually use them, so in a couple weeks I’m taking a trip out to Port Angeles and staying in a tiny house for a week. I’ll probably bring a guitar and my iPad and try to just, like, decompress, and Be, and spend a bunch if time in the olympic peninsula and enjoy the small town vibe.

Everything I’ve seen about Port Angeles indicates it is a pretty good place with a lot of comfort potential. Maybe even the sort of town I’d want to retire to. And apparently it’s even pretty trans-friendly! I look forward to seeing this year’s Clellam county election results.

Getting fail2ban working on Ubuntu 20.04

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Any Linux system that’s exposed to the world tends to get a lot of hack attempts at it. I’ve typically run fail2ban on mine to try to mitigate this, but on Ubuntu 20.04 I was unable to get it to actually detect various attempts.

There are a lot of tutorials out there for fail2ban in general and even several on older versions of Ubuntu, but there’s one slight change on 20.04 (or maybe even an earlier version) which makes them not work. After a lot of hair-pulling I found one particular tutorial which had, buried almost in the marginalia, the magic thing I needed to get it working: basically, you need to use the systemd log scanning backend, as none of the others seem to actually have access to the logs themselves, at least not without a lot of hassle.

So, the short version: add backend = systemd to the [DEFAULT] section of /etc/fail2ban/jail.local. But read on for some sshd configuration notes as well!

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Server rebuild status

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So the nice thing about cleansing fire is it makes me realize that I had a lot of websites that I didn’t really need to keep going, just because I, like, never touch any of them or they’re just for fun.

For example, I was the only user of Reminder Me, and I’ve been moving all of my chore reminders over to the iOS Reminders app anyway, now that it does a better job of it than my crappy little RSS “app.” Given that it was one of the first Python things I wrote (and was a Python CGI, no less) and I’d been planning on rewriting it entirely if I decided I needed it anymore anyway, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth the effort of getting it working with nginx. Plus, it was on Python 2, which is a major pain to even deploy anymore.

It was fun having a “band” website but I hadn’t substantially updated it since the release of Refactor back in 2015. So, I’ll just make it redirect to my bandcamp. I’ll probably want to get my static large-file storage bit up separately though.

Similarly, I don’t really see any point in putting my professional audio portfolio back online at this time; it was woefully outdated and never got a lot of traffic from people looking for what I was offering anyway. So, meh to that one.

I was hosting a couple of small websites for my parents and another for a friend, and I unfortunately didn’t think to back them up in advance. It would have made my life a lot easier if I’d not been going so impulsively. Impulse control, what even is it? Anyway, hopefully all that content still exists elsewhere.

Mostly I’m just noticing just how many heckin' domains I have and how pointless most of them are. Especially now that most browsers don’t allow emoji domains anymore.

Swag and marketing “gifts”

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On IndieWeb Chat, the topic of conference swag came up, in the context of a bigger discussion about freebie giveaways and the apparently unending demand for free t-shirts.

I have multiple drawers stuffed full of free t-shirts that I have no intention of wearing. And I can’t imagine anyone else wanting to wear them, either, and donating them to thrift shops just feels like it’s offloading my problems onto someone else.

Much of the swag that places hand out (be it at conferences, first days of work, awareness campaigns, or whatever else) seems like it’s at best well-intentioned but at worst a gigantic environmental burden, both in terms of peoples' environments and the environment of the planet as a whole (materials, energy expenditure, landfill, etc.).

So here’s some thoughts on common bits of swag that I’ve received and my personal usage of it. This applies both to conference swag (provided by conferences and vendors thereof) and employee swag (i.e. given out on employees' first days or during internal events or the like).

Writing stuff (pens, notebooks, etc.)

I am in favor of things like this. I’m always losing pens, and taking notes on things is a lot easier if I have notebooks to take the notes in. So, I generally do use this stuff. But I preferentially use ones that are on the nicer end of things; spiral-bound notebooks with hard covers, pens which aren’t just crappy ballpoint pens, that sort of thing.

I definitely prefer paper that is either unlined or gridded/graph paper. I’ll use lined notebook paper but it’s not as useful to me as a sketchbook or something with grids.

And of course, some people don’t care for this stuff and won’t use it. So, make it opt-in.

Clothing items

Clothes almost never come in a size or style which is comfortable for me. I hate wearing shirts with large swaths of non-breathable logo printed on them. I also hate wearing shirts that are just plain advertising for other things.

I also do not wear polo shirts. Even when I was male-presenting I didn’t care for that style.

Also, “unisex” t-shirts really mean “men’s.” Worse, if I show up at a place and people tell me the shirts are “unisex” (and don’t tell that to other people in line) I just feel called out for being visibly trans. You might think you’re being inclusive, but you’re not.

If you’re going to have t-shirts as a thing to give out, please make sure to have both crewneck and scoop-neck styles; crewneck are more masculine, scoop-neck are more feminine. And provide a complete range of sizes for both styles; there are small men, and there are large women. And make the shirt something that people want to wear on its own, rather than being purely a marketing vessel for your thing.

Like seriously have you ever seen some random person on the street wearing a t-shirt saying “Do everything, believe more! IT IS WHAT WE BELIEVE” and then decide to look into rackmount server hardware or whatever?

Hats are similar; some people love baseball caps, others can’t stand them. Same goes for knit caps, beanies, trilbies, fedoras, and so on.

Also, in this day and age, it seems likely that going forward a lot of places are going to be handing out face masks. In addition to the t-shirt issues (especially regarding breathability — that is obviously way more important here!) you’ll also probably want to make it obvious that they’ve not been handled directly by people at the conference (for example, being in a sterile plastic bag), and of course different people have different head sizes/shapes and material preferences. They should also probably have flexible metal for shaping around the nose, and a pocket for a removable filter.

So basically: give people choice, make it something that people would want to wear, and make it opt-in.

Water bottles

Oh my god I have so many reusable water bottles that I never use. These seem to be especially favored by companies where they have disposable paper cups and want to discourage people from using them. When I worked at HBO we got a new reusable water bottle pretty much every month. Some of them were nice, some of them were crap.

All of them go unused.

Like, I get the intention behind reusable water bottles: Hey, let’s be good to the environment, let’s not use single-use drink containers like disposable cups or single-use water bottles.

But look at it this way: anyone who’s going to not use disposable drink containers probably already has a reusable drink container they really like. And unless this drink container is better than an average one, it’s probably just going to take up space in a cabinet or landfill. This is especially true for low-grade “sports” bottles where they aren’t even usable in a sports context (for example, being made of a rigid, thin plastic but having a squeeze-bottle top).

Like, don’t try to replace single-use bottles with never-used ones. That’s not actually helping anything.

And I don’t know about other people, but if I’m in a situation that I’m using a disposable container, it’s because I don’t have my reusable container with me. Giving me another one to not have with me isn’t going to solve the problem. If I’m visiting an office I won’t have my own personal coffee cup. Maybe just have reusable drinkware available for visitors to use, or something?

As far as bottles go, different people have different tastes for what sort of material and shape and so on makes for an acceptable experience. Especially among folks with various sensory sensitivity issues and so on.

Basically: make it opt-in.

Stickers

Some people love stickers. Some people don’t. Some people will take the stickers and never have any idea of where to put them and they just accumulate in a drawer somewhere until the backing falls off and they make a big mess and oh god why didn’t I just throw them out oh no now there’s gunk all over the place

Make it opt-in.

Random cosmetic items

There’s a tendency at women-focused conferences especially to provide random “girly” things. They seem to always focus on the audience being women, and not aspects of the audience itself. I’ve been to women in tech conferences where the swag bag is full of things like press-on fingernails, makeup mirrors, nail polish (usually in gaudy, branded colors), and so on, never anything to do with the audience of the conference.

What’s even worse is when someone makes a gendered comment when they hand me the bag, in a way which implies that I wouldn’t want this stuff because I’m not a “real” woman. (Which also implies that men shouldn’t want these things, either.)

So, basically: make it opt-in.

Pronoun pins

I love pronoun pins. They’re great. I especially like ones with a write-in spot and which can be rewritten (such as being able to write on them with a “permanent” marker and then erase that with an alcohol wipe or something).

These go into a bigger category of thing but it’s good to at least consider the following things:

  • Make the pronoun itself the central focus
  • Make it easy to read at a distance
  • If you use color as a shorthand, don’t use commonly-gendered colors (e.g. pink or blue), and also consider colorblindness for readability
  • Offer at least he/him, she/her, they/them, and “ask.”
  • DO NOT PROVIDE A JOKE PRONOUN OPTION. I cannot stress this enough. Joke pronouns as an option only serve to delegitimize the entire thing (although it’s handy to see who to avoid by who’s wearing the joke pronoun badges, I suppose).
  • Also, it’s nice to let people take more than one, as a shorthand for “these options are all fine.”

And make it clear that this isn’t just for trans people! Encourage everyone to have one. But encourage, don’t force — some people are still in the closet or otherwise aren’t comfortable disclosing.

Basically, do what you can to normalize the idea of cis people declaring their pronouns, and to make the pronoun declaration obvious, but also accept that people might have reasons not to declare them, and at least make allowances for the fact that not everyone’s pronouns are going to be in the set that you consider.

(This obviously applies more to conferences themselves than about individual vendors at conferences.)

Overall

So, the summary I have on marketing swag in general:

  1. Make it opt-in
  2. Make it opt-in
  3. Provide utility
  4. Provide choices
  5. Don’t treat everyone as an external marketing vessel, especially when your goal is just to market to the recipient
  6. Make it opt-in

Whoops

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The plus side of using sqlite for everything: all my site data is just stored in files that are easy to recover!

The minus side of using sqlite for everything: way too easy to clobber newer content while incrementally restoring backups.

Well that blew up…

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So, I found out that my wildcard SSL certificates weren’t being renewed, which in turn was because certbot needed to be able to edit DNS records in order to do so. In investigating that I found that I couldn’t install the latest version of certbot and its Linode plugin, which led me to discover that my server was actually running the i386 ubuntu core with amd64 grafted onto it, instead of being actual amd64, which was in turn because this server had been provisioned years ago and i386 was the supported configuration.

So I went through the exercise of trying to switch over to amd64, found that the best path forward was to back up all my data (which was already done since I keep incremental backups every night) and just reimage. Which seemed like a pain. But the alternative for a more graceful transition was to set up a new VPS, migrate stuff across, and then decommission the old VPS, which would have also been a pain.

So anyway I decided that since my server was still basically running 32-bit and would be stuck there forever if I didn’t rip off the band-aid, I’d rip off the band-aid.

While I was at it, I’d been meaning to switch to nginx for years, and this was a good enough excuse as any.

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Three triumphs

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Three nice things happened today:

  1. It turns out my favorite dress has pockets which I somehow didn’t realize at all and now it’s my even more favorite dress

  2. first day at work went well

  3. Hacked my camera to make it Better

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