My urbanist fantasy

I mostly love the town I live in, except that I really miss living in a more urban area with good walkability and transit.

I also love being in the Seattle area, except that everything feels so far away because of the transit situation. And when I do end up in the city I get so fed up with the constant presence of every tech company I cannot stand the existence of.

Sometimes I think about moving and starting a new chapter of my life, but I’m not sure what that would look like.

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rss2discord v0.4.0

I made some changes to rss2discord, most notably:

  1. Now it batches updates into a single post
  2. It lets you provide a custom message which can be used to send a role ping or the like

I am mostly posting this blog post to test the latter in production on my server, but also it’s nice to have more visibility for rss2discord.

💬 Re: MIndie-Agent: An IndieAuth Bot Notes

In reply to: Re: MIndie-Agent: An IndieAuth Bot

This is an interesting approach (and unattended IndieAuth has been desirable for quite some time, particularly for things like private posting appearing in feeds and authenticated Webmention and so on) but it will be really annoying if this is what ends up catching on instead of Ticket Auth, which was meant to solve this very problem much more simply but never got any real adoption.

Brief weekend notes

  1. I will be performing at Song Fight! Live!, which is in Seattle again this year, on Saturday, and I am also looking forward to seeing those who are coming from out of town this year. (And the in-town folks, who I seem to only actually see at Song Fight! Live! anyway.)
  2. I am woefully out of shape and in so much chronic pain, and I’m trying to balance taking walks and actually using my Powerball regularly again with not completely fucking myself up with post-exertional malaise.
  3. I’d also love to be playing Stepmania but it’s too hard on my knees anymore, so I really need to try out VaporStep which looks to be pretty neat and is potentially much lower-impact.
  4. I am very much enjoying the use of my DynaVap cannabis dry-herb vape, which is easy to use and gives me a nice clean draw. I bought it with the optional DynaTorch butane lighter (which was tricky to fill the first time but there’s good guides on Reddit) and the magnetic debowler/storage stand.
  5. Separately I had also bought a POTV One which is also nice, but I’ve ended up just using it for concentrates since it came with that ability and I’d been trying to figure out what to do with this CBD concentrate I’ve had for ages, and switching between concentrate and herb is a little annoying. But also it came with a free cannabis storage container which is also really nice, and I’ve been using it with the Dynavap which pairs very nicely with it. (That said I probably wouldn’t have bought it if it weren’t included for free.)
  6. I’ve been wanting to get back to working on Misfits, but what little energy I’ve had for music has been going to live performances, and the rest of my life right now seems to center around basic daily needs.
  7. My kitties have been very cuddly though and that’s nice.

❤️ HTML Can Do That Notes

Like: HTML Can Do That

I didn’t know about popover! Wow, that is a lot nicer than using Javascript to toggle dialogs. I’m definitely gonna start using that.

No more Mx. Nice Enby

A couple days ago, the fucking crawlers ramped up their efforts to get past my 429 error page, so I finally set up a fail2ban rule that would block anything that kept on poking at things.

Hoo boy that was the wrong thing to do. When the bot farms started to detect that I was blocking them at the IP level, they started a massive onslaught coming from massive coordinated botnets that came from everywhere, because apparently the bot networks have decided that if they’re being blocked, they’re going to do whatever they can to get around the block, and they were specifically only making a single request from every one of the tens of thousands of IP addresses.

After several hours of frustration I decided to take this site down for a bit, and found that as soon as my server started responding with error 502 making it look like it was down for the count, the botnet slowed to a trickle. Which tells me that they don’t give a shit about polite requests to please slow down, but will stop when they think that the server has been overwhelmed and taken down. But of course as soon as I brought it back up and a single bot saw that my site was back up, so returned the torrent of bullshit.

So, I changed my anticrawl thing a bit where now a failed check sends an inappropriate error 502.

As a test I did see if I could put my existing automated sentience check on the error page and the bots were still trying to submit the form, so I’ve changed the form to be manual, and to require filling in the world’s simplest (and hopefully most accessible) CAPTCHA.

Repeated failures to get past the CAPTCHA will still result in an IP block, but for now it seems that this is keeping the bots at bay.

Anyway, as soon as I instituted that change on this site, they started hammering my music site instead, so I put the same mitigations in place there too, and now my server is out of crisis mode.

I hate that I have to spend so much fucking time on this fucking bullshit, and that the solution requires violating HTTP standards. Because that seems to be all that these fuckers understand.

I’m tired, y'all.

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