Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
I’ve had the same phone for the past five years, an iPhone 13 Pro which I bought for two reasons:
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.
I made some changes to rss2discord, most notably:
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.
So the Steam Frame pricing is finally announced. 256GB for $1059, 1TB for $1299. I have Thoughts.
So, I’ve been no fan of Gumroad for quite some time, and now they’ve gone even further all-in on using AI for everything and being especially gross about it.
Here’s some alternatives that are worth considering.
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.
Folks were looking for a centralized website for Chorus which wasn’t just the repository, so today I threw together another site, MecaGorp, which will be hopefully where I put all future information about Chorus/Canimus and its related efforts. There’s a lot more stuff to add but in the meantime it’s at least a starting point.
I ended up just going with Publ as usual because I can’t be bothered to learn how to work with anything more light-weight right now. Maybe eventually I’ll try out 11ty or something, but whatevs.
I don’t expect that site to be particularly high-traffic but it’ll be nice to have things be a bit more properly-catalogued there. And since I’m hosting the site files on github it makes it at least feasible for others to contribute more readily.
xkeeper posted a blog post about their issues running TCRF.
On a related note, here’s my webserver’s HTTP response code stats for today, across all of my websites:
fluffy@nautilus[/var/log/nginx] fluffy$ cut -f3 -d\" access.log | cut -f2 -d\ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 3 408 4 502 4 503 10 410 20 504 56 307 60 403 165 406 225 401 462 499 662 405 670 500 819 202 1739 304 2989 400 6299 206 16352 302 32402 301 52673 404 83035 303 192512 200 308859 429
This is pretty disheartening.
A few days ago I happened upon this video about visual snow syndrome and I watched it even thinking that it was kinda clickbaity, since I always figured that visual snow syndrome is something that a lot of people have and it’s not a big deal.
But it actually made me realize that there’s a lot of stuff that’s possibly interconnected in my brain. Because one of the things the presenter mentioned is that it’s also linked to tinnitus and heightened pareidolia, which are both things I’ve always had. As well as migraines. And I wonder how much of my other brain shit is also explained by this?
