busybee fluffy rambles

I made a change to Authl which more or less necessitated resetting everyone’s login.

I mean, it only really necessitated resetting the logins of folks who sign in via Twitter, but the way Publ authentication works (or at least the way I have it set up on my site) means I can’t reset just an individual session.

Also it didn’t really require a full login reset but it would have been confusing for some folks for some amount of time, so I figured better safe than sorry. “Oops I need to log in again” is a lot less difficult to deal with than “it says I’m logged in, did fluffy remove me from their friends list or something? what did i do wrong :( :( :(”

This also means that all bearer tokens have been reset, so if you were doing something with those you’ll need to generate a new one (either from your profile or via TicketAuth). Of course you automatically get a TicketAuth grant when you sign in anyway, so if you’re using TicketAuth I guess there’s nothing extra you need to do to begin with.

Update: haha I forgot to actually push this entry until like 4 days later oops. well okay have an explanation if you were wondering

Too early in the morning for me, I’m afraid.

It’s now been 10 years since Chris died. I have now spent 5x as long grieving him, being messed up about him, than I spent with him, and that has also now covered approximately 25% of my life in total.

But he left that much of an impression on me.

Actions matter.

Today I got a market research survey from the garbage company which wanted to know my opinions about how valued I feel as a customer. One of the questions was a 1-10 scale of whether I’m “disappointed” or “delighted” with the service, and a text form where they wanted details for why I gave the rating I did. I had a lot to say, and I’m posting it here just so that it actually gets read by someone.

Never mind that the only reason I use you is that you have a local monopoly on waste management services, I am continually frustrated by how your workers will often skip my home, or will knock over the trash can and then not pick it back up or empty it out. Also, it would be great if you could institute a system where it’s paid by weight rather than container size; my garbage output varies widely from week to week and my bins are usually just half-full, but with just enough trash that going to the lower tier size wouldn’t be sufficient. Having it be based on actual weight of pickup would be a lot more fair.

It’d also be great if you’d partner with Styro Recycle to offer styrofoam recycling; right now my choices are either to drive to Kent (which is wasteful) or to put styrofoam in the trash (which is wasteful). In a perfect world things wouldn’t be packaged in styrofoam to begin with but that’s not something I, as a consumer, have control over.

I attempted to send this message to the .us registrar’s contact form but they kept on throwing up unreasonable, hidden barriers; it required a full first name that’s at least four letters long (sucks to have a name like “Jay” I guess) and “must only contain alphabets” (i.e. no punctuation or spaces, sucks for anyone with apostrophes) and the text input must be under 500 characters, with no indication of how many characters you’ve written.

So, I’ve submitted a very edited-down version, but am reproducing my letter in full here:

Hi, I have a number of domain names registered under several different TLDs. Most of them allow anonymous proxy registrations, with the sole exception of .us.

The lack of proxy registration causes me to get quite a lot of unsolicited calls, violations to my privacy, and attempted scams from bad actors who are all making use of the WHOIS database.

When will .us allow anonymous/proxy registrations, as is standard for pretty much every other TLD?

The current policy is especially problematic for marginalized people who are subject to protracted abuse, harassment, and threats of violence, and this makes .us unsafe for use for all but the most privileged of people.

I absolutely implore you to revisit this regressive, unfair, and downright dangerous policy that does nothing to actually improve the supposed security of the .us registration database.

You know what I miss about the pre-9/11 days?

People being able to go to the gate to greet the traveler as they arrived.

It was always so nice to welcome people, or be welcomed. After 9/11 that little ritual went away, because now only travelers themselves were allowed beyond the security checkpoint, and nobody wanted to wait for their loved ones outside of the security checkpoint, so that very quickly made way to people waiting in the loading zone, which then turned into waiting in the cellphone lot, trying to make the whole greet-and-pick-up process as soullessly efficient as possible.

There’s a bunch of other stuff that changed so much that people are talking about, but this is a thing that I haven’t seen anyone else mention. Just this little bit of humanity that was part of the travel experience.

Then again, everything we’ve lost comes down to little bits of humanity, in the end.