busybee

I ended up leaving a bunch of my meetup groups and networking events and their respective Discords, and also decided to take down my studio streaming setup, because they were all wearing on my mental health. I want to get back to working on stuff because I want to, not because I feel obligated to “grow my audience” or whatever. My fun activities were starting to be less about fun and more about my failure to get any sort of cachet, and something had to give. And I didn’t want that “something” to be the things I enjoy doing.

It’s totally fine to want to do things, but it’s important to realize why you’re doing things, and be willing to course-correct when you realize that those things are getting in the way of the intended purpose.

From Namecheap’s blog:

Imagine if next year you had to pay 10 times as much to renew your domain name as you paid this year. Based on an action proposed by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), price caps could be removed on several top level domains, which could significantly increase the price of domains.

[…]

ICANN’s current contract with Public Interest Registry (PIR), the group that runs the .org domain name, lets PIR increase the wholesale price of .org domains by 10% a year.

That’s a lot, but at least it’s capped.

Now ICANN is proposing extending the contract to operate .org but letting PIR set whatever prices it wants. Rather than a 10% increase to renew your domain next year, it could suddenly start charging registrars like Namecheap 100 times as much. Registrars would have no choice but to pass these charges on to customers.

This actually affects .biz and .info as well as .org; you might notice that this website is on a .biz domain, so it affects me. I also have an .org site that would also be impacted. And there are so many other .org sites out there which are run by non-profits or individuals who do things for reasons other than pure profit.

Once upon a time, people would fill their spare time with hobbies, things they do because they enjoy doing it. They could be passive, like watching TV, or they could be active, like knitting or playing piano, or they could even be a side gig for extra income, like woodworking or painting.

When the Internet came about that made for many more varieties of things that people could do for their spare-time hobbies. They could make weird little videos for YouTube or they could record music and produce albums that other people could listen to (and maybe even buy), or they could stream their video game playing to hang out with others or to compete online.

Somewhere along the line, as a society we seem to have decided that all of those activities must be done as a source of income. You can’t just “make videos on YouTube” or “stream on Twitch,” you are expected to become “a YouTuber” or “a Twitch streamer.” If you make things as a hobby it’s expected that you set up an Etsy store to sell them online; if you collect books or figurines or old video games it’s for making a collection you can sell on eBay. If you record music and put it online you have to put it on all the streaming services and market yourself to make it worth your while, because otherwise how will anyone discover it? Oh, you want your friends to listen to it? Well they’re all using Spotify now, and they’re only going to listen if The Algorithm tells them to.

If you’re not spending all your time doing marketing or sales or producing Content for the Content Gods you are Doing It Wrong.

Every time you post a video to YouTube it goads you about how far you are from monetization. Every time you do a Twitch stream it follows up with an email about how far you are from making Affiliate. I don’t know what Affiliates get after their streams – probably something about their monetization stats or how far they are from Partner or something. I don’t know. I don’t think I care. But whenever I attend the local Twitch streamers meetup, invariably all of the discussion revolves around how recently everyone got Affiliate, or how far away everyone is, and how sad it is that I’ve been streaming on and off for years and don’t have it yet and I have got to Find My Audience. It feels like a cult.

So, just an update from my last bit on discontinuing my CPAP. I feel like I’m back to where I was before the CPAP started causing problems, and I’m also up to 30mg of nortriptyline and that’s feeling fine. I also heard back from the sleep clinic today and while the doctor still hasn’t had a chance to go over my sleep study (I guess she’s been out of the office for some reason) the clinician agreed that I should stay off CPAP for now if I’m feeling better without it.

While making my streaming setup writeup it took a lot of self-control to not write up an exhaustive list of all the music-making gear I have in my studio. But I was morbidly curious enough that I’ve decided to write it up anyway. So here is a shrine to my history of Gear Acquisition Syndrome (and, I guess, my lack of self-control).

Streaming music production has its own set of challenges which aren’t well-addressed by the various tutorials out there. After a lot of iteration, here is a setup I ended up with that had a reasonable balance of flexibility and performance.

It should also be fairly adaptable to other situations where a single-computer setup doesn’t obtain the necessary performance.

Watts Martin writes:

There’s a lot of reasons people are down on Medium, Ev Williams' ongoing whatever-the-hell-it-is. It’s a platform! It’s a publication! It’s a platform for publications! It’s a clean, clutter-free reading experience, except for all the clutter!

There have been a few great stories written about this; my favorites are reporter Laura Hazard Owen’s “The long, complicated, and extremely frustrating history of Medium” and acerbic typographer Matthew Butterick’s “The Billionaire’s Typewriter.” (He occasionally updates this, most recently linking to Owen’s article.) Butterick critiques Medium’s design from an ethical standpoint, which turns out to be bang on point with Medium’s ultimate underlying problem:

Medium thinks it’s a brand.

The rest of the entry is very much worth reading, and is a great description of all the things I hate about Medium and why I wrote Publ and insist on hosting my own blog instead. And I’m sure is why there are so many other self-hosted blog engines available and getting stronger these days.

Lately I’ve been having fun designing critter leggings. Today my plaid ones arrived and they came out really cute! I’ve tweaked the design a bit (probably hecking something up) but they’re really adorable and comfy and I highly recommend Threadless leggings.

I’ve also made a few other designs, such as this graphics joke (primarily the leggings and backpack) and I’m probably going to make a whole bunch of cute animal bottoms for folks to wear.

Any suggestions for favorite species to include would be quite welcome!

Also, if you visit Threadless via my referral link, you get a coupon for $10 off!

Okay, so, here’s the error which caused me to downgrade to my iPhone 6s:

This was only happening on the XR, though (not on my iPod Touch, iPod Classic, or either iPad), and my iPhone 6S was working just fine.

Today I was actually pretty pleased with using the iPhone 6S and generally liking it better than the XR for the reasons I thought I would – it’s smaller, lighter, less obtrusive, and frankly less annoying to deal with overall. So I decided I’d buy a new battery for it and try my hand at that, since it doesn’t seem all that hard after all (and all of the battery cases I could find had critical problems like being too big or heavy or having connector failure or catching on fire).

So, a few months ago I upgraded to an iPhone XR, which I thought was pretty okay, but there’s been an accumulation of issues with it that have me back on my old iPhone 6S for a bit. I dunno if I’ll stick with this or what, but so far I’m liking the 6S tradeoffs better.

Much has been written about how Electron apps take a lot of memory; after all, each one is running its own instance of a web browser, and pulling in all of the overwhelming amounts of support code that implies. Slack can easily end up taking over 1GB of RAM, and Discord usually takes a few hundred as well. As someone who used to use IRC back in the 90s, when a single task taking even 1 MB of RAM was considered a lot, this feels rather horrifying:

On my iMac, with 24GB of RAM, that means that chat apps – doing the equivalent of an IRC client (granted, with a bit more visual stuff, but not that much) – are taking about 6% of my RAM!

But come to think of it, back in the mid 90s, when a typical computer had 8MB, an IRC client probably took around 400KB of RAM, which is also 6%. So have things really grown proportionally in that way?

Well, I’ve figured out a way of getting these chat apps to take half as much of my total RAM overall, but first, let’s talk about my personal history of memory usage.

Okay so it looks like re-pinging of existing content to fed.brid.gy doesn’t cause it to reappear again, although it’s still a bit of a UX disaster how backfilled toots show up (namely as a gigantic flood to every follower’s timeline). I think that’s more of a Mastodon UX problem than ActivityPub or fed.brid.gy though, and it’s probably a necessary evil based on what happens when a Mastodon sidekiq queue gets backlogged or whatever. Not to mention even in a things-are-current context, the nature of how Pushl works means it’ll probably still cause stuff to get missed.

It’s April 1, and nobody seems to have noticed the little joke I put on my site, or at least didn’t react to it. Which is fine, it was mostly a last-minute commentary on web UX patterns and so on.

(If you’re seeing this in the future, I added a GDPR compliance popover that prompts you with, “This website uses cookies to remember if you’ve clicked this button,” and a button which reads “I clicked it.”)

Anyway! It’s been a few days since my last post and I’m feeling somewhat better right now, so I’d might as well share what’s changed.