This presents a problem, as there are so many things I’d like to be doing, and even taking care of my basic day-to-day needs already puts me right up at my limit most of the time, and often pushes me over.

It has me thinking quite a lot about what I need to go on.

Things that are helpful

I need to know that the things I’ve done have been worthwhile, and that there’s a reason to keep on doing the things I’m doing.

Things that would make a huge impact along those lines:

• Knowing that people are listening to my music, and sharing it with others
• Feeling appreciated for the things that I’ve done, and anticipation (but not demand) for what’s coming next

Having fatigue makes it difficult for me to do a lot of things, and I’m severely isolated.

Having friends who are willing to come over and spend time with me, and help me with household chores (cleaning especially), without judgement, would help substantially.

I also have so many projects that I’d like to be working on, and where having me be the sole person doing it would not be sustainable or successful. People who I can collaborate with, especially on software, would be great.

At some point I’d particularly like to get back into making comics, but drawing physically hurts me to do anymore. Having someone I can work with to at least finish Lewi (and, ideally, Unity) would be amazing.

But really, anything that tells me that what I’ve done has made an impact on them (especially positive impacts) would be amazing. Fanart and covers of my songs and such would be so incredibly precious to me.

And, of course, learning something I can actually do that would help me with my fatigue and chronic pain. Not palliative care (I can already smoke weed all day and wallow in oblivion), but like, something that would actually make a measurable positive impact on my health and ability and which I can actually access without going into bankruptcy.

Things that are less helpful

I’m not seeking financial support per se. I made plenty of money as a software engineer, and while my savings won’t last forever, I have enough to get by for a while. My reason for seeking disability is to gain access to helpful services that are gated by a disability determination (and where public funding drives the cost down).

Having people show appreciation by buying my music and games and such would be nice but it doesn’t do nearly as much for me as contributions in other ways (especially things that help things to keep going, like code contributions and help with word-of-mouth sharing and so on).

Whenever I’m in a depression hole about how I’m not doing well and not able to do the things I’d like, the last thing I need is aphorisms and platitudes about how okay it is that I’m not able to do things. That just makes me feel worse; at best it makes my works feel like they weren’t meaningful or worthwhile to begin with, or that the things that I’ve lost aren’t worth mourning.

And being told what I can or should do in any sort of minimizing language? Remember that the word “just” can do some heavy lifting. When I’m already barely treading water, burdening me with another hundred pounds is not helpful.

Some talk about finances

My overall cost of living is, at present, $4200/month. About 65% of that is housing expenses (mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, etc.). Most of what remains is medical expenses (expensive medications, insurance, copays for medical appointments, and so on).

At my current burn rate, I have enough savings to last quite a while, but if I were to start paying out-of-pocket for the help I need, my savings would disappear pretty quickly, and they are only half-measures anyway. For example, cleaning services generally don’t do any of the hard parts, and around these parts would cost me another $1000/month for the amount of help I need. And while I can (and often do) outsource my travel to Lyft, that adds up real fast, and anyway having a way to get places doesn’t help when I’m feeling too tired to even go anywhere to begin with.

Theoretically I could reduce my expenses significantly if I were to move somewhere cheaper and completely upend my life and lose what little social life I have already, but as I wrote about previously, a place that actually fits my access needs while also being affordable doesn’t seem to exist.

I also recognize that I am in an incredibly privileged position. I don’t currently have to rely on anyone to financially support me, and I’m not at risk of losing my home. If I were in this same health situation but didn’t have the good fortune I’ve experienced throughout my life, I’d be in a much more desperate position. So many of my friends are in that much more desperate position, and it hurts me that I can’t help them out.

I want this kind of support to exist for everyone. Everyone either needs help and support, or will someday.

Some summarizing

I think that at the core, my biggest issue is just the social isolation. I hate that I’m experiencing life through a straw and watching it pass me by on a timeline, and that any attempt at fixing this only puts me in a worse state.

I need my privacy and my own space but I also need connections with others.

Some sort of cohousing situation would probably be great. Like, I’d love to be part of a village with a common creative space, and where people look out for each other and make sure they’re doing okay. And where there’s mutual support for getting places. Maybe I need to look into local cohousing groups; there’s a lot of promising-looking ones happening, although most of them seem to be either established (with no openings) or are in a “we need people to do the hard physical labor of building this thing that may or may not exist in a few years” phase.

So at least in the interim, having more in-person social connections would be great, especially if it doesn’t involve me being the one to have to travel to make it happen, because that is very much off the table for me right now.

(And getting help with cleaning and grocery shopping would be nice.)

comments

What I found is that while there were some slight differences between the coffee varieties, and I’d probably be able to tell the difference between them in a side-by-side cupping, the differences weren’t so profound as to make me think I need to particularly focus on fermentation as a selection criterion for my beans, especially since it’s uncommon to even encounter fermentations when going with decaf.

So, here are my observations regarding the things that make the actual differences to my coffee enjoyment.

Caffeine level

This isn’t about flavor preference so much as the fact that if I have much more than 100mg of caffeine in a day I also end up having a panic attack and my sleep gets disrupted, badly. I primarily drink coffee for the flavor, so for me, caffeine is the most important aspect as it determines whether I can even drink it.

It’s also for this reason that I only seriously consider Arabica beans, as they’re naturally lower in caffeine than Robusta.

Other varieties (such as Eugenoidies) do exist, but they’re pretty uncommon and expensive, and I have never heard of them ever being available in a decaffeinated form.

Roast level and profile

The way that coffee is roasted is, by far, the most important factor to whether I’ll like a coffee or not.

I tend to prefer lighter roasts, as they come across as brighter and fruitier, and often keep more of the natural spiciness of the beans. Darker roasts tend towards uniformity and come across as burnt, to me.

In particular I like lighter “city” roasts, which tend to preserve the fruit flavor while also picking up a little bit of chocolate and spice.

Some roasters are finally getting savvy to providing these lighter roasts in decaf, but they tend to be super expensive; this is why I mostly roast my own, with beans primarily sourced from Burman.

Origin

I’ve consistently found that I prefer South/Central American beans over African beans. In my experience, South/Central American beans have a nicer flavor profile with roasted lighter, whereas African beans tend to only do well with darker roasts.

I have no idea why this is.

Separation method

What we know as “coffee beans” are actually the pits of a fruit, known as a cherry. Part of the coffee process involves separating the bean from the rest of the fruit.

There are a few different methods of doing this. The most common ones are:

• Washing: The cherries are split open and then the fruit is mechanically separated from the bean, which is then washed in water before drying
• Natural process: The cherries are kept whole when dried, and then the dried fruit is mechanically separated later
• Honey process: This is a middle ground, where the skin and pulp is removed but the mucilage remains attached for drying

Personally I prefer natural process. It retains a lot of the fruit flavor from the cherry, and this is especially nice with a lighter roast level. Honey process retains a lot of the sugars and tends to get a lot more roasty than washed beans, but doesn’t have the particular flavor components that I’m seeking out.

But all of these methods are fine!

Also, you can make washed coffee taste very similar to natural process by grinding some cascara in with the coffee. S&W Roasting is a great source for this.

Decaffeination process

As we saw when I participated in the decaf project, my preference is generally for either the water method or Ethyl Acetate decaffeination, although I don’t have a strong preference between the two. I do not care for CO₂-based methods which add a bitter aftertaste.

Fermentation method

And, finally, the fermentation method seems to matter the least of all to me. Not only is it very uncommon to find fermented decaf to begin with (and caffeine content is by far my most important factor!), but I just don’t really taste much difference between processes.

My current favorites

These are my current home-roasting go-tos. My favorite roast profile is 5 minutes at 980W of power, followed by 2 minutes at 1100W, followed by a 3-minute cooling cycle:

• Mexican Esmeralda EA Natural
• Colombian Huila “Decaf de Caña” EA
• Indonesian Sumatra Royal Select SWP

And when I’m feeling fancy and want to buy other peoples' roasts:

• Café Mam light roast
• S&W Coffee: This roaster is generally a bit more experimental and their stock rotates/depletes frequently, but every single decaf I’ve ever had there has been incredible. Expensive, but worth it.
• Perennial Common Voice Decaf: Another tasty light roast, but also quite expensive.

comments

• My previous phone’s (iPhone 12 Mini) battery was worn out and had become worn out super quickly
• I wanted the LiDAR sensor for the work I was doing at the time

Anyway, it still does everything I need in a phone (which isn’t all that much), but over the last several months the battery wasn’t lasting a full day on the rare days when I went out, which is of course when I most need the battery to last.

New iPhones are stupid expensive, even decent low-end Android phones are stupid expensive (and would need me to switch out a lot of my infrastructure/ecosystem buy-in, costing even more), and so of course it’s not too expensive or difficult to replace the battery yourself.

So I bought iFixIt’s battery replacement kit, and the other day I replaced the battery.

The final step of replacement is to charge the phone to 100% and then allow it to discharge to 0% to finish calibrating things, and with the new battery, the dang thing lasted for over two days on a single charge. It’s also back up to its full performance, or at least it feels snappier (I didn’t think to take any benchmarks before and after, though).

With any luck this phone will continue to last me for another five years. I’m so done being an enthusiast for phones.

I also ended up finding my old iPhone 6S and giving it a charge, and if it weren’t for it no longer supporting the latest Apple ecosystem stuff (including my Apple Watch and my HomeKit setup), it’d still be a perfectly usable device even today.

I used to buy a lot of cellphones to play with and swap between. They were generally pretty cheap and things were always evolving and fun and weird. Here’s some highlights from my phone journey:

• My first cellphone was the same Nokia 3390 that everyone had in 2001. I bought it because it was cheaper to get a cellphone with a minimal plan on Voicestream (which would later be bought out by T-Mobile) than it was to get a second phone line, when the town I lived in at the time still hadn’t gotten any broadband service.
• I bought the original Danger Hiptop which was the first mass-market smartphone (and the direct ancestor of Android). It had a lot of promise but had too many problems to continue on with, mostly due to service unreliability. For example, the way it handled its “always-on” connection was by always being “dialed in” to GPRS and wouldn’t allow incoming calls to interrupt that session. Also remember how original iPhone users ended up getting gigantic GPRS call logs? T-Mobile did it first!
• I got the N-Gage QD, not to play games on but because it was an affordable Symbian phone. It was pretty good! Then it self-bricked on a daylight savings change and I ended up recycling it because I couldn’t figure out how to get it out of a bootloop.
• Then I had a long series of Ericsson/Sony Ericsson phones. The R520m was pretty good. The T28 was even better, and I used that one for years, including as a GPRS/Bluetooth modem for getting online with my Tapwave Zodiac. The T610 was amazing although I ended up going back to the T28 for some reason. At this point I was using an iPod for music. This was normal.
• I had a Sidekick 2 for a few months. It was so bad that it inspired the song Robot Baby.
• Then I switched to a Palm Treo 600 which was a bit more convenient than my two-device setup, but still used the iPod for music.
• And then when I worked at Sony, the W580i came out and it was incredible. Small phone that would sync all my calendars and contacts, had a pretty okay (for the time) mobile web browser, and a pretty good music player! This was my daily driver for years, and I looked down on the iPhone with derision because the W580i could do pretty much everything the iPhone did, and had user-installable apps and a fitness tracker and supported stereo Bluetooth headphones. Plus its T9 was actually faster and more accurate than the iPhone’s on-screen touch keyboard.
• When Android came out I was definitely Team Android for a while, aside from a brief foray into the original iPhone, which I found to be clunky, annoying, and super unreliable (which was mostly AT&T’s fault, but that was the only carrier it worked on at the time). Notable phones that I tried included the HTC Magic, the Nexus One, the Galaxy Nexus, and a bunch of random crappy Android phones that were the included ones in the various cheap-ass phone plans when I was trying to minimize my telecom costs
• For a while I tried going without a phone entirely, and used an iPod Touch, a mobile access point, and a shoddy Twilio setup. It was a frustrating mess and just got people making fun of me. But I thought it was a worthwhile experiment, but I ditched it when the iPhone 6 came out.
• The iPhone 6 was okay, but I ended up upgrading to the 6s the next year because it wasn’t quite up to scratch even at the time. It didn’t help that I’d underestimated how much storage I’d need for both photos and music.
• Since then I’ve stuck with iPhones; I’ve had the 8, XR, 12 mini, and 13 Pro.
• I’ve also had a few Android phones as spare devices for mostly developer and app-access purposes. I have learned that I really do not like Android anymore.

Anyway. Sometimes I get tempted by some of the ultra-lightweight/minimal “dumbphones” out there, like the Dumber Mini and Clicks Communicator and the like, but none of them actually do the handful of things I actually use my phone for, and my hot take is that the way to get a simpler mobile device without a lot of app-based distractions is to not install apps unless you really need them, and to disable immediate notifications wherever possible. It’s still not perfect but I also just don’t really find myself being hooked on my phone to begin with.

Because for all the phones I’ve had, it’s always just been a passive device most of the time.

Anyway. I plan on running this iPhone 13 Pro into the ground. It does everything I need, isn’t loaded with shitty AI, has a great camera and the least-bad mobile music player I’ve used, and even upgrading to a newer iPhone would mean having to replace a bunch of my accessories and it wouldn’t give me any more capabilities than what I already use. The only real limitation I have is that it’s only a 128GB model so I can’t load my whole music library onto it, but my ridiculously-complicated smart playlist setup takes care of that, and maybe someday I’ll have a better option anyway.

I balked at spending $1000 on a phone in 2022, but I haven’t had to spend anything on new phones since then aside from the $50-or-so total to replace the battery, and $200/year (so far!) is the best dang value I’ve ever had in a good phone. I suppose it’s possible Apple will drop support for this phone in a few years, but even then it’ll probably be a while before it stops working with everything I need it to.

comments

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.

Here are things that are valuable to me:

• Affordable housing and food
• Being able to have a recording studio in or near my home, without noise leaking in from or out to neighboring homes (including an acoustic drum kit)
• Having access to transit that doesn’t completely wipe me out just to get to the nearest usable bus stop
• Having access to trans-affirming healthcare and not having to worry about being hate-crimed
• A local government that has committed to remembering that trans rights are human rights
• Access to long-distance transit (i.e. well-connected train and/or bus station, and not too hard to get to an airport)
• Good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure
• Clean air
• Good and affordable Internet

And here are things that are nice to have:

• A decent food culture
• Access to forests and large bodies of water
• A local trans community
• A local furry community
• Coffee shops that emphasize flavor and technique (ideally third-wave and with good decaf)
• Majority English speakers

Things that would make life easier for me but aren’t strictly required:

• Not needing company sponsorship to move there
• Still being able to use my 110V hardware

Whenever I go on a Quixotic quest to find such a place, nothing really turns up. So far the least-bad option that keeps turning up is Victoria, Canada, but moving there would require some finagling to make it legal, and it’s also still a bit isolated for my tastes.

I feel like the best option is to just stay in White Center and just become an advocate for better transit and bike infrastructure. To that end I’ve sent messages to my local representatives, and I’ve already gotten some encouraging responses. Maybe I can help change this town to be the place I want to be, or at least less-bad than how it feels right now.

Here’s how White Center currently scores on the above points:

• Affordable housing and food: Not particularly great. At present I’m paying around $2500/month for housing (including property tax and insurance), and that’s on the low end. Food is about twice as expensive here as most of the US.
• Recording studio in/near home: I do! It’s in my basement. Basements are super uncommon here. But I have one, and it works great for this. Other houses here have yard space for a backyard recording shed, which is also acceptable.
• Transit access: This is of course my biggest frustration. There is a bus stop right around the corner of my house, which was a big factor in why I bought this place, but a few months after I moved in the bus line that stops there got its service significantly reduced and now it only runs every 70 minutes and during commuting hours. In the five years I’ve lived here, I’ve only taken that bus twice, and I had to plan ahead. The time I still spent waiting for the bus was longer than it’d have been to walk to the next nearest bus stops, which are about 15 minutes away (but require traversing hills and so it wipes me out bad).
• Trans-affirming healthcare: Yes, and actually it’s better in White Center than in Seattle proper, amazingly enough. At least for general practice. For everything else I have to travel to Renton or Seattle, which gets back to the transit issues.
• Trans rights being human rights: White Center is pretty libertarian, but in an anarcho-socialist way. So it suits me just fine. Seattle proper is also quite good. Neighboring Burien, not so much.
• Long-distance transit: Our airport is pretty good, and it’s super easy to get to from White Center. Train travel is much more limited, but such is the case for all of the US. Train and bus access are just okay, and require traveling to Seattle proper.
• Good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure: Seattle is great about this. White center, not so much. Downtown White Center has recently gotten a huge infrastructure upgrade which makes it very walkable and easy to bike through (although the actual bike parking isn’t so great), but downtown is just where you go to go to bars and restaurants or shop at little boutiques. The actual day-to-day activity (such as grocery stores) is better handled down in my neck of the woods, “My neck of the woods” is only half a mile from downtown, but that half a mile involves an incredibly steep hill that is not safe or fun to bike or walk up, and the main throughfare has shitty sidewalks and no bike lanes.
• Clean air: For the most part, yeah, it’s pretty good here.
• Good and affordable Internet: I get symmetric 500Mbps for $50/month, and that was a downgrade from symmetric gigabit, which was $70/month.
• Decent food culture: There’s some okay places to go here but they’re expensive. The food culture in Seattle proper is a lot better, but also a lot more expensive. And it still can’t hold a candle to Portland.
• Access to forests and large bodies of water: I have found nowhere better than Seattle for that. White Center has a fair amount as well. Burien also has an incredible nature park (Seahurst) but getting to it without a car is a nightmare.
• A local trans community: Seattle is basically the trans capital of the world, as far as I care, and I know several local trans and nonbinary folks in and near White Center. Although few of them are within walking distance. I’m sure there’s a bunch I don’t know though.
• A local furry community: The Venn diagram of the trans people I know near White Center and the furries I know near White Center is practically a circle.
• Good coffee shops: In White Center we have Moonshot, and Sound & Fog is currently my favorite coffee shop in the world and isn’t super far away from the BRT.
• Majority English speakers: Well, yeah

So I mean based on my rubric, White Center is pretty great. Looking at it that way, it’s a pretty high bar to clear.

I just wish it didn’t cost so much to live here, in terms of both finances and energy.

comments

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.

comments

Currently I use a Bigscreen Beyond and a bunch of basestations. The basestation tracking quality is awful and has been getting worse over time, and I definitely want to switch to inside-out tracking. Also I’ve been less than impressed with Bigscreen as a company lately.

Having a wireless headset would also be really nice. And the wireless implementation is pretty decent from what I’ve heard.

But this is pretty darn expensive!

I’m also concerned that it might not be possible to modify the face gasket to let me see my guitar while I perform, although replacement gaskets are fairly cheap so it’d be easy to find out. There’s also a passthrough camera which might be able to do what I need, although I’d need to be able to purposefully partially overlay the passthrough over my SteamVR environment, as I need this while playing VRChat, which is very much not a mixed-reality game. I’m also sure I could 3D print a custom gasket like I did for my BSB.

What’s really annoying about the price is that it’s this high mostly because of RAM prices, because Steam Frame is meant to be a standalone device that happens to also work with PCVR. I have basically zero interest in standalone VR gaming, and I don’t like that I’m being made to pay a premium for that thanks to AI price increases.

Anyway, I’ve signed up for the preorder lottery.

If I get one I’ll probably see about selling my BSB, although the process for that is difficult (and is a big part of why I’m not thrilled with Bigscreen as a company).

In any case I’d still keep my base stations and fullbody tracking stuff. Even when Fluxpose finally ships I have a reason to do the playspace merge thing and continue using my Tundras for some stuff.

Gosh this hobby is expensive though.

comments

comments

Here’s some alternatives that are worth considering.

Ko-Fi

It’s what I use for my main shop these days. Their pricing is quite nice: 5% cut for transactions on the free tier, 0% if you pay $12/month. They support both digital and physical goods, although their variant support and shipping calculation is a bit weak.

The main downside is that people don’t realize that Ko-Fi has a fully-fledged shop and membership system; for whatever reason everyone still just thinks of them as being a tip jar. Which is unfortunate, because they’re quite good at the other things too!

Payhip

Payhip is similar to Ko-Fi, but does a better job of marketing themselves as a storefront. Their pricing is okay although not as good as Ko-Fi’s; the free tier is a 5% cut, but it costs significantly more to pay down the cut ($29/month to get 2% and $99/month to get 0%).

I haven’t worked with them directly but a friend of mine speaks highly of it, and it seems like it was designed with inventory and variant support from the ground up although I don’t have any idea of how it actually works to the user. So I’ll probably sign up for it since some of my art pieces and coffee items that I’ve been meaning to list for sale again are pretty clumsy to list on Ko-Fi.

itch.io

itch.io is mostly seen as a place to sell games and conduct game jams, but it’s also great for selling digital assets and music. They let you set your platform cut, and default to 10%.

There’s technically support for physical merch although it’s quite weak, so I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose.

Jinxxy

Jinxxy is designed specifically for VR assets, and has become very popular for VRChat creators in particular. As far as I can tell they only support VRChat assets, however. Similarly to itch.io they let you specify your own cut, and default to 5%.

Patreon

I’m not exactly a fan of Patreon (despite having capitulated) but in addition to memberships they also have a means of selling digital goods. I don’t know anyone who really uses it that way and the discovery is pretty bad. It also only supports digital goods, and they charge a 10% cut unless you get one of the higher plans and I can’t really be bothered to research this one too much. But it’s an alternative to Gumroad so it was worth listing all the same.

Lemon Squeezy

I have not used this or seen it in operation but it came as a recommendation on Discord. The pricing is pretty decent, taking 5% + 50¢, and since it’s operated by Stripe it’s at least implied that you are only paying that much (rather than an additional cut to Stripe as is the case with all the other options above). They only do digital goods, however.

Less recommended: FastSpring

This was another Discord-originated recommendation. Again, I haven’t tried it at all, and they’re incredibly coy about pricing. So I’m not sure I’d bother with this one.

Less recommended: Artisans Coop

I tried these folks out for a while as an Etsy alternative. They are kind of weird to onboard on, their inventory management system is “quirky” (putting it as nicely as I can think to), and setting up shipping is really wonky. It has the feel of them just white-labeling an existing ecommerce portal thingamajig. The interesting thing about them is that they operate on a co-op model which might tickle the right ethical alignment for some, but for me it isn’t sufficient on its own.

comments

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.

And this wouldn’t even be a problem if they’d just RESPECT THE SIGNALS I SEND ABOUT WHICH PAGES ARE EVEN WORTH CRAWLING. I mark the problematic pages with rel="noindex nofollow" and if something declares itself to be a bot I don’t even show the links that lead to the bad behavior in the first place! But no these ABSOLUTE PIECES OF SHIT see any impediment to their crawling as something to get past.

I want to fucking murder whoever is behind this shit.

I wouldn’t, of course, but god damn I would not shed a single tear if I learned that these fucking assholes died in a terrorist attack.

If you are a crawler author: either learn how to behave, or eat shit and die in a goddamn fire, you fucking wastes of carbon. You are making the world a worse place by existing.

comments

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.

comments

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.

For those who don’t know, 429 is Too Many Requests, and is what my site responds with when it detects bad-behavior crawler activity, primarily from attempting to crawl over the tag browser, which is not presented to properly-declared bots (because there is no reason for bots to crawl them).

So, of the nearly 700,000 requests served up today, around 44% were these crawler bots. Most of these bots come from residential proxy networks, meaning people have installed malware like Honeygain to earn tiny amounts of money for “Internet testing” or similar.

Things are even worse, though. That 303 response code is See Other, which is a form of redirect that is used when you redirect a HTTP POST to a GET. There is only one place on my sites that such a thing happens: when someone presses the button for the “sentience check” that occurs on a 429 error page. When this button is clicked, the user gets a simple “button pressed” cookie that is signed with the user’s IP address and User-Agent and with a timestamp that expires after an hour. For a legitimate user who happened to trip the bot detection (by legitimately browsing multiple tags simultaneously), this will grant them access to the site. However, what’s actually happening here is that the crawlers are pretending to click the button so that they can try to access the site, but because each request comes from a different IP address or a randomized user-agent (trying to look like a real web browser), they end up just trying the same URL again and getting the same 429 response. So that’s another 12% of my website traffic going to bots who are specifically trying to get around my anti-bot measures.

Back when I first started with this anti-bot measure I only checked for the presence of a cookie, under the presumption that the bots weren’t storing them at all, but one of the bots from the Alibaba cloud IP range did start to get through the check, indicating that it was storing a cookie, and it was flooding my server with very expensive requests as a result. Signing it to the IP address stopped that, at least, but it hasn’t stopped the unrelenting onslaught, all the same.

Okay, so HTTP 200 is the response code for an actual successful pageview. At best that’s around 27.5% of my traffic.

Let’s see how much of that is coming from declared bots:

fluffy@nautilus[/var/log/nginx] fluffy$ grep ' 200 ' access.log | grep '+http' | wc -l
55024

So, of the 193,000 successful web requests, 29% is coming from bots that declare themselves to be bots.

Let’s spot-check some of the other successful requests:

x.x.x.x - - [07/Aug/2026:23:43:10 -0700] "GET /blog/everything?id=1643&tag=late-stage-capitalism HTTP/1.1" 200 3697 "https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/everything?id=1643&tag=late-stage-capitalism" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Mobile Safari/537.36" "beesbuzz.biz" https

Okay so, this request is being made with its own URL as its referer, which legitimate browsers don’t do, but which bots do in order to try to look like real traffic while avoiding anti-hotlink protections. That’s harder to filter out with a simple command line. But spot-checking my access log, I see a lot of requests like that.

I also see a lot of ClaudeBot requests. These do not properly declare themselves as bots, as they do not follow the +http convention for giving an informational page about the bot. They do provide a contact email address. The requests are all for nonexistent paths and seem to be probing for runtime configuration files and AWS credenetials and so on, so I doubt that these are actually ClaudeBot.

35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/.env?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/home/ubuntu/.aws/config?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/rootkey.csv?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:41 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/terraform.tfstate?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:41 -0700] "GET /@fs/var/www/.env?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/home/ubuntu/.azure/credentials?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/var/www/html/wp-config.php?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/root/.config/linode-cli?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:48 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/.openai/config.json?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https
35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:51 -0700] "GET /server/.env HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https

Anyway. I don’t really have the energy to figure out a good test to find people who are legitimately browsing this site without doing much deeper analytics on IP addresses and so on, but I can safely say that very little of the traffic going to my server is fulfilling the purpose of putting my creative works online for other people to peruse.

It’s disheartening.

I spend so much time and energy and effort trying to make things that work well, and very little of it goes towards making a difference that matters. I am in a constant state of pain and fatigue, and try so very hard to do things that I care about with what little time and energy I can muster for it, but it all feels so futile.

People keep telling me that AI is the future and you “can’t unsqueeze the tube of toothpaste” and so on, but what good is any of that shit doing? What good am I doing? Why do I even bother?

What’s the point to any of this?

comments

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?

So for example, fibromyalgia generally manifests as having a bit of pain that just leads to massive overwhelm for me.

And then the MSG sensitivity I have seems to be caused by overexposure to the flavor of MSG lingering in my mouth.

And the vertigo I have is triggered by being hyper-attuned to motion around me.

And my migraine triggers are being overloaded by sensory input (usually smells or sound or flashes of light).

And I have always had a tendency to photophobia as well.

My anxiety also feels like it’s a sort of feedback cycle that happens.

And maybe it’s even the source of my mirror-touch synaesthesia?

This doesn’t explain all of my problems (like my connective tissue issues which are also at the root of my most intense pain flareups) but I wonder if this is an avenue worth exploring. And how I would even go about exploring it.

But also given that my creativity is all rooted in the random nerve firings that make connections where they aren’t obvious… maybe this isn’t something to fix. Just something to better understand.

It’d be nice if I could figure out a way of keeping the good parts without being so badly affected by the bad parts. (As with so many other things in life, I suppose.)

comments

On the plus side I’m finally working on music again. Hopefully I can keep up a more sustainable momentum this time around, because I really do want to finish Misfits sometime this year. But I also don’t want to do my usual multi-month crunch that leaves me even more drained when I’m done with an album.

I’ve also been working on the next version of the-protocol-formerly-called-Canimus. At present the tentative rebrand name is “Chorus” although I’m not totally sold on it (but my various collaborators like it). Anyway, for now folks can look at the WIP draft branch and maybe comment on it? I’ve gotten some really good feedback from some folks but more eyes would be better, I think.

I’ve also been doing voice training again, this time with a practitioner who knows what the hell she’s doing. It’s going okay.

I only really have energy enough to do a few hours' worth of activity on any given day, and last weekend I made the mistake of going overboard with the exercise, which wiped me out for a good chunk of this week. Post-exertional malaise has such a hair trigger. I miss being able to walk 5 miles a day without even thinking about it.

I also miss being able to play DDR/Stepmania, but it was too hard on my knees, and I was also starting to worry about how much my floor shakes during more intense stuff. Maybe I should try setting it up in the basement, if I can figure out a good place to put it.

On the plus side, my VRChat fanbase is slowly growing. I’ve had some pretty good experiences lately where people actually come to see me perform, and they actually want to talk to me about the music afterward! People also keep on requesting the Furality song, which I can’t accommodate during my sets because my backing track is fixed ahead of time, but maybe I’ll make a backing track for my next show. I dunno.

But anyway. I guess things are fairly okay, or at least holding steady for now. Wish I could figure out a fix for the fatigue though. It’s been such an impediment to all the things I would rather be doing.

comments