20200907

Mon Sep 7 06:00:01 EDT 2020 ======================================== Slept from eleven-thirty to nine. Woke around six, and slept somewhat shallowly after. Mostly cloudy with a 40 percent chance of showers in the morning, then partly cloudy in the afternoon. Highs in the mid 70s. West winds 10 to 20 mph becoming northwest up to 5 mph late in the afternoon. H&T closed for Labor Day. Finished reading the fifth Murderbot book before bed last night. To do ---------------------------------------- - Brush up on C A bit. Talked to Mom for a bit. They're having big adventures with squirrels in their attic. https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=gopher.black+70+312f70686c6f672f32303230303930352d676f6f646279652d74696c64652d626c61636b > A few days ago I woke up to a string of emails about abuse from a member of tilde.black upon EFNet, the IRC network. I was about to start work and didn't have the energy or time to deal with the problem, so I took the server offline. The next day I thought more about the situation and realization came to me that I had absolutely no desire to spend my time figuring out who the bad apple was this time, removing them, and sealing the door against them returning. It wasn't the first time I'd had to act upon someone taking advantage of the system and it sure looked like this wouldn't be the last time either. > When I created tilde.black it was on a whim. I had this silly idea that I could pre-generate usernames from dictionary words and then when people joined they would get a random name. What better way to provide anonymity, right? Since it was going to be a system about privacy, I felt a secure OS was warranted and I went with openbsd despite knowing nothing about it. This was an opportunity to learn, and learn I did. I learned to value and appreciate a lot about that system. The sane defaults, the truly incredible documentation, and the intuitive configuration were all pleasant surprises. The web server, horribly named httpd (try web-searching for help on that) was another matter. Shortly before this incident I had finally broken down and just installed nginx. > The experiment was good. It lasted far longer than I expected and gained far, far more users than I ever thought would find it interesting. For one thing the very nature of this private tilde went against the concepts of community building that really make a tilde work. There was almost no peer engagement happening. But people were attracted to the idea of the server. I think, in the end, I was too. I really liked the concept of a private, anonymous place where people could experiment. In reality it was pretty boring, though. > From a user perspective the best thing that came out of it was brool, a user who kept a file called "stoned.txt". It was in essence a never-ending phlog/journal of random thoughts, ideas, and art that came to them while they were high. It was fantastic. I'm sad that's not around anymore. I hope whoever made it has a copy somewhere and finds a way to ressurect it on another server. It spawned a few copy-cat files, but it was a true masterpiece and really deserves some recognition. > Beyond that there was some stock market analysis, a few irc bot coding projects, the odd shell scripting thing here or there, and a few minimal websites. Not a lot to miss. > I had put my initial gemini work up on the server. In fact, I made it a point not to put gemini on gopher.black or on any of my tomasino domains specifically as an excuse to log into tilde.black and do something. That was all backed up in git, though, and has since migrated over to tilde.team[0]. > gemini://tilde.team/~etomasino/ > Tilde.Black is shut down for good. I stopped seeing it as fun at some point and it had become a burden. I hadn't been able to put that into words until this EFNet incident. Were it not for this trigger the site may have continued for months more, but it would have inevitably fallen. It was a neat idea and that's good enough. > Now I have cosmic.voyage as my sole remaining tilde community and I want to put my love back into it. With the growing popularity of black I hadn't spent nearly enough time looking after cosmic. It's been sort of on autopilot, you might say. There's still writers writing. There's still chatters in the channel in IRC. I find I still have a passion for it and an excitement for it to continue and grow. > This November I'm going to put out a series of writing prompts as a sort of mini-contest to see how much we can all write. I don't know that there are any prizes, but hey, maybe? I just want to really do something for it to give it the love. Do you know what I mean? > It reminds me a bit of cat's sites: baud.baby, baud.vision, and konpeito.media. There's a guy who has some incredible passion to the stuff he puts out there and I am in awe of it each time he does so. But like cat, I get bored of it sometimes. Bored isn't even the right word. Other things come first and it sort of doesn't matter. Or maybe it does matter, but the fact that it matters annoys me so I ignore it. Or maybe my mind is just sick of dealing with thoughts in the way required to engage with my project. There's a hundred metaphors and none are quite correct. > Cosmic will be getting more love soon. Hopefully my gopher hole will as well. Once I start writing in one place it's hard not to write everywhere. Maybe this post will help kick it off! Either way, saying goodbye to Tilde Black feels great. Chatted with Jay on Jitis for a while. We drank a couple glasses of Scotch. Jay: > Where you need to allocate heap memory is where you have data structures that will change in size. > Or you don't know at compile time what size it will be. Servings: grains 6/6, fruit 1/4, vegetables 2/4, dairy 4/2, meat 4/3, nuts 0/0.5 Brunch: hot dogs, cucumber, banana, Cheetos Lunch: coffee Afternoon snack: Scotch Dinner: hot dogs, carrots

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