Got Emotional

Once in a while, you’ve got to bend the rules a bit.

hjhornbeck: I know, I know, I’m not allowed to comment here, but this is definitely worth clarifying in public.

i wonder if he ever feels weird about me insta posting shit-talk when he drops a long and carefully composed post.

Nope! One side effect of having no comment section under my posts is that you can’t do drive-by insults. If you have beef with something I wrote, you’ve gotta spend the time and effort to type up a blog post, and that leads to much higher-quality feedback. I haven’t always spotted your blog posts directed at me in a timely fashion, but I have always found them educational.

This goes both ways. My “Loneliness” series is me bringing out my “A game” to respond to your pinned post. I’m trying to keep it down to four posts in five parts, but that currently implies “Loneliness, 4” is going to be quite long. Hopefully it’s worth the wait.

If my last post‘s thesis is correct, the alternative to dysfunction is dialog. Get everyone talking, swapping evidence and arguments, and we’ll avoid all that mess. I’ve been trying to put that into action for months now… with one glaring exception. I publish a blog post, Mélange responds, but I don’t respond back. Wash, rinse, repeat.

LLM boosters and I have another asymmetry. If LLMs have “become your councilor, your guidebook, your companion, friend, or even lover,” as I put it, you are not going to respond well to any critique of them. It may not have been obvious I was trying to soften the blow on my first critique of Ranum, but for the second I tried to make it visible enough to be seen from space. Mélange has made it abundantly clear they do not want me in their comment section, even when I’m not challenging their views. My words can do a remarkable amount of emotional damage, so I must wield them carefully. Or not wield them at all, even if that makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

Get emotional. Tell us why you feel what you feel. I did. … While I don’t think you’ve been straight with us about the emotional underpinning of your position, you really aren’t obligated to. I’m not entitled to anything you don’t want to give of yourself.

A few paragraphs of minimal critique made Mélange explode, by their own admission, and yet they also want some sort of reply. I suspect this is bait (why threaten to ban me, when you’ve already banned me?), but my hypocrisy is grating on me.

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FTO Update, June 2023 to June 2025

Wondering why it’s been so long since I gave an update? Allow this table to explain:

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
October 2023 $32.94
October 2024 $32.94

The past two years have played out exactly as I expected. I’ve kept up with software upgrades, watched for instances to block, and otherwise carried on boosting like a madman. As you can imagine, it’s tough to motivate yourself to report “nothing to report” over and over again, so I’ve gotten lazy about updates.

At long last, though, it is time to end that lazy streak.

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Fixing Websites

… I haven’t written part two of this, leaving you hanging for almost a year?! Unacceptable!

Since it’s been a while, a quick recap of the story so far: a Deathlord said FtB was a scam, Frankenstein’s monster asked the dead if that was true, and when there was no reply told everyone to pretend “freethoughtblogs.com” didn’t exist. Along the way I also introduced you to Elizabeth, four-digit numbers, pools, corporate mergers, and resolvers.

All clear? Good, now we can discuss ways to prevent the February outage from happening again.

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Treading Water

The body ASC tried to bury at those crossroads has clawed out the grave and left them worse off than before. They face some difficult choices: try to woo back the reactionaries, and piss off the LGBTQI+ community even further; make a big show of inclusion, and start the long and difficult task of regaining the LGBTQI+’s community’s trust; or try to bury the body again, and risk an even bigger controversy at a later date.

That’s a four year old prediction at this point, so it’s worth circling back to. Has the Atheist Society of Calgary been embroiled in more controversy? [Read more…]

FTO Update, May-June 2023

Important stuff first: FTO will be de-federating from universeodon no sooner than a week from now, and once Facebook/Meta announce more details about Threads/P92 we’ll be blocking them as well. As usual, here’s our financial situation:

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
March 2023 $0.00
April 2023 $0.00
May 2023 $0.00
June 2023 $0.00*

And here’s the requisite plug of FtB’s instance and instructions on how to join. I should also mention I added the phanpy UI to our instance. It comes with a lot of useful features, like a “boost carousel” and grouped notifications which make browsing a more pleasant experience. It also supports multiple accounts, none of which have to be on FTO. I’m a big fan. Phanpy has its downsides, but I want to save them for a future review of Mastodon clients.

In the meantime, let’s talk about some recent controversies on the Fediverse.

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FTO’s Bills, February-April 2023

Wait, what day is it?! Yeesh, I’ve been terrible about keeping all of you updated on the server. Hang on, let me tabulate the costs for February and everything since…

Month Cost
November 2022 $26.06
December 2022 $8.73
January 2023 $4.75
February 2023 $0.19
March 2023 $0.00
April 2023 $0.00
May 2023 $0.00*

Bwhahaha!! I love it when a plan comes together. One of the critical things we need keep this server going is funds, either through keeping our costs down, raising funds up, or some combination of both. Thanks to some careful setup by myself, the cost side of the ledger is hilariously healthy.

That’s not the only critical thing, however. No doubt you’ve encountered more than one “Mastodon is dying” article before this point, but if you look carefully they mostly date from February. How do things look in May?

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Part Three: Welcome to OUR Mastodon!

Are blogs dying off? The trend of setting up faux blogs to rig search results and/or soak in ad revenue suggests so. The rise of newer mediums, like video and social media, has also created powerful and more addictive alternatives that drain the life from blogging. However, it’s hard to keep a straight face during the eulogy when Substack and Medium are standing right there.

Over here at FtB HQ we’ve been hedging our bets, for instance with the YouTube channel we fired up a year ago. That wasn’t enough for me, so a few months ago I committed to the rather unoriginal idea of spinning up a Mastodon instance. After much tinkering with the innards and taking the thing for a few joyrides, I think it’s ready to go live. Hence, this post! [Read more…]

Russia Has Invaded Ukraine

I had grand plans for yesterday. Then I spotted Twitter reacting to Zelensky’s last-minute plea for peace (here’s a snap translation). I spotted the rumours Russia would start bombing Ukraine at 4AM. I saw the Twitter reaction when Putin declared war on Ukraine, in the middle of a UN Security Council meeting no less. I saw the reaction as Russia launched an invasion on at least three fronts, rolling out tanks and bombing airports all around the country, an hour after the rumoured start time. The goal: regime change and mass executions. Like most of us, I didn’t see the warnings that an invasion was going to happen.

During a recorded speech at the State Duma on Dec. 2021, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the ultranationalist leader of Russia’s Liberal Democratic Party, discussed Putin’s sham proposal to NATO. Zhirinovsky told fellow parliamentarians: “I liked one phrase from what the President said yesterday… he said that we won’t allow our proposal to result only in futile discussions… They either fulfill it, or we’re moving forward with another option… Let it be February 22, 2022 at 4 a.m.” Zhirinovsky added: “The year 2022 is the year of the tiger. It’s a breakthrough, a jump by the Russian tiger…This won’t be a peaceful year, but a year when Russia will become great again and everyone will have to shut up and respect our country.”

I woke to anti-war protests in Russia, and Russian celebrities condemning war, despite heavy pushback. Poland has opened their borders for Ukrainian refuges. Russian troops are trying to capture the Chernobyl nuclear plant have captured the Chernobyl nuclear plant, for dog knows what reason. “Mobile cremation units” now occupy a small part of my brain.

And Ben Shapiro found a way to blame transgender people for it all.

My grand plans for yesterday were scrapped, and replaced with a mad scramble today. I don’t have time to type up my usual thousand-word analysis of it all, so I’ll just leave you with this.

Stay strong, Ukraine.

Fundraiser Update: Only Minor Explosions So Far

It doesn’t always show, but there’s a lot of prep work for these fundraisers. I’ve got a half dozen illustrations to create, a scene to render, and a video file to edit, most of which has to be finished before Saturday. I’m also finding Steam games are finicky; Crypt of the Necrodancer disables my secondary monitors if I try to run it fullscreen, and only properly recognized my controller once. It still works with a controller, mind you, but the digital pad is disabled. Monster Prom fails to load at all! I’m guessing it does something funky when initializing OpenGL, but without proper debugging symbols I can’t say much. I have both a plan and a backup plan for Monster Prom, so it should still be a go.

Last I heard, we were up to $1,629.34 in donations towards FtB. That’s a few days old, but my general impression is that we’re not pulling in as much as we did last month. There’s no shame in that, times are tough and this fundraiser is a marathon. If you’d like to boost those numbers, your two choices are FtB’s PayPal or Skepticon’s Paypal. The GoFundMe is still down, and at this point I doubt it’ll come back up.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a hard drive to reinstall.