Quiet-Quit Tuesday I think I am going to *try to* quiet-quit today. I need a day to myself to work on my own stuff and to make existence tolerable for just a little longer. There's been a lot going on at work but today we're in kind of a holding pattern and a lot of people are out today so I'm going to try to get away with doing very little work today and just focus on myself. Still stuck at the desk though because you never know when something urgent might pop up. Of course, now that I've posted this and cast it out into the universe, it will probably conspire against me and make it one of the most hectic and suffering work-days in recent history. ----- The Enemy is at our Gates The Gates of Gopherspace are currently being breached by the invading army of content scrappers in their endless pursuit of LLM training material. I now find myself having to identify IP subnets and block them at the firewall level. We all knew this was coming and none of us, AFAIK, have a great way of dealing with it. Why do we care? It's about bandwidth. It's no big deal to run a gopher server on a home PC connected to a residential internet service provider ... provided that my upstream bandwidth isn't being hammered. When that happens 1) you find your connection slowing down and 2) it's possible (though hasn't happened yet) that you might piss off your ISP, them thinking you're running some commercial internet service that really shouldn't be attempted on a residential plan. So far, for me anyway, it's not that bad but this is just the initial wave, things are going to get worse for all of us gophernaughts. This is especially an issue if you host media beyond text, like the various radio content hosted here, which I may end up removing for this very reason. Well, I do have one idea that might help, at least in the short-term. A human visitor is one that makes a request for a document then sits there and reads it. They don't make 200 requests in the span of 1.5 seconds. I could implement something that would automatically reject connections from an IP which just made a request less than (some small amount of time) ago. ----- Another Mandela Effect I've posted about the Mandela Effect before. Well I've had another one. There exists a show, not one I'd normally know about, a soap opera called "Passions". The reason I know about it is because for the year 1991 (and vicinity) I would go, after school, to the house of (who is now) my wife. At that time she was the girlfriend to my best friend in high school. I was also friends with some of his other friends and we would often hang out at her house after school. We'd play Nintendo and watch MTV and just chill for a while and then I'd head home which was a few blocks away. One of the things we watched was Passions. It was a crazy show with ridiculous events like aliens and stuff. We liked to make fun of it. My (now) wife's sister I think was kind of into the show. A few months ago, maybe a year at the most, my wife and I were talking about that show and I think she looked it up on her phone to remind herself about it. I *think* she remembered it, not sure. The other day I brought it up again, not sure why, I guess I was just reminded of over-the-top plot lines and it made me think of it. This time she had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. She looked it up on the internet and said that the show aired in 1999. At that time we weren't hanging out, she wasn't even in the same city and I was working nights and certainly wouldn't have been watching soap operas by myself (or at all). Indeed, if I look it up now, it says 1999 (imdb). The fact that my memory of 1991 is inconsistent with the "local" timeline is one thing but that my wife doesn't even remember talking about it a few months (again, maybe a year) ago is also interesting. I think she, or I, or both (or everyone?) is shifting timelines. Is that the most likely explanation? No. I know Occam's razor doesn't favor this explanation. But when you have so many things like this (and I'm only telling you the more obvious ones) and you have to come up with the "most likely" explanation for each one which is, each, a separate and distinct explanation, then it might seem that one answer to all of them (even if not the most likely) may seem more plausible. ----- More on aNONradio A while ago I wrote a phlog about the aNONradio general playlist and my excitement that I was finally able to spice things up with some new tracks. I started to realize that the tracks I had been uploading for a while and *finally* all hit the playlist overnight (for some unexplained reason) is ... well, a lot of tracks! If they had come on as I uploaded them, or shortly after, I probably would have stopped uploading. I don't want the entire aNONradio general playlist to become the all Chips 'n Dip playlist. So I've stopped uploading for now. If other DJs were also adding new content then it wouldn't be a problem. We'd all be adding new stuff, the old stuff would get displaced and disappear, and the whole listening enjoyment of aNONradio would be better for it. It wouldn't be the same songs every day, it would feel like ... well, radio. But, that's not happening. Other DJs don't upload stuff to the general playlist (anymore and/or very often). What I'd like to do, then, is to remove some of the stuff I've uploaded so that I can upload something new. I can't find a way to do that. As far as I can tell there is no mechanism for me to manage content that's already on the playlist, at least not by me. I have sent an email to the SDF admins on this topic but didn't get a response, been over a week ... nothing but silence. So, for now, the stuff I've uploaded will just stay and get ran day after day after day. I think this is probably what happened with "Music for Nitrogen Narcosis". Most likely that DJ (Overland) went through the same route as me: Uploaded some songs here and there, they didn't seem to show up, then one day the *ALL* did all at once, then he couldn't remove any, and just gave up on it. <-- Just my guess. I'm not complaining. I know the spiel, it's a free service, it's a privilege not a right, I am owned nothing, I'm lucky to have a time-slot at all, etc... etc... etc... But just asking for help and getting crickets really rubs me the wrong way. Even when I'm busy or I feel the question is stupid I at least provide some kind of response. I would at least say "I'm sorry there's no way to do that at this time". So, giving up on a response from the admins, I've posted the question to bboard, though I suspect the response will be "ask the admins". .