MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

all the evils of the world let loose (my computer broke)

published: 4-14-2019

Early this morning, a person I care for very much sent me an angry message stating that they would no longer use the entirety of Riot because the main server, matrix.org, recently got hacked. This coming off the heels of the news that I couldn't come home this weekend for a much-anticipated outing because the roads were "too bad", and then the sudden weight of multiple final projects all falling on top of me at the same time...

Every once in a while, I have a day where I can't accomplish anything of value because I'm too restless. Obviously I can't just play video games all day, but neither do I want to do any homework as well, and the storm brewing inside me for apparently no reason at all just flares up a wall of Imposter Syndrome whenever I seek to fulfill some creative endeavour. Twelve hours of fruitless misery, sitting alone, accomplishing nothing in ironically what should be the most productive time of the week.

There might be some purpose in the days, as my body finding a way to force myself to slow down and meditate and "chill". But I don't know if I can afford letting these days slip by. I don't know if I have the time.

Along with these days comes an urge to purge everything of mine off the internet. The assorted fediverse accounts I've made purely to shitpost with, the Zot profiles and their mirrors, my gopherholes, my websites, my pubnix accounts. Not because of any perceived dangers, but because they make me "vulnerable", in a way. As if, if nobody sees me at all, I can't accrue any criticism, can't be yelled at for anything, can't be SWATted or doxxed.

But if I actually took that jump, if I deleted everything, that's a step I can't take back. That's an irreversible action. And what if I change my mind tomorrow, with another night's sleep and another night's dream pondered over? What if, tomorrow, I have the idea for the one big post that finally launches me into respectdom?

Or maybe just fame under a different name.

Have I already accomplished what I long yearned for, and not realized it?

So I sit alone in my room, resisting the urge to break into sensory-overloaded tears whenever my roommate walks in and promptly leaves a few seconds later, stewing in my own indecision. An aloe plant sits in the corner of my windowsill. I rip one of its leaves off and rub its juices into my dry and discolored shoulders, tears blooming in my eyes, and I wait.

And I wait.

But sometimes we wait too long, and it becomes the next day. A new set of obligations, both imposed and self-made.

A few weeks ago, Mister Metokur did a blackpill-style stream called "At Least We Aren't Europe", in which he discussed Europe passing Article 13 and the absolute shitshow that would follow for the internet. I had a whole post written out, in which I denounced the modern Internet and proclaimed that I would be going gopher-only, but in the process of trying to combine that and the above, I accidentally deleted it.

With that being said: it is my wholehearted belief that we are living in Clown World.

Wile Gopher might be a step in the right direction, it has its own regressions as well. Lack of transport security, for one. And despite all the adulations of the "Small Internet" and the lack of corporate influence, one has to keep in mind that, thanks to the existence of Gopher-to-HTTP proxies, mainstream search engines are starting to pick up on Gopherholes and some of their content. If our sole goal is to escape Google's spotlight, we aren't going to be safe forever.

But then again, I would hope that you all wouldn't be so single-minded.

Speaking of Article 13, it was my intention to try to solely use Tails as my daily driver for the entirety of this month. But my computer broke. Took a flying leap off my desk during class last Tuesday, and one of the hinges snapped and now makes horrific cracking noises whenever I try to pry the laptop open. The lid is now hilariously off-center from the lower part of the machine, and I don't know when I can get it in for repairs.

Which leaves me in a precarious position, because, if this were during the WordPress days, all I would have had to do was just install their app and I would have been off and running like nothing had happened. But thanks to that computer, I no longer had to rely on a content management system in order to publish stuff, because I could just write it locally and paste it into a template page file, and uploading was just a few SFTP commands away.

As it turns out, unless one wants to branch out into the proprietary section of the Play Store, Android devices don't take too well to SFTP when one is forced to use public keys instead of passwords.

Beforehand, my workflow looked like this:

computer -> SDF; computer -> tilde.team; computer -> circumlunar.space

But GNURoot Debian, which I use on my old Samsung tablet that never received Lollipop and thus can't run Termux, doesn't particuarly take too well to trying to chmod my SSH keys so it doesn't shit itself with permission errors. ConnectBot, which does work with my keys, doesn't support SFTP last time I checked. So the only SFTP account I can get into is the one at the SDF.

Thankfully, tilde.team's outgoing SSH ports are open, so I can just put my keys on there instead! Which is how, despite everything going to shit, publication really hasn't slowed all that much.

Now my workflow looks like this:

tablet -> SDF; SDF <- tilde.team -> circumlunar.space

The tablet uploads it to the SDF, From tilde.team, I GET the files I uploaded and PUT them into circumlunar.space. If you're reading this, it works!

Publishing seems to be the only thing that really works. The spooky Weirdiverse pages I've made require a heavy amount of GIMP finessing. AnLinux's scripts allow me to install Ubuntu within Termux, but the VNC server within refuses all connections. The VNC server within Termux itself works fine, but none of the available repos contain any of the graphical tools I want.

And anything graphical I'd want to do would be constrained to the phone only, since all I have is a USB mouse I "borrowed" from my father and a USB-C to USB adapter that came with my phone that doesn't fit in any of my other devices' ports. Not that it matters much, as most of what I do nowadays is just text-life.

But I do miss Calibre.

Does this make me a phoneposter? An awful, dirty, reviled phoneposter? Is it solely the act of using one's phone to do something that makes one a phoneposter, or is it some combination of traits- short thoughtless replies, a gravitation toward consuming versus producing, oversocialization- that are most likely to occur when one has only a phone with which to do their daily computing?