Usually, I have a plan. My plans don’t always work out, but I endeavor to think things through in advance.
I make plans for my blog. Why wouldn’t I? It’s my blog. I made it myself. I wrote every fucking word. I built it. It’s mine.
Fuuuuuuuucccckkkkkk yyyyooooooouuuuu!
I write whatever the hell I want. No editor. No deadlines. No bullshit. It takes work and I pay my own way but TANSTAAFL. The payoff is that I can decide the world is too serious and pivot to talking squirrels or motorcycle tales. You’re welcome. (If you didn’t like that move… sorry, but it’s the call I made.)
That ability to make decisions is a piece of freedom. Nobody tells me what to write and nobody makes you read it. (If you like what you read, you can be a hero and hit the tip jar. Many have and I appreciate you all. If you don’t want to tip, don’t. Just enjoy the free ice cream. How’s that for no pressure?)
Anything built; especially if it’s done in a spirit of freedom and humor, draws asshats like a moth to flame. Fun attracts the humorless. Freedom attracts the woke-scolds. They scan the world with an inner Eye of Sauron ever reducing discourse to their level of insecurity. Unaccomplished losers are driven to censor the world; it’s their burden… a lust to tear down that which others have constructed. Thus they attempt (and fail) to fill the hole in their own heart. So far I’m too irrelevant to matter. Maybe I can keep it that way or maybe someday my number will be up. There’s no end to the joyless woke Karen-bots; how long before they run out of more attractive targets?
That’s the problem with the Karen army. It can’t be reasoned with, it can’t be bargained with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear and it absolutely will not stop.
Don’t fret over it. These things are true and have always been true. The human urge to oppress fellow humans is only barely held back by what we call “civilization”. Civilization ebbs and flows. Of late, it appears to be ebbing. That’s not a lament, it’s merely an observation.
Which causes me to ruminate on future paths for adaptivecurmudgeon.com. It exists because I chose (wisely!) to leave the “free” wordpress cage. It works. It might continue to work for a long time. Or not. I wonder if someday the whole damn internet will converge and my little blog will be the least of our losses in a scorched earth drive to finally homogenize the masses. My first plan under such grim odds was to say “adios”, go dark, and go fishing. Lately I’ve wondered if the Samizdata approach could take root in America? I start to think it might. Perhaps some Americanized version of the thing?
I mentioned that mostly idle thought in my last post. Remember, I’m in no hurry. My ISP has been excellent. I’m too small to matter. Nobody takes me seriously, etc… So there’s no rush, only a slow summertime brainstorming session in my pointy head.
But I’m not alone. Bison Prepper is blazing a trail! They’re going off-net. Real world! IRL! CDs in the mail.
How ballsy is that?!? I salute Bison Preppers for making a bold play!
Here’s the details. (Keep in mind I know nothing you can’t read for yourself.) He will mail a monthly CD with 80+/- pages of content for $1.07. Good grief, that’s a lot of work and a very low price. I hope he doesn’t lose his shirt!
Only time will tell how it pans out. Only one thing is sure, he chose an antifragile approach. He can write anything he wants. Anyone with an optical drive can see it. Google, Blogspot, WordPress, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, F***book, Twitter, YouTube, that bitch in your HOA, and the cretins at your HR department can’t do a goddamned thing about it. Nice!
Dude’s got great big clanging balls. I wish him well. I can’t wait to see how it pans out. If you want to dip your toe into the future (?) of low tech, you might want to order up a few month’s worth of goodness through the mail. The address is here. See if you like it. See if he can manage it. Find out now, while there’s plenty of time and it’s just an interesting test case.
As for myself, I’m running on a slower time scale. Burning optical media sounds like a stone cold PITA and I’m not ready to go there… yet. However, I’m watching his experiment with great interest.
It all seems rather timely. Independence Day looms and here’s a guy taking a stand for freedom. It’s not all fireworks and hot dogs, ya’ know. Sometimes freedom is when a buck sends a CD to your mailbox with all sorts of interesting shit you might otherwise never hear.
A.C.
A half-step between the status quo and snail-mailing CDs would be to secure a fixed IP address and publish that. That way we could type in 192.164.01.02 or something and go straight to your site, if DNS is down or your domain name registrar stops service. I believe that Survivalblog is doing that.
A different half step would be to collect emails, and be prepared to email your missives,
I like that idea. I’ll look into it.
The problem with getting your own IP and server is you have to maintain it and defend it against the inevitable DOS attacks. This is why you use an ISP.
There are plenty of them out there. And, you don’t have to get one in the US, or with a US based company. That’s the cool thing about the interwebs.
You can run wordpress anywhere, from most ISPs. As long as you aren’t under the wind of “Big Tech” you’ll be fine. In the big picture you are a small fish. Not that the won’t get around to the minnows of the web.
As Gandalf said in moria – “Perhaps our presence will go unnoticed…”
Just do backups.
I do plenty of backups. That’s rule one.
A personal IP is a security risk and IT challenge I don’t need. I checked and a hosted fixed IP is about $90/month. That’s too expensive for me. No rush, I’m just exploring ideas and my current setup (which ‘ain’t free but is cheap enough and basically runs itself) suits me for now.
It’s ironic to look back at the ‘promise’ of the internet just a few years ago; the information super highway, the free flow of knowledge shared among peoples. I remember using Yahoo in the 1995(?) time frame to search for stuff from obscure resources and finding it without a filter. The content is still out there, and maybe you can find it with the right search terms and boolean operators; but more likely the search results go through an algorithm that is based on prior searches, trending searches, ones geographical location, advertising objectives and likely a search company’s political agenda. So much bullshit.
Yes, I too remember what the internet was looking like and compare it to what it has become. Many of the things I eagerly anticipated truly came to pass. But I never anticipated it being used to power up massive spying and propaganda machines that literally drive people mad. The good stuff is impressive but the evil wrought by social media and smart phones is creating an entirely new kind of human and driving them to stampede off cliffs.
Does anyone still make modems any more? Remember Bulletin Board systems? Basically the precursor to the internet. I had a good friend that ran one. This was before the days of hard drives, he had stacks of SCSI floppy drives connected to his computer so he could put content up, tell people which drive it was on a share it.
Now with multi-terabyte hard drives, a BBS would be easy to set up and run and would be impossible for the internet police to shut down.
De-centralization may be the solution if the suppression of the internet continues apace.