§ Card of the Now ^
§ New Entries ^
The commonplace is starting to resemble my private notes more closely, with lots of weird lists, more random short posts, and fewer essays. I put together an absurdly long list of cooking tips and added some recipes. I sketched out some of my philosophy for the site. I posted some pixel art.
Suggested reading:
§ Website Features ^
§ Badges ^
I've made a few more badges for the rotation in the bottom right corner. I also added a section in About with ones for memberships in clubs and directories, several of which I made for lack of an existing badge.
I also made one for another project on a whim, which was fun.
§ Glossary ^
Posts whose filename starts with YYYY-MM-DD_def- now act as glossary entries. When I use a term from the glossary, you can hover it to see the definition. Example: fondleslab
§ Hashtags ^
The biggest change to the site's design is that tags are now displayed alongside links to posts. This provides clues as to what a post will be about. It also enables you to jump to hashtags from all over the site, which I hope will improve the exploration experience since the hashtags are basically the only organization there is.
It doesn't look that great, and I still haven't decided how to do nested tags. But it's better!
§ Navigation ^
We now automatically build a list of slashpages and a sitemap. They're linked to in All. (Also, the sitemap is linked to by the pipe that separates <-- Prev and Next --> when CSS is off. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
I'd like to make a little navigation guide at some point --- suggested hashtags/posts to check out, brief descriptions of the slashpages and what tags mean, etc.
§ robots.txt ^
For a while, I didn't have a robots.txt. Why would I care if robots visit my site? Sounds great! (I don't pay for traffic.)
Then, when testing things out, I realized that clients will pretty much always attempt to fetch the file, and it might be infinitesimally faster to serve an empty file. So I used a 0 byte robots.txt for a hot minute.
Later I came across a post by Seirdy about what they put in theirs. We're mostly on the same page, so I copied their file to block a bunch of IP snitches and a few other creepy bots. But I decided to delete the parts blocking AI scrapers.
I went back and forth on it. On the one hand, I hate most of these companies, and my data might help enrich them in some small way. On the other, I like the idea of my data shifting the output in some small way toward my own opinions. Even being ingested by an unserious fascist project like Grok would be good: it would make it ever-so-slightly less fashy and ever-so-slightly more likely to spout off in favor of trans rights (and ever-so-slightly more difficult for its owners to sculpt into a nazi).
What finally made up my mind was that by blocking all the scrapers who respect robots.txt I would just be giving a leg up to the ones who don't.
I've been scraped by at least one weird AI startup already! I can't find it now, but at some point https://geist.haus/ had a copy of my About page show up on Google. God knows what they actually do. They describe themselves thus:
Research at the seam of psychology and machine intelligence.
GeistHaus is building AI for therapy and assessment --- the kind of careful, structured, deeply attentive work that has historically demanded a trained human across the room. The project is early, and quiet on purpose. More to come as the work matures.
For researchers and clinical advisors: If you work in personality assessment, psychodynamic or psychoanalytic traditions, or on the AI side of long-horizon systems and the evaluation of open-ended conversational work, we'd like to hear from you. Particularly if you've thought about what it would mean to do this kind of work well.
Sounds like snake oil to me. Snake oil that now contains a small sliver of my bad opinions. >:)
§ Projects ^
I've found myself unexpectedly drawn to making webpages since the last soop. These are perhaps pushing the site more in the direction of a digital garden. In the last three months I've made:
- All the apps (except maybe the breath counter, that might have been there)
- A digital Death Note
- HAND THING DOT PARTY
- machine wash cold
- A small library of illegal zines readable in your browser
Let's talk about a few that I didn't write a post about.
§ Digital Death Note ^
The Digital Death Note is just a coat of paint on a guestbook script provided by Web 1.0 Hosting. It's the first thing I've added to the site that enables user interaction (unless you count mailto links).
If you're not familiar, a Death Note is a fictional book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. Since magic isn't real, this digital version is just a public avenue for wishing death on people. Sort of a wishing well for people with malice in their hearts.
I was curious to see what people would do with it. I thought it would be much more interesting to collect the names of people who my visitors wish were dead than those of the visitors themselves. Of course, people can always write their own name, and might be more likely to do so if they notice it's a reskinned guestbook, but I primed the pump by listing humorous (?) deaths of famous people I genuinely hate.
Results so far are mixed. First of all --- spoiler alert --- most of the names are from me. I started submitting them there instead of updating the page; I don't remember why. Other than me, I've had three responses so far.
The first just said "nobody". I thought that was lame and deleted it.
The second one was intriguing. The name listed is Joriel Alves, who as far as I can tell is not a public figure. So someone either wished death on a person they know personally or signed their own name. The cause of death is also interesting: "shot by a friend near a lamppost". If the user was following my lead, it could be an inside joke, some irony about Joriel. Or... maybe they just wanted it to be something specific and that was what they landed on. In any case, it's exactly the sort of respose I hoped to receive.
A third arrived yesterday. Victim's name: "The woke owner of this site". The cause of death is even longer than the name:
She goes to blowjob everyone previously listed in this site, then realizes she was on the wrong side of history all the time. She goes to the Democrats HQ wearing a Harry Potter shirt, goes down on her knees like that autistic woman who did so when Trump won the first time, screams like a pig and takes her own life by swallowing a dildo and getting out of breath. Her last words are "I can't breathe".
I can't decide whether I should delete it or not, but I'm leaning toward leaving it. On the one hand, it's not in the spirit of the page because it doesn't really wish death on anyone (more like a rape fantasy), doesn't list a name or even a pseudonym, and the cause of death is far more elaborate than the Death Note rules allow. And then of course there's the excruciating rightwinger stupidity.
However, I've already played fast and loose with the Death Note rules, and the user followed my lead --- and even tried to make a (racist teenager's equivalent of a) joke, which shows effort. And while the text isn't funny on its own merit, it is funny that someone was butthurt enough to post it.
Those two actual responses really delighted me; I'm glad I decided to advertise it on the home page. But lately I've been wishing I had a normal guestbook too, so that sweethearts/dorks like the person who wrote "nobody" can leave their mark. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can only have one instance of the guestbook script, so this will have to wait until I set up a VPS.
§ Noliza ^
Noliza is a little joke that I think is funny. It was inspired by the moral panic over "mentally ill" people talking to chatbots, and by the way chatbot guardrails abruptly stop you from expressing yourself about taboo subjects like suicide.
Some people really want these things to meet an impossible standard: perfectly safe and perfectly truthful. I made a chatbot that actually achieves that standard! It just so happens to also render it completely useless.
As I recall, all Eliza really did was rephrase people's statements as questions or ask "and how did that make you feel?". I figure a simple "no" is just as realistic.
(I also thought "Should I text my ex?" would make for a good single-serving site, but shoulditextmyex.com is already taken by some grifter who fails to answer the question correctly.)
§ Wander Console Builder ^
It would be really annoying to have to enter each Wander URL in wander.js, with proper quoting and commas and so forth, so I wrote a little shell script to take care of it for me. Easy peasy! But most people don't even know what a shell script is, much less how to write one; they need a little help. Wander Console Builder is an effort in that direction.
Besides simplified URL input, it includes a rudimentary custom theme creator. I also made it easier to check if a website can be shown in an iframe --- just click the link and it will try to load it. (I plan to streamline this with a check-links-mode.)
Also, I made the theme super gay. It's priDEMONth and it was really fun. Ideally it will encourage queer people to join Wander and act as defensive coloration against bigots.
It's so easy to find boring technical bullshit with tools like Wander and so hard to find anything cool. I figure lowering the technical barrier might improve that situation.