Castle Magus

"WordPress cofounder Matt Mullenweg is going after a rival hosting firm he says is 'strip-mining the WordPress ecosystem.'"

Yeah... this is the first I've heard of any "WordPress drama," and all it does is make me glad I never really got into seriously using WordPress for anything significant. I do have a WordPress account, but I use that almost exclusively for making the occasional comment under entries on John Scalzi's Whatever blog.

The last bit of "drama" I had with a blog service led me to almost immediately abandon ship entirely. See also: Facebook and Twitter, better known as 卐.com now I mean X.com now. (Just to note, in case it's not obvious, that "Twitter" link back there is actually three separate links, because I "deleted my Twitter account" on three separate occasions, with only the last one being the final, permanent one. "So far," at least, though I seriously do not ever see my self creating a new account on 卐, not even for "placeholder" reasons. So, again, if anyone ever happens to see "KaneMagus" on Twitter X 卐, it is most definitely not actually me.)

Glad nothing like that has happened (yet) with Dreamwidth. ¬_¬ (The only real "problem" I have with Dreamwidth is that the number of characters allotted to the subject field is often woefully inadequate, as I often mention in related posts.)

I also, interestingly/weirdly enough, already have a "wordpress" tag. Go figure.

Honestly, as far as point #4 of this post goes, I'm glad that some of these established social media brands seem to be starting to expire. Very little of value will be lost when they do vanish. That said, I also can't really bring myself to care all that much about any new ones that may show up to replace them, either. Right now, I have (the nigh worthless recreation of) my Twitter account, which I hardly even look at anymore, let alone actually use, and I have this Dreamwidth page, and... that's it. I don't really feel the need for more, and unless Dreamwidth suddenly goes away for some reason, I haven't seen any compelling incentives to change that lack of feeling.

As for the all-consuming, ever-burning trashfire that Elon Musk has sparked at Twitter (or, rather, made much larger, given that Twitter was already kind of a raging trashfire even before he bought it), I'm not too awfully interested in that, even out of morbid curiosity. (Every single time Elon Musk and/or Twitter comes up in the Google News app on my phone, for instance, I tell it to show me "fewer stories" like that, not that that helps at all, since I still get stories about Elon Musk almost on a daily basis, despite that. I might still watch Some More News or Last Week Tonight episodes on the topic, or, you know, read John Scalzi posts about it, but that's about it.)

Lately (and by "lately" I mean in the past 30 minutes or so, on an idle whim), I've been kind of thinking about starting to crosspost this Dreamwidth blog over to my currently completely unused Wordpress thing, but before doing that, I would want to export all of the already existing posts from here to there. However, that does not appear to be a simple thing to do, and I'm not currently interested in trying to jump through a lot of hoops to get it to work. As such, I'll probably never actually bother to get around to doing it. Alas. *sigh*

My main reason for wanting to do this is because my Dreamwidth blog apparently does not exist, at least as far as Google is concerned, which is something I've been pondering for longer than just the past 30 minutes. The base-level Dreamwidth page does, as well as some blogs of other people, but mine doesn't, at least as far as Google knows. But my unused, cobweb-covered Wordpress thing with only a single entry does exist, so sayeth Google. Similarly, my old, defunct Livejournal page also exists, according to Google, unlike the DW page, even though I haven't touched the LJ in half a decade.

If I could simply figure out how to get the DW blog itself to be properly indexed by Google, that would be probably good enough and would negate the "need" to export/crosspost to a blog that actually is indexed by Google. In the DW settings, I have the "Off-Site Search Engines: Attempt to block outside search engines from indexing my journal" option not checked. It used to be the case that I could have simply submitted the URL to the old Google webcrawler, but apparently that has long since been discontinued, and now you apparently have to "own" the URL (which I don't, obviously, since it's a third party thing) and be signed up to Google Search Console or whatever the fuck, in order to submit said URL for crawling purpose. Or, else, if it is possible for me to do it, despite it being a third party thing, I haven't figured out how, yet.

Then again, perhaps the fact that my DW blog isn't searchable via Google is actually a blessing in disguise. ¬_¬ *shrug*

(EDIT) Granted, it's possible to search for the URL as a text string and get some results (i.e. without the "site:" operator), but those results are other sites that link to my DW blog (the vast majority of which seem to be comments I left over on John Scalzi's website), rather than direct links back here via Google itself. Eh... I've probably thought about this for longer than it's worth to do so. *sigh + shrug* (/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) Also, on a tangent, when I click that Google link in the previous "EDIT" section, for some odd reason, I see Google results for DeviantArt, but only for like half a second or so, and then they weirdly disappear. Same thing happens if I just search directly for DeviantArt, too, though for that, at least, there's still a right-side panel thing for it, for what that's worth.

...

After a bit of research, it apparently has something to do with the Personal Blocklist add-on I have installed in Firefox, even though I do not have any DeviantArt domains blocked in that. When I disable that add-on, the DeviantArt Google results show as normal and don't disappear. However, with the add-on enabled, DeviantArt results are acting like the domains that I do have explicitly blocked with that add-on (e.g. Faux Noise dot com, etc.), though. Weird. (/EDIT 2)

(Because Dreamwidth is still fucking dumbshit with the asinine limiting of subject length, here's the full headline: "Developer turns 'future of gaming' talk into a surprise attack on convention's NFT and blockchain sponsors")

"The speaker was applauded enthusiastically after his talk."

This is, I hope, yet another nail in the coffin of all the crypto/blockchain/NFT bullshit. If that dumbfuckery has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into its grave, then so the fuck be it. Regardless, it needs to die, and the sooner the better.

Seriously, Dreamwidth, you need to increase the number of characters allowed in the subject field.

Full subject, due to above lamented technical constraints: "A public university in Ohio will pay a professor $400,000 after disciplining him for refusing to use a transgender student's pronouns"

So, yeah, that's both a waste of $400,000 and a waste of a teaching position that could be better filled by someone who is, you know, not an utter fucking asshat.

But then, during my 20+ years as a student (1985-2008), I eventually learned that "being an utter fucking asshat" was not, in any way, ever a disqualifier that prevented someone from being a teacher. Granted, thankfully, it was rare enough that it was "eventually" and not "very quickly," but still...

See also: Chilling effect. This asshole's freeze peaches were never in danger. However, his dipshit lawsuit and the school's unfortunate decision to settle are certainly a danger to transgender students.

Test post with "Hidden " as the subject line.

(EDIT) Turns out the quotation marks, in conjunction with the word Hidden caused the issue, somehow. Replacing the actual quotation marks with character code " allows the subject line to appear as expected. Using actual quotes, instead of the code, however, causes the subject line to disappear, thanks to some strange html shenanigans. For this particular post, the subject line is now actually "Hidden " rather than "Hidden ". (/EDIT)

(EDIT 2) Here is a companion post, which demonstrates the original issue of the disappearing subject line. (/EDIT 2)

(EDIT 3) Issue originally encountered here, for reference. (/EDIT 3)

A post on Whatever dot Scalzi dot Com.

Personally, I loathe the telephone. I hate it when the house phone or my cellphone rings (or lights up, in the case of my cellphone, as I tend to keep it perpetually on silent/no vibrate mode these days), partly because I know that it's almost assuredly going to be some spammer/telemarketer/survey/whatever that I can safely ignore, which is the case 99.999% of the time, but partly because it might be someone I actually know, such that I would have to get up and go to the phone (or pick up my cellphone, if that's the case) and answer the phone (or call them back, more likely) and actually talk to someone. Blugh. I never look forward to getting a phone call, on those rare occasions when I am expecting one. I'm not sure what I hate more, honestly... waiting for such a call that I'm expecting or getting such a call out of the blue that I wasn't expecting. They both suck, but the unexpected ones are maybe slightly more irksome and even anxiety-inducing, because I always initially expect it to be bad news of some sort. I never look forward to making a phone call, on the extremely rare occasions that I'm forced to make a phone call, for whatever reason. It's dreadful. I've never made a "video call," but I'm pretty sure that I would hate those even more than mere voice calls. Basically, as far as I am concerned, the very concept of the telephone (smart or otherwise) can die forever.

I also hate sending/receiving texts on my phone. For me, it's email, this blog, and Twitter (until I get completely sick of Twitter and abandon it again, which may very well happen, and possibly sooner rather than later), and that's pretty much it (via my desktop PC, that is, not via phone, as I hardly ever use the smart phone I do have for anything beyond maybe playing a game on it, once every other blue moon or so). I think I prefer the blog/Twitter, at least when I'm using them merely to blast my thoughts out into the ether, without any concrete expectation of a reply.

Have I mentioned that I'm a fairly asocial person, generally speaking (and have become more so in more recent years)? Not necessarily antisocial, but definitely asocial (and there is a difference). I'm pretty sure I've mentioned that in the past on more than one occasion. ¬_¬

Oh, and to follow up on that previous post, it's also rather strange to me how all these stupid fucking assholes who don't think there's any point to gun control laws "because criminals don't obey laws anyway, duh," tend to be the very same goddamn hypocrite assholes who want draconian immigration laws out the wazoo in order to stop the "illegals."

I mean, obviously, immigration laws clearly aren't stopping people from trying to cross the border "illegally," so... ...I guess what that means is that we might as well stop trying to fix immigration laws, yeah? Might as well get rid of all the immigration laws, since they don't work, eh? It's the exact same argument, right?

Just to reiterate one more time: these people who profusely salivate at the idea of Trump putting brown children in fucking concentration camps because those children and their parents ostensibly "broke the law" are a circle in a Venn diagram placed directly on top of the other, nearly identical circle of people who scoff at gun laws because "criminals don't obey laws anyway, so what is the point."


(Anyone who wants to steal this Venn diagram, or recreate this Venn diagram to make it not look so shitty, feel free to do so. I don't care.)

The difference, of course, is that gun laws would directly affect them and their ability to rub their guns against their genitals or whatever asinine reasons exist for which they "need" guns, whereas immigration laws only adversely affect the Other™ people, people whom they hate for no good reason.

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(Was going to copy/paste this here from Facebook, but Facebook gave me that "Oops something went wrong" goddamned horseshit when I tried to post it there, because fuck Facebook, so here, Dreamwidth gets to have this first, for a change.)

A post on Wil Wheaton dot Net.

Social media is toxic, radioactive, poisonous pigshit, and aside from this here Dreamwidth blog and a (highly curated) Facebook page, I, like Mr. Wheaton, will it leave it to the pigs to wallow in it until heat death. (Unlike Mr. Wheaton, I have zero interest in either Instagram or Tumblr.)