Article about a long-running (30 years!) project to keep an MUD game going based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe. Particularly cool that Pratchett himself gave them his blessing, so long as they didn’t turn a profit 🙂
Yay, my status.lol account works!
Still need to work out what to do with these statuses beyond that – hook up the feed to Micro.blog and get that to crosspost to Mastodon, perhaps? Maybe compile the day’s statuses into a daily post on here? 🤔 (Except that’d be a manual process…) Hmmmmm!
Well, I succumbed to FOMO and made myself a new profile page on omg.lol 😂 I thought their new status feature looked nifty, even though I haven’t been able to get it to work, LOL (but I’m going to try again later – I think it might be because I only just created an account, so the staging server where I’d need to get the beta API key from doesn’t know my account exists 😢). Not really sure what I can use omg.lol for that I can’t already do on this site, but it’s a bit of fun, right? 😅
Found this a thought-provoking blog post, which linked to this other post I found just as interesting: How Websites Die . If I dropped dead tomorrow, my site would stay online for as long as Vercel is willing to keep it up (and I’m not aware of them currently deleting free plan sites for inactivity, but policies can change), but at some point my domain name would cease to be paid-up, and stop functioning, I guess. I found it interesting that a trust fund with $400 in seed money should, in theory, be able to keep a domain name paid up in perpetuity.
Of course there are other facets to my “digital life” as well – social media accounts, my acculumated photos and videos, the contents of my journal/Obsidian vault. I’m not really interested in making sure my future heirs can have unfettered access to those – the curated highlights are enough (although if I drop dead tomorrow I haven’t put together any 😂). Having a social media account in “memorial mode” for a while makes sense, but ultimately I think of social media as impermanent, as new platforms or servers rise and fall. A dedicated, static website seems to make more sense as a long-term memorial.
The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine is also a great resource, and so long as it stays operational, people will remain able to browse many websites even after they’ve gone offline at their original location. It’s not really as good as keeping something online, of course, but it’s better than nothing.
Remember my annoyance three weeks ago when Duolingo rudely denied me the “#1 in the Diamond League” achievement because somehow Diamond Tournament doesn’t count? WELL, finally I have got my rightful achievement 😎 Now to never care about getting first place again, lol
About a week ago I got an email from Heroku, linking to this blog post , telling me they’re abolishing their free plans towards the end of November. This is a bit of a bummer, because currently I rely on Heroku’s free plan to run my instance of IndieKit (a Micropub server that allows me to post to my site on the go). I don’t use it …
I gave it a solid eight days’ trial, but I’m closing Arc Browser and moving back to Vivaldi as my default web browser. I really love the UI of Arc, in particular the way its Spaces help me organise my browsing, but for some reason it uses over 100% CPU constantly whenever it’s visible on the screen. I’m sick of hearing my MBA’s fans blasting at full pelt when all I’m doing is basic web browsing on lightweight sites! I’d happily revisit it if I heard a future update fixed the performance issues, though. Apart from that it is really nice to use.
For a long time in Duolingo, I have coveted the “Finish #1 in the Diamond League” achievement. It seemed to be beyond my grasp because like every single week, someone would get thousands of points ahead of me by Tuesday and prove to me that I had no chance (although I guess at least they were considerate enough to do it early, so I wouldn’t waste my time for the rest of the …
How are some websites just coded SO badly? I don’t understand. If I scroll through a long discussion on Discord, or even just leave Duolingo open in a background tab (!), my laptop’s fans go into overdrive as these sites somehow chew up obscene amounts of CPU. How does a developer fuck up so badly???
Thanks to @rcrackley , today I received my invite to try out Arc Browser ! Haven’t really used it enough yet to form a solid opinion, but so far it’s fun and novel. I was relieved to find you can install normal Chromium browser extensions in it – I need my Bitwarden 😅
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.