I took a few days off. I didn’t have any particular reason nor much in the way of goals (though I had some of those, mostly unmet). My boss keeps reminding me that I use the least PTO of all employees so, here I am, having burned a few days’ worth.
Continue readingCategory: Linkage (Page 1 of 76)
I suppose I should apologize to somebody for that post title, but it’s true in its own way, right? Right.
A couple of years back I threw some money behind the idea of a self-produced, non-Netflix-y 13th season of Mystery Science Theater 3000. And it was good! Very, very good. Albeit not without the sort of technological growing pains one might expect from cobbling together a whole streaming environment out of available parts. (Not entirely unlike using special parts to make robot friends, after all.)
But seriously. Several sets of hosts, some superb(ly bad) movies and top-notch riffing, exactly what one hopes for from another batch of newly-minted MST3K. I got what I paid for, no argument there.
Oh, but I also had signed up at a level which suggested there’d be… physical goodies. At some point. Well… it took a couple of years but today’s that “at some point.” Behold:
Stickers! A t-shirt! A popcorn bucket! A guzzler of a drink cup! Posters! (Not pictured in an unrolled state; they didn’t want to stay unrolled without heavy weights for eight corners’ worth, oh also they’re huge. Just trust me that they’re really nifty.)
It’s not like I signed up to back Season 13 specifically to have physical goodies shipped to my doorstep, but I’m sure not complaining. And I’ll definitely get some mileage out of that t-shirt if nothing else.
Maybe I’ll pour some non-popcorn-y snacks into the bucket and curl up with “Beyond Atlantis” some evening soon…
Well, just by typing that subject line I’m going to have a particular Pet Shop Boys song stuck in my head for a while.
There are worse things.
Anyway: Since that-which-was-Twitter continues its slide toward both irrelevance and hostility toward the masses who made it what it was, I should mention that I’ve (more or less) moved elsewhere. If you look on the sidebar you’ll see the “Find Me Here” link list. Other than the webcomic and the self-referential link to… the website you’re reading now… no, I don’t know why that’s there, honestly… you’ll find the social-media-ish things I’m inhabiting (to greater or lesser degrees) in the meantime.
I wouldn’t say that any of them are my exclusive hangout. Even Twitter was never my exclusive hangout, just… where the bulk of my time & energy went. (Maybe I should thank the emerald edgelord for freeing me from that? Er, no. No, never, never will I thank that jackwagon for anything, ever.)
Anyway: I can be found at “the fediverse” (on a Mastodon server), Tumblr, Bluesky, and I really ought to pick my Pixelfed account back up again, plus potentially whatever else may come down the pipe later. (Technically I have accounts at Spoutible and Cohost but… eh. I haven’t touched those in months, not going to bother linking them.)
Things are a hot mess, aren’t they? Find me somewhere and we’ll chat about it.
In lieu of more interesting content, let’s do a quick rundown of a few of the shows I’m watching lately:
Continue readingI’ve reached endgame for my “ChooChooingScenery” game of Satisfactory, the point where I gear up to send off the final Space Elevator shipment consisting of four products: Assembly Director Systems, Magnetic Field Generators, Nuclear Pasta (which, despite its name, contains zero radioactive source material), and Thermal Propulsion Rockets.
The math is all sorted out, source materials (almost) entirely in production, and I have a vague notion that I’m going to build a gigantic factory in the “dune desert” to house this last great project. But I want to make it nice and neat for a change. I want to build a set of machines that not only fit together well but looks good doing it.
And I can’t do that if I’m not absolutely clear on the exact order of what things I need to go into which other things to make the next things.
Continue readingIt’s amusing to look back on previous server migration posts and realize how long I’ve been a Linode (now Akamai, oh boy) customer. And yet, only a couple of years after the last round of server changes I decided to do it once again.
Why?
Mainly because I wanted to get away from the Apache webserver. While it’s the workhorse driving a lot of the World Wide Web even now, it’s showing its age and, well, there’s the whole naming optics thing, isn’t there? And after seeing an online friend rave happily about this thing called OpenLiteSpeed (including how much less of a pain in the backside it is to deal with versus NGINX, the other leading option) I figured, you know what? It’s time for a change.
So change I have. This site, along with nearly all of my other web-based projects, lives on yet another new Linode/Akamai virtual server, this time without the usual Apache webserver setup. My thoughts on “OLS” itself will have to percolate a bit before I can craft them into a coherent post but in short: It’s quite slick, but its documentation has some glaring holes and it isn’t always easy to search online for fixes to weird problems. Additionally, certain WordPress plugins don’t like it very much. (Or OLS doesn’t like them. Take your pick.)
It is downright peppy, though, and a breeze to administer. Setting up the reverse proxy for my Foundry VTT rig was actually simpler than it had been under Apache… not that OLS’ documentation made that any easier to figure out, mind you.
I still have some things to move over before shutting down ‘node3’ but considering I only spun up the new host Saturday morning, to be here midday on Tuesday with nearly everything sorted and settled? I’m happy with this result, yeah.