Rustic Cyberpunk

This blog was originally hosted on a retired Lenovo ThinkPad from the mid 2000s. It had a dead battery and a chipped screen, but the cost of replacing both would have been close to the price of another used laptop from eBay. So when I bought the replacement, I relegated the old hulk to hosting duties. It had performed admirably for more than a year now, but I've noticed a steady uptick in the amount of traffic I'm getting and things have slowed down a bit.

At one point, all my Tor sites were down due to a crash that I didn't notice. For some reason, the clock had reset to an earlier period and that was causing some issues with connecting to the Onion network. This might be due to failing hardware or another problem that I haven't figured out yet. Either way, I decided this was a good opportunity to avoid this and future limitations. I moved everything to a "proper" server.

Since about a month ago, I was experimenting with my home rack that I used at one point to host all my sites. The burden of hosting an email server hasn't lessened over the years so I gave up a while ago and the rack was sitting idle. My other concern was the noise. Since avoiding the phone more, I think I've become more sensitive to ambient distractions when they previously blended into the background. I managed to quiet the server a tad by installing an SSD and using only the CPU and power supply fans to cool the case. So far, it has worked quite well.

This level of nitty-gritty server work was very exciting to me in the past, but now it's become a chore. Like a farmer who has grown to dislike his tractor. I hope this will be the last time I have to meddle with computers just to write my thoughts.

I've also been working on something of a forum as well, and having a better system may allow me to actually follow through. It's something I've been thinking about since I left all social media. I wanted to create "rooms" with a good ambiance and a cozy feel to discuss things. Not quite chat rooms with their near-instantaneous chatter, but something with a built-in pause to reflect before posting. I think we're missing the "let's just think about this" buffer on social media and we're seeing the effects spilling over to the real world. It's causing us real harm. Something like a mood room to slow down and talk about things feels like a better option to me. I'll try to work out how this will be implemented soon.

I have a bad habit of starting things that I don't finish. Sometimes, it's just being busy, but other times, I'm genuinely drained of all interest. I don't know if there's a cure for this, but I'll try to mend it by actually finishing this time.