Although Plume won’t snitch, I can confirm it is 6h and I’m still awake because reasons. Because of this I’ve found myself in a timeloop. Having taken my time to write about the dangers of Nostalgia, I feel I should be more immune to this.

I am very much not and I ended up reliving the abject horror glory that was AOL Journals in my mind, because none of them managed to get scraped by the Internet Archive it seems.

As we all know at this point I had a very long run with LiveJournal which I’ll stand by to my grave, but what is lost in the ether is my short time on AOL Journals before they wrapped that shit up hard.

AOL Journals, much like AOL was a very specific kind of kitch you just had to experience. Trash colours, trash fonts, and trash clipart all at once. You could even use AIM to update your journal, it was very novel. I even published my first “proper” websites on AOL, hand coded HTML I just learned by watching what others did (my first one was on AngelFire from a library computer which I regret).

It gave me a warm feeling of platforms long gone, remember when the Eternal September was the worst thing that happened from a platform ? So quaint by today’s standards.

I miss the good parts of those communities, AOL and CompuServe, even though we all kind of hated Steve Case for various reasons. It is times like these, not exactly being able to think properly because sleep patterns, is when I feel like I’m chasing that dragon again. I’m even going to admit, I fucking loved the Weird AOL period and I really wished it managed to survive and keep to that (now its just another shitty ad company).

photo credit : tatslow on flickr

The internet ain’t like it was, but there are parts of it that still are. I am, in fact, right now writing this post on a platform, a loose collection of Plume instances that are sharing posts between themselves and keeping the network alive even if one or more servers tanks it. Even Mastodon, Calckey, etc can peer in and poke around.

Much like AOL Journals and early LiveJournal, I have no real control of how my texts are presented (which honestly is a selling point for not in 1995 me). Even if I do customise my CSS, the base structure is still the same.

I think I’ve become numb a bit from being constantly online since November, probably not touching enough grass and such, or more likely that I’m finding the minimalist web (which for the record I’m totally fucking guilty of that) just as bland as my daily routine.

But as I’m writing this caught up in that old mindset, I remember that Calckey and other parts of the fediverse are weirding the net back up, and to be openly honest with myself, I’ve found that wild rush from joining in.

Granted blog.sus.fr spammed timelines by mistake when I was doing the mega import and it wouldn’t be surprised if that got me a mute or an instance ban from it (and for those who did I don’t blame you, I fired in 6500 posts in the space of a week). But that came really from a passion to nurture my Plume instance and call it my online home. Something, admittedly, I tried to do with AOL Journals, Blogger, VOX, and TypePad without any traction.

Yes, the old internet is gone with its gaudy colour schemes, Comic Sans partout, but it is coming back with a vengeance and a lot more 💖 than Steve Case could ever muster.

Vive l’Internet bizarre, vive le fediverse

I kind of touched on some of these things in an older blog post #CapitalismRewardsHorriblePeople but I’ve really hit a wall lately.

I was keeping to a solid routine of waking up early, doing a day of projects, job applications, etc and going to bed at a reasonable hour. I also started to do more cooking and cooking different things.

Lately, however, being “normal” is getting hard, really really hard. I’m on the sofa all day, awake all night staring at the ceiling, and all kinds of hungry. To the point I’ve shouted out in to the internet universe for help :

This is a bit of a shout in to the void but I’m getting desperate.

Since my income was sliced in half (#BurnOut / #SadisticManagers) and everything is doubling in price I’ve had to choose between bills and food, this month I had no choice.

Both lost to the bare necessities.

The most I could spend on myself was 16€ for my birthday dinner. I’ve lost 10kg, I’m scraping the barrel to exist.

If anybody can help with anything, I’d be grateful

Genuinely, even if its a couple euro to spare I can at least skate by (which I guess is the theme of 2023).

All this while I’m desperately trying to find a job and going through interviews to get out of this situation.

But you know, Macron at least politely asked the supermarkets to reduce costs (traverser la route ne semble pas aider)

I’ve basically been existing on bread and water for nearly a month and still just under two weeks to go.

I’ve got half a kilo of flour left, no soap and cat litter needing to be replaced. I feel like shit mentally, physically, and soon I’ll get to smell like it too.

Only the cats have been spared from this since their food and care is non-negotiable. I’ll get kicked out of my house before they go hungry (except I miscalculated on the litter by a week)

It has been real bad lately, food prices are getting stupid, people who are on double my income are struggling to get to the end of the month and I’m struggling to get to the end of the first day that I receive my assistance. I’m applying to all kinds of jobs now, anything, ignoring all the red flags along the way.

So I can move past this particular part of the post, if you can help, I’d really appreciate it. You can also send a EUR amount to this IBAN, nothing is too small NL18 BUNQ 2206 2327 31.

Anyways, one of the things I’m trying to do is socialise more. Honestly I don’t have a lot of energy at the moment, so trying to organise some get togethers at my appartement and I’m looking at trying to volunteer my excess time to go out and just see other humans (I know the cats will hate that).

I got a push in the right direction from a really good interview I did, it was a technical win since I wasn’t chosen for a fairly minor point out of my control. The point here was I threw everything at it and I got far on it.

At the moment I’m just waiting, waiting for my income, waiting to hear from jobs, waiting to hear back from charities, and there is little more I can do about this so I just have to wait.

Yesterday I got a rather interesting email from Proton

Subject: We’re doubling your storage space

Starting today, we’re doubling your base storage space to 6 TB for free. This gives you more space to store your emails, files, and memories.

One of my main problems with Proton was although I have the visionary package (I paid in advance, thankfully as my poor ass couldn’t afford it now) the long time limit to that package was 30GB and I’m currently riding a mailbox of about 20GB. When Proton Drive came out, being mail heavy made the drive not that useful.

Then they increased the space by a lot, I think I got a few terabytes. This email, well nice, I got a lot of terabytes now.

I’m undecided what I do here, I really love Nubo and I mean I love everything about it, they’re Delta Chat friendly, the cloud uses Nextcloud so everything syncs great, and its a cooperative. The only “negatives” and I use that loosely, is the storage cost, and that is only dictated by me and my usage and that the cloud storage isn’t encrypted (unless you use something like Cryptomator).

With my cloud and mail, I’m using over 50GB which is pricey, and currently a bit of an issue on my side.

This is where I’m in the middle, I should probably be using Proton for more now that my account has a monsterous amount of available space, however, all is not perfect. Proton has some issues here :

• Doesn’t work with Delta Chat, even Proton Mail Bridge strips the DC headers and breaks it
• No auto-sync for files on any platform
• Non-PGP encrypted emails lack translations and have to have a password for exchange¹
• No ability to properly integrate Calendar / Addressbook (either via a sync app or CalDav / CardDav)

I want to swap over one of my domains to Proton again, but I do need to be able to use IMAP / SMTP for an application. It should have been easy enough with the bridge and a dedicated account, except, protonbridge-cli is a fucking nightmare in Debian. I’ve not got it to work, at all.

The lack of features is also an issue on top of Proton just being another corporation and we all know you can’t trust shit when they get too big and bought.

For the moment I might do a move of some data off Nubo or run an archive on the mailbox to reduce my usage there, maybe retry protonbridge-cli and see what happens.