There are so many people in this band! You wouldn't believe how many if we told you. That's why we always have so many different styles and genres of music. Try to figure out who is who! Open for co...

YouTube video by Red Means Recording

I mostly love the town I live in, except that I really miss living in a more urban area with good walkability and transit. I also love being in the Seattle area, except that everything feels so far away because of the transit situation. And when I do end up in the city I get so fed up with the constant presence of every tech company I cannot stand the existence of. Sometimes I think about moving and starting a new chapter of my life, but I’m not sure what that would look like. Here are things that are valuable to me: * Affordable housing and food * Being able to have a recording studio in or near my home, without noise leaking in from or out to neighboring homes (including an acoustic drum kit) * Having access to transit that doesn’t completely wipe me out just to get to the nearest usable bus stop * Having access to trans-affirming healthcare and not having to worry about being hate-crimed * A local government that has committed to remembering that trans rights are human rights * Access to long-distance transit (i.e. well-connected train and/or bus station, and not too hard to get to an airport) * Good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure * Clean air * Good and affordable Internet And here are things that are nice to have: * A decent food culture * Access to forests and large bodies of water * A local trans community * A local furry community * Coffee shops that emphasize flavor and technique (ideally third-wave and with good decaf) * Majority English speakers Things that would make life easier for me but aren’t strictly required: * Not needing company sponsorship to move there * Still being able to use my 110V hardware Whenever I go on a Quixotic quest to find such a place, nothing really turns up. So far the least-bad option that keeps turning up is Victoria, Canada, but moving there would require some finagling to make it legal, and it' salso still a bit isolated for my tastes. I feel like the best option is to just stay in White Center and just become an advocate for better transit and bike infrastructure. To that end I’ve sent messages to my local representatives, and I’ve already gotten some encouraging responses. Maybe I can help change this town to be the place I want to be, or at least less-bad than how it feels right now. Here’s how White Center currently scores on the above points: * Affordable housing and food: Not particularly great. At present I’m paying around $2500/month for housing (including property tax and insurance), and that’s on the low end. Food is about twice as expensive here as most of the US. * Recording studio in/near home: I do! It’s in my basement. Basements are super uncommon here. But I have one, and it works great for this. Other houses here have yard space for a backyard recording shed, which is also acceptable. * Transit access: This is of course my biggest frustration. There is a bus stop right around the corner of my house, which was a big factor in why I bought this place, but a few months after I moved in the bus line that stops there got its service _significantly_ reduced and now it only runs every 70 minutes and during commuting hours. In the five years I’ve lived here, I’ve only taken that bus twice, and I had to plan ahead. The time I still spent waiting for the bus was longer than it’d have been to walk to the next nearest bus stops, which are about 15 minutes away (but require traversing hills and so it wipes me out bad). * Trans-affirming healthcare: Yes, and actually it’s better in White Center than in Seattle proper, amazingly enough. At least for general practice. For everything else I have to travel to Renton or Seattle, which gets back to the transit issues. * Trans rights being human rights: White Center is pretty libertarian, but in an anarcho-socialist way. So it suits me just fine. Seattle proper is also quite good. Neighboring Burien, not so much. * Long-distance transit: Our airport is pretty good, and it’s super easy to get to from White Center. Train travel is much more limited, but such is the case for all of the US. Train and bus access are just okay, and require traveling to Seattle proper. * Good pedestrian and bicycle infrastructure: Seattle is great about this. White center, not so much. _Downtown_ White Center has recently gotten a huge infrastructure upgrade which makes it very walkable and easy to bike through (although the actual bike parking isn’t so great), but downtown is just where you go to go to bars and restaurants or shop at little boutiques. The actual day-to-day activity (such as grocery stores) is better handled down in my neck of the woods, “My neck of the woods” is only half a mile from downtown, _but_ that half a mile involves an incredibly steep hill that is not safe or fun to bike or walk up, and the main throughfare has shitty sidewalks and no bike lanes. * Clean air: For the most part, yeah, it’s pretty good here. * Good and affordable Internet: I get symmetric 500Mbps for $50/month, and that was a downgrade from symmetric gigabit, which was $70/month. * Decent food culture: There’s some okay places to go here but they’re expensive. The food culture in Seattle proper is a lot better, but also a lot more expensive. And it still can’t hold a candle to Portland. * Access to forests and large bodies of water: I have found nowhere better than Seattle for that. White Center has a fair amount as well. Burien also has an incredible nature park (Seahurst) but getting to it without a car is a nightmare. * A local trans community: Seattle is basically the trans capital of the world, as far as I care, and I know several local trans and nonbinary folks in and near White Center. Although few of them are within walking distance. I’m sure there’s a bunch I don’t know though. * A local furry community: The Venn diagram of the trans people I know near White Center and the furries I know near White Center is literally a circle. * Good coffee shops: In White Center we have Moonshot, and Sound & Fog is currently my favorite coffee shop in the world and isn’t super far away from the BRT. * Majority English speakers: Well, yeah So I mean based on my rubric, White Center is pretty great. Looking at it that way, it’s a pretty high bar to clear. I just wish it didn’t cost so much to live here, in terms of both finances and energy.

I made some changes to rss2discord, most notably: 1. Now it batches updates into a single post 2. It lets you provide a custom message which can be used to send a role ping or the like I am mostly posting this blog post to test the latter in production on my server, but also it’s nice to have more visibility for rss2discord.

So the Steam Frame pricing is finally announced. 256GB for $1059, 1TB for $1299. I have Thoughts. Currently I use a Bigscreen Beyond and a bunch of basestations. The basestation tracking quality is awful and has been getting worse over time, and I definitely want to switch to inside-out tracking. Also I’ve been less than impressed with Bigscreen as a company lately. Having a wireless headset would also be really nice. And the wireless implementation is pretty decent from what I’ve heard. But this is pretty darn expensive! I’m also concerned that it might not be possible to modify the face gasket to let me see my guitar while I perform, although replacement gaskets are fairly cheap so it’d be easy to find out. There’s also a passthrough camera which _might_ be able to do what I need, although I’d need to be able to purposefully partially overlay the passthrough over my SteamVR environment, as I need this while playing VRChat, which is very much not a mixed-reality game. I’m also sure I could 3D print a custom gasket like I did for my BSB. What’s really annoying about the price is that it’s this high mostly because of RAM prices, because Steam Frame is meant to be a standalone device that happens to also work with PCVR. I have basically zero interest in standalone VR gaming, and I don’t like that I’m being made to pay a premium for that thanks to AI price increases. Anyway, I’ve signed up for the preorder lottery. If I get one I’ll probably see about selling my BSB, although the process for that is difficult (and is a big part of why I’m not thrilled with Bigscreen as a company). In any case I’d still keep my base stations and fullbody tracking stuff. Even when Fluxpose finally ships I have a reason to do the playspace merge thing and continue using my Tundras for some stuff. Gosh this hobby is expensive though.

So, I’ve been no fan of Gumroad for quite some time, and now they’ve gone even further all-in on using AI for everything and being especially gross about it. Here’s some alternatives that are worth considering. ### Ko-Fi It’s what I use for my main shop these days. Their pricing is quite nice: 5% cut for transactions on the free tier, 0% if you pay $12/month. They support both digital and physical goods, although their variant support and shipping calculation is a bit weak. The main downside is that people don’t realize that Ko-Fi has a fully-fledged shop and membership system; for whatever reason everyone still just thinks of them as being a tip jar. Which is unfortunate, because they’re quite good at the other things too! ### Payhip Payhip is similar to Ko-Fi, but does a better job of marketing themselves as a storefront. Their pricing is _okay_ although not as good as Ko-Fi’s; the free tier is a 5% cut, but it costs significantly more to pay down the cut ($29/month to get 2% and $99/month to get 0%). I haven’t worked with them directly but a friend of mine speaks highly of it, and it seems like it was designed with inventory and variant support from the ground up although I don’t have any idea of how it actually works to the user. So I’ll probably sign up for it since some of my art pieces and coffee items that I’ve been meaning to list for sale again are pretty clumsy to list on Ko-Fi. ### itch.io itch.io is mostly seen as a place to sell games and conduct game jams, but it’s also great for selling digital assets and music. They let you set your platform cut, and default to 10%. There’s _technically_ support for physical merch although it’s quite weak, so I wouldn’t recommend it for that purpose. ### Jinxxy Jinxxy is designed specifically for VR assets, and has become very popular for VRChat creators in particular. As far as I can tell they _only_ support VRChat assets, however. Similarly to itch.io they let you specify your own cut, and default to 5%. ### Patreon I’m not exactly a fan of Patreon (despite having capitulated) but in addition to memberships they also have a means of selling digital goods. I don’t know anyone who really uses it that way and the discovery is pretty bad. It also only supports digital goods, and they charge a 10% cut unless you get one of the higher plans and I can’t really be bothered to research this one too much. But it’s an alternative to Gumroad so it was worth listing all the same.

YouTube video by fluffy

A couple days ago, the fucking crawlers ramped up their efforts to get past my 429 error page, so I finally set up a fail2ban rule that would block anything that kept on poking at things. Hoo _boy_ that was the wrong thing to do. When the bot farms started to detect that I was blocking them at the IP level, they started a **_massive onslaught_** coming from massive coordinated botnets that came from everywhere, because apparently the bot networks have decided that if they’re being blocked, they’re going to do whatever they can to get around the block, and they were specifically only making a single request from every one of the tens of thousands of IP addresses. After several hours of frustration I decided to take this site down for a bit, and found that as soon as my server started responding with error 502 making it look like it was down for the count, the botnet slowed to a trickle. Which tells me that they don’t give a shit about polite requests to please slow down, but _will_ stop when they think that the server has been overwhelmed and taken down. So, I changed my anticrawl thing a bit where now a failed check sends an inappropriate error 502. As a test I did see if I could put my existing automated sentience check on the error page and the bots were still trying to submit the form, so I’ve changed the form to be manual, and to require filling in the world’s simplest (and hopefully most accessible) CAPTCHA. Repeated failures to get past the CAPTCHA will still result in an IP block, but for now it seems that this is keeping the bots at bay. Anyway, as soon as I instituted that change on this site, they started hammering my music site instead, so I put the same mitigations in place there too, and now my server is out of crisis mode. I hate that I have to spend so much fucking time on this fucking bullshit, and that the solution requires violating HTTP standards. Because that seems to be all that these **_fuckers_** understand. I’m **_tired_** , y'all. And this wouldn’t even be a problem if they’d just **_RESPECT THE SIGNALS I SEND ABOUT WHICH PAGES ARE EVEN WORTH CRAWLING_**. I mark the problematic pages with `rel="noindex nofollow"` and if something declares itself to be a bot I don’t even show the links that lead to the bad behavior in the first place! But **_no_** these **_ABSOLUTE PIECES OF SHIT_** see any impediment to their crawling as something to get past. I want to fucking murder whoever is behind this shit. I wouldn’t, of course, but god damn I would not shed a single tear if I learned that these fucking **_assholes_** died in a terrorist attack. If you are a crawler author: either learn how to behave, or die in a goddamn fire. Fuck you. Fuck all of you. Eat shit and die, you fucking wastes of carbon.

Folks were looking for a centralized website for Chorus which wasn’t just the repository, so today I threw together another site, MecaGorp, which will be hopefully where I put all future information about Chorus/Canimus and its related efforts. There’s a lot more stuff to add but in the meantime it’s at least a starting point. I ended up just going with Publ as usual because I can’t be bothered to learn how to work with anything more light-weight right now. Maybe eventually I’ll try out 11ty or something, but whatevs. I don’t expect that site to be particularly high-traffic but it’ll be nice to have things be a bit more properly-catalogued there. And since I’m hosting the site files on github it makes it at least feasible for others to contribute more readily.

xkeeper posted a blog post about their issues running TCRF. On a related note, here’s my webserver’s HTTP response code stats for today, across all of my websites: fluffy@nautilus[/var/log/nginx] fluffy$ cut -f3 -d\" access.log | cut -f2 -d\ | sort | uniq -c | sort -n 3 408 4 502 4 503 10 410 20 504 56 307 60 403 165 406 225 401 462 499 662 405 670 500 819 202 1739 304 2989 400 6299 206 16352 302 32402 301 52673 404 83035 303 192512 200 308859 429 This is pretty disheartening. For those who don’t know, 429 is Too Many Requests, and is what my site responds with when it detects bad-behavior crawler activity, primarily from attempting to crawl over the tag browser, which is not presented to properly-declared bots (because there is no reason for bots to crawl them). So, of the nearly 700,000 requests served up today, around 44% were these crawler bots. Most of these bots come from residential proxy networks, meaning people have installed malware like Honeygain to earn tiny amounts of money for “Internet testing” or similar. Things are even worse, though. That 303 response code is See Other, which is a form of redirect that is used when you redirect a HTTP POST to a GET. There is only one place on my sites that such a thing happens: when someone presses the button for the “sentience check” that occurs on a 429 error page. When this button is clicked, the user gets a simple “button pressed” cookie that is signed with the user’s IP address and User-Agent and with a timestamp that expires after an hour. For a legitimate user who happened to trip the bot detection (by legitimately browsing multiple tags simultaneously), this will grant them access to the site. However, what’s actually happening here is that the crawlers are pretending to click the button so that they can try to access the site, but because each request comes from a different IP address or a randomized user-agent (trying to look like a real web browser), they end up just trying the same URL again and getting the same 429 response. So that’s another 12% of my website traffic going to bots who are specifically trying to get around my anti-bot measures. Back when I first started with this anti-bot measure I only checked for the presence of a cookie, under the presumption that the bots weren’t storing them at all, but one of the bots from the Alibaba cloud IP range did start to get through the check, indicating that it was storing _a_ cookie, and it was flooding my server with very expensive requests as a result. Signing it to the IP address stopped that, at least, but it hasn’t stopped the unrelenting onslaught, all the same. Okay, so HTTP 200 is the response code for an actual successful pageview. _At best_ that’s around 27.5% of my traffic. Let’s see how much of that is coming from declared bots: fluffy@nautilus[/var/log/nginx] fluffy$ grep ' 200 ' access.log | grep '+http' | wc -l 55024 So, of the 193,000 successful web requests, 29% is coming from bots that declare themselves to be bots. Let’s spot-check some of the other successful requests: x.x.x.x - - [07/Aug/2026:23:43:10 -0700] "GET /blog/everything?id=1643&tag=late-stage-capitalism HTTP/1.1" 200 3697 "https://beesbuzz.biz/blog/everything?id=1643&tag=late-stage-capitalism" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0; Nexus 5 Build/MRA58N) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/65.0.3325.181 Mobile Safari/537.36" "beesbuzz.biz" https Okay so, this request is being made with its own URL as its referer, which legitimate browsers don’t do, but which bots do in order to try to look like real traffic while avoiding anti-hotlink protections. That’s harder to filter out with a simple command line. But spot-checking my access log, I see a lot of requests like that. I also see a lot of `ClaudeBot` requests. These do not properly declare themselves as bots, as they do not follow the `+http` convention for giving an informational page about the bot. They do provide a contact email address. The requests are all for nonexistent paths and seem to be probing for runtime configuration files and AWS credenetials and so on, so I doubt that these are _actually_ ClaudeBot. 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/.env?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/home/ubuntu/.aws/config?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:38 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/rootkey.csv?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:41 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/terraform.tfstate?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:41 -0700] "GET /@fs/var/www/.env?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/home/ubuntu/.azure/credentials?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/var/www/html/wp-config.php?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:44 -0700] "GET /@fs/root/.config/linode-cli?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:48 -0700] "GET /@fs/app/.openai/config.json?raw?? HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https 35.205.29.241 - - [07/Aug/2026:23:47:51 -0700] "GET /server/.env HTTP/1.1" 404 184 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; compatible; ClaudeBot/1.0; +claudebot@anthropic.com)" "flrig.beesbuzz.biz" https Anyway. I don’t really have the energy to figure out a good test to find people who are legitimately browsing this site without doing much deeper analytics on IP addresses and so on, but I can safely say that very little of the traffic going to my server is fulfilling the purpose of putting my creative works online for other people to peruse. It’s disheartening. I spend so much time and energy and effort trying to make things that work well, and very little of it goes towards making a difference that matters. I am in a constant state of pain and fatigue, and try so very hard to do things that I care about with what little time and energy I can muster for it, but it all feels so futile. People keep telling me that AI is the future and you “can’t unsqueeze the tube of toothpaste” and so on, but what good is any of that shit doing? What good am _I_ doing? Why do I even bother? What’s the point to any of this?