Category: Technology Page 1 of 4

There is very few things, bordering upon zero, that would make me want to rejoin any social media account.

What joy I might ever get from them I get from just doing a little random browsing. And the way reddit is going, they will have blocked that as soon as they can figure out how to block it AND still sell the data on the side.¹

Can’t turn your users into blood for the blood gods without pretending to care about the children, or some shit.

BUT, one thing that might inspire me make at least a “DumbStuff1849” style account is the ability to auto-block everyone who has marked their profile hidden. All posts. All comments. Hell, even all the upvotes and engagement. Let me see the “non-hidden-profile-reddit” stats only.

I’m not going to post anything so they can see my profile all they want. I don’t care. Or I can make a half dozen alts. Like the old days.

I like user privacy. I largely demand user privacy. This feels like something else. At least in practice.

A lot of the weirdest stuff comes out of those accounts. People generating 100k+ karma per month and you see their post and it’s just something racist, nationalist, sexist, or…just kind of this odd milquetoast “Yeah, things are shit, what about it?!” thing that reddit does so well.

You might know what I mean, where you complain about anything or brag about anything or just feel joy or hate or anything about anything and there are strings of comments about how it doesn’t matter, it all sucks, and you know what…you are a piece of shit for having feelings on it. The default state of reddit being nowadays, it seems.

The more obvious that sort of thing is, the more likely it will be a hidden profile. 200k karma. 3 months old. Moderator of two low-quality subs that often smash through to the front page despite posting nothing that isn’t some general “aren’t things stupid now” kind of vaguepost. AND WHY? Why do the bots care? I can at least get why the [REDACTED] guys pretending to be American-hating European teens might want to stay hidden so folks don’t realize they are not from a dozen different countries at the same time.

Then you add in the those that hide their posts and to mark the profile “mature” so you have to be signed in, having 18+ posts allowed, and then just see you can’t actually see anything.

Look, I know. You have reasons to want to hide your profile. That’s fine. I’m not judging you.

You do you, boo.

To clarify, I mean the way a lot of social media sites are actively trying to stop people from being able to even browse for any length of time without having an account. For reasons. ↩︎

There will come soft catfishing…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-19

In Internet, Technology

Current Musical Mood: NMIXX’s Strange Muse.

Adapted from: *Photo by Iván Antonio on Unsplash*

I assume that most people reading this have some notion of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains.” If not, there is a Wikipedia link. It’s worth it, finding a copy. One of THE (definite article) stories.

It got a bit of a boost recently because the date in the story is possibly 4 August 2026 (assuming the system is working). Which meant we just survived one of the fiction nuclear winters. Good for us.

You might have less a notion that the title and theme comes from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale about how if people wipe themselves out in a war that nature will not care. It’s a bit wrong, the poem, because humans are part of nature and our passing would have some side-effects. I’m going to quote it in its entirety because I think the sentiment is valid. The thing that cares most about humanity’s survival is humanity and our ability to trick ourselves into thinking that’s a lie is madness:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

While the Bradbury story is perhaps mildly prescient about how fast mankind could destroy itself¹, I can’t help but feel that some of the horror people face while reading it is that some aspects of our technology will keep working after we are sand and ash. We will be survived by something we consider wholly subservient to us that no longer cares. Piles of plastic trash if nothing else. Miles and miles of destroyed forests and all those extinct species that will never return to the universe. Look upon us, distant and ancient stories, and tremble in dismay…

…because we are colossally stupid.

WHICH IS ONE HELL OF AN INTRO TO THE MAIN POINT OF THIS POST, sorry. Digression is my middle name. Heh, “Dougression”…

The point was story about me reading a reddit thread about a man being soft catfished² and giving everything away to try and be with a woman who did not exist and how that might constitute a “teaching moment” for the rest of us³. If I am confusing with you, that is ok. It is a confusing time to be alive. There was as Brazilian influencer who did not exist. A man who did exist, according to an article which was not written by a human, gave away his… look, here’s a poem:

Yesterday, on the line
I met a woman who wasn’t mine
She wasn’t mine again today
I guess I’ll give everything away
Just to move some 2000 miles
only to learn she never existed, all the while

I am not linking to the story or the thread because the story was definitely written by AI. Something folks started noticing…

Here’s a legit crazy thought that does not keep me up at night but often makes me go, you know, hmmmm…

…is that a non-zero number of anti-AI reactions are written by AI. AND, I suspect that “non-” portion of non-zero is a number a lot bigger than zero.⁴

While I could go on and on about the fact that no one’s lonely uncle is going to be safe, anymore, it was actually the Bradbury story I thought about first.

That if somehow people just ceased to be in a way that did not wreck the infrastructure (aliens, I assume, or mutant bigfoot attacks) that there would be at least a time where a bunch bots just responded to bots and wrote articles for bots and music for bots. Think of the millions of thumbs up and posts on Youtube going “2091, anyone?” with no one left to read them.

If only some author had written about the danger of giving over our creative and emotional processes to unfeeling things and how it would leave the earth a barren place, eh?

Just to be fair, Body Snatchers and its OG movie are all about the importance of feeling and creativity and messy emotions and how being replaced by an “rationally arguably correct” but callous way of living will leave the earth a barren place… and a lot of folks have assuming it was an attack on Communists.

We don’t exactly need AI bots to come up with terrible takes.

The important take away is that our stuff is going to survive us. Especially the plastic bits. Sorry, Ozymandias.

It does seem a bit off that a nuclear blast close enough to eradicate a family in a flash would leave their edifice to capitalism and modern convenience standing. Sounds like engineers needed to use that blast-proof tech to protect kids and not just sell expensive smart-houses, eh? ↩︎
“Chatfished” was my clever neologism I was going to use but other people have used it so I have decided it is dumb and childish. Follow-ups included “cAItfished” but frankly “soft catfishing” allowed me to work in the Bradbury story. ↩︎
We are going to leave aside the fact that the non-existent woman almost definitely didn’t invite him to do it, according to the badly written article, meaning the man just…stalked someone who did not exist. Maybe some Brazilian paper has a better version of the story but it is frankly secondary. ↩︎
Just look at all the hype around the attack on the datacenters and people claiming it shifted the arguments online and such. That story feels immensely and quickly overblown. That it helps to dehumanize people who disagree with us online was a bonus feature. ↩︎

Five Suggestions to Fix Junior’s Toy Hunt

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-08

In Internet, Technology

EDIT: Just to clarify, this isn’t me…I realized after the fact that it might sound like I’m fishing for my own upvotes…

Good job, Duolingo… your fun event went over so well your volunteer community managers over on the subreddit are having to cut out complaints (while allowing multiple posts of people posting about how they only had to spend 2k gems to win back 5k gems).

Thinking back to yesterday’s post where I ranted a bit about it and how awful gacha based “fun” actually is, I was thinking of a few suggestions to perhaps fix it if you don’t want to turn the whole thing into a pointless misery-fest.

Keep in mind Suggestion 0 is always this: never use gacha.

No One Can Use Gems to Get Pieces

Absolutely most important.

Easy enough. Some countries (and maybe some people) can’t use gems to buy pieces — and therefore get gems back — so make it where no one can.

I cannot stress this enough: no one buys pieces with gems.

Too many people online seem to be forgiving the game because they can cash out and get everything. Everyone should suffer equally if you want honest feedback because gacha players lie about being free to play and nothing wrecks a gacha fan base like FOMO. Make it so everyone is free to play and the truth shall set us all free.

No Gem Prize

Likewise, absolutely no gem prize at the end. Maybe, if you insist, give people 200 bonus gems a day for unlocking all that day’s nodes. At the end, people end up with 5k gems even if they don’t get all of the suits.

In fact…

Add in Too Many Suits

There needs to be more suits than any one can win even if they are absolute God-Tier in their luck. No one can collect them all. Everyone will have gaps.

As it stands, Duolingo has incentivized people — in most countries — to spend gems and wear the same two or three top tier suits which negates any reason to have those top tier suits. Hell, I imagine most players will have discarded wearing the suits in a week or two and it is basically just way for some people to game the system for a few free gems.

If you have it so that there are 10+ suits and people can only likely get 6+ then it means someone might miss the unicorn but get the Hawaiian Shirt and that is way better.

Duolingo Needs a Better Dupe System

Duolingo’s biggest sin after the allowing some people the chance to spend gems to make gems was the duplicate system.

Rather than getting five pieces to unlock a new piece which is probably a low tier piece that you will just get the next day and then it goes into the dupe pile itself you should…

either (a) Allow people to cash in dupes at a later date to give them some control over it,

or (b) [preferred] allow people to spend dupes directly on the suits with lower tier suits being something like 20-30 dupes while the upper tier suits maybe costing 50-60. This way folks eventually get the one or two suits they want.

Suit Pool That Returns

If you are going to emulate better and more profitable gacha, steal a core mechanic: you have more styles/suits/characters than anyone could win or ever need and most of them return in subsequent iterations.

This means the unicorn, etc, will be next time probably at a lower tier.

Duolingo’s Junior’s Toy Hunt Was an Absolute Mistake

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-07

In Internet, Technology

I would never suggest that Duolingo is anything like vital to anyone wanting to learn a language but it can be fun and helpful especially if you are also learning a language in another way. On its own, it gets a lot more variable depending on the language.

Then, this past month (give or take), they decided that what we needed was for them to add in a whole gacha mechanic. You play every day and then you unlock a certain number of pieces which then might unlock suits. There are six suits (+ 1 bonus if you get the rest) and from 1 through 6 they get a bit rarer and harder to get.

The suits are fun and whimsical and pretty optional and it doesn’t really matter, right? Just bonus content?

No.

And let me tell you why not.

Gacha mechanics in games are all about abusing human addiction-forming tendencies. They primarily exist to make money off people by triggering FOMO. People have suffered from gacha enough that I am generally never going to approve it being added.

Duolingo already uses multiple gamification metrics. Adding gacha is an awful choice on top of the stack.

I cannot imagine a proper gacha-centric system that would actually make game play more user friendly because the definition is that someone people will be lucky and some will not. Even if all it takes is time to complete, random chance means some will spend less time than others. This is BEFORE we get to the real world expenditure of some currency to speed up the process [which this, of course, has].

Like in this case where you need two “gold pieces” to unlock the rarest suit, the unicorn:

You have a 2% chance of getting a gold piece. There are, I think, 4 you need in total (could be 3, hard to tell at a glance at this point since I’ve already unlocked the majority). I’ll talk about this in a second, but I could personally get 4 pieces per day for I think 30 days. 120 pieces. At 2% odds, I can’t get there without luck being on my side and there is no guarantee that the gold piece you get won’t just be one you already have.

There is the standard stupid gacha duplicate system where every fifth duplicate you unlock a guaranteed-to-be-new piece. This improves the odds and makes it possible, but still not guaranteed. In the above, the purple pieces have a roughly 20% chance of showing up. Purple as rarity, not individual. I have something like seven days left so 28 pieces which should mean around 5 purple pieces. There’s no guarantee at ALL that it will be the purple pieces I need. Statistically, they will not be.

At this point, without getting at least one new purple, maybe two, I have no chance of winning.

“But, Doug, in this case, it’s just…”

No. Absolutely not. Because in this case it is like every other stupid gacha system and the lucky folks will get 5000 gems on top of their “just cosmetics” while others will not:

And sure you can earn gems on the daily by all sorts of things and in a few weeks (or months?) build up to 5k, but you know how else you get 5k of them at once? Cash…

Completing this month-ish long gacha event is the equivalent of spending around €15 in game (minus the gems you spent before going on reddit and claiming to be “free to play” because I have no idea what is up with gacha players and that pretense). All or nothing. You can miss a single piece and you are just as unlucky as someone missing 10 or refusing to play at all [unless you really want to dress as a lava lamp and frankly I respect that about you].

If they had cut the gem prize out and just said, “Hey, here are 15 suits and no one can win them all but if you don’t win your favorite then you can spend €2-€3 to unlock the one you want,” then I would have considered it more user friendly. It could have been comical just to see what kind of horse or sheep you end up getting.

It is also feels like some sort of test to figure out mechanics to be implemented elsewhere.

Some people (like me) can get 4 pieces a day but cannot buy additional pieces [probably thanks to Belgian law]. Some people seem to only only get 2 or 3 pieces per day (no clue why this might be). A lot of people have the ability to spend gems to get pieces (which seems to be the default). Some people started days later than others. There are a variety of glitches where people aren’t getting all their pieces.

This means you have all sorts of sub-pockets. Will people spend gems on such things. Is 5k worth it for the 4-per day crowd? How about the 2-per day crowd? There will be a PowerPoint slideshow about this presented at a board meeting.

Wave to the board, everyone!

HEY, DUOLINGO HEADQUARTERS, IT IS ME: SEMI-ANONYMIZED USER!

We have two options:

It is a real gacha and there will be some portion of the user base¹ too unlucky to win the 5k gems and all seven suits OR
It is a fake gacha and eventually everyone should win which means anyone who spent real gems, and possibly real money, lost.

In this case, option #1 is technically better but it’s also pretty damned awful for any company to be injecting into their games. I have no doubt that someone is already typing up a report if this should be a new regular business model for them to try and use despite it having to be a failure.

This simply cannot win them any new customers.

I refuse to believe that people on the fence about language learning or who have never heard of Duolingo installing it to play for the toy hunt but there will be people who ABSOLUTELY will leave the app because of it.

They only way that Duolingo wins is if enough people either become more entrenched into the app because a unicorn avatar cost them time, possibly money, and effort OR if enough people bought/spent gems to get bonuses pieces that it triggered a slight uptick in monetary gain that outweighed the folks who are now unsubscribing or just putting put off by it.

That and/or selling addiction-forming-behaviors data to other companies who are trying to figure out how to gamify daily tasks while making profit.

Oh, by the way, buying pieces does not guarantee you won’t just get duplicates. For around 5k of gems spent, you are only guaranteed 3 new pieces, total. But hey, at least some people have the option.

*snagged from u/wistfultyrant on reddit, used without permission*

Someone came up with an app to predict if you should spend gems to complete it [if you have avoided gacha your whole life, you might be surprised to see such dedication done for free by fans but you get used to it…] and right now it puts me around even odds to finish.

I did get the two I wanted (Rex and Mech). Even getting the two suits I wanted just makes me kind of distrust the game, though. And once the “learning app” adds in a game like this and makes it front and center, it is clearly defining itself as edutainment over education.

The tool I share below that sentence but above this footnote calculates actually the majority won’t complete it even if they do their lessons like a good little userbase. ↩︎

And another one…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-10-05

In Internet, Rants

Current Musical Mood: Mrs. Green Apple’s POPS [LGT: YT Music].

UPDATE (2026-Oct-06)

Since I posted this, Renegade Studios has responded and offered folks who felt caught off-guard a chance for a refund. Also, quite a few folks who had a more positive response have joined the thread and pointed out some things I talked about here: the shipping was transparent, etc.

Again, my primary complaint is the timeline (I knew it was coming, had planned roughly accordingly, and was still caught a bit off-guard by the timing).

I’ll leave the discussion about if people could have saved money for certain tiers by waiting and ordering later. Probably. Almost definitely. I don’t think I could have saved money since I was all-in. Still, there will be some.

Original Post

I talked about, not that long ago, withdrawing from crowdfunding. It’s been brewing. And, in the immortal words of DJ Khaled: there’s been another one.

Now, before I continue, I do want to say that I do not actually hold Renegade Studios culpable for [most of] this. In fact, without burying the lede, here is an extremely relevant screenshot of a pair of graphics still up on the Backerkit page that, as far as I know, has not been altered from the time period when I backed it:

Shipping is relatively high and relatively variable. And it tells you that taxes (VAT) will be applied at a later date. This was honest, upfront, and for shipping broadly accurate.

Here is where I do hold Renegade Studios more culpable: I got an email this weekend that said, “We have just now added the total of shipping and VAT to your pledge and you’ll be charged Sunday/Monday,” and if you glance across the Belgium line you can get an idea that we are talking about at least double digits. +VAT. Because there was a glitch that caused the prices to not show up until around 48 hours ago and shipping was charged, for me, around 8 hours ago.

The minimum time to prep should have been one week.

The screenshots at the top of the page show some of the responses to this. Thread is up to 285 messages. Some are repeats. Some are in support. Most are complaints.

Folks were finding out they were going to be charged on Monday (message actually said Sunday but my bank was waiting until Monday) for an amount that we found out on Saturday (or Friday, depending on time zones).

That is a problem. Even if RS was very upfront about what it was — and shipping was technically cheaper than above (maybe around 10-15% cheaper, give or take).

And for people in the US it almost sounds like they could have pre-ordered it from Amazon, gotten a fair number of the items at roughly the same price, and saved on shipping at least if they weren’t going all in. Even the Renegade Studios website might give free shipping over certain amounts.

I’ll let others do the math.

THIS IS ALL TO SAY that it just gets added to the stack of the many ways I’ve seen confusion, dismay, and issues crop up even with otherwise open and honest companies handling crowdfunding when said crowdfunding could have been pre-orders through existing storefronts.

It’s not on them, but I miss the days when crowdfunding felt a bit more energetic rather than expected.

Withdrawing even further from crowdfunding… aka, thanks for the marketing stunt

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-12

In Internet, Rants

Current musical mood: Syayos’s Anthem 1.1.

*from photo by Madeline Liu on Unsplash*

Last November, on my RPG/Solo-play blog, I posted about setting limits on my crowdfunding this year. I simultaneously spent too much on campaigns but also kind of hit the goal (backed fewer, paid more for the ones I did back). A partial success, in other words.

A few brought instant joy and have maintained that energy.

A few others: exact opposite.

Most campaigns I backed had very mixed results as to their delivery this year. Some of it was very much on them. Some of it was on the vast ocean of international shipping changes and charges (and the double whammy of changes to charges).

Some of it was obvious business strategies to treat Kickstarter and Backerkit as a lower responsibility store front to keep pushing hype.

The long and short of it can be summed up as:

I don’t need your extra crap designed to trigger FOMO
It is generally cheaper for me to buy it at full retail through a shipper who can handle international shipping

This past June had me me paying €30 in customs fees for a £12 deck of cards. Not like a fancy deck of cards with handwritten unique and bespoke fonts. Just…a deck of cards with some branding. Kind of stuff you’d expect to be for a tenner.

I had one book show up and thanks to the jackasses handling shipping (€40 I spent on it, including fees being supposedly pre-paid) writing it out as a “gift” worth only $0.01 I had to pay an additional €40. That’s €80 extra for a €40 book.

It sours things.

Many of the small projects I like to back are frankly economically untenable for me to get any physical tier in their current forms. Some creators are leaning hard on POD and I like that when I can print it either in country or through companies who will take the fees up front so I don’t have to pay extra fees later.

Shipping can still be steep, and quality takes a hit, but it’s doable.

There are also plenty of upper/mid-tier projects. Those can be nice because I know the product will be good, the shipping will be handled, the add-ons will be of quality….and I can buy everything I want from those campaigns from a store without going through crowdfunding tomfoolery. It’s ironic that those are the best ones to back for customer satisfaction.

Which brings me to a third bullet point which I held back, and it’s the most damning one for my own continued participation:

It is obvious that crowdfunding as a whole no longer aligns with my personal philosophy of what it means

This morning I got recommended a Youtube video with a name not quite but essentially: “Our Dream Is Dead.” I absolutely refuse to share any part of it [besides one graphic at the top of this post] but picture something like below for a thumbnail only he made himself up to look a bit like a clown (?) and slapped the word FAIL on it and you will get the point:

*Photo by Christian Buehner on Unsplash*

Over the video he goes on to explain a lot of things, mostly about how he is a great marketer for crowdfunding and how much he understands how to game Kickstarters and how, despite this, how much this dream campaign ultimately failed.

Dead, Space Pilgrims, dead in the water.

Screenshots of conversions and the lack thereof. Actively mentioning board game content creators for not being good marketing. Talking about Substacks and how to build marketing lists and, this cannot be stressed enough, how the man talking about a “failed” Kickstarter campaign knows how to market Kickstarter campaigns. All the while showing quality, PR-team-approved shots of the game in question.

wink, Space Pilgrims, wink

If you haven’t guessed the twist: the Kickstarter has actually fully funded within days of launching and still has 20+ days to go.

The video is marketing. How much is debatable. I feel like a lot but (see edit below) the creators are saying it was mostly accidental. There feels like some cynicism, here. It was not a “Day 3 and we are 70% there!” but “Day 3 and our studio is doomed.”

Marketing released before the campaign had succeeded but shown to me and many others after. Turning Kickstarter into GoFundMe but the thing on life support is the dream.

People trying to point this out in the comments are either being ignored or, in one case, having it explained to them how if a Kickstarter doesn’t fund in the first 24 hours it is a failure.

No matter how cynical this is, though, versus how honest: it really demonstrates how crowdfunding has long been digested and eaten by the exact same language it was meant to fix.

Pitting content creators against content enjoyers.

Thank you for helping to make it really clear to me how much I don’t care about participating in the guilting-customers into liking, sharing, subscribing, backing, and buying game.

Parasocial bullshit is destroying content creation more and more everyday.

To the rest of you, with only a couple of exceptions, I’ll see your stuff after it gets released and people come up with reviews that you didn’t pay them to write.

I hope it makes it. I truly do. I’m sure there is an audience out there somewhere for it.

Now I’m wondering how long until someone Kickstarts a campaign to market Kickstarter campaigns. Probably been done, hasn’t it?

EDIT/ADDITIONAL

Around the same time I was typing up my post someone else was calling them out for the “stunt” and the creator feedback actually makes the core issue sound much worse:

Third, we do not think we set [a dishonest] target; we set the minimum funding goal, which, of course, was expected to be surpassed quickly. If “funding goal” were the final objective for campaigns on Kickstarter these days, the campaigns would end once they reached it. But the algorithm here rewards those who raise 1000% of their minimum funding goal, ranking them higher. That explains why almost every campaign (regardless of their status and size) sets goals like this. Even in your list of backed projects, we can see many examples like these. They just succeeded in raising these “1000%,” so it is not presented to them as a sin. At least, we see it this way.

Even if this takes some disdain off the eyes of the creators, it just shows that this style of crowdfunding is a dead endeavor. Because people backing a project but not getting what they backed because the costs weren’t covered?

That’s a terrible practice.

I’m not giving the people who made the video a complete pass, though. I saw the video.

NYTimes’ Connections’ “hidden” community

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-11

In Internet

Current musical mood: Cephalo.

Sharing my own results today rather than a screenshot of anyone else’s material but in doing so realized I hit 777 Connections with a 44 streak and that seems fun.

I’ve thought about commenting on this topic for a while and today feels like as good as any for it but one of the fascinating things I have found as a longish-term player of NYTimes’ Connections puzzle is that there is a long-running community “hidden” in the comments section. A comment section I doubt many even really see.

Obviously, it’s not really hidden or I wouldn’t say jack about it. It’s just a group of folks who mostly share feedback on puzzles and the art given in the hints section but every once in a while it bubbles up into something interesting and unique.

Today is 11 September so quite a few of the posts are talking about 2001. In the past, though, I have seen a college student calling out for help due to homesickness and depression — with older folks giving actually helpful advice — and I have seen people talking news good and bad. There are some people who post stuff pretty much every day or weekly. Very nearly a blog with fans who follow and comment along.

Today I scrolled down and found there’s someone doing a kind of music puzzler thing with folks playing along. In a place “meant” to talk about solving a specific puzzle for a specific day.

It’s fascinating. And it takes me back to a period of time before we were all shunted into the Mass Approved Social Network Places™ and phrases like “subreddit” and “Facebook Community” became algorithmically controlled and billionaire spawning short-hand substitutes for events which have been happening since prior to the broad-release of the World Wide Web.

Back when you might hang out on an author’s website, a product forum, or a city page a few dozen people were active. Usenet groups, IRC channels, and mailing lists about all sorts of topics. Local BBSes about a music scene. The varieties were endless.

Never really private — though sometimes a bit invite-only (I was in some 90s RPG writer groups more locked down) — and how toxic vs nice they were was entirely down to whatever handful of members settled first. With plenty of members who hated the off-topic chatter while the boring silence without it was deafening.

These little fragile bespoke communities under constant assault from spambots, in-fighting, and the eventual heat-death of their tiny universe when whatever admin running it retired or had to retire the software due to security issues.

In that in-between living like dandelions growing out of sidewalk cracks: all down to the auspices of wind and rain.

Subreddits and Discord Servers try to emulate this but are something else. Built to allow it rather than simply watching it grow. With mods and multiple bullet-point lists for rules.

Flowers planted in a field rather than finding purchase in an empty lot.

Today’s Conspiracy Theory: Election Years and “New Maps”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-09-10

In Rants, The Algorithm

I’m going to not wade into the fact that you are almost definitely hearing about post-partum depression a lot because it is a mid-term election year in the United States (though you most likely are). In 2024, there was a certain track meet. 2020 I don’t even have to talk about.

Let’s just say certain patterns persist.

The less emotionally draining side of this same conspiratorial coin — though frustrations do run deep — is people trying their absolutely hardest to Both Sides™ the UN’s adoption of Equal Earth Projection maps.

Just today, this post popped up like so many others on Reddit as of late…

Obviously, I highlighted the text to bend it to my argument but the fact that the poster [whose name I kept in if you want to look some of their stuff, which does include some quite interesting map discussions besides this] felt to describe this in terms of victimhood just shows how people are baking the argument into the pretense of a statement. Begging the question or some such legal term. The mind boggles. Et cetera.

“Biggest victims…” Lord save us from Redditors. Could have just said something like “have the largest distortions in Atlantic centric versions of the maps” or whatever.

I legit feel that certain algorithmic forces are trying to poke this bear and ride the US-defaultism nature of sites like Reddit, Youtube, Facebook, etc to try and convince you that you should feel victimized by a map. Maybe I am just really unlucky. Who knows.

OP is also just wrong. Here’s what the above would look like if they had used the Pacific centered version of the map (which honestly gets more landmasses right so I don’t mind it, even as an Euro-located person, sorry Greenland/Iceland).

Heck, several places already use projections that are closer to to Equal Earth than Mercator. Go look at stuff like Winkel Tripel and Robinson Projections.

Good for all the people learning this past week that not everyone uses the same Atlantic-centered Mercator map (even if they end up preferring what they know). It is a nice moment to find out how other people do such things.

For the record, my favorite is probably something like Dymaxion or Hao’s Projection. Pole focused maps make the various landmasses much more interesting to me.

Also, we are now in the era where digital maps and the ability to have multiple projections at once makes this very, very moot. Different maps for different tasks.

A phenomenon that worries me though it might not actually exist…

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-08-12

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

*Photo by* *Mohammad Alizade* on Unsplash+

Have you ever been bothered by something which might not exist but also probably does? Something that is out there, perhaps intangibly, but its inchoate presence is felt like a fear more than actually touched?

An asteroid drifting through space an AU away. Undoubtedly there, but maybe just never here?

I have a similar feel to the collective responses and comments across online forums, social media, and more or less any place with open comments.

This post is directly in response to a couple of crowdfunding campaigns I backed early last year which have this year run into delays largely due to variances in the whole global shipping market (especially for smaller creators). A fair percentage of the comments are relatively positive or positively constructive, maybe asking for a refund due to the delay.

Just, there are a lot that are oddly…passionate. I’m talking about, “This is your last warning, you will SEND ME MY BOOKS!,” type stuff. Sometimes across multiple paragraphs. This is the stuff publicly posted so I can only imagine the personal emails and such are worse. Saw a couple of exchanges where people went back a bit later to apologize for some of the things they said, but then there were newer comments where these delayed shippings were deeply emotional troubling to the commenter.

I get it, I really do, but delayed shipping due to 2025/2026 is not exactly a personal attack. Few things are. If there is one thing I need you to take away from this post, it is this:

The content creator most likely does not know you and despite the constant drive to content consumers towards parasocial relationships¹, virtually (even absolutely) nothing the creators do is aimed at YOU personally. Fact is, one step towards happiness is realizing how few people actually even know you exist. Start with those people.

It is also just a broad response to why I can’t quite stand getting back into any social circle on the internet as a whole for long.

This is not a new phenomenon. “Don’t read the comments!,” has been internet wisdom longer than many current internet users have been alive. Back 10-20 years ago I had multiple scripts and style overrides in place to essentially hide every comment section on every site I regularly visited.

It just also feels worse. There’s a flavor there that I cannot fully place or identify. But it bothers me.

Years ago, maybe decades ago now, there was a comment/forum section for AL.com² where posts were strangely deranged and strangely off-topic. A collection of ego-centric diatribes in which virtually any topic was an assault on their particular self and way of life. Museum having a new exhibition? Dozens of rants about how art erodes the community while eating up valuable taxpayer dollars and also their nephew saw a painting of a fish that was aesthetically unpleasing. Which might turn into a debate about best fishing spots and how BamaKid033 is mentally broken if he likes fishing on X River. New fried chicken restaurant? THEY are destroying property values in good Christian neighborhoods. Space and Rocket Museum getting a grant to help preserve some of their exhibits? I kid you not, the end of all goodness as we know it. This last one happened a few times.

It has been some time since those were in existence so I am just taking some broad swipes but, Space Pilgrims, I need you to understand they are only gently broad. I just dialed them up a tiny bit for effect (and also dialed down for palatability).³ These were regular commenters. Racist. Deeply political (especially, on AL.com, to the right-wing side). Paranoid. Snarky. You can tell they thought they were funny when posting it. Starting from an immediate stance of aggression and personal attacks. Simultaneously painting the commenter as both the victim and also the powerhouse of the known universe. “You will listen to me! I am tired of being used!”

Maybe now that I’m largely off social media and largely in my own sphere doing IRL projects it feels worse than it is, but it feels to me like the AL.com comment section has taken over the internet.

OR, to use a different but similarly timed example, remember how Rebecca Black and her mom paid money to make a fun video where it was just a bunch of kids having a blast being in a music video? And the internet decided that because they could see it that the video was somehow forced on them and people, including somewhat reputable musical journalists, felt the stupid need to comment on it? To attack children for a video that should have been seen by a few dozen people and be a fun, core memory?

The hatred towards Rebecca Black’s “Friday” should be studied as one of the dumbest moments in internet history and a lesson we absolutely did not learn.

I really don’t think the human race has caught up to the fact that the internet is by and large voluntary. I’m not sure, at this point, if we ever will.

I saw a video this past week where a person who posts regular videos-of-the-day to talk about fun topics — in other words, using Youtube kind of like it was first and for a long time used — just was discussing an odd thing he read on Reddit and there were multiple comments where people were angry about the existence of the video. It felt like the presence of that video in their subscription feed was an affront to them.

Find any article that is slightly negative — about veganism, Doctor Who, whatever, pick a topic — and then people coming out to comment in a kind of hateful, snarky tone is not precisely unexpected. Studies have shown how people are drawn to negativity in social media and online discourse. It is just the vibe feels… well, it’s a vibe.

Paranoid. Self-obsessed. Angry. Lacking thoughtfulness. Lacking respect. Personally wronged. Gleefully antagonistic. Raging against the dying of the light (which might not ever have existed, another fake fall from Eden). Victim and aggressor. And, perhaps most annoyingly, utterly convinced that a slightly humorous, snarky tone is the exact way to make them sound sane. Why is it always posted in a faux-humorous tone? Did Vine and X break us? That short form commentary must be cute and funny? Hell if I know.

To put it in another way, it is like we have regressed as a digital society. Because we are on our phones on our own couch, maybe we think the internet has come to our living rooms rather than us going to it? A generation of people being fed by food delivery drivers complaining about the decor of restaurants. A generation waiting for the AI bubble to pop and spending hours each day creating AI art to pass the time out of fear of boredom.

“We drove to the gym…” only it’s everything, everywhere. All at once, even.

You blend this with rampant positivity on the “other side” and it is maddening. Of course both being couched in various oft-repeated phrases that have been The Algorithm™ approved. Generally without personality.

Four blue hearts in a line or death threats with nothing in between. Where “mid” and “average” are active insults.

“Ahh gurl energy got me feeling some way…,” fucking indeed.

THEN, Space Pilgrims, then we add in the bots…

Something made worse by platforms driving creators to fake friendships and engagements in order to court people towards things like Patreons and Youtube Memberships. It is deeply gross. ↩︎
I’m not linking it because I don’t really like their new website but it is awfulllly trivial to figure out how to get to it if you want to see it. ↩︎
I had a friend who hung out on that forum who got involved in a MULTI-year MULTI-party bullying cycle where many members claimed other people were stalking them or trying to destroy their lives. It was…odd. ↩︎

I Has a Sad… Good Bye, Media Library (version something)

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-07-02

In Technology

I have had an online server I have used for a few years for all sorts of things. Cloud storage. Seedbox. And especially a media streaming server.

Outside of physical media — and, to a now much lesser degree, YouTube — that server was my media life. Fact is, with my music and its complicated curated playlists and metadata it was the heavy winner. I spent maybe a hundred hours working on it and that was ok because I spent a couple hours per day using it. Sometimes much more.

Only Kaz and I had noticed that it was starting to limp along here or there. Kicking connections. Having some trouble processing slightly larger files.

It was clearly having trouble. The people who run it were looking into it.

Last week it stuttered so hard it just stopped working except in random bursts. Then, yesterday I got the news that the drive(s) the server was on just crapped into dust.

In the arms of an angel…

I spent a few seconds just staring into space and then went: ok, let’s start rebuilding.

It was a bit later when I realized that it is nearly impossible to rebuild to its previous form. At least not without some long term struggle.

Let’s take the music: There were a few thousand songs on there. Artists were marked with their country of origin, moods, styles, and related artists. I had a few different tags that helped to build a few large, well-used, and ever-shifting playlists. I had manually gone through and added artist photos for every single artist in my collection. Some bios. I had rebuilt cover art to look better whether on the screen or on the phone. I had months and months of play data. I had hundreds and hundreds of songs with ratings out of five stars (including half stars) to help me sort through albums and getting just my favorites. I had stuff on there to analyze sound styles to bring up sonically similar songs. Different “radio” modes.

More than that. All that could played on my computer or TV or phone from the same database.

Even though I already have another such online drive in place and could relatively quickly upload the music I have on my computer, it would easily be August or September before I had reasonable chance to rebuild any major portion of that and stuff like the ratings and moods and seed playlists would never happen quite the same way again.

And it’s a good chunk my fault. I *should* have taken the time to set up a relatively simple script to back up the metadata. Just stored that off-site somewhere. The basic 1-2-3 rule: 1 place is very bad, 2 is better, 3 is best. I got sloppy and now I’m paying for it.

Even some self-recriminations don’t make up for those moments I remember stuff that I had built up like a digital packrat for years and sorted joyously.

As of right now, I have no plans to build up music on this iteration of the drive. I’m going to get some of the video content back in place and leave it there for a bit. I’ll make sure everything is marked and consistently backed up.

For music, I’ll just go with Musicolet on my phone and Foobar2000 on my computer. There will variations in playlists and content and that’s ok. I’m already figuring out how to do small hacks on both to just get some of the flow I like back.

I am going to miss PLEX Music, that’s for sure.

Sometime this summer I will start building up my own NAS and get it good and beefy and stable early on. At that point I will probably return to building up my music library.

And hey, by this time next year it might be back to as good!