Tag: ranting about the algorithm

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

On 2026-08-12

*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. ↩︎

Chewing on a Proper “Self-Hosted” Web-Sphere: Very Early Thoughts

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-04-07

In Internet, Rants, The Algorithm

It wasn’t technically Daniel Sell’s “How to Stop Jumping Ship” that made me start thinking about the topic of this post, but that is a linkable resource that has some of the information that has filtered into my brain space:

How To Stop Jumping Ship
08 Mar, 2026

Almost all of us have been on the internet long enough to have had one of our essential community hubs go flying off into oncoming traffic. MySpace, G+, Discord (world weary sigh)? Facebook and Shitter's decent into I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream? Dead and dying, the lot of them, and they take what little community they generated down with them every bloody time. I'm tired of wasting energy on rebuilding community ties over and over again, it's not an especially good use of our time and it means that those of us who are most comfortable with, or benefit the most from, a fractured, chaotic wider community benefit and rise to the top. Behold, the world.

Important bit from slightly below that:

So I propose…we just toss it all in the bin and go back to the beginning. Blogs, newsletters, IRC, mailing groups, and, sure why not, Usenet, go nuts…These things are time tested, functional even in the face of overwhelming lack of interest from the general internet, and are, most importantly, utterly unbreakable. A specific blog, irc etc etc might disappear, but that won’t take anything besides that one facet of a larger whole with it.

What actually started it was an email which was sent out to the Melsonia email list. Same sort of information, a bit more pithy:

Do You Have A Blog Yet?

'Cos you should. Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy. So I made a webring and a blogroll to make me happy.

How To Be Happy Too
Go make a blog now. Even if all you do is post your campaign notes up on it, I wanna see it.
Join a webring. Yes, like in the 90s. People will find your blog and you don't have to do anything other than be you.
You can even add a blogroll to it, just like in the Google Plus times.
Post. Read. Post. Read. Delete social media. Post. Read.

Really, it's that easy. You don't need to be good or popular or cool. If anything, they're the worst people to have blogs. The uncooler the better, I say.

Pretty much everything in that image is in the above linked post, though one addition is very much in-line with the stuff I talk about here, which I’ll quote:

Social media is poisonous, drains all your finer impulses. Wastes energy you could spend being happy.

He includes a link to Bear Blog which I won’t include because I’m sure it is fine but this is not an endorsement of a particular product over the other and at a glance, the software seems to violate a couple of principles I’ll talk about in a minute.

If anything, this post is absolutely an anti-endorsement of anything that might be considered a product. Websites/Apps-as-products are killing us. Killing the earth. Killing creativity.

I Digress All Over The Algorithm

One caveat creeps up almost immediately: Sells and I are at least partially concerned about two different things. He seems to be largely talking about (a) moving towards a platform where ideas exist outside The Platform® and are not beholden to the constant drive towards enshittification and profits AND (b) coming up with something that trumps the Algorithm Class’s version of a good time. I like both of those things, both fit strongly in my Reclaim Ownership concept I have been discussing here or there on the blog, but I think for me there is something else brewing in my brain:

Stop treating the Algorithm Class like your friend: you are a commodity to them and the current internet is designed to take resources from you and feed your resources into their bank accounts [money they use to take more freedoms from you].

We are witnessing the death of ownership and are being manipulated into thinking we need them. In 2026, The Algorithm tells you you are bored, that you are unhappy, that you are worthless without The Algorithm, that your replacement worth is derived from the dopamine you get from participating in a rich-person’s profit margin. And we believe it…

Come and share! Like and subscribe! Upvote! Get your five-year streak!

We live in a world where we give third-party companies all the content that makes the platform worthwhile but then you give up increasing rights to your own creations as they rapidly change the rules. They don’t even ask nicely. They just have your college friends’ content being held hostage and you are lonely.

AI amoebae demanding access to our creations. Less control over what we can share versus keep. Free-fall user unfriendly design based around selling digital baubles. Digitally engineered loneliness and disease. All the other terrible aspects forced upon you while specialists in behavioral modeling outsource whitepapers to tell the owners of the servers how to maximize profits from your work.

It’s Big Tobacco all over again. Paying experts to make things more addicting while telling us they are just giving us a product we really want and rumors of your own addiction are greatly exaggerated.

With the bonus that it’s not only our creations, but often the core of our friends and family groups being held for ransom. “Keep smoking and you can keep talking to your mom back home!”

THEN, they take extra data from you and sell it.

It’s like the worst possible version of the peer-review process. That process has volunteer writers being edited/scored by volunteer editors and volunteer peer-review committees. Then the output is given freely to scientific publishers who generate substantial profit off making it available. With the consequence of not publishing can include missing out on tenure and promotion.

Only instead of contributing to the ever-expanding world of valuable science, we are simply trapped in a loop where in leaving a billion-dollar money maker we have no control over ends up with being branded as anti-social and distant. No party invites without social media. Missing out on collector’s items by our favorite brands because people on X got first dibs. How in the hell do we know what Florida Man is doing this week unless we spend hours each week doomscrolling through made up posts about Florida Man?

“I can’t leave Instagram, what about all my friends!?,” we say over and over as our data is stolen and the money generated from it is spent to lobby for war crimes. Taking your joy of expression and turning into AI slop generated in data centers so environmentally unfriendly they are altering ecosystems while unwriting decades of copyright and intellectual property law.

Don’t say, “If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer.” That’s tired. Sad. Ignorant. You can pay for it all day long and to The Algorithm Class you are just money and never enough.

Besides, you are very much paying for it and its the most expensive purchase you have ever made.

Like cats, there is no free social media. We are collectively paying billions of dollars to avoid going to bed on time. Our tax money spent to subsidize The Algorithm Class. In return, The Algorithm Class buying out a large portion of our governments for their needs. Every lost ecosystem and plot of land to build data centers. We are spending generational wealth indirectly to look at ads on Facebook.

And the saddest thing is that for all this money, you and your creations are worthless to them individually. Sold for pennies. A penny today so they can buy congressfolk to not pass privacy laws and make a dollar tomorrow.

That’s the thanks you get. Being sold for $0.03 on loop with no protections just so hackers can get your national ID numbers and ruin your credit while the data hoarders say, “oops,” and face no consequences.

There is no ceiling that will stop folks from generating profit off of your hard work and there are very few protections to keep you from suffering the laziness of their vibe-coding neglect.

I DIGRESS.

An Early Thought Experiment Towards Doug’s Ideal Web-Sphere

The point is that reading Sells’ post made me think about how hard it would be for me to actually get any of my friends and family on board with creating a web-ring or similar. I could probably get two or three signed up but the siren call of the wide-open for-sale web would hang there. We are two decades into the social-media-and-search-engine revolution that has stripped us of a properly free internet.

This means this is all in the heady realms of though experiment, so taking that as an act of freedom rather than problem, I was thinking of things I would like to see if I could back and shove Myspace off a cliff.

An actual emphasis on creator ownership, not just virtue signaling. No caveats or catch-EULAs where you give up the rights.
An emphasis on self-hosting or hosting done by entities where you pay them real world money to host your data and in exchange they treat it as hands off for any other use unless they pay you to use your data.
Related to above, but you are free to take your data whenever and wherever you please. Zero retention in a third party and absolutely no “a third party sold your stuff to another third party that has no contract with you explicitly” unlike the current real world problem.
“Censorship” and moderation are generated at the hands of the end-user through tools easy to read and use.
No advertisements unless the content creator is getting paid a substantial portion of the fee [let’s say 80+%] and at their behest [yes, this means content creators will have to pay to post stuff].
Multiple media streams — text, microblogging, video, audio — can be handled by servers optimal to them, each chosen by the content creator.
No addiction-behavior models. Discovery layer predicated by the needs and desires of the end user rather by a creation of any sort of presumed force.
In fact, there would be optimally many many end-user tools that have their own approach to discovery and moderation.
Anonymity vs ID exposure decided by content creators.
Absolutely NO Upvotes and, perhaps most controversial, probably NO comments posted to your own data stream [they would be posted to the commenter’s data stream]. The idea is to break apart the Skinner Box variation of the internet [as described here or there by Cory Doctorow]. You will not get algorithmically friendly shiny cookies. You share data and information and art: others can read it and watch it and enjoy it. SEO is the mind killer. SEO will pass right through you. When SEO is gone, all that remains will be memes.

In other words, something where people create content streams through many different self- or creator-focused-hosted methods and something — webrings, RSS/Atom feeds, metadata chunkers, your own eyes and fingers — will handle this and there will be no fake digital commons generating billions of dollars in revenue as long as you keep playing ball and getting your grandma to sign up for an account.

No lectures from AI-generated moderators about how you need to tweak your content to maximize conversions.

Hell, there would be no conversions. Death to the trust-economy. No product of The Algorithm Class has earned the right to addict us and constrain us to the information/data/consumption-complex they have chosen.

You decide what you want to read and no one knows what you do with it but you.

“It’s Gonna Be Our Year!”

By Doug Bolden

On 2026-01-01

In Daily Life, Expat Stuff, Grimbergen, The Algorithm

I don’t know who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to let me have so many green-tea-and-gins last night but they were a complete idiot.

Name probably rhymes with bug or rug or something similar.

Funnily, it wasn’t the gin that was the real problem. Had I mixed 2-3 shots of gin with a liter of water and drank that I’d probably feel pretty swell today. It was the couple of liters of green tea that kept me up to something like 03:00.

One year I’m just going to go to bed for New Year’s. Since Belgian parties are just getting started at midnight, it probably won’t be for a couple of years, mind.

It’s a gray day in Grimbergen which is just sort of saying, “It’s a day.” Kind of nice, though. Not too cold. Not too loud. Windy in a pleasant way. Noon but feels either earlier or later. A kind of liminal space.

I’m sitting here next to two open windows letting in 5C air and giving a thought to the standard thought that we all do on 1 Jan: resolutions. I swore off the whole thing a few years back, mostly, but sometimes they are fun. Sometimes they are hopeful.

Over on the Doug Alone, I talked about (mostly) leaving crowdfunding. That’s one of them. We’ll see how that goes.

A couple of other bigger ones in a more general sense of things (since crowdfunding is pretty much 100% tied into my solo roleplaying hobby) are (a) reducing gamification in my life and (b) generally increasing privacy awareness. And (a) is going to impact a lot of other potential resolutions.

“It’s Going to Be Our Year!”

Before I get to that, let me give you some insight into the core Doug experience. Last night, after getting the first green-tea-and-gin in myself, I started sending out pre-Happy-New-Year’s messages to a few friends and while the messages tended to be personalized, in very nearly all of them I joked about the phrase, “This is going to be our year!” Those who get my sense of humor appreciated I was both making fun of arbitrary goalposts and whispering the foulest curse of them all: hope.

It helps you have say it with a shaky voice like a person saying, “Maybe the cave troll isn’t home, we should go into the dark cave and find out.”

Joyfully nihilistic curses aside, maybe it will be. I don’t know. I just take things as they come, mostly.

(a) Reducing Gamification

This is frankly the biggest one for mental health and general well-being. I have no specific numbers (which feels like a pun) but the gamification of every single aspect of our life feels like it is increasing. Earn points for purchases. Day-week-month streaks in every app. Add five friends to earn a point. Allow GenAI to access your data? Well, we’ll do it anyhow but if you give it away you can get a badge to show off on your profile that no one will ever click.

I pay money to upgrade the “freemium” experience of Duolingo, Geoguessr, and NYTimes Games. All three are big about pushing daily plays and uses [“Please stay addicted to our services”]. Badges. Achievements. I “buy” (lease? not sure what the proper legal term would be) books on the Kindle and it sends me notifications about not letting my streak expire. When I started deleting social media, I was seeing it more, there. Stuff that has no business setting weekly/monthly/annual goals have started bundling it.

Back 20 projects on Crowdfundr.ai? You get platinum status. There are no benefits but still we love you like your parents never did. Spend $2000 on gachas? You get 1.25 points per $100 spent instead of just 1 point.

It’s an incessant noise. And the fact that so rarely do hitting any of these milestones unlock anything besides maybe meaningless in-game currency shows how effective it is to just offer up a hexagonal png to keep people reaching for a goal that only exists to increase company profits through addictive behavioral programing.

When I was first workshopping this resolution, I thought about flat out cutting out any app or system that had such systems baked in only I realized, relatively quickly, that I would more or less be able to not access the things I actually use.

Instead, the idea is to simply ignore the badges, achievements, streaks, and other stupid bullshit designed to increase addiction. If I didn’t read today, no more panic reading a chapter to keep my Kindle streak going. If I don’t feel like doing Duolingo, just let the streak die. In some cases, this will likely be tied into getting rid of some freemium upgrades. So it goes.

The irony of this is that it kind of negates the concept of resolutions. I do want to read more. Play more of my old favorite games. I want to solo play more. Take bigger risks. Lose weight. Work on fixing my ankle.

I will likely have to compromise to some degree. It can be hard to lose weight without tracking calories somewhat. It can be hard to budget better without a budget.

Just absolutely no apps to do the data for me.

(b) Increasing Privacy

Which brings us to the other major resolution. Find ways to increase my overall privacy. This one is harder to specify without sounding a bit like a conspiracy nut. Or, perhaps, it is easier to specify:

Stop giving private information to unlock upgrades,
Use more offline stuff and fewer things that require third party tracking,
Avoid using cloud-based systems more, especially now that so many cloud-based systems have decided that using them is akin to giving your personal documents to their AI systems,
Using my own storage back-up solutions, own media servers, own email servers, etc.
Using more encryption that isn’t designed to expose the data to the host,
etc

There are so many little ways this one will show up. It makes me think of something that Northerlion (the Twitch Streamer) said. He mentioned that getting cash from the ATM feels like a borderline criminal act because you get the cash and then no one really tracks how you spend it. The sense that if we just use the stuff we own, we are going dark.

After the move to Belgium, I have been watching more stuff streaming from my personal server and through physical media, partially because I would have to use VPN to watch my American-media-libraries despite paying a lot of real money to build them up and still being an American citizen.

And one of the aspects of this is that when I put in that DVD/Blu-Ray/CD then no one but myself really knows what I am watching or playing. If I play a CD a dozen times, it doesn’t get tracked and used to sell me something. I can watch a movie a dozen times and it is up to me to watch trailers to see what else I might like.

We’ve been so conditioned to accept The Algorithm(TM)’s “help” to fill every waking hour with media that we are giving up the ability to own these pieces of happiness. It is becoming increasingly obvious how much companies don’t want us to own our own media now that I kind of have to own it to enjoy the things I enjoy.

Just look at videogames. Now you buy a code in a physical case and you attach that code to your account and if that library every goes away, you bought a physical case in a store to temporarily lease a game.

Or movies where you buy a blu-ray and they want you to use the “free digital copy” code so they can keep better track of who has what. Some Blu-rays and DVDs have features that require you to access the internet to see fully.

“If you are not paying for it, you are not the customer,” is a lie. You are the customer, always, but also the product. It’s kind of up to us to set the line and we are currently losing and pretending its inevitable.

And that’s…madness.

The Blogger Canonical (?m=1) Issue Revisited

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-11-19

In Blog Stuff, Dougiverse, Internet, The Algorithm

If you want to just see an explanation of the issue, you can skip to THE TECHNICAL ISSUE, below. First, I get to rant a bit and give some context.

When I first returned to blogging after eight years, it was not with a traditional blog: it was with The Doug Alone PROLOGUE. It was a place for me to post notes and recaps about the solo rpg stuff I was doing.¹ Only there was a problem. I actually mentioned it on my final post on that blog. Google more or less refused to index it.

It looks like it did at least briefly index a single page and then wiped it later.

Even though the blog was primarily meant as a play journal, there were elements that I wanted people to find. Only there was a primary error that kept showing up by way of explanation:

I had a vague notion of what that meant but the more I looked into it, the more I found posts by people insisting it was not an error. It was intended. It’s not up to Google to SEO for you. Maybe your blog isn’t worthy. Here’s a reddit thread with most of those things said from just a few months ago.

However, after Noism Games posted a post noting their Blogger/Blogspot traffic had just plummeted, I felt curious and looked again.

Doug Is Right: The Blogger Canonical Edition

Here’s the tl;dr: I am right. The SEO experts are wrong on this one. Neener neener.

I knew I was roughly correct. I’ve worked with a lot of different web platforms over the years and am well aware that Google is a fickle beast when it comes to promoting something (say, a one-off post about carpet beetles) over things that are more core to your blog identity (such as old posts about a variety of horror movies). However, months of Google flat out ignoring a blog with unique content was not consistent. At least a few pages would have passed The Algorithm.

Those more in the know of the technical issues probably know, and I had an idea but just not why Blogger/Blogspot was being hit by it. Had I cared more, I would probably have put it together earlier. Would I have still moved blogs? Oh yes. I like having my own space to play.

The Technical Issue

What’s the issue?

Webpages can have canonical tags. It’s not required. It just helps Google (and other search engine type things) to say that the page with the listing is the page you want to index. If you are on a platform where your content might bounce from page to page, you can use it to say that this is the correct page.

EXAMPLE: You have a cooking blog. You have a set of pages with different recipes and other pages that include snippets of those recipes and you don’t want Google to send folks to the pages with only the snippets (such as a category page or a front page that shows the most recent). You prefer your recipes to be front and center. You put the canonical tag on those pages.

In the specific case of Blogger/Blogspot, there’s a bit of code that basically tells each new page to have a tag on the post itself:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

One aspect of this is to drop a simple line that gives the URL and says “this one, Google” in the <HEAD>:

<link href='https://dougalone.blogspot.com/2025/09/beginning-to-migrate-some-content-to.html' rel='canonical'/>

And that should be well in good except for a technical glitch on Google’s side. It does not scan the blog like a person on a home computer will. It scans largely as a mobile device. And Blogger/Blogspot, a GOOGLE PRODUCT, tries to be helpful by serving up a ?m=1 version of the page. Old themes did not have a native mobile version. Newer ones do, but the artifact from Ye Olde Times is still there.

Which means that Google gets a link like this for the page linked above:

https://dougalone.blogspot.com/2025/09/beginning-to-migrate-some-content-to.html?m=1

You can likely see where this is going. If you click on it, it is identical to the previous page, except the rel='canonical' is not pointing to that link, it is posted to the .html, not the .html?m=1 version.

This means for every Blogger/Blogspot page scanned, Google sees a page constantly serving up alternate pages and because the ?m=1 keeps persisting, it constantly fails to find the canonical pages.

What’s the Fix?

Unfortunately, the two primary fixes are both on Google engineers and since this has been brewing for a few years, I have no idea if they will fix it. Hopefully so, because Blogger/Blogspot is a nice all-in-one blog for people who don’t want to fiddle too hard and just want to get their content out there.

FIX #1 would be for Google to not treat ?x=y as wholly different pages at least in the case of mobile pages where the canonical link has identical content. I appreciate there are lots of cases where it is different content, but there should be a way to prevent that.

FIX #2 would be for Blogger/Blogspot to stop appending the ?m=1 to mobile pages. There are better ways to handle that. That feels like an artifact from 2010 era internet. Back when you had completely separate mobile sites. Ah, I remember those days unfondly.

What can we do as users of the product? I’m not sure. If you look, there are suggestions for Javascript workarounds. I am attempting to use the script at this page. Go gently into that night and double check before you use it, yourself.

I also did try updating my robots.txt file to tell Google to ignore ?m=1 pages. Will it work? I don’t know. I’m not precisely holding my breath. If I remember to check in a couple of months and it has worked, I’ll let you know.

User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /share-widget
Disallow: /*?m=1
Allow: /
Sitemap: https://dougalone.blogspot.com/sitemap.xml

Obviously, if you want to use that you want to change the final line to be whatever your blog’s address is. I’ve seen variations of that across multiple posts so I don’t know where it originated. Apparently older Blogger blogs had a baked in robots.txt but mine didn’t. I had to add it whole cloth.

Let’s see what the outcome of this double approach might be.

NOTE: It is possible that Google will eventually scan it via a non-mobile-first scanner and make all this a non-issue. Just 16-months seems like a fair time to run a test.

There is a paradox of solo play where a lot of folks, myself included, have a strong urge to share it with someone. The initial idea was not a blog. I thought about streaming some stuff on Youtube. Since I ended up figuring out a lot of mistakes, tweaking a lot of notions, and so forth: I am glad I went for a format that did not involve me just sitting there confused and sweaty on camera. ↩︎

Just deleted most of my Patreon follows, including the free ones

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-22

In Internet, Rants, Technology, The Algorithm

This morning I got a message from a Patreon Creator that was a simple “Hey” but based on previous interactions, I know any response to it would result in this person asking for more money. Let’s call them Person K.

I one time, now years ago, actually did send them some money outside of Patreon. I eventually said I wasn’t going to send them any more and after a few exchanges stop replying. Over the next few years, they sent me a lot:

I obfuscated it because I’m not interested in real naming-and-shaming but that should give you an idea. Each of those blue-boxes is a message, more or less. Most are friendly. Some are a bit insistent. All are basically asking for money. I skipped a few because I think I had enough to establish the point.

Not a single Doug-reply is in there. I left their Patreon a bit back, including the “free tier” [they sent me a “bye Doug :'(” response]. Then they kept messaging me. Not so frequent that I cared all that much.

Today was just a different sort of day, though. The kind of day where I was ready to delete most of the flack off my digital landscape.

I figured out how to block Person K — which gave me a message that Patreon had removed me from their page, so I guess somehow I was a zombie there — and gave a pretty big think about how I wanted to use & engage with Patreon if I kept using it. The final answer, after around thirty total seconds: not much. Very nearly none.

My problems with…well, sort of with Patreon but buckle up because Doug’s about to go off

I have always been a moderate- to lower-tier user, even at peak. There are lots of reasons why I have never gotten deeper into it. Let’s come up with something like a starter three really quick (# given is roughly the order I’d put the problem):

(5) The interface is fairly poor for a website that is one of the major backbones of the indie creator scene.

(3) It quickly gets costly. While backing a couple of Creators is not a whole lot of cash, it is easy to end up backing 10+ and seeing a monthly bill rivaling old school cable bills. Especially with how many Patreons have that stupid “$20+ a month to get your name at the end of my videos” thing.

“I’d like to thank DickMaster2000, the Might Gooble, Tom the Tominator…”

I personally don’t tend to engage with content on a subscription basis, ever. (4) I do things in little bursts.

This means I would back a podcast, listen to some of their backlog, wait a few months (paying the whole time to not use them), and then do another backlog. At this point I might leave or I might wait another few months to pick up another backlog.

If I ever left, if I ever downgraded, I might be losing out in months of content that I could access as long as I kept paying.

Which brings me to a fourth reason which is #2 in the final list, though this is less Patreon-specific and more the whole damned thing that is happening right now:

(2) Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic: freemium memberships, gachas, crowdfunding with backer-exclusives. Even when they enable some creators to make special content for their best supporters, there are very few safeguards for the backer-side and drive creators to work around this “value added” model.

FOMO is a billion-dollar industry driver across its many facets and a major slice of a lot of the modern hobby landscape. Apps that allow extra features, sites with minor upgrades, games with a few bonus aesthetics, gacha pulls, overspending on crowd-sourcing for extra features, member videos, etc.

I am not necessarily blaming all content-creators. Some do try to take care of their content-consumers. Some are in a place where this is the best way for them to publish their content. Some work very, very hard to make it worthwhile.

And, to clarify: exclusive content is not necessarily evil, no more than having a unique painting for sale at an art festival is evil, but when combined with the structure of the modern content marketplace, it has to be careful.

These massive third parties that run the websites and portals make it a constant focus for content-creators [from big media empires to smaller creators] to drive content-consumers to enter into a buy-in relationship. Break the old game with new characters. Make your character look more unique. Get a campaign exclusive t-shirt that you might never wear. A bonus chapter for your favorite book series. An exclusive series of videos shot in the director’s bedroom!

Come inside, friends, here is exclusive!

Which is where we get to #1 in the ever growing list:

(1) Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.

In many cases, they force consumers to spend a lot of time and effort to keep engaging with these communities and hobbies. Not just with the central creators but also the other members of the community, including trophies for heavy interaction and fake incentives to share memberships and similar addiction-driving behaviors.

We all lose (maybe not the platform owners)

These last two feed on each other. Creators are driven into increasingly less-profitable time-sinks to push a business model that has the real capability of driving consumers into feeling actively responsible for the well-being of their favorite creators.

That latter point cannot be stated loud enough. Whether it is time [like, comment, subscribe, share] or actual money and effort, our relationship to content creators is in a terribly strange place now. With many smaller creators having no other real options but to encourage the same predatory behavior that enables other entities [larger content creators and platforms] to also feed upon those same consumers.

Platforms like Youtube and Twitch have created a new type of rock star for us all to want to be. One with the doors kicked wide open. Only, the rules keep changing. The revenue keeps dropping. The user experience gets worse. Creators start tacking on Patreons, memberships, donation drives, subscription drives, an all sorts of behaviors that take away from the core experience that justifies the content creator even being on the damned platform to begin with.

Too often, your success is not about whether you are good or talented or just in it for fun and having a good time. Over and over the message is driven home: success is doing exactly the sort of thing that increases profits for the platform owners, the revenue handlers, and all the people who use them for advertisement. Keep your fans engaging so their data can be more widely shared with entities that are barely required to even admit they in the food chain. .

At best, it is a terrible stop-gap for a broken creator-consumer relationship where a few entities own so much of what we can consume while more indie folk are constantly trying to stay afloat [and here comes GenAI to tighten the screws further while eating the indie creations to learn how to emulate them].

At worst, this is an active abuse of psychological principles that have plagued humanity all the way back to our hunter-gatherer tribal roots. The need for community. The need for recognition. The need to provide. The fear of scarcity.

[Recap] The list in order of importance and slightly expanded

Business models that thrive on parasocial relationships, pseudo-communities, and consumer addiction are inherently evil.
Business models that promote FOMO [fear-of-missing-out] are inherently problematic.
Patreon quickly gets costly if you support more than a small number of Creators or feel the need [see #1 and #2] to engage at a higher tier.
I do things in little bursts, which systems like Patreon take advantage: you either engage constantly or you generate a backlog where you keep paying to avoid missing the content you already “own.”
The interface is fairly poor for a website all about connecting Creators to their consumers, which again means you have to engage frequently or spend time navigating past other temptations.

Um…Doug? We were talking about Patreon…

Right. RIGHT. Sorry, I get a bit ranty when I have a headache.

Also, like…when I don’t have a headache. Just, you know, in general.

The above thoughts had been on my mind for a while. The three “about Patreon” parts (#3, #4, and #5) are really why I just never could enjoy Patreon, personally: the UI, the cost, and the way I actually like enjoying the things I enjoy.

I didn’t like going to the website very much. I refused to get the app. I would get notifications and sometimes actually follow the link to get whatever file or post it was about. I would sometimes skip a month or two and just miss stuff. Every time I had a backlog I would just get frustrated trying to figure out what stuff for which I had “paid” was actually available [note: about that paying for…it’s complicated for such a model].

I still kept it up for a small handful of creators, some just a month or two, because I liked to support them. What’s that, did I feel responsible for them? Yeah, kind of. That is part of the problem, see? You start to feel like you, the viewer, are somehow beholden to pre-pay for content you may or may not enjoy because a lot of those content-creators are nice people with a dream.

However, when Person K from the first section of this post contacted me, it was a breaking point.

I went through a list.

Every Patreon I followed, paid or not, that I primarily enjoyed off-Patreon, I instantly unfollowed.

If I like their content on Patreon but was only there for short glimpses into the background “behind the scenes” type commentary [i.e., one that played, inadvertently or not against my sense of FOMO], I unfollowed.

If I was just there to support them for a bit and had already accomplished that, I unfollowed.

If I was only keeping one around to eventually get around to getting the content to which I had already subscribed but hadn’t actually consumed, I unfollowed. Yes, I lost all that content.

And on a personally selfish level: was I getting my money and time back or more? If not, I unfollowed.

Finally, was it sparking the hell out of some joy..

…if not? Yep.

There were times these points clashed. There were some that actually sparked joy but had exclusive tiers I didn’t want to bother with. Some were worth it but I would rather engage with them elsewhere.

Absolutely none of the people I unfollowed today were honestly bad actors (Person K is the closest to an exception but I can understand wanting money). They were all lovely creators. Just Patreon and all those points above showed up on a day when I headache.

The two which remain + some bonus shout outs

To end this on a kind of positive note, here are the two that survived all the cuts:

Witch House Media: I have been following them since their HPPodcraft days and they put out regular, good content about a niche genre that I adore.
Tana Pigeon | Mythic: I use Mythic a lot and I love reading the magazine. While I do get to take part in some polls and such and ask questions and whatnot, the Patreon is well worth the fee since I would have spent that money on the books and zines anyhow. It also lets me get some news about something that is a major hobby of mine. Excellently run.

Two that I did not keep for various reasons but did deeply appreciate are Dean Spencer Art and Brandon Scott. Dean Spencer puts out some of the best stock art for content creators and has regular posts and engagement. I just would rather go back to buying the pieces I will use, when I use them. Brandon Scott makes wonderfully creative stuff. He is the most likely candidate for someone I will go back and refollow once my headache clears.

Bonus shout out: Cracking the Cryptic. Lots of interactions, lots of content. I just reached a point I’d rather watch them on Youtube and buy their games/books.

Credits

The “Empty Tunnel”: Photo from from Getty Images via Unsplash+ License.

500 Day Reading Streak: I would like to thank the constant gamification of everyday pleasures! Also, my mom…

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-14

In Reading

Last night I hit a 500-day reading streak on my Kindle.

Which is to say on my Kindle App because I don’t think my Kindle, not even my newer Colorsoft one, has any sort of streak/days-of-reading/Kindle Challenge type screen. Maybe it does. I’m not going to look for it.

That’s neat though, hitting that. Only you can likely tell from the fact that the number of books I read on Kindle are only 31 this year [roughly 3 a month] so it doesn’t quite line up. With the move and all, it’s been a rough year for reading a lot.

I have maintained the act of looking at pages on a screen in a prescribed manner. I am the best.

Four quick thoughts and then to my morning workout with me! Why this streak is a lie…

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it’s actually longer…

The real total is something like 800 days. Twice over the past 2-3 years, the system has essentially not counted days when I have 100% read something. The last hiccup, apparently 500 days ago, was after I had spent a couple of hours finishing the back half of some book.

I remember being irate at the time because not only had I read for some time, but because I had the book in my library clearly marked as finished and had submitted a rating through the app. The “Finished Date” and presumably the “Rating Date” would have been for the day that the same app was claiming I had skipped reading.

Part of the reason I got to 500-days this time is because I was initially fussy about that and then it just became a habit.

I don’t recall the time before but I remember irate at that time, too.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only tracks the bare minimum…

I don’t know what all it actually tracks, not really. Is just opening the app enough? Just opening a book? The truth is that at 100-days of those 500-days were me opening the app or my Kindle (etc) and just reading for maybe 3- to 5-minutes. I would guess my average duration per day would not be all that high.

It is nice to have a gentle prod to keep up some reading because reading is a habit you have to nurture. It just might be better if I could set a minimal threshold [e.g., 10 pages, 20 minutes] to actually count.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only counts books-on-Kindle…

Probably half my reading, or more, in that whole time period was via physical books. Which means I either have to do the bare minimum opening of the app to satisfy above or I have to get a book on Kindle and on paper and then move the Kindle version forward.

I have done a bit both. Where both feel silly.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: the constant gamification of everyday pleasures is a poison…

In this case, the streak is not so much a lie as a constant external stressor to stay addicted to an app for reasons only tangentially related to the purpose of the app. Reading some is not hard for many of us but reading regularly is hard. Much like diet apps and exercise apps and productivity apps and language apps and many others: having this gamification added to them can help you to hit goals. That is true.

However, the fact that so many apps have such streaks and such baked in is mentally draining. We can no longer just play our games. Now, we have to play our games daily for shiny lights and particle effects to keep blessing us. Skip a day and you might just receive a meaningless warning. Our gentle hobbies to survive the soul-crushing march of modern life have been turned into just another stress for us to endure.

The whole time our personal data and habits are being scraped and digested by The Algorithm. Using the app is giving them permissions to dig deeper into our lives.

And we don’t even get paid. Hell, we pay for it.

Anyhow, off to see if I can hit 1000-days.

Inline Substitution Ciphers to Play with Semi-Hidden Text

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-11

In Blog Stuff, Ciphers, Coding, Encryption

jLh 903mO moh0 m3 S6 SnE 0so Vhshn0Sh 3SnmsV3 6Y ShFS SL0S 0nh 903mO0MME ‘Lmoohs ms QM0ms 3mSh’ (C2r!) 9tS 0M36 Vhshn0MME nhO6Vsmd09Mh 03 LtU0s-BnmSShs ShFS 9E nhS0msmsV UtOL 6Y SLh QtsOSt0Sm6s, BLmSh3Q0Oh, 0so 6SLhn hMhUhsS3. jLm3 B6tMo hs09Mh Uh, Y6n ms3S0sOh, S6 BnmSh ShFS SL0S O6sS0msho 3Q6mMhn3 6n L0o 6SLhn 03QhOS3 s6S msShsoho S6 9h nh0o 9E jLh 7MV6nmSLU BLmMh 3tnn6tsoho 9E ShFS SL0S m3 QhnYhOSME LtU0s- 0so U0OLmsh-nh0o09Mh. a O6tMo 30E ‘J6t = Q66 Q66 Lh0o’ BmSL6tS SL0S 9hmsV msohFho. uE NhhQmsV mS 0 36UhBL0S 3mUQMh 3t93SmStSm6s OEQLhn, SLm3 Uh0s3 SL0S mS h03E Y6n Qh6QMh S6 Sn0s3M0Sh h1hs BmSL6tS 0sE 3OnmQS 0so 0MM6B3 mS S6 9h nhM0Sm1hME tso6sh 0S 0 M0Shn o0Sh.

If you click the text above, it should “solve out” to a line of text that reads:

The basic idea is to try and generate strings of text that are basically ‘hidden in plain site’ (PUN!) but also generally recognizable as human-written text by retaining much of the punctuation, whitespace, and other elements. This would enable me, for instance, to write text that contained spoilers or had other aspects not intended to be read by The Algorithm while surrounded by text that is perfectly human- and machine-readable. I could say ‘You = poo poo head’ without that being indexed. By keeping it a somewhat simple substitution cypher, this means that it easy for people to translate even without any script and allows it to be relatively undone at a later date.

And then if you click it again (without refreshing the page), it should do essentially nothing. This is my basic first pass on coming up with an idea I have had for Dickens of a Blog since way back. I am unsure when I first posited it but likely around 2006 or 2007.

The idea was simple: set aside some portion of the text in an otherwise open-to-read blog post {e.g., spoilers, info semi-hidden from scrapers, bits that otherwise might be triggers} through a simple enough cipher or baseline encryption that solving it would not become hostile to Doug’s happiness if keys/etc were lost.

The Code Behind It

Version 1 is above. What happens if I have a fairly simple Python code:

from random import sample

def scramble_AlphaNum(oldAlphaNum):
    return ''.join(sample(oldAlphaNum, len(oldAlphaNum)))

alphaNum = "AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz0123456789"
newAlphaNum = scramble_AlphaNum(alphaNum)

text = "The basic idea is to try and generate strings of text that are basically 'hidden in plain site' (PUN!) but also generally recognizable as human-written text by retaining much of the punctuation, whitespace, and other elements. This would enable me, for instance, to write text that contained spoilers or had other aspects not intended to be read by The Algorithm while surrounded by text that is perfectly human- and machine-readable. I could say 'You = poo poo head' without that being indexed. By keeping it a somewhat simple substitution cypher, this means that it easy for people to translate even without any script and allows it to be relatively undone at a later date."
txet = ""
paraName = "demo01"

for t in text:
    try:
        txet = txet + newAlphaNum[alphaNum.index(t)]
    except:
        txet = txet + t
        
output = """ <p id=\"""" + paraName + """\" onclick="gentleScramble('""" + newAlphaNum + """', '""" + paraName + """'); this.onclick=null;">""" + txet + """</p>"""
        
print(output)

Right now, I have to manually edit the file to have the paragraph, div, or span ID and then the contents. It’s fairly trivial to more generalize this. Running that, it spits out a paragraph tag that looks like:

<p id="demo01" onclick="gentleScramble('70u9wOboihzYgVXLamGHINxMAUrsk6CQfcpnv3jS2tR1DB4FJEZdeyWqP8Tl5K', 'demo01'); this.onclick=null;">jLh 903mO moh0 m3 S6 SnE 0so Vhshn0Sh 3SnmsV3 6Y ShFS SL0S 0nh 903mO0MME 'Lmoohs ms QM0ms 3mSh' (C2r!) 9tS 0M36 Vhshn0MME nhO6Vsmd09Mh 03 LtU0s-BnmSShs ShFS 9E nhS0msmsV UtOL 6Y SLh QtsOSt0Sm6s, BLmSh3Q0Oh, 0so 6SLhn hMhUhsS3. jLm3 B6tMo hs09Mh Uh, Y6n ms3S0sOh, S6 BnmSh ShFS SL0S O6sS0msho 3Q6mMhn3 6n L0o 6SLhn 03QhOS3 s6S msShsoho S6 9h nh0o 9E jLh 7MV6nmSLU BLmMh 3tnn6tsoho 9E ShFS SL0S m3 QhnYhOSME LtU0s- 0so U0OLmsh-nh0o09Mh. a O6tMo 30E 'J6t = Q66 Q66 Lh0o' BmSL6tS SL0S 9hmsV msohFho. uE NhhQmsV mS 0 36UhBL0S 3mUQMh 3t93SmStSm6s OEQLhn, SLm3 Uh0s3 SL0S mS h03E Y6n Qh6QMh S6 Sn0s3M0Sh h1hs BmSL6tS 0sE 3OnmQS 0so 0MM6B3 mS S6 9h nhM0Sm1hME tso6sh 0S 0 M0Shn o0Sh.</p>

I add that to my document via Custom HTML. The first string is the randomized a-z/A-Z/0-9 alphanumeric characters of the common American English alphabet (etc). It is randomized per running of the script.

Then at the bottom of the page, I insert another Custom HTML section with this Javascript:

<script>
function gentleScramble(newAlpha,para) {
	const AlphaNum = "AaBbCcDdEeFfGgHhIiJjKkLlMmNnOoPpQqRrSsTtUuVvWwXxYyZz0123456789";
	const newAlphaNum = newAlpha;
	
	let victim = document.getElementById(para).textContent;
	let solution = "";
		
	for (let v = 0; v < victim.length; v++) {
		foundIt = newAlphaNum.indexOf(victim[v]);
		if (foundIt != -1) {
			solution = solution + AlphaNum[foundIt];
		} else {
			solution = solution + victim[v];
		}
	}
		
	document.getElementById(para).textContent=solution;
}
</script>

That text the paragraph and the substitution cipher and runs it the first click before passing the “this.onclick=null” to stop it from glitching out if a reader spam clicks it.

As it runs through it checks for characters in the defined “alphaNum” and ignores any that are not included. Those that are included it just re-subs them back to their original.

Voila.

Before you might say that this is fairly insecure, that is kind of the point. Is not trying to deeply encode the text, it is more just trying to play at gently hiding the text in a somewhat breakable pattern.

Current Issues

The first issue is that it is pretty hands on to generate the content, which is not 100% a problem for me but if I have several of these elements it will start to wear.

The solution I’m going to do is build a quick tool that allows for different element types {div, p, span} and a bit more of a GUI, probably through just a quick HTML page with text areas and buttons.

The second issue is that it only accepts characters in the a-z/A-Z/0-9 ranges. If I am typing in French and other languages, characters with diacritical marks will be ignored. This means that “ä” will show up as “ä” in the enciphered text. It’s not a deal breaker since the bulk of the text will be gently scrambled, but it can lead to potential weirdness.

The solution to this could be either to scan the contents and generate a shortened “alphaNum” that only includes characters in it while ignoring all the punctuation OR creating a new diaAlphaNum that includes a separate list of diacritically marked text.

I’m not sure which I prefer. I think I prefer to not worry about that so much.

The final issue at a glance is that any HTML elements inside that element {em, a, strong} would likewise be translated which at best would simply glitch them and at worse could in theory create HTML that is broken if it happens to stumble upon a different element than intended.

My solution to this problem is just to not do any of that.

There is a slight non-issue that feed readers and such will likely break in trying to help, but that’s a bit ok for the moment. Not for driving clicks or any such thing, just in that earlier attempts to build CSS/Javascript spoiler type solutions sometimes resulted in said spoilers being clearly visible to feed readers. It does possibly interfere with screen readers and that is a much bigger problem, but I’ll have to test it.

Possibilities for Expansion

My possible end goal for this would include this as a checklist:

Perhaps using a Vigenère cipher instead of a simple substitution one [because I prefer those],
Making it at least “smart” enough to ignore interior HTML elements, and
Generating a bit of styling that makes it more obvious what the reader is supposed to do, possibly including a failsafe type option if the reader has all javascript blocked, etc.

Ghost and The King: Dreamin’

By Doug Bolden

On 2025-10-02

In Discoveries, Music, Music Video

Here we go. Here’s a decent “first real post” besides the classic “hello, world” type posts with with which blogs are stricken.

Every once in a while, I get into a mood for new music. It tends to be the kind of thing where I am beholden to The Algorithm™ to actually find anything. Bandcamp. Youtube. Maybe Google searches. A few other places.

One trick is to find a song/musician I liked. Search that/them. Look for other stuff recommended or discussed around them. Dip toes in. Keep going. Follow the trails. “Truffle hunting,” we sometimes called it while working at the library. Find a resource, see what it linked and cited, follow those and keep digging until you have a better scope.

Except, you know… The Algorithm™.

At any rate, one of those songs that I drummed up earlier this year while cruising through a mix of Durry’s build up to This Movie Sucked, trying to find new Japanese pop music, and trying to find new Belgian/French music (prior to the move) was Ghost and the King’s “Dreamin'” off their 2024 self-titled album.

I quite enjoyed it. Pleasant tune. Fair lyrics. I liked the set up of the video [including some very low budget Legend of Zelda cosplay]. I miss that personal vibe for Youtube. It feels like a passion project.

A handful of times since then I’d go back and listen to it. I even bought the album. I consider the album as a whole fair. “Dreamin'” is my still favorite song, but you can sample tracks “Don’t Often Sing the Blues,” “Nightingale,” and “Give a Damn” if you want to get a vibe for the rest.

With my most recent rewatch, I saw that only had 250 views (on Youtube, not sure about Spotify since I don’t really hang out in the latter anymore unless someone insists it upon me). Which seems low. I wanted to go ahead and give a shout out. Left a comment. All in all just trying to poke The Algorithm™.

It is currently the last video they posted and I don’t much else about it or them. Their online presence seems to be mostly social media. I’ll leave that to others to share.