Category: Commentary

Merry Christmas everyone. Especially the folks on Discord who I haven’t had a chance to interact with in a while. Am I missing any excitement on there?

I just got  a notice that I’ve received a few discord messages. However my discord account is still inaccessible so I can’t log in and view them. At this point it’s somewhat doubtful if I’ll be getting back in. So… if anyone had anything important to say, please send it through the contact form or email (address also on the contact page) instead.

But with that event over, I think I’m due for another semi-vacation on the blog. I’ve got a few things to take care of, including trying to get back on Discord, though if they’re dead set on getting a non-prepaid phone number from me, there may not be much I can do. Anyways, I’ll still do an update or two per day, but it’s gonna be less than usual for a bit.

Edit to add: Speaking of taking care of things, I just updated WordPress and a bunch of plug-ins. Let me know if you notice any unexpected behavior.

It seems I’ve lost access to my Discord account, for the time being at least. Needless to say, this is a pain in the ass since I can’t even manage my server. But I’m mostly posting this to let anyone who may message me there know why I’m not responding. Sorry, this happened very suddenly. Anyway they’re demanding “verification”, and it seems my prepaid phone isn’t good enough for them, so I’m stuck.

I will make further efforts to resolve this at a later date, but I can’t make any promises. I’m certainly not getting a new phone plan just to please some idiot at Discord HQ.

If anyone was having a problem with the main page not updating, or with the Random link going to the same post repeatedly, I think it’s fixed now. Let me know if I’m wrong. You may need to clear your cache or force-reload once to get it working again. Worst case, it should resolve in a week, because that was the longest I set anything to cache for previously.

Leaving tomorrow, getting back on the weekend. I’ll have a few posts queued up, but expect less than normal.

Sometime over next few days (maybe as soon as tonight, depending on how hard it looks) I’m gonna try setting up Cloudlfare to save bandwidth. I don’t really know how this will go. I’ve been assured I can always turn it off again, but beyond that I can’t make any promises. So worst case the site might be temporarily unavailable. One thing I do know is that anything involving changing DNS (which this does if I understand right) can take a while to propagate to everyone, so a certain amount of patience may be required with if any weirdness does come up.

Edit: Wow, that was actually easy. (Almost feels too easy…) I think it’s basically up and running. Now we just need to wait and see how it goes. Be sure and let me know if you notice anything wrong.

I just updated WordPress to 6.0. Since that’s a major version change I suppose there’s a higher than normal chance something might have broken. As usual, let me know if if you notice anything wrong. Conversely, I also updated several plug-ins including Jetpack, so there’s at least a possibility this will help with the images not appearing for some people.

First of all, I’m sorry about this. I think I know what’s going on, but unfortunately it’s mostly outside my control.

As you may recall I’m using a WordPress plug-in called Jetpack, which takes over some of the load of sharing images with you all  (and it’s free, so that’s pretty nice), but it does have weird glitches sometimes. In this case it appears it’s failing for people in Europe. I had a hunch when I saw which people were commenting about the error, and viewing the blog through ProxySite.com, which let’s you pick a US or EU proxy, seems to confirm it.

Since it appears to be a 3rd party problem, I’m hoping it will resolve itself, but of course I’ll look into it too, I’m just not sure there’s much I can do. I’m afraid disabling Jetpack isn’t an option, unless I can find a replacement. When I had a bandwidth crisis a month a go, doing that is exactly what caused it.

I’ve made another tweak to try and cut bandwidth. Basically direct access to the images is completely blocked now, so it should always go through Jetpack. But there’s a pretty high chance this change broke some things. Please let me know if you see the “Bandwidth doesn’t grow on trees” image appearing where it shouldn’t, or similar errors, and I’ll see what I can do to fix it. It’s likely I’ll need to set up exceptions to the rule in certain places.

I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but I’m kind of running out of ideas here. Cloudflare is another option, but at the moment that looks even less appealing.