September just flew by this year. I was going to take it a lot easier but life had other plans, of course.

I've been getting my cluster off the ground. I have it running now with k3s and all that but haven't gotten any of the services I want running on it yet. I tried to get a simple Apache container running so I could maybe tentatively attempt to move this site to it but I started running into the infamous "exec" error that comes with running Helm manifests on Raspberry Pi's. It took like two hours to clean up that mess. Just trying to delete that malformed container was a nightmare. Every time I thought I killed it there was some daemonset somewhere spawning more containers to replace the ones I was squashing. It was like some fucked up digital hydra, every head being replaced with two more. After I finally got the thing done and dead I was too exhausted to look into it further. I just moved this current server to the same switch along with my development server and called it a day. I do like the blinking lights of this setup, it oozes this mysterious technological vibe.

Like always I've picked up a few more technical books that I started leafing through. By chance I stumbled upon a social media mining book that I read in a NoStarch sampler and decided to get it. It's pretty good, although perhaps a bit shallow on the technical end. The book recommended another book by O'Reilly that came with a whole Docker container full of Jupyter notebooks and I picked that book up as well. I've applied for Twitter API keys and it's been surprising slow, I think I put the application in two weeks ago. In a sense that's a good thing. After all the bad stuff that's been happening with social media it's a positive development that there are safeguards in place. It just sucks that for a lot of straight evil folks with money it's easy as hell to get a Twitter API keys but for basic people like me it's a pure lottery if I'll ever get them.

As I wait I've been working on the book I bought before this about making webbots and spiders with PHP/cURL. I've gotten some of the basics down and hope to maybe make something interesting in the coming weeks.

I started playing Minecraft again and it concerns me. I really wanted to play something that can soak up my whole attention for more than 15 whole minutes and I knew slipping into the warm bathwaters of Minecraft would do just that. Walking around really feels like a new world opening up again. I was able to find a saddle right away so now I'm able to explore a whole lot more. I don't know what to do right now. I know I should stay away but there's something that's beckoning me in that game.

I've also been watching a lot of YouTube now, especially commentary channels. The "Algorithm" favors them so I end up watching more and more of that kind of stuff. When I started looking into myself and wondered what keeps me hooked to these videos it began dawning on me that commentary YouTubers are like virtual friends in many ways. They look right into the camera and talk to you. They talk about current events and you slowly get a sense that you are getting to know them as people. It's human contact mediated by flashing lights on a screen. It's creepy as hell when you think of it that way, but that's what it really it. In the truest sense, it like that stupid metaphor in "Fight Club", it's a single serve friend you can pull out when your primitive mind wants to see a human face so you stop feeling lonely.

What got me thinking about this is how casually many YouTubers mention that to them, making videos it a strictly commercial thing. I was watching a D'Angelo Wallace video where he signs off every video on his second channel with "now that I got 10 minutes of content out of this thank you to all xxxxxx of my subscribers, remember to...." etc. I know he says this in a joking way as an offhand remark but it really shows the mindset of the average YouTuber. You need to make 10 minute videos so you can fit the ads in and make money. Every video I watch now has bleeped out curse words and the YouTubers do their absolute best to phrase things in a way so that the algorithm doesn't get offended and demonetizes the video. It's like there's a new god guarding the morality of the world and that god is the YouTube suggestions algorithm.

Don't get me wrong, I know people have to make a living and make money if YouTube becomes your career. It just shocks me a bit how openly cynical a lot of YouTubers are about the whole thing. Some of them just outright say they saw how much money commentary YouTubers make and decided to just follow suite. I commend their honesty, but you'd think if you call yourself a "creator" you'd want to at least pretend the stuff you're doing has some kind of artistic merit.

Now I'm just nitpicking but I also hate how the term "content creator" has been absorbed by the community. Content creator sounds like a term used by YouTube technical staff to label the people who make videos. Content has a weird objectifying meaning to me. Content as a word sounds dull and meaningless, something that is put out to captivate attention long enough to allow for monetization via advertisements. The content is there just to keep you there just long enough. I'm probably not expressing my thoughts as clearly as I'd have hoped and maybe I'll get around to writing more about this. I just wanted to say that it weirds me out.

That's it for now, I'm going to end this post here. Hope I have something interesting to say next time but who are we kidding, it's going to be the same tripe next time as well. :D