arcanicanis

I am a bit concerned about my gravitation to the game 'Casualties: Unknown'. A lot of it's really miserable, yet I cling right back to it, in an addiction that I don't fully understand. I was first playing it nightly from my Steam Deck, which was even more of a challenge (could only reasonably progress as 'Relaxed' tier; while 'Normal' is only progressable on desktop).

It should come as no surprise that when you try to dumb-down the responsibilities (and cheapen) an IT role, that you're only going to ensure retards are going to be running everything. The substantial scope of outages and data breaches in recent years should make it pretty self-evident, but I don't know if management types will ever learn anything.

https://arcanican.is/blog/2026/no-fun.php

Had a stream of thought that I needed to get written down, as presented above. Just expressing a mix of thoughts I've had in recent years, and not to seek out sympathy or anything. I'm sure there's some other folks involved in hobbies or communities that feel the same.

Oh my. I think I've just hit a new revelation for a software architecture that should be a lot more servicable, stateless, and more practical to host with just static files, and possibly still be able to do federation (through a second layer atop, for converting NDJSON streams and ID references, into standard ActivityPub objects/collections).

I was working on a sideproject of a web-based yt-dlp frontend (and media platform), but may be able to 'kill two birds with one stone' with the idea.

Time to throw almost everything out again and see if this one sticks.

Possibly to your interest, if you haven't seen it already: https://autocrypt2.org Apparently only 25 pages long, with seemingly clear and specific steps and some code examples (at least in cursory skimming): https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-autocrypt-openpgp-v2-cert/

I guess someone beat me to one of the pet projects I had in my pile (although probably far too literal of a recreation, I would have made some artistic liberties to make it distinct): https://github.com/processone/fluux-messenger

I'm sure OMEMO or other amenities will naturally follow, in time.

I guess I don't really know what I want anymore.

Despite having all the simple necessities, as well as plenty of positive social interactions and other things lately (even much more social/active than I normally am), I still don't feel 'completeness'?

For 'career', it gets draining at watching much of it being rotted out for exclusively overseas hiring, much of it being oversaturated by the MLM and 'get rich quick' types running it, and very little of anyone caring anymore.

Finding some Significant Other or "gf" or whatever is something that's barely on any list of priorities, just something to only cause more problems, I haven't cared about it (nor bothered) at all far beyond a decade now, and I only see plenty of divorce and separation now. Add to the fact that Gen X usually characterizes it like they were lucky, "like getting on the very last helicopter out of 'nam."

It'd be cool to make more friends, but online there's a sizable portion that refuse to associate if you don't adhere to like 95% of their political platform, others that feel 'walled off' by being opaque and always distant, or those that just want to fuel division/drama and 'whisper networks' (sometimes even over people they haven't even talked to...)

Usually my lead motivating force is making demonstrable progress in my professional/hobby projects, but now I'm sputtering out. I had made a stint on some fun creative side projects, but that doesn't help get the important work done. Social activity isn't filling the gap either.

I guess in the worst case, if I continue to feel some level of incompleteness or mood fluctuation or whatever, that I could maybe finally get around to having some blood work tests done, just to make sure it's not neurochemical antics.

I usually try to avoid touching any sort of "self-pity" subjects, given that social media is a TERRIBLE enabler of creating professional victims/whiners. Of course I'm highlighting plenty of the negatives, but there are also plenty of positives too.

"It is what it is" or whatever.

I keep building a pile of side-projects, and I'm sure that probably dries people's patience/hopes on earlier projects getting done (but I definitely will return to doing more ActivityPub and XMPP stuff again soon).

I guess I have a clearer set of ideas and design choices to make something more worthwhile to compete, for one niche that needs to be filled, and finding a decent middle-ground in expectations. Here's the design constraints/ideas I have:

Some video/voice conference system, reachable by some URL permalink, as a WebRTC web application, but intended for social/gaming use (not a formal 'professional' presenter-led conference system) Real-time chat would be completely ephemeral and there would be no concern about enforcing log retention at all (maybe past 60 messages at most) Instead, when there isn't a call, the same URL would serve as effectively a "sticky note board" where folks within the group would leave comments of when the next hangout is, or for folks to leave comments of not being able to make it next time, or that they'll be a little late, etc Could also have basic polls or go in deeper extremes like offering a 'mutual date/time planning' calendar system (timezone aware), for planning the next meetup time It would NOT intend to be another thing to add to the list of applications you keep open 24/7, and would by design be something you'd intend on peeking in at on occasion, usually where some reoccurring event/hangout/meetup is the foundation to a group This could also serve in auxiliary function to things like tabletop sessions (or VTTs, like Foundry) and alike too Or completely absent of using the video/voice call system, could be for in-person meetups also (and still provide a platform that someone could 'conference in') There could be an out-of-band notification system (email, instant message, etc), to ping about announcements or provide reminders, but meant to be infrequent and not spam your inbox

This is to avoid creating another catch-all, please-all, multi-purpose do-everything chat system that nags your attention and expects you to "just install the app" to maintain functional usefulness of it.

And more importantly to help keep folks together, to actually be doing stuff together, and not adding to the pile of messenger crap they have to 'maintain' attention on.

Would there be anything else worth adding, or existing ideas to refine further?

Uh-oh, I guess my fate is sealed: apparently I've been a wirehead for a sizable portion of my Steam activity this year.

My Modus Operandi

I'm probably not a socialite nor a regular to social media, most of my interaction occurs through chat or other realtime mediums instead (I should be 'approachable' on any platform regardless). I can be totally silent here for weeks, while still actually being here almost daily. I don't know the 'unwritten rules' in microblogging, so I'm sure I break supposed decorum plenty.

I'm very selective in who I follow, typically only following "low frequency posters", while I do very much manually navigate interesting "high-frequency poster" accounts periodically, by checking their posts [anonymously] directly on their instance. If you're a high-frequency poster on an instance that prohibits anonymous viewing, then you're unfortunately invisible to me.

While I may carry a negative sentiment towards specific subsets of people, it does not mean I carry those sentiments towards individuals (e.g. while I hold a disgust towards, say---Microsoft, it doesn't mean I automatically hate your guts if you're a Microsoft employee/contractor).

Debates/arguments are emotionally compartmentalized. If I'm arguing over something, or if you piss me off, it's almost never held against you. Sometimes my writing might read a lot more charged than what's intended. You can be diametrically opposed to me on almost every belief, and I can still be mutually friendly, as long as I'm not being routinely dragged into every "whataboutism" of the day, or expected to act as the spokesperson to every clickbait headline.

I usually don't try to initiate interaction with people across instances, unless it's clearly some informational prompt that I might be able to assist in. Otherwise if it's just social, I usually keep my distance: because there usually seems to be a hidden "social barrier" of being walled off from others, that I usually don't bother much anymore.

I am vulgar, but I will sometimes try my best to match the respective tone. If it's a professional context, I'll try to remain professional. If you're a bad actor just trying to play an optics game, I will just inherently be a dick back.

DO NOT ever try to control who I'm "allowed" to communicate with, what I'm allowed to participate in, etc. Sometimes I do have a hidden motive of trying to lead people away from dark places, meanwhile people aimlessly trying to disrupt that in some 'social justice!' agenda just end up f'ing it over entirely, and just produce a net-negative outcome all around. Invariably, expect that I may periodically jump in on some 'colorful' discussions, or interact with unusual characters.

I am fairly hard to 'weird out' (where it could almost be a sport in itself), so don't worry too much about impressions, if you reach out. You could literally come out of left field, talking about what my blood type is, life history, etc, and I'm not going to panic or anything. I have/had folks that could be categorized as stalkers (locally), and I manage to befriend those too. Just don't be the type to be showing up at the home of any of my family/relatives; nor just be some coomer seeking out someone to RP with (or something?) at all costs, with no substance in even basic conversation (as I've encountered when I had a character...).

Are there any FEPs for object expiry? Had some ideas recently, while also peeking at Nostr, which has their counterpart: https://nostr-nips.com/nip-40

There would be no expectation as some privacy/'security' feature, as it would be MAY rather than SHALL, and generally just to keep databases from permanently storing superfluous ephemeral events. This would be in scope primarily with servers and not so much with affecting client behavior.

This specifically would be ideal for things of short-term or instant messaging contexts with ActivityPub; perhaps also outlining some recommended defaults. e.g. instant messages that have an expiry of 30 days, music/game scrobbling events of a 5 day expiry, etc.

Nonetheless it would help cut down clutter and make it less painful for using ActivityPub as a transport for ephemeral content too.

I guess one effect I still miss from the Beryl/'Compiz Fusion' era of Linux compositors, was being able to use Ctrl+Scroll to adjust the transparency of a window. So I could have a movie playing, drag a terminal over top, make the terminal semi-transparent, and be able to mentally switch focus between the two, without having to look between screens.

That could be an interesting concept/trend: hosting providers where the users of a hosted service could just directly donate towards the provider (on behalf of the hosting customer), while having some mechanism for attestation on-platform that they were the donor of said funds.

I was recently contemplating ways to get a person's "currently playing" info (given there's no local API to query that directly from the Steam client, for example), then it crossed my mind that a Steam game's AppId might be passed through launch arguments, and apparently that's the case (for example, ATLYSS):

somebody 576533 0.1 0.0 29480 23876 ? S 20:40 0:00 /bin/sh -c /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-launch-wrapper -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- '/home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64'/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental'/proton waitforexitandrun '/ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe' somebody 576534 0.1 0.0 29004 5756 ? S 20:40 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/reaper SteamLaunch AppId=2768430 -- /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/common/SteamLinuxRuntime_sniper-arm64/_v2-entry-point --verb=waitforexitandrun -- /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/Proton - Experimental/proton waitforexitandrun /ext/SteamLibrary/steamapps/common/ATLYSS/ATLYSS.exe somebody 576843 10.3 0.1 232648 60504 ? Sl 20:41 0:00 /home/somebody/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/gameoverlayui -pid 576734 -steampid 3248 -manuallyclearframes 0 -gameid 2768430

Then I was having a concern of whether I'd have to query third-party platforms (e.g. SteamDB), just to infer the info about a game, from just it's AppId, but I guess there's actually an open, unauthenticated JSON API to query that data directly from Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/api/appdetails?appids=2768430

So as it stands, it wouldn't take much for a person to write a plugin to whatever XMPP (or etc) client, to push out that data, for those that want that visible.

Meanwhile, for open source launchers (e.g. Lutris), I'm sure someone could probably devise some userspace D-Bus API or something that a person could push that info locally (versus having to infer it off of running processes and their args).

Just doing some restructuring and refinement of my personal website thing, and got around to writing out one article I've been meaning to for a while now: https://arcanican.is/blog/2025/toxic.php

Title: The Catch-All Brain Shutoff Word: Toxic

I think the most consistent lie I've heard over the years is "yea, I'll holdout on my current copy of Windows until it's no longer viable, then I'll switch to Linux".

Adding to the broader subject: I don't even know what barriers are left for Microsoft to cross to alienate it's customer base that it hasn't already done. I think the only thing left they haven't done yet is just blatantly turn into ransomware, demanding you to do some action in limited time, or else face total data loss.

Had to update a few things

Great, the "non profit" ICANN is opening up another gTLD expansion in 2026, for companies to buy "bid" more new TLDs for possibly a couple million dollars each (if I'm not grossly misunderstanding or skimreading it).

https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2/agb

https://newgtldprogram.icann.org/en/application-rounds/round2

..."modern" CSS frameworks feel like a mental illness.

It's exceptionally vile how saturated the tech industry is with people that have no idea what they're doing, that act as if they're a "pro!", when they are the very reason there's major security incidents, or end up as another statistic of a botnet.

Everything is entirely about comfort to them, they don't want to adapt or learn, they just want to slap everything together with options that make them feel comforted and empowered, and never call in specialists where necessary.

Just as how dangerous a point-and-click Windows sysadmin with heavy Dunning-Kruger effect is, there's very much the same counterpart with the average idiot calling themself a web design agency because they know how to install WordPress (if at all, if they don't lean on something else to do that for them).

For something that could be done effectively in 50 lines of code (or sometimes basic sysadmin knowledge), they will instead go out to find a scatter of 3 different plugins to accomplish the same task, of dubious authors/quality.

Because they don't know how to code, and because the built-in block-based visual editor is "too confusing" for them, they will instead install a whole suite of another entire visual editor (Beaver Builder or Elementor), all entirely around their comfort. This crap can take up to 1GB of RAM to fulfill one web request, and they never see this as an issue (contextually: 1GB to generate +150KB of output).

Latest exhibit is an unfinished e-commerce website, that's had two other contractors they went to first, whereas after each contractor they'll pull me in solely to be the janitor and clean up others' work, usually starting as a call in middle of the night (phone ringing at 11pm/midnight in US Central), but they'll always cancel any subsequent work that needs to be done, and go with someone else instead.

Same thing happened again: they call me in to be the janitor in the middle of the night, they can't even be bothered to remember my email address (and ask for it to be spelled out for the +10th time over the phone), and when I check out the same project now, it's even exceptionally worse.

First time I've had to "fire the client" (after 2 years of this across other situations), and here's a video meme I've made of the actual plugin list they've amassed for a site that's supposed to be 'trusted' to process credit card information. (For context, only ~5 plugins would be necessary, if done competently. One plugin name is censored, because it has a contractor's name)

Just as I was rotating keys, I peeked around and noticed this is a currently ongoing project: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-openpgp-pqc/

Alright chat, rate my most inefficient base64 encoder:

(Inputs are on the left of a card, outputs on the right; red wires implies string datatype, orange implies char, green implies int. Light cyan-arrowed wire is an event impulse, pointing in direction of event trigger. Function input is in the top-left of first pic ("derp"), function output is top-right of last pic ("ZGVycA=="))

This is a component of a project of writing an XMPP client entirely in a visual scripting language (Protoflux) in a VR platform (Resonite), communicated over WebSockets. I already have the XML parser built. Had to write a base64 encoder next, to encode login info for PLAIN auth (since I don't have cryptographic primitives to do SCRAM).

Imagine if we had a protocol where it was required that you'd open up your SQL server to the public internet (with access control on writes, or reads on protected data, of course), and just have remote servers/clients just query straight off your database, regardless of query complexity.

So how is Solid any different than that with SPARQL, N3, Shape Trees, etc?

Every time I look at the stack of protocols to Solid ( https://solidproject.org/TR/ ), it feels like the engineering mess that was the OSI protocols, of overcomplicating a [relatively] simple problem.

I'm not saying SPARQL, semantic data, and alike don't have utility, as I'm sure it's probably used in various massively-scaled production environments; but that I don't see how you expect to have something publicly internet-facing that any entity on the internet could incur a heavy query on the server, or just with offloading so much compute responsibility to a server, instead of making a dumber server (just like how you can achieve an ActivityPub implementation in just static files, since it doesn't have a query language).

I could be uninformed (and I only periodically peek at it, and skim through some of the specs at times, I don't know it in depth), but I still don't see how this is going to be anything that could be operated cost-effectively and not be prone to trivial Denial of Service abuse.

That's jolly. Apparently Spectrum Business email can't handle sending to servers that use any form of greylisting. If it can't deliver successfully on the first attempt (even if a temp-fail code, such as 451), it just gives up right away.

Just another case of the wrong people being employed in the wrong position.

I usually don't care for needlessly abstract discussions, but in the objective of code readability; when describing a semantic triple, is it fair to use target instead of object?

In other words: subject --(predicate)--> target

instead of the usual: subject --(predicate)--> object

It feels like 'subject' and 'object' could easily be confused for where they are in the triple (for those new to the concept), while 'target' is clearer, yet any documentation on semantic triples seems to only use 'subject', 'predicate', 'object' to describe the components of a semantic triple.

Didn't expect that turn for someone that's been mostly virtue signalling the past couple years:

Neat, didn't notice that SCRAM for HTTP Authentication was a standardized thing until now: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7804

Apparently authored by an employee of an XMPP software vendor.

From periodically lurking X (and I'm sure the same applies to Bluesky), I don't understand the fixation of all the people that want to act as some self-appointed justice system that declares people 'pedophile', 'zoophile', or whatever else, based on some Google Doc of just alleged Discord/Telegram/etc screenshots, of conversations with people you have never heard of.

Should I demonstrate how trivial it is to edit conversation history in Discord with developer tools (when accessed from a browser)? Is it worth making a tool to fake Telegram screenshots, to also illustrate the same?

Why is it almost never verifiable court documents, charges, local news reports, etc? If the conversation screenshots are "proof", and there is reasonable evidence to a crime, why is nobody bothering to report to law enforcement, to then officially legally request those conversation logs from the platform and investigate further?

Then there's also times when people will decry any accusations against their friends or acquaintances as baseless, as nothing more than a desperate measure to take them down, but then clap like seals for any campaign against people they hate, for probably no different of quality of 'evidence'.

Just to be clear: anyone advocating for pedophilia or zoophilia deserves the woodchipper. What I'm complaining about is the people obsessing over and recirculating gossip, playing 'moral authority' of the internet, and all the factions that are just a constant inward firing squad.

And hell, it doesn't even have to be alleged crimes, there's some subsets of people that are just appear so insufferably miserable to each other, like some alleged Christian groups throwing each other out and advising people to stay away from certain people, for barely any justification at all.

I don't understand how people aren't self-aware of their own behavior, especially when it very likely is the cause to why they have no stable friendships or are usually alone.

What would be a fair, self-discoverable mechanism for a private user storage for an ActivityPub actor, primarily for the storage of arbitrary content such as client preferences, encrypted keyring, etc?

Naturally all I can think of would be another endpoint listed under the endpoints map in an actor, perhaps with a property name of userStorage, whereas the endpoint would be a Collection that you'd Add or Remove objects from.

Or alternatively, if it's something that should just be genericized to some system of arbitrary user-created collections (no idea if discussions about the streams attribute went anywhere), but then that'd probably lose meaning for something that could be self-discoverable (such having to then discover which collection holds a private-only user store for client-managed data, and make it more needlessly complicated).

This is pretty much the last gap that I need figured out, and then my overall plan should be complete, once resolved.

One thing I don't understand with DMARC reports: how do you even know which sending user is authoritative for a domain? Is the trust model just TOFU (within the same domain)? The DMARC TXT record just designates where to send reports to, but not which account reports should originate from for a domain.

Now I'm randomly curious: does phenomena of Dunbar's number indirectly include parasocial connections and brand names too? Do the people that worship brands and celebrities therefore have much less 'mental space' for remembering actual people in their lives?