this blog: the dystopian future

As imagined by Rene Abythe.

But seriously. When the spammers and scammers ceaselessly nibbling at this blog's undersides, trying to get a malware toehold, finally drive me to use the giant governmento-corporate hosting services, one hopes there will be an alternative besides these two (Dumb and Dumberer).
As Bruce Sterling observed 10 or so years ago, the internet is an open sewer. Those huddled nervously in the gated communities (liking and sharing loudly to hide the reality of the septic Red Death outside) should stop and appreciate that which manages to survive in the muck of petty criminality that is the modern, barely-password-protected, non-prophylactically-shielded Net. Think about that next time you cast your naive Millennial aspersions about a self-hosted blog's "lack of transparency."

(For those in the enclaves: self-hosted comments are like tonsils, and current medical wisdom suggests they be removed to prevent future disease outbreaks. An alternative is replacement with something like Disqus, a prosthetic body part that someone else hosts and ultimately controls. It's only a matter of time before those become part of the Dumb or Dumberer families, is my belief.)

All of which is not to say that carefully-wrought blog posts, long in the writing and thinking, particularly need to be appended with "Nice job, dude," "You are completely wrong as usual," or the like.