I used the same web host from November 2004 through December 2023. They were always good to me.

In December 2023, I got caught in what was, essentially, a scam. One of the discount sites that rhymes with “Poop On” offered a “lifetime hosting” package for a couple hundred bucks. Unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited number of sites. I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I thought if I get a few years out of it before they wound down, it would be worth it. So I switched.

Well… It lasted all of about three months before the “company” that offered the package “went out of business” and just sold all the accounts to their hosting wholesaler. The wholesaler then proceeded to charge us all at more or less what I’d been paying to my original host every month.

So to be clear, some “entrepreneur” 100% just defrauded a whole batch of people out of a bunch of money, then profited again by selling all those accounts in place to the company where they were hosted anyway. I imagine it’s like the old chain letter scams—people set it up when they need a quick $50,000 or $100,000 and assume they won’t get into legal trouble.

Anyway, now my sites were all on an international hosting wholesale host… who has honestly just plain sucked, and who really doesn’t care much about supporting these individual accounts vs. their reseller accounts. To be clear, it has sucked badly. Slow, no control over site domicile (I ended up on a UK physical host), buggy, unreliable. So I’ve been meaning to rehome back to my original host for a long time. (I toyed with the idea for a while of hosting in LightSail in my own AWS account, but I just don’t have the guts or the trust in my own skills to avoid huge unexpected charges.)

Anyway, we finally did it. Here we are with the first (and most important) of the sites back onto our US-based host that served me well for 20 years. The site feels much faster and the CPanel installation actually works properly. Also, I managed to create the hosting account with a serious typo at the start and they answered my ticket and changed the string in their hosting DB within about 10 minutes, from ticket create to ticket resolve.

If you want to know who the hosts are, let me know. But aside from that detail, the takeaway is: for everyone that for a couple of years now has at times had to email me with “I think your site is down again,” that era should be over. Thank God.

And hopefully I’ll post more as well, because the crap shoot of “is the site up, and will it respond within five minutes” when I go to post should now also be done with.

The structure of creativity throughout the information age is pretty simple, and it goes something like

• Increasing exponentially through the rise of the electronic world

• Reaching a crescendo around the time of the critical mass of the internet, with a higher cultural creativity and innovation quotient than ever before

• Then, falling completely off the face of the earth and entering a period of zero or even negative (destroying) creativity after the arrival of social media

Art is dead and I hate it. We need to kill social media and kill the internet and kill technology so that we can have art and the humans and sex, drugs, and rock and roll back.

Death, death, death, death, death.

— § —

Every word or image of creativity deletes a corresponding chunk of time from your life.

This is why creativity hurts, and also why the oldest people are also the dreariest.

— § —

The Posting Plan has been in execution and then aborted and then in execution and then aborted over and over again for days, and amidst it all of course there were more threats and such. But that’s how it all works, life isn’t really life without threats and such, especially in America the Beautiful.

— § —

When I feel my youngest is also when I feel my oldest.

There is a way in which nobody can read this or bad things will happen to me, and this is the sort of thing that everyone deals with in Our America which is why we’re all nihilists. At some point in the repression curve you decide that actually you would love for bad things to happen to you because you are tired of chewing on your voice.

Whatevs whatevs.

Nobody cares because nobody has time to care. Hell, people don’t even have time to care for themselves.

— § —

Frank Lloyd Wright is the scarecrow.

Enough.

Night.