It’s the end of the year, and I’ve done a lot! Of course, I also had a list of things I wanted to do in my Apple Notes, and uh … I actually don’t think I did even one of them. Seems, “Get more serious about dating and dating apps” just wasn’t in the cards. Regardless, I still did a lot of stuff, and things.
Near the end of last year, I decided that hosting my own Mastodon instance, was just too expensive to do on my own. From keeping remote-media bloat down, and figuring out how to keep Elastic Search under control, I ultimately decided that seventy bucks a month was too much.
Maybe, I’ll take another crack at it. I don’t know, yet.
But, with taking my Mastodon instance down, I erected the website you’re reading this post on, right now. I learned a lot on and about JavaScript, and Python, and set this whole thing up to be … reactive, and to showcase what I post on short-form social media, directly on my homepage, since I’m not always writing blog posts (they take me a while!)
During this time, I spent my online life on Labyrinth.Zone, and Social.lol. I also spent time on Wafrn, and even became a moderator there, who contributed a little bit to its development (when I say a LITTLE BIT, I mean a very, very, very little bit), but we know how that story went, and I have a whole lot of other things I want to say about the rising … thinly veiled MRA movement on the Fediverse, and beyond. But this just ain’t the post for it.
On the side of development, and AI …
I put a whole bunch of hacky utility scripts on Github, and then eventually and abruptly stopped using Github.
It’s been a turbulent year in regard to AI taking over everything, and especially in respect to how I feel about it. From outright hating every inch of it, to conceding that, if it doesn’t go away, then I’m going to spend a lot of time, maybe too much time, seething with hatred, instead of simply just learning how to live with it.
Which, is limited, because I’ve been off of Windows for two whole years, now!
I published my own Python app for ripping images off of an Instagram account, … and then subsequently found out later that as soon as you get rate limited, it’s useless. But, this was more of a response to being perma-banned by Instagram’s AI, for reasons unknown, with zero ways to regain control of my account, ever.
On the “metaverse” that I willingly participate in …
At the beginning of the year, I also took my city in Second Life down, and only recently decided to put it back up again. I’m in-debt up to my ears, largely due to some animal vets … years ago now, who gouged the absolute hell out of me, and have been slowly recovering ever since. And, I thought, why let debt control what I do and enjoy. What, like … I’m waiting to be debt free before I do what I want with my free time?
I could be eighty years old by then!
So, Neo Machina lives.
And, as usual, I’ve continued maintaining my virtual store, REVOSA, in Second Life, for it’s tenth year in a row that it’s been operating, entirely under my own control, and nobody else. I say, “nobody else,” because, although it is a much different beast than it was in 2015, it was something I built in response to someone screwing me over and stealing my oldest work.
If you’ve read this far, you’re probably going, “Seems like a pretty mediocre year, so far!”
But wait, there’s more!
I launched a “Discover the Fediverse” web app that makes browsing servers slightly easier! And, while I don’t know if anyone even uses it, you can check it out, here, or load it into FDroid with this link.
I also, finally released my TWENTY NINTH album on Bandcamp! Something I’ve been going at since 2017, despite the railroading and stonewalling I received from certain dudes on Twitter within the synthwave scene, back in 2020.
And then I launched a GoToSocial instance, and was satisfied with it for … about a week. Or, until I noticed that there’s really no way to get a federated timeline going. Which, kind of, to me, defeats the purpose of being on the Fediverse. If your connections and the people you talk to are only coming in one direction, i.e., via their discovery of you, then it seems kind of one-sided.
Especially, since, I’m on social media, not just to post and ghost, but to share my work with other people!
So, I launched my Akkoma instance (registrations are via invite codes you must obtain from me), that lives on a server alongside my Bluesky PDS (which is private, and is mostly just for me).
Akkoma is very lightweight, and so far, over the course of a month, I’ve been able to keep the instance size down a considerable amount. But, we’ll see how this shakes out.
In my personal life, or, in things I’ve been working on that people can’t see directly, at all times, or even ever, I’ve started re-writing my scifi novel (once again), and, although I have a lot of plans for it, I don’t have any idea for a date or time that it’ll be completed.
For now.
And … I think that’s most of it? There were a lot of other little things that happened. My indecisiveness about social media in-general, hopping back and forth between Fedi and Bluesky, until I launched both my own Fedi instance and my own PDS, which I now just use as a short-form base of operations. And, of course, there’s my old-school PhpBB forum that I run, which has a few people posting here and there.
Which, I should mention, only exists because of a heated argument I go into it with the guy who runs MelonLand, over his entire dismissal of anyone’s valid concerns on the topic of AI.
Anyway, that’s my year, uh, “wrapped.”
I’m not sure what I want to accomplish for 2026, but maybe for sure, I’ll definitely put, “Be more serious about dating again” on my to-do list.
Source: https://mkultra.monster/thoughts/2025/1 ... 5-wrapped/
