Haha I wrote year 3030 accidentally. I’ll be dead by then, 100%. I wonder if my blog will survive until then? Probably not. Realistically, the moment I die, the blog dies too. Even though I’ve got blog posts scheduled to publish years from now, they’re likely only going to get read if I’m alive to maintain the VPS and the WordPress instance. Once I’m dead, the 1 person in the world who wants the content to survive is gone.

Now if there was a blockchain publishing extension for wordpress which built static a static page in advance, and published it only when a certain time arrived… Then there might be a chance. Unfortunately, no such solution exists… At least to my knowledge.

There is an IPFS extension, but it’s not going to do anything for me for unpublished content.

The blog is incredibly fragile as-is. There’s the breaking updates that can happen on wordpress while using plugin auto-updates. just the other month I experienced this, where a WordPress statistics plugin auto update and broke the entire website. Instead of loading content, a white screen of death accompanied with a database error blocked the grimtech.net experience.

Then there’s SSL issues, such as certificate expiry. It’s not an automated process at the moment, and every few months a new certificate must be generated or people’s browsers will block them from accessing grimtech.net via SSL. I’ve worked around this problem by not forcing HTTPS, which would let users access grimtech, albeit in an unencrypted manner.

Another potential failure point is money. This blog is hosted on a Virtual Private Server (VPS) by the excellent Vultr service. Use my referral code to get $100 in free service! https://www.vultr.com/?ref=8506203-6G

Vultr is great, but it comes at a cost. If left alone, my automatic credit card payments would eventually bounce, and service would expire.

I make automatic backups to Amazon S3, but those backups are locked away from public view. If the blog goes down, there’s little chance that the archive on S3 would re-emerge without me. As with Vultr, S3 is not free, and lack of payments would mean that the content gets permanently deleted.

There’s really only one way that this blog withstands the test of time, and that’s if I keep living until there’s a more permanent method in which to preserve my words. IPFS/Filecoin seem to be one of the most promising ways, at the moment. Unfortunately I think it’s going to take a few years for the tools to become available to where it’s something that I can do without spending exorbitant amounts of time doing research and implementation.

Is my content even worth preserving? I hesitate to say this because it’s bringing up feelings of low self esteem, but who am I to have my thoughts and feelings preserved past the point of my death?

I’m just an average guy living in year 2020. I haven’t done anything especially noteworthy. Sure I’ve done lots of things that I’m proud of, lots of things that I care about, but so has the next guy. What makes me so special to deserve my history to be preserved?

People get forgotten. There are countless people who have lived who have zero evidence that they had lived. That’s really sad.

I’ll probably end up like that. By running this blog with the intent of preserving my words after my death, I’m trying so hard to be somebody worth remembering. All while being painfully average. I’m doing something that is completely futile because of how fragile it is. Like I said before, nobody’s going to give a shit about this blog once I’m dead.

I was reminded of my friend Mindsforge, so I checked out his website. It’s good to see that he’s posting project writups every now and again.

Fuck, what if my friend Mindsforge passed away? Would there be anyone to preserve his content? I guess that person could be me. I’d have to get in touch with his family somehow, and convince them that I’m a friend.. A friend who hasn’t talked in years LOL.

But see what I mean? It would be easier to just let the content disappear along with the creator.

Well fuck.

Oh, I just thought of what I’d do. I’d add a section of grimtech.net for dead friend’s content.

Fuuuuck, that’s dark.

I guess it’s a bit deep, too. When loved ones die, their stories carry on by the people who those stories were made with… And only them. So this digital medium of blogging would be analogous to the survived memories.

I think I’m going to write a letter to my friend. I haven’t contacted him in some time, and I’m thinking of him, so now’s a good time. I’m writing it here first, so I can count it as journalling, LOL

Ahhh, I can’t send that shit! I’m totally depressed right now, and that feeling is going straight into the letter.

Time to walk to the mailbox.

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It is snowing. The snow is sticking. There’s probably 6 inches on the ground, which means it’s going to be very difficult to walk anywhere. Bicycling is out of the question as well.

Today I had plans to walk to the grocery store, but I’m abandoning that idea.

I ordered $25 worth of peanut butter via amazon. Amazon is one of the few places that I can order groceries online, and pay with EBT. All the grocery stores in the area accept EBT, but not for pickup or delivery. In-store only.

I’m paying a lot more for groceries because of the shipping. It sucks but what can I do? I guess I could ask my mom if I could go with her to the grocery store. That would be my most cost-effective and frugal way of getting groceries.

I’m out of raisins. sadface.

I’m out of everything that I can just open and eat right away. My go-tos over the past few months have been peanut butter, raisins, and oatmeal. I still have oatmeal. I think I’ll go have some of that.

I fucked up my oatmeal and had to throw it out. I used too much coconut oil and it was absolutely disgosting. I threw out the coconut oil, too, because it’s over a year expired.

Well I’m sad to do that. Here I am talking about being frugal and I threw out a cup of oatmeal. 🙁

I’m going to jump into gratitude because I’m not feeling so well today. I could use some gratitude. I could use gratitude and love and belonging.

I have group therapy today at 1PM. I’m thinking of skipping because I am not in the best of moods. Last week, the facilitator was talking about doing some chair dancing thing this week, and I really don’t want to do that.

I guess I could always pass. Passing in group therapy is always an option. I know group will definitely raise my spirits, if if just make the effort and show up.

I wanna work on video-website. It’s becoming a distributed system rather than an app, and that seems like the path of least resistance.

I started using CapRover the other day. It’s a very nice system. Kinda like a self-hosted Heroku. It’s got the ability to host a cluster of machines across various datacenters. I’ve wanted something like that for the longest time. It’s made deployments really easy. Not quite a git deployment like I had hoped, but a CLI deployment which is just as good.

I’ll start with gratitude today by saying that I’m thankful for CapRover. It’s surprisingly free software, given it’s feature set. I guess they probably wouldn’t have much audience if they didn’t give it away for free. What I do with web development is kinda niche.

I’m grateful for my friend Christopher Toledo. I’m going to send him a short message just to see how he’s doing, and not dump all the negativity that I was feeling this morning.

I’m grateful for my family. Christmas was warm and lovely, and in the days following, I feel a void.

I’m grateful for wordpress and how stable it has been. I often recommend it to people who want to start a website or blog, and I continue to stand by that recommendation. It’s got a great plugin, theme, and developer ecosystem, it’s user friendly, it’s fast and it’s good looking.

Excelsior!

I’m saying excelsior now, because I feel like it. Today’s affirmations are yet to come.

32. I am having a bad day. Let’s start over. Rebooting in 3… 2… 1… From here on, let’s have a great day!

58. Note to self: You are amazing.
57. I am a success: I can make this day great.