theropologist

Alice, 26 days ago to random

A/S/L?

I'll go first.
45/tomato bisque/California

theropologist, 26 days ago to random

The moon is in plantigrade this evening. This has angered the worms. Look at them writhe! See how they flail their tiny pink noses in their fearsome wrath! Don't worry, buddy, they're just worms. They can't do anything to you. Go ahead, stomp them with your big flat feet! Feel that hot pink spaghetti wriggling through your toes! This is what you were made for.

theropologist, 26 days ago to random

Life hack: always keep a banana on hand to secure your mouse when transporting your laptop.

theropologist, 27 days ago to random

Two sheds, perchance just one.

theropologist, 27 days ago to random

The second law of thermodynamics seems to apply to everything in the universe except my shred pile

theropologist, 27 days ago to random

Welp it appears that I have reached the age where I understand the need for perching reading glasses upon the tip of one's nose

theropologist, 27 days ago to random

Wait, you're telling me Space Jam isn't a Grateful Dead documentary??

theropologist, 29 days ago to random

The law of information entropy states that users will come up with increasingly baroque ways to break your software the closer you get to your vacation

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

If you could have one new skill starting right now, what would it be?

the_etrain, 1 month ago to random

It's a Snoop Doggwood cause it's 4/20.

mentallyalex, 1 month ago to random

There are bots reply guying to tell people the man who self-immolated was "not a trump supporter, just mentally ill. It's really sad."

I read the manifest. He was definitely not a well person, but he was also most definitely not just mentally ill.

Dismissing someone's illness as their only defining factor is gross. Did his illness play a part in his death? Most assuredly. But so did many other decisions.

theropologist, 1 month ago to random

Standing in line outside a record store again, waiting to buy another Grateful Dead live show that I can download for free off of archive.org. Best day of the year!

RickiTarr, 1 month ago to random

I remember being a kid, and having the realization that the money the government has is our money, and how weird it is that people act like using social services is taking advantage of the system somehow. We are the system, the people embezzling money through the "defense" budget are the people taking advantage of the system.

theropologist, 1 month ago to random

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

State of The Instance - April 2024

I finally got the invoice for March so I can crunch the numbers once again. Hetzner has assured me this was a one-time delay and going forward I'll be receiving my invoices on the first of the month like normal, so my precious spreadsheet is saved.

On another note, Hetzner has recently gone from Extremely Boring to Moderately Interesting, which is enough to cause me a good deal of anxiety. There have been a couple of reports from other admins about Hetzner closing their accounts with no explanation and, more importantly, no access to their data. This is a nightmare scenario, but I'm not ready to jump ship just yet, because I've looked around at alternatives and Hetzner is still Pretty Dang Cheap. However, as a hedge against the nightmare scenario, I have moved the database backups to another provider's data center on an entirely different continent, so that if something happens with Hetzner I will still have a recent copy of the database and will be able to migrate the instance to a new hosting service with minimal loss of data.

Ok, on to the numbers:

In the month of March we gained 13 new party-goers, plus 22 new sign ups in the first 18 days of April, for a grand total of 394 beautiful beige babies. Of those, 235 accounts have been active in the last month.

Welcome new party-goers! if you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

Finances:

For the month of March we received $230.00 in donations. After PayPal fees, that comes out to $200.87. We had $1,496.60 left over from February, so our total available funds for paying the March hosting fees was $1,726.60.

The hosting fees for March break down as follows:

VPS Hosting: $91.07
Foreign Transaction Fee: $2.45
S3 Storage: $9.28
SMTP Relay: $15.00

Total: $117.80

After paying the hosting bills for March, we have $1,579.67 left in donation funds. That's enough to keep us running for over a year, so we are in good shape. Thank you to all who donated!

And thank you to all of the party-goers for being awesome people and making this the great community it has become. It's honestly more than I could have imagined when I started this instance, and it's all because of you fine folks.

Beige-bless :bb:

A spreadsheet breaking down donations by date for the month of March: Date Amount Fees Net 3/4/2024 $10.00 $1.34 $8.66 3/4/2024 $10.00 $1.34 $8.66 3/4/2024 $50.00 $4.74 $45.26 3/6/2024 $10.00 $1.34 $8.66 3/6/2024 $10.00 $1.49 $8.51 3/9/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/14/2024 $10.00 $1.34 $8.66 3/15/2024 $10.00 $1.49 $8.51 3/17/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/17/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/18/2024 $10.00 $0.79 $9.21 3/20/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/21/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/21/2024 $10.00 $1.34 $8.66 3/21/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/21/2024 $5.00 $0.99 $4.01 3/22/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/25/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 3/27/2024 $50.00 $4.74 $45.26 3/29/2024 $5.00 $0.91 $4.09 Total $230.00 $29.13 $200.87

theropologist, 1 month ago to random

I can't believe I was able to download an audio file of Bobby Weir singing "Wang Dang Doodle" without having to fire up the Tor browser or anything