The Mesk Mirror situation, and my withdrawal.

[Drunk Swede]

Alright, a situation update for those involved regarding the server situation and my inability to continue keeping up mesk's video archive long term. I hope lav won't mind me once again borrowing his general section, since I really have no other way of making a public statement aside from using mesk as a gopher.

I have been chewing through old spare hardware to maintain the server, wrangling together whatever I can using duct tape and string, but it's reaching the point where I don't exactly have the ability to continue doing this much longer. If you happen to be someone capable of acquiring the required hardware to take over this duty, here's what you need to know.

Currently the total size of the mirror is around 3tb, so you at the very least need 2x4tb drives to support the project in its current scope (online mirror and offline backup). It is being hosted on a personal internet connection that is being "shaped" (aka the nice way of saying throttled). For the best download speed, use a vpn (not tor, because I don't want tor traffic to be hitting my home connection for obvious reasons), preferably mullvad (verified good speed and bypasses throttling), to exit into sweden. This bypasses most throttling as you'll be on enterprise traffic instead of personal traffic.

Another note is that if you're not using reliable downloading tools (such as anyone using browsers that aren't pale moon with dta/gta or equivalent tools like wget or whatever), you're really gonna want to 100% verify hash matches against those on the server using something like hashmyfiles, or really any software capable of checking hashes.

Someone is already pulling a massive amount of videos simultaneously at the time I'm writing this. If you are this person, and you intend to take over the mirror project, please try to get a message to me either via pm here, or via meskian gopher systems.

I'll be trying to keep it up for as long as I can, but expect the server to go dead in at most half a year barring total component failure (it's already had bsods, random shutdowns, hdd's have failed, boot disks have failed, psu's have failed, the os is acting derpy, etc, and eventually I'll run out of spare crap to shove in that pc).

[IskatuMesk]

I appreciate the effort you have gone through to maintain the mirror. It's a shame that professional service, communication and consistency cannot be expected out of corporate services and only random individuals on unrelated areas of the planet.

No one other than the person you already know has ever made mentioned of having a server. Once this server goes down I will no longer have public content and will no longer be distributing content privately. Dreamhost killed my interest and passion for maintaining freely and easily available content to end-users and killed an enormous amount of my passion for creating content to begin with.

[Drunk Swede]

Yeah, it's sad to see corporate lies of "unlimited storage" kill your motivation to do shit. Anyways, I wanna thank you mesk for years of entertainment, and fun times had shitposting over the years. Even if shit got rocky at times, I wish you the best after I fuck off for good.

[IskatuMesk]

I've spent a very long time contemplating a lot of the ups and downs of the decades of casting. Especially the double interactions of how having a priority list and then the subsequent Dreamhost shitshow both impacted my shaky consistency extremely negatively. The latter was especially thunk provoking because I had often openly considered dropping the site myself, especially after 2017 which was a severe blow to my motivation and mental health in general.

I think the ultimate conclusion I come out of these contemplations is that I like to have agency in what happens to my work. I never pulled the trigger on any single thing because ultimately I am a creature of building things and even after the FTP goes dark I will undoubtedly continue to record and produce video content so long as I live. Given the very recent health scares though it's hard to say if I will actually outlive the ftp or not. In either event, it's always bothered me to have other people taking the responsibility of what should be my burden and my task. The decision to bring my work to the public sphere, especially given its problematic and controversial nature of being critical and analytical commentary, was mine, and ultimately I felt it should be my decision in how it is distributed, in what state it's distributed, and how that availability to others should be managed. While I can't control what other people do once they have my content, as a distributor I have always felt that centralized or archival platforms were not the correct decision and I wanted complete and isolated agency over my own platform.

I left youtube for a great many reasons and it would be foolish to think even my tamest content has a place there, quality notwithstanding. But the most important reason is that I don't have agency. It's not my site. I didn't build it. I didn't build GP, either - the domain has passed down over countless years and I've been with it since its inception in a great many forms, before finally resting in Lavarinth's hands. Lavarinth owns the hosting account and Lavarinth built the initial foundations of the site for me. But from thereon I took over, I learned the CSS and HTML necessary to adjust it, I organized it and made use of the human resources I had available to trial it and perfect it.

The goal never has been, never will be, to gain popularity, to posture as a social figure, to become an "influencer". Yet to this day I still have people asking me about content I made over twenty years ago. That's an aside.

I don't do well in social spheres. GP was never to feature socializing of any kind. I post updates and coffee hours. You consume them, if you want. That's it. It's not parasocial. I don't know you. You don't know me. I create content. Maybe your friend told you about it. That's it. That's all it ever should be.. I worked to try to restrict my content from appearing on SEO or crawlers to what extent my very juvenile knowledge allowed me. That's because I don't like what I become when I get into the spotlight. I can't handle it. I can't handle people, I can't handle pressure, and I can't handle responsibility. The realization that even a priority list was causing me subconscious distress and warping my decision making and actively hurting my productivity was enormous in realizing the weaknesses of my own mental growth. I can't be trusted to have associations to people even transiently.

GP's conclusion was the worst possible outcome. I had ultimately decided I would keep going because I had built it and it was mine and only I had the right to determine how it lives or dies and I chose to live because I wanted to keep building content, and every time I wondered how far I had come in video casting I only needed to type in a simple address and see something I had built with terabytes of content I could link to anyone in my contacts, articles that, while dated and poorly written, were relevant and educational to present day.

Then Lavarinth tells me days before Christmas that it all needs to end and there isn't shit all either of us can do about it.

Not having the power to make a difference, to have agency in the fate of sixteen years of work, is crazy. It feels terrible. Now you have borne the responsibility of a megacorporation in their stead without the financial backing that they were given by extent of a long and faithful contract. That has never sat right with me and never felt like something that someone else should have to do. The fact they are willing doesn't mean anything to me. It's just not something I really believe in. I especially realized that this morning when you told me about the tor client. "What if he gets in deep shit with his ISP because he was hosting MY content? That's my responsibility, now".

They are just stupid videos of some washed up Canadian talking about digital media only a handful of people really genuinely give a shit about or want to learn from. 99% of the people who are in my circles don't watch my content or give the slightest shit about anything I do. But it's something I've made since before most of them were even born. It's a part of me. I can't escape it any sooner than I can escape wanting to build things. This is what I do. I've tried to run away from it countless times in my life but I can't.

After Smokey died, my life ended. I've been a lifeless, soulless golem trudging along waiting to fall int a hole and disappear. Another death struck this year and it hits hard. Everything is falling apart and dying around me. I keep drifting and fading away. But I still make those Epic 7 recordings every second week day. I still edit those Elden Ring videos. I am a broken machine trying to cling to an old dream I don't even remember anymore. Just because it is my nature to do so. I cannot change what I am.

But the process of just trying to make that content a thing as content has been so unbearably stupid. Every single year we had those idiotic automated e-mails to scare the shit out of me. I always had to be worried about saying mean words on the internet because I don't live in a country that has freedom of speech. I always had to wonder if one day one of these companies would try to financially ruin me with bullshit lolsuits just because they'd know I have no way to defend myself.

I don't need to worry about those things anymore. I literally don't have the power to make a damn of a difference. And I honestly just refuse to have this responsibility offloaded to anyone else anymore. One all of this is over it's over. I don't want anyone else trying to take up the mantle. I'm not offloading that onto anyone else.

Life is watching everything you love die and coming to hate everything you once enjoyed.

[Drunk Swede]

I just want to note that I don't think there'll be an issue regarding the tor thing. I immediately looked up a listing of all known tor exit nodes and blocked that, which I can just point to if the isp ever cries about it and go "there, I immediately responded by blocking tor, I am not running a hidden service here". It did jitter me quite a bit though, because as anyone even vaguely familiar with tor's reputation is probably aware, every single exit node is watched by so many glow in the darks that the ip's could be used as christmas tree lights. Even if there's nothing to hide, being under scrutiny doesn't exactly feel good when you've already got paranoia issues.

If my situation was a bit less fucked, and I could just go and hop onto a new isp without worries, that'd be one thing, but... let's just say my situation wouldn't make it easy to do so, and that I'm fortunate this isp let us sign a contract in the first place.

Anyways, if you don't want to hand over the responsibility of publicly hosting content to someone else, then I guess people can consider this a grace period for just downloading things they wanna hold onto. As I said, I'll be withdrawing and becoming a complete lurker during 2024.

[IskatuMesk]

I've considered doing the hosting myself but I don't think I want to run a server 24/7 on a machine I do a lot of work on, and I'm plainly too dumb and busy to learn networking and administrative shit to keep it secure. As it is, I think just uploading directly to the one person will suffice for me after the fact. Maybe you can fetch the files from him when the time comes.

I've made the content available as best as I can and as best as you can for anyone who genuinely gives a shit. They only have themselves to blame if they miss it.

I've effectively withdrawn. Other than CMBW casting this is the closest thing I've come to being public about my work and the former has nothing to do with me at all.

Its crazy to think I've been making videos for nearly thirty years.

[Drunk Swede]

Afaik you're not even on an ip block where you could feasibly do self-hosting. You'd have to harass your isp to put you on a static ip rotation instead of the dynamic block (a dynamic block is when tons of people share an ip behind basically a domain instead of having a single ip assigned to them) so you can port forward. You could do say magnet links and torrents though, or possibly some p2p protocol. That's not really my domain of expertise though so it's something to investigate. If you could end up on a static ip, you might consider running an ftp maybe. At least I think there's less security concerns, and you can set it up to require accounts/manage accounts really easily from a gui.

[IskatuMesk]

Torrents would likely be the best middleground. Less overhead and hassle.