Status Updates (Patreon)

Hey all, so there’s been a fair bit going on behind the scenes, and also you may notice that there hasn’t been a video in quite awhile. We also gained a Mastodon server (social.restless.systems) in addition to the wiki. I’ve also been going through a pretty big set of life changes, so I wanted to give everyone the what’s going on, and where we’re going

Here’s the tl;dr

• No TBD on next videos, but I’m expecting to start streaming at least biweekly if not weekly.
  • May do supporter specific streams depending on interest, these might be more chillax streams vs. in depth tech ones.
• we’re going to be doing a lot of infrastructure and building things
• NCommander is going through some major life changes for the better
• I’m going to be documenting a modernization effort for a vintage website
• Laying down the foundation for the road ahead, including incorporation

Where’s the video coming out?

So, let’s get this out of the way first. I’m not sure when any new videos might come out. I’ve done several research projects, and livestreams, but right now, I’m very much discovering I can only be split in so many ways. I have been drafting a script for at least two potential video ideas (VENIX, and POSIX Subsystem), but I’m honestly not certain if I can make the time to even start work on either of these until after the New Years.

I do intend to keep live streaming, and will be streaming large portions of modernizing a legacy Perl project (see below). For the time being, I’m doing charity fundraisers, as well as things relating to potential upcoming real life work and more. The goal is to raise 5,000 USD for Trevor Project by December.

As things stand right now, I simply can’t do what I want to in terms of content creation with the very small budget available to me. Once I’m working full time again, and able to pull in a paycheck, I’ll have a lot more flexibility, including hiring editors, and others to help with what is an increasingly scary workflow.

Unfortunately, the Twitter implosion very much threw a massive monkeywrench. I’m going to document this below, but the last week has very much been learning what it’s like to speedrun Ruby on Rails devops. So, let’s go through the state of things.

Restless Systems

So, it started with a wiki (https://restless.systems) and now we have a Mastodon instance; while I don’t know if Twitter will actually go on, a significant portion of my non-YouTube presence is on Twitter, including a lot of my research threads such as POSIX Subsystem for Windows and others. We’ve also been doing a lot to document various such as AIX on Itanium (https://restless.systems/wiki/AIX_on_Itanium), various bits of computing history, and trying to save what we can of Internet history such as https://restless.systems/wiki/SoylentNews_History.

I’d like to give a major thanks to all who help edit the wiki, and a special thanks to BlackCoffeeDrinker, who has very much taken up the hat of devops for Mastodon maintenance to help keep some of the load off my back. I do very much hope to properly compensate them in the near future, which brings me to the next point.

Spinning up our own Fedi instance was not something I did lightly. By and large, the community made on YouTube, Twitter, and on Discord is a major part of what has let me do some absolutely incredible videos, and has helped lead to more than one major preservation milestone. I could have gone with just making an account on a larger provider, but there’s something to be said for providing your own service if you’re already got a lot of people in one area using it. Right now, we have just under 40 active users as is, a number I expect will grow as time goes on.

So far, Mastodon has proven to be a small, but ongoing time burden that will hopefully get better as we go. The same can be said for the wiki. BCD and the Wiki Volunteers are already doing work to get a fully automated devops platform, and we’ll likely be migrating Mastodon and MediaWiki to a Kubernetes style cluster in the near future, which will help with both administration burden and more. As resources allow, I also intend to grow the team to help keep this all possible. That brings me to my next point.

Incorporation

Well, this is always a scary word, but bare with me. Right now, everything is done in my name, and if something goes wrong, I’m entirely on the hook for it. With dealing with user created content, especially on the wiki and Mastodon, it’s time to seriously look at handling putting things under a holding company. This also means that if something happens to me (hospitalization, sudden death, etc), there’s a decent chance much of the archival and preservation work done as a community can outlive me. I actually do have experience in building this type of business before, I helped found SoylentNews Public Benefit Corporation in 2014, and it's still here and kicking nearly a decade later.

In all likelihood, incorporation is going to initially come in the form of an LLC, which, if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it. The short version is it makes it way easier for me to pay people for their work, and opens the door to doing a lot of things that would otherwise be impossible.

This won’t have any direct impact on any of you, but I feel it's important to keep everyone in the loop on what I’m doing, since you’re very much helping me do something. The largest thing that having incorporation in place is it would allow us to host specific fundraisers (ala Kickstarter) for preservation, or special events that are beyond any one individual.

I’ll keep you all apprised of where I stand as far as getting this done over the next month or so. Since I mentioned in passing that I already had experience with incorporating, I should probably bring up the next item, and that’s the SoylentNews revival project:

SoylentNews Revival

So for those who've been here since the very beginning, you may or may not be aware that neither YT nor DisNCord were the first real communities I was a part of. Before that, there was SoylentNews, which can be best described as “you don’t get to siphon a large part of the Slashdot old guard” in a week. I’ve already hosted a livestream on my work on reviving SN here, (https://youtu.be/HYRz7z3VW9Y), although its currently unlisted since I was concerned about possibly leaking internal IPs, I’m still working through cleaning up bits of it.

For context, SoylentNews is now 8 years old news website, which is running on a 30 year old mod_perl codebase (the same one that powered slashdot.org). The best way I can describe it is it  best be described as a passion project for the old Internet, combined with literally sticking it to the man. A pretty lengthy write-up on what’s been going on with SN can be found here (https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/11/12/1828232), which got up to about 140 comments before I had an accident with the production database. Given I’ve spent a not insignificant amount of time creating and forging SoylentNews in 2014-2016, I really don’t want to die a slow and inglorious death.

This is very much going to be a spare time project, but over the next few weeks, we’ll likely have an ongoing series going through maintenance, repairs, containizeration, and modernization over time. I’ll try and recount parts of lore during these streams, and I will mark them as best in advance as possible.

N’s Life

So, as you may have also gathered, I’ve been going through a large change in my life. My stint as the Restless Yankee was apart of this, and the month and change I spent touring has helped bring a lot of things into focus. It’s also illustrated some things in my personal life I really need to address.

I haven’t made it secret that I have chronic health issues, but well, recent treatments have helped, and I think I need to try and get back into the workforce. I’ve already had a few interviews, and sending my resume out to a few more places. It’s my hope that once I’ve got an actual paycheck again, I’ll be able to hire an editor, at least part time.

By and large I can do the research and scriptwriting for my content in a few days at most, but making motion graphics and more to keep it accessible is really hard. With additional, properly paid help, I can likely reduce the amount of time I need to produce a video. This also ties into incorporating my content stuff, since I can properly pay people then.

There’s also a much larger part of this. While I’m not ready to write it up in this post, it’s by and large dealing with a lot of the aftermath of depression, and worse. I love making content, and I love seeing software preservation, but to do the work I want to do properly, I need to be in a better place. I’ll write more about this in future posts, and talks on stream, but I thank you all for sticking with me.

Anyway, until next time, this is NCommander, signing out, wishing you all a pleasant day …