Bingology - The Blog of Aaron 'BingoBoingo' Rogier

Dead Internet Theory And Searching For The Sticky

September 11th, 2021

As my adventures in dropping video content into an internet sewer continue, searching out topics capable of generating stickiness with an audience is a challenge. Recently considering "Dead Internet Theory" in one video, I got to explore some of the mechanisms challenging human activity on the internet.

After flitting through Uruguay related topics and trying out some internet weird, covering the ways the internet has rotted and been replaced by cattle herding mechanisms may be the useful line of inquiry. Useful in the sense that it's a topic I can keep pumping out content that may lure in an audience that continues viewing for that toilet tainted ad money.

Following the events of the past year and a half, the mass discontent is out there. Plenty of reclined bipeds doomscrolling in their bubbles waiting for things to happen. I ain't got, at this time, any thing to happen for them. But I suspect there's enough interest in the whys of the rot to work my way into becoming a regular feature of the doomscrolling. It's only been 20 years since all the television news networks launched that bottom of the screen doom scroll of their own. Since that morning during the European history exam where we were pulled into the classroom next door to watch the towers get fucked by airplanes in the biggest premier of any porno in history, the US has played everything wrong. And people still wonder why I don't intend to go back?

I'm spending this 9/11 with a wonderful companion that adores me. She was alive at the time, but doesn't remember where she was (probably shitting her pants was the guess).

There's been no new cult to find. Nothing out there worth evangelizing. Might as well tell people "Y'all aren't an incels, your're getting fucked plenty. You just don't like it." Elon Musk moves from California to Texas just in time for Texas to start shitting the bed too. Tijuana was closer bitch.

I made it out of a failing empire, to a smaller more orderly outpost of civilization, but the humanity supporting civilization all around has fallen into rot. There weren't men with which to build a lasting Republic, and I'm still bitter about only discovering stimulant medication now. All I see to do is start feeding the doomscroll the story of the rotting as I lived it. Happy 9/11 everyone.

Posted in Exercises, Housekeeping, Midwestern Rube, PolitiX, Politics | No Comments »

Adventures In Video

August 22nd, 2021

Apparently Youtube with stealth disappear comments, but only after they put out the notification.

Free Man
Why you make content on us.alphabet platform? Shouldn't had more sense to continue self hosting? As soon that Google wont like your content they will take down the channel

The simple answer is that the platform is where the eyeballs are. It's where the consumers have come to expect.

Does self hosting offer a greater likelihood the content endures? It does as long as the bills get paid, which in the case of video content means virality, audience growth, and everything driving the why of producing content for a mass audience presents a threat the the availability of the content. Contrary to consumer expectations, data transit is not cheap and platforms use their scale to cut costs.

If I'm going to self host video content while starting with a small audience should I either plan to keep my audience small or is the right move racing to put boxes to cache content on every ISP's local network and hoping to grow into the infrastructure make more sense? Is using some other hostile platform like Cloudflare as a bandaid the right move? At a stage in the journey when I'm trying to learn the craft of producing watchable video content, is putting in the further effort to learn how to host video my self and marketing my own vanity platform, the right thing to do?

It's a hard question.

Yes I recently started stimulant medication. The initial buzz of energy has died back to the point where I'm not constantly going Marie Kondo on my surroundings, but it has given my vastly improved connection between the part of my brain that knows shit and the part that makes decisions about shit and upped my productivity accordingly.

Today, my sober assessment is that the consumers have come to expect, and I might as well put something on the buffet to get slopped onto their plates. The online environment has degraded to the point where building an audience on a platform and potentially running off with a fraction of the audience to another platform seems to be the least unreasonable path into publishing video.

Do I enjoy this state of the world? No, but efforts to build another one crashed and burned leaving me with a profound crisis of faith. I've got plenty of doubts and regrets looking at the past. "What if I'd managed to start stimulant medication in time to do something adequate for the Republic? Would it have made a difference?" or "If I started this medication sooner, would my 20's have been something other than a mess of self destructive decisions that only failed to end in my 20s because this Republic thing kept dangling a thread of promise for a better, saner future..." The answers to these questions are and forever will be inaccessible to me. No amount of wanting otherwise can change that.

So I've got to take this new found ability to do things and thrash about a bit until something sticks. One thing I discovered while live-streaming was that there is some portion of the population out there that finds my voice to be something comforting they can listen to before going to sleep. I have no idea why they do, but the most intense on-off whirlwind "it's complicated" I have ever had involves a 22 year old exemplar of this phenomenon.

Sometime last year on one app I told her to check out my vibe on another app where I was livestreaming. After some weeks of quiet viewership, around the new year she asked if I wanted to go on vacation with her because her friends were afraid of virus. So I arrange a rental car, she arranges a cabin the in the middle of nowhere a short walk from the beach, and we leave for this vacation the day after meeting in person the first time for ice cream. I have hit my head on so many things, I am not a sufficiently objective observer to say definitively that I have grown, but at least the Ritalin tuned down the dumb impulses and relieved whatever persistent lack has made my the front of my brain my worst enemy in practice all of these years.

Thusly, I'll be continuing the content production and sticking it on Youtube for a while. Maybe I get banned and run with my content somewhere else? Maybe out of the entire human population, the natural cap for my audience size is small? Maybe I eventually end up pushed into self hosting? Whatever happens, on the way there I can't let myself get paralyzed by the demands of idiological purity. Not after the war to make a better world has already been lost. The consumers are all penned up, and I'm going to try to figure out what they crave. Then I'm going to give it to them hard and fast.

I've chased far dumber things since the Republic burned. I've not ever had this sustained ability to do, not outside of moments of acute crisis. I need to see where it goes.

Posted in Exercises, Housekeeping, Politics | 1 Comment »

An Exploration In Multi Media Toilets

August 12th, 2021

Explorations in multimedia production and publication continue.

Can I milk an audience out of the toilet that is Youtube? Fuck it, I'll try.

Posted in Exercises, Midwestern Rube | No Comments »

Ritalin Diaries Part 1

August 7th, 2021

Last Friday, at the age of 35 the psychiatrist decided to trial me on Methylphenidate. In the weeks since she prescribed firing the therapist that referred me to her, the hypothesis moved to considering actionable space to work on unfucking my brain. This my three pot of coffee a day habit and the fact that bupropion, a mild NDRI stimulant marketed as an antidepressant had almost been doing something positive lead to trialing methylphenidate. Apparently my present situation and history hit every single box for an ADHD diagnosis.

Of course this comes no less than 20 years after it could have influenced my early adult life.

My brain is the Columbia shuttle. Broken during the launch process with every prior person I've consulted on the matter denying the possibility that my gross executive dysfunction could be in the structure of the meat of my brain.

Never mind every university I went to offering mental health services that included "Comprehensive ADHD screening" on request. Comprehensive in practice always meant in my experience "unless you have a childhood diagnosis or are in danger of failing out, shit luck." Venlafaxine, fluoxetine, lamotrigine,¹ quetiapine, risperidone, clonezapam, alprazolam, lorazepam, and any other number of substances "controlled" or otherwise were routinely offered. Polypharmacy was common as well as prescribing ever so slightly different drugs of the same class despite debilitating side effects and absent therapeutic effects...

By contrast here in the civilized world, my² psychiatrist was able to work with me and my history to skip replaying entire failed classes of medications.

The psychiatrist's screening was short, but included basic questions including "Do you have any family members with ADHD?" to which the honest answer was of course I do. Grandma and Grandpa on mom's side had 8 children and plenty of my cousins got diagnosed with ADHD. The screening appointment happened over videocall for her convenience which allowed her to see my living space along with my habitual coffee and cigarette consumption.

After filling the prescription and getting a night's sleep here comes the Ritalin diary:

Day 1: Took pill, drank coffee. Intentionally started cleaning. Ended up doing a rather deep clean and organization. Made the third pot of coffee decaf. Productive. Calmer than I remember ever being as an adult. Urge to compulsively smoke cigarettes disappears
Day 2: Took half pill. Calm persisted. Didn't start the day with any set task sink to dump stimulant focus into. Had a pleasant day.
Day 3: Took half pill. Calm persisted. Focus endured. Having a third consecutive day of calm productive focus without being in acute crisis begins striking me as alien. Become incredibly resentful towards surviving parent for going through life with a nearsighted frontal lobe.
Following days: Holy shit this feels so normal and the opposite of intoxication

I don't know what comes next, but never have I ever been this resentful in my life. My capacity to forgive has never been lower. I had always though something was off. There has always been a tremendous disconnect between my ability to project what's happening around me into the future based off of what I know, and my disappointingly short sighted ability to make decisions based on what I know. It's as though the knowing part of my brain and the deciding part of my brain had been separated and are only just now meeting each other.

A month ago I was ready to feed myself to the Orcas out of nihilism. Now I want to go to war. So many points of discontent with how my own brain works ameliorated with one tiny pill a day and all I want now is blood for the blood god.

The much feared sided effect of sudden total skin necrosis missed me in favor of "exploding head syndrome" as a side effect... [↩]
Any this is a profound difference between how the civilized world works in contrast to the failed USSA. I have my psychiatrist, at a reasonable price. [↩]

Posted in Computing, Housekeeping, Midwestern Rube, Politics | No Comments »

How "Therapy" Re-Fucked My Head - Short Form

July 22nd, 2021

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Exercises, Midwestern Rube | 6 Comments »

Uruguay-SSR And The Hallucinated Seige

April 14th, 2020

What happens when one of those seasonal viruses comes that usually wouldn't even get reported as something unique, but the US has visibly fallen so far everyone is now racing to train their herds to Asian norms concerning seasonal respiratory viruses? What does it look like when your city is already has the right aesthetic for a Fallout film adaptation? Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Birds, Exercises, Midwestern Rube | 1 Comment »

Introducing "The Montevideo Standard"

March 20th, 2020

I present Montevideo's premier by default online English language newspaper, The Montevideo Standard. With the closure leaving Bitcoin news a rather indefensible line¹ and the question of what remains on the other side of the herd's present stampede uncertain, it is time to try something different. Read the rest of this entry »

Or as Qntra coverage since roughly the time of Trump's election would show, it has been hard to do primarily Bitcoin news since the Republican edifice started showing wear. With the Republic Impossible, Qntra as such doesn't seem to have space for being of much other than historical interest. I could try to add to the conversation around the end of the Republic, but what can be said other than "In hindsight, it is clear that despite being the right thing it may me stupid. It may have even allowed me to quietly load up on still more stupid than I could otherwise carry." I was tired before the Closure. After I was and still somewhat am sad. What seems to have left is a lot of, at times rather paralyzing, anxiety. For being the right thing, the Republic opened a particularly dangerous "faith thinking" hole in my head. Just as the herds have frozen in panic, I feel a greater freedom from anxiety than I have in a very long time. [↩]

Posted in Exercises, Housekeeping, Midwestern Rube | 5 Comments »

Qntra: A Plan For Action

March 9th, 2020

Introduction

Substantial credit goes to Diana Coman for helping me to organize and see that I have been carrying around substantially more accreted stupidity and accompanying blindspots than I thought. And in that the need for planning exploded beyond simply "Make Marketing Big" into what is essentially a complete operational reboot of Qntra. On some of these points action has begun as the plan iterated through several drafts, but with the drafts having stabilized it is time to shift from planning and leap into action. I've still got dumb to unload and head breaches to fill, but when it comes to Qntra... This is the program. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Exercises, Housekeeping, Midwestern Rube | 2 Comments »

A Homework Assignment From Diana_Coman: Trawling Ancient PMs Seeking What Worked For Early Qntra And Where I'm At On Scripting A Conversion Engine

February 20th, 2020

This assignement was issued in #Ossasepia, where a number of young hands have gathered to work on fixing their heads under Diana Coman's guidance:

diana_coman: BingoBoingo: so listen, do yourself a favour for starters, trawl those pms or whatever and write up a summary with what you 2 tried and what worked and what didn't, in what way, etc; write up somewhere in clear also what your current script does and what/where you're stuck + why; I honestly couldn't quite follow at that level of detail from the chans only.

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Computing, Exercises, Housekeeping | 3 Comments »

Outreach Automation: A Call For Bids

February 16th, 2020

Discussion in #trilema-hanbot this week lead to a rough outline for a two or three piece toolset for leveraging automation to assist in Qntra outreach efforts. In order of priority the toolset needs to consist of at least items one and two:

A Blog Crawler: This tool needs to take as input a starting url. Using curl the crawler will grab the page, grab outbound urls¹ from the starting point, and begin crawling in search of blogs with live comment boxes. In most cases² This will mean going from the directly linked page to the top linked post on the blog and seeing if a comment box is there. Whether the crawler should crawl to complete the sweep out to a certain depth or crawl to accomplish a certain number of iteration per run is unclear to me at this time though I suspect the latter is the more manageable approach. At the end of each run, the crawler should produce a list of urls to blog posts with comment boxes and report the number of targets it found out of the number of total urls crawled.
A Comment checker: Far simpler, this takes a list of urls of the sort produced by the above crawler and returns which of those urls contain one of several strings indicating a Qntra outreach comment successfully reached publication along with the number of successes out of the total urls checked per run.
(Maybe?) A Comment Shitter: Unlike the two tools above, sample code for accomplishing this is common as are commercial advertisements by folks advertising they operate this sort of script. Depending on the post, a clearly human comment can be written in 3 to 8 minutes. By contrast finding a live blog that can take a comment using my own eyes runs anywhere from 2 to 20+ minutes biased towards the high end. On Google's blogspot platform, when the blogger decides to allow name/url identification for commenters there is a 100% success rate in comment publication after doing a 10-ish second task to help Google train their cars' eyes. The situation on Automattic's Wordpress fork is more complicated, but Automattic's bias towards preventing actual commucation between persons leaves a lot of open questions to be explored.

Thusly I have a problem. As I work on learning way to make the computer do more for me and plugging a skills deficit, the comment checker strikes me as the sort of limited scope problem that makes a fine sample problem for automating. The crawler however involves a greater deal of complexity, and is likely to bring in a larger number of tools. As wrestling with what the crawler should do and what needs to be done to implement it is taking substantial space in my head, I am inclined to lean on Auctionbot to see if anyone's up for being hired to produce an initial version of the crawler which I can then deploy, read, study, and learn from.

Proposed Crawler Specifications

I am seeking a web crawling script that does the following:

Takes as input a url and optionally a number of iterations, i. 1000 is probably a safe initial default value for i³
Grabs the url with curl collecting all outgoing links, writes each url as a line in a text file named churn
Grabs the top url in churn with curl, follows the first link in an html div named "main" and checks to see if that page has a Wordpress or Blogspot comment box allowing comments with a name/url identity. If yes, that page's url is written as a line in a text file named targets. If there is no comment box, the page's url is added as a line to a file named pulp. Outgoing urls on the page are appended to the bottom of churn
Adds the url from churn and the second url as lines into a file named churned and removes them from churn
Checks new top item in churn against churned. If the url isn't in churned, it processes it as in 3, otherwise it adds the url to churned and removes it once again from churn.⁴
After performing items 3, 4, and 5 for i iterations, writes a line at the bottom of targets stating "X potential targets identified this run." and at the bottom of pulp writes a line "Y monkeys scribbling on electric paper". X is to be the number of new lines added to targets during a run while Y is to be the number of new lines added to pulp after a run.

Notes On The Spec

The decision to run for a set number of iterations rather than walking a set depth from the first url was made after trying to chart out the additional complexity involved in charting this varied thing we call the internet out to specified degrees of depth. Going out to the first degree might be fine. The second may even be manageable. I've not been seeing many blogs that keep their blogrolls trim and limited at active blogs. I suspect that by the time a complete sweep of the third degree or fourth degree of seperation is completed, run times would be geological without re-inventing some sort of early Googlebot.⁵

If this project receives multiple bids, I may hire multiple bidders to each produce their own implementation.

Initially I thought sidebar links specifically would be the thing to crawl, imitating the more productive method I found for manually crawling. After viewing the page source on a number of blogs, the is substantial variety in how sidebars are maked as such in the code. Identifying a blog roll is easy with human eyes, but much harder for computers. [↩]
Though the logic of doing this in all cases is likely to be far simpler. [↩]
Of course practice will inform. [↩]
The reason to put duplicate lines into churned is that in looking at churned after a run, some popular things might be identified. [↩]
This isn't to say a search engine using the original PageRank algorithm and similar, but seeded from a core of Republican blogs wouldn't be useful. It simply isn't useful for the task of churning through the muck of strangers looking for potential people. [↩]

Posted in Computing, Exercises, Housekeeping | 6 Comments »