Big Update

A lot has happened in the past week and a half for me. In brief: there was a shooting on my university campus that left one student in my graduating class dead, my right knee unexpectedly sprained and dislocated, and I’m now being evicted and have to move out by the end of March. That last part has some very big implications for this blog, and I’ll mainly focus on that. I won’t elaborate on the shooting since the investigation is still ongoing, and I don’t want to potentially dox myself, even if it’s kind of hard since it’s national news.

My Health

You may have seen me posting about it recently, but to put things succinctly, I had a right knee sprain and needed to go to the ER. Luckily, there were no fractures, and it was minor enough that they didn’t investigate further to see which ligament was sprained. I was in an immobilizer, which is a modern splint that’s basically a neoprene foam roll with straps and metal rods that attach with velcro to the sides and behind the leg in order to prevent any movement of my knee. I stayed in it for two days before I was cleared to return to class as “normal”. I was in crutches for three days, and now I’m moving around with a hinged knee brace.

As of typing this, I still don’t have full movement of my knee. It’s too unsteady to walk for more than a short distance without a brace before it buckles, and it’s stiff bending more than 90 degrees. With a brace on, I can get around, but getting in and out of chairs and walking on stairs is difficult, and painful at times. I haven’t gotten in touch with an orthopedic specialist yet, but I fear it will take some time before I’m able to move around pain free again, if ever.

My Home

With little warning, the landlord decided to sell the house and kick us out with scarcely over the minimum required 30 days by law. He knows I’m injured, he showed the house to a realtor while I was still immobilized, yet still expects us to find somewhere that rents to people with pets that doesn’t have a waiting list stretching into next year. I’ve lived where I have for 11 1/2 years now, I grew up in this place, and it’s going to be difficult to go. There is a chance that I may end up being homeless on April 1st, living off of a couch at my grandparents, losing my cats that I love to death.

As for this blog, https://foxiepa.ws/ has let me host it on their server, so it won’t disappear. I’ve already pulled the plug on my Raspberry Pi. Given the circumstances, the archive of the original Gopher will be gone indefinitely. On the bright side, now that it’s hosted on an actual VPS, I’ve taken the time to properly set everything up. Now, DNSSEC is configured for the seedy.xyz domain, and other TXT entries were added to let mail servers know that no mail is sent from this domain, so they can properly discard spam if it exists. I’ve also properly configured my internal build and deploy scripts to only send the public generated pages rather than the entire git repository and build files to the server. Finally, IPv6 is now properly configured (hopefully, I haven’t tested it).

As for further improvements, sometime in the future I will do custom HTTP error pages since the Nginx configuration is set up for it now, as well as get a new home for a remote git repository (I took it down from tildegit since I started posting smut here, and the tildeverse isn’t an 18+ community).

I hope by next month I’ll be settled in, or at least all my things are in boxes at a new place. At least it’s a near certainty that I will be close enough to walk or bike to wherever I need to go instead of relying on others to drive me. That is, assuming my leg improves enough. Don’t worry about the blog either, it’s a lot faster and a lot more stable now, and the problem of what I’m going to do with it when I move out on my own is solved.

A final note, you may have noticed some old links are broken. I started to realize that dumping all posts in the same directory would be a Bad Idea, so I changed the sitemap slightly such that posts are under a subdirectory by year. The older posts aren’t gone, I just thought it would be better to eat the link rot now rather than wait until I have hundreds sometime in the future that would get broken.