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Way back in the year 2000, I bought a domain name to move my personal website from the school web server to someplace I could keep it visible after graduating. I picked Hyperborea.org from an adventure movie I’d seen years earlier, wanting something that sounded fantastic but wasn’t Atlantis, which had already been done to death (and besides, it was taken). In 2002, I set up the first version of this blog, running on b2/cafelog. At the time, Katie and I both posted here. She later moved to LiveJournal, then stopped blogging, then set up again at Feral Tomatoes.

Somewhere along the line I bought KVibber.com and set it up to redirect to my main site. Then in 2022 I rebuilt it as a simple Indieweb-style profile, figuring that while Hyperborea was a digital home, it really wasn’t a digital identity. I’ve been using that in various online profiles ever since, but kept most of the actual stuff on the existing site while I dithered over what to keep where.

Eventually I decided I wanted to move over to the newer domain.

The Eleventy parts were easy: I just needed to change some parameters and rebuild. The hand-crafted parts were relatively easy: global search and replace.

And of course redirecting each section to the new site as I moved it.

Search indexes are slowly shifting over. Google so far has decided to keep pointing to some of the older pages even though those pages redirect to the new ones.

The blog…is complicated. WordPress and ClassicPress use a database for some things and files for others. Plus I’m using the ActivityPub Plugin to make the blog visible on the Fediverse, which brings its own set of complications. I was relieved to see that copies of posts previously federated at the old site do in fact show up correctly on the new site’s Fediverse view.

One thing I decided on early on: I was going to use a subdomain this time instead of a folder, because too many things (some plugins, .well-known files, etc) assume your blog is running at the top level of the site.

I did a first pass Wednesday night to copy the files and database, set up the new config, run all those search-and-replace actions, and kick the metaphorical tires. Since then I’ve been spot-checking things here and there, and the new site seems fine so far.

I tried running the ActivityPub migration, but it doesn’t seem to have sent any followers over. And when I look at the old @kelson profile in Mastodon, it says it’s moving to…@kelson, instead of to @k2r. Most likely it’s either an incompatibility with ClassicPress or another problem with running in a subfolder. I’ll give it another stab tomorrow, but there are only about 5 followers at the moment, and I can just DM everyone if I really need to.

Then I can self-destruct the ActivityPub view on the old site, and once that’s done, I can redirect the blog to the new location.

Better Late Than Never

I’m kicking myself for taking so long. I should’ve just moved wholesale over to KVibber.com back in 2022. By waiting until 2026, I’ve left the new location without proof of having existed before the slop era. (I’m still writing articles myself, not using an “AI,” so all the mistakes in this post are my own.) Unless someone looks up the old hyperborea.org version of a page on the Wayback Machine, but they shouldn’t have to know to do that.

But the old name is awkward and hard to spell, and apparently some of the creepy groups that have weird obsessions with the myths it came from are more substantial than the historical footnotes I thought they were back in the day.

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Last night the whole family got into a multiplayer Minecraft game for the first time in a while. Weirdly enough, *one* system was showing way to many materials as copper. Even stuff like snow. WTF?

Well, we realized it was after 7 PM local time, which meant on UTC time it was already April 1, so it must be this year’s April Fool’s joke for Minecraft. (Or in this case, one of the mods.) But why only on one computer?

Then it hit me: The host was a Windows machine, which means the hardware clock is set to local time (instead of being set to UTC and just displaying local time). I was connecting from a Linux box that dual-boots, so I’d long since set the hardware clock to local time so Windows wouldn’t fight with it. The one showing all copper, all the time, was a Mac, which doesn’t dual boot, and uses Unix under the hood, so its hardware was set to UTC, and it was the only computer of the three that was already running in April 1.

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I’ve been using the excellent ActivityPub Plugin for WordPress to connect this blog to the Fediverse for several years now, and it keeps getting better. The plugin makes any WordPress blog also work like a Mastodon server, so you can follow and interact from any site running Mastodon, Akkoma, Pixelfed (image posts only, of course), Snac or my favorite, GoToSocial.

Last year some features started breaking on here as WordPress and ClassicPress diverged, and I put some stop-gap fixes in place. I never quite got around to debugging it in my spare time, though. So I was very happy to see that starting with the 7.8.3 release a couple of weeks back, ActivityPub for WordPress now explicitly checks for ClassicPress to fall back to a compatibility mode!

You still need to trick it into thinking it’s on WordPress 6.5 or later (ClassicPress 2 split off from WordPress 6.2), but the latest version fixes all the problems I’d been working around on this site, including broken comment forms and missing images on the Fediverse view of a post.

Update: I missed a scenario with filtering comment authors in comment_reply_link. I’ve manually worked around it for the moment, and when I have a chance I’ll either do a proper bug report or suggest a proper fix.

So I’d like to give a shout-out to Matthias Pfefferle and the ActivityPub Plugin team and say: thanks for fixing it!

And if anyone reading this wants to connect their WordPress or ClassicPress site directly to the Fediverse (rather than just cross-posting or auto-posting links), this plugin is still the best way to do it.

On a related note…

I finally got around to fixing Share Classicly so it won’t add its link to the Fediverse view of a post. (Aside from cutting the clutter, boosting would make more sense anyway.) That’s the plugin I made that adds a ShareOpenly link to each post, so your readers can share to a Micropub, Mastodon, Bluesky, etc. account.

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We finished re-watching Deep Space Nine a few days ago. Quark’s rants in the second-to-last episode about rolling back the reforms regarding gender and worker protections, complaining that Ferengi society has been infected by a disease, and declaring that if he becomes Nagus he’ll bring back what made Ferenginar great again sound eerily familiar.

There’s even a bit about a latinum-plated toilet seat — I mean waste extractor.

It certainly sounds more like what Musk, Trump and Hegseth have actually been saying and doing than any other kind of “making Star Trek real”. Unless Musk’s obsession with eugenics and passing on his genes is enough stronger than his racism that he plans to make sure Khan exists. (Eeeeew.)

Wait, maybe that’s why Khan is white in the Kelvin timeline.

Seriously, though, the Ferengi have always been an extreme caricature of American culture and capitalism taken to absurd lengths. They were even compared to “Yankee traders” in their first appearance on TNG. In 2016, Trump campaigned as an extreme characature of a conservative, the kind that viewers a decade earlier would have dismissed as unrealistic. And since he won, the GOP embraced that caricature and has remade itself into a political/business alliance that makes Quark look downright progressive by comparison.

After all, Quark once brought up the horrors of Earth’s history: slavery, devastating wars, etc. Ferengi never had government death squads rounding people up off the street for being undesirables. They would have just let someone new in town pay the requisite fee and let them go about their business like a civilized culture.

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This is kind of funny. When I watched the movie Avatar way back in 2009, I was struck by the similarity of the premise to Timothy Zahn’s 2002 novel Manta’s Gift:

The main character, a human who’s suffered a severely disabling injury, is offered the chance to place his consciousness into an alien body and report back to the human expedition. Over the course of his time there, he finds that he has more in common with the aliens than with the humans who sent him, and pushes back against their exploitative agenda.

OK, so it’s a brain transplant, not a neural link, and it’s manta-like beings who live in the groundless atmosphere of Jupiter, not humanoids who are part of a literal Gaia.

I just discovered that the book was re-issued in 2020 (Timothy Zahn, 2002) with a tagline describing it as “A gripping first-contact adventure for fans of James Cameron’s Avatar…”

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In retrospect, it’s wild that so many tech people who were hyper-aware of the fact that Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s and 2000s was due to more to marketing (“never underestimate Microsoft on marketing”) than technical merits…fell for the idea that a “marketplace of ideas” would coalesce around the best ideas, and not just the loudest ones.

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I can go with your scifi/fantasy story’s super-impossible thing being associated with an eclipse. It’s activating or deactivating people’s super-powers? Sure! Certain magic spells can only be cast during an eclipse? Sure! The moon transforms into cheese? OK, whatever. (pun not intended)

But please, please get the basic mechanics right! Continue reading →