WAIT LET ME IN I WANT TO HAVE THE LAST WORD IS IT TOO LATE!!!

Also, I respect your insistence on using a term other than American to describe people from the US.

Because no one else belongs to a state and so calling ourselves “statesians” is therefore better?

They’re basically like the elves in Tolkien’s world: they’re the elder race that is wise in a lot of ways, but also have a lot of flaws.

Best of all, they would not have to work for Bezos anymore.

(I tried staying a subscriber to support the genuinely good investigative journalism they do, but Bezos’s changes to it were got to be too much for me to swallow; what finally drove me over was the incredibly congratulatory editorial that the editorial board posted in response to the kidnapping of Maduro from Venezuela.)

No worries! Pronouns in the English language are sufficiently ambiguous that it is easy to make that mistake.

It is a little weird that this had never occurred to you until it popped into your head during a shower, but better late than never!

Hey, now, just because I am an overly paranoid person does not mean that you have to be as well!

Thus dooming its fate.

Thanks, your comment is an antidote to my paranoia that it is impossible to do anything to address all threats. 😀

Given that your advice is very sound, I have a question: would I gain much by using OpenBSD? The conventional wisdom when I last checked is that it is the most secure unix-like operating system on the planet.

Right, but there is an entire spectrum of plumbing maintenance. I am perfectly capable of plunging toilets, but when a drain fails to work after several attack on my part then it is time to call in the plumber.

I mostly just like building and tinkering with things, and I really like the idea of setting up services that I control that host my own data that I can access from anywhere. I have no real interest in learning about more than the minimum amount needed to do that simply because that is not how I would like to spend my time.

(Lest you continue to have the wrong impression that I am afraid of learning new things: There was a period in my life where I was constantly learning new technologies, programming languages, etc. Eventually I realized that I had demonstrated that I was capable of learning anything that I wanted, and there were so many things out there to learn that I needed to start becoming more selective. At the moment my learning goals tend to be more math focused; currently I am trying to learn graduate-level category theory and measure theory.)

If I really need to master all of the steps that you’ve described before deploying my host on the Internet, then my conclusion is that it is more trouble than it is worth, because my concern is that if I screw up then I will make the Internet a worse place by contributing to botnets.

That does not sound so bad; the parent comment made it sound a lot worse than that.

I admit nothing.

Everything that you mention is sensible, but it seems like it would take so much time not only to set up but to perform the ongoing maintenance you described that it just is not worth the trouble to self-host, which is a significant factor in why I have not taken a shot at it.

You have the same ideals as the artist; why do you want to be their enemy?

That’s not a fair representation of our society; a lot of them end up in the street or incarcerated as well.

So in other words: the artwork is bad, and the artist should feel bad for making it. Got it

I will give you the benefit of the doubt that of course you would split the profits from the ticket sales; you just left it implied.

I really wish that my parents had mentioned much earlier in my life that mental illness runs in the family and what the signs were so that I could have started getting treatment right away, rather than wasting years of my life confusing feelings of depression for proof that I was a terrible person. (Just to be clear, there was no malice involved; my mom just felt really self-consious about it, so she did not want to bring it up.)

The blood of our enemies.