I want to have a cool logo but I can’t really justify paying to commission one to my family. Conversely, I’m not going to ask an artist to work for free, because I value their work and don’t want to imply that I don’t. So, how I can I reconcile these seemingly incompatible requirements? I’m not sure, but I’ve been tossing this around:

• One or more artists submit rough drafts of their ideas,
• I select one that resonates with me and help the artist develop it,
• That artist gives me exclusive rights to the design so that there aren’t 43 instances with “my” branding, but
• The artist keeps all merchandising rights, and I help them advertise stickers, t-shirts, etc.

Releastically, that probably wouldn’t generate a lot of revenue (although I’d certainly buy some stuff for myself). However, the artist would get 100% of all income from it. If I’m the only one who buys a t-shirt, it’s not that great a deal for them. If I help them sell a hundred shirts or somehow become Internet famous, that could be a nice chunk of change, of which my cut would be $0.00.

2017 has been a wild ride, but I have a lot to be very grateful for. I am honored and privileged to be surrounded by my lovely Mastodon friends, and to be in a position that I can give back a little to our community. Thank you for being a bright light in an otherwise challenging year.

In the spirit of continued transparency, and because I haven’t remembered to do this in a while, this is an accounting of Free Radical’s hosting costs for November 2017:

• The DigitalOcean droplet and persistent block storage (for PostgreSQL) was $22.00.
• The Amazon Web Services S3 media and backup storage cost $3.59.

The DigitalOcean CPU usage graph runs consistently at about 5%. Memory is always at about 70%, with most of it used by PostgreSQL for caching. Disk usage is at about 0% except during hourly backups. Bandwidth averages about 20Kbps except during those same offsite backups.

https://freeradical.zone/ is way #under1000.

I’ve had a hard time going cold turkey with birdsite but it gets easier by the day. I still think of it as the early service that was new and different and exciting and wasn’t being used as a machine for spreading hate. I need to break that habit, but it’s hard.

This morning I drank deeply of that cesspool and was shocked at how horrible it is. Was it always that bad and I was just used to it, or has it taken a recent and sharp turn for the worse? I don’t know. Either way, here we are.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v2.0.0.

Free Radical celebrates its 200th verified user.

The victory parade was well attended.

Free Radical is now on Mastodon v1.6.1.

The Free Radical Ansible repo commit 76a0107 fixes two problems:

• Docker uses aufs instead of overlayfs because overlayfs is ridiculously slow during an important container startup step
• Sets the root directory for HTTP connections so that certbot renew cron jobs complete successfully

Several times I’ve compared this instance to my living room. I think that’s a powerful and accurate analogy and I’d like to explain what I mean by that.