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Recent Changes on Home for Fiction

August 5, 2024

Important Note: There are some more recent developments that occurred in the wake of the text below. Besides the recent changes described in this post, I decided to make the Home for Fiction apps Patreon-only content again. Yes, I admit it: I have been defeated. I was naive to think this could work, simply as a result of Disney-magic and people’s understanding. To put it plainly, I simply can’t afford to pay for the server resources required. It’s either this or nothing.

Everything below this point should be seen as a snapshot of history and might not reflect current reality.

You might have noticed some minor changes on Home for Fiction lately. Or then again, you might have not, and the only person reading this is me. Ironically enough, this very element (meta- time!) is part of the reason there have been such changes.

Among these recent changes, the most conspicuous must be the disappearance of comments and the lack of a link to the support page that used to decorate the header.

Moreover, if you’ve found this post coming from the common app interface (just try to visit any of the Home for Fiction apps), you have realized that all Home for Fiction apps are nowadays limited to a fixed number of users per day. Each user is also limited to a few boots per hour.

I want to explain all this – though, somewhat egotistically, not to you; the intended audience is I alone, as it has always been. Writing this post is only meant as a vehicle for putting my own thoughts in order and understanding something new. But if it’s informative to you, great!

recent changes Home for Fiction. Image of unimpressed cat.
Here’s an unimpressed cat to go with this post…
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Simple Analytics that Respect Privacy: a How-To Guide

July 29, 2024

A programming post for today, but with a little twist. We’re not making a story planning program or an interactive fiction “game”. In a way, we’re not even making anything concrete – though I will share with you some code samples. Instead, we’ll take a more theoretical look at what I term simple analytics, with respect for privacy in the foreground.

As you perhaps recall, I recently revamped both the main Home for Fiction site and the blog itself. Doing so, one of the things I wanted to do was to completely eradicate all forms of privacy-invasive analytics. So I threw out Google Analytics as well as Jetpack analytics for WordPress.

Let’s take a look why and, mostly, what could one do if they’d like some simple form of stats/info that respects users’ privacy. I’ll also throw in a story about grandpas’ underwear for good measure – trust me, there is a connection hidden in there!

simple analytics; image of chair on Greek island
Simple analytics, Greek style!
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“Am I the Asshole?”: The Art of Self-Assessment

July 15, 2024

There is an often quoted claim suggesting that if you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole, but if you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole. This isn’t always true – there are never black-and-white answers – for reasons we will examine, but it implicitly focuses on an important issue: How do we determine whether we’re right or wrong? How do we determine, “am I the asshole”?

There’s even a Reddit thread where people share incidents with strangers and expect them to answer, “Am I the asshole”? Of course Reddit, like the internet at large, relies on consensus. If 10,000 people insists you’re wrong, they must be right… Right? At least that’s what the bandwagon fallacy would like us to think. Obviously enough, this takes us back to the “assholes all day” problem.

But again, there are never easy answers.

So in this post, let’s try to unpack all this. Let’s see why we can’t rely on public consensus to figure out whether we’re right or not, and what we can do about it.

Am I the Asshole? blurry image of people
Humans are social animals. We want others’ approval. But what if others are wrong?
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