Notices by Velocirooster adminensis :bc: (theropologist@beige.party)

I know a lot of people were waiting for quote toots but one thing that immediately irritated me about 4.5 is that boosting now takes 2 clicks by default. That's a 50% reduction in boost efficiency! If you are like me and find that kind efficiency hit unacceptable, you can enable quick boosting in user preferences. Give that baby a click and keep on boosting like a champ!

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers and prospective party-goers! :bc:

Due to a surge in fake account sign ups, I am closing new registrations for now. If you would like to sign up for an account, please contact me directly or have a party-goer recommend you.

Thanks, and Beige-bless 🇧🇧

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

I'm working to resolve some issues with slow page and image loads. You may notice the site going down briefly while I'm noodling around in the guts of the instance.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

Done noodling for tonight. Hopefully things are sliding a bit faster through the ol' feditubes.

Got the offer letter! I start next month.

Had a good interview today for a job that would be perfect for me. So naturally I have entered a fresh doom spiral.

Thanks for all the positive vibes everyone. I got a tentative offer today!

Pleased to report that I still have no idea what I'm doing

A lot of people have asked me what the name "Beige Party" means. I now present the definitive explanation:

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

We are overdue for a Mastodon update so I will be upgrading us to version 4.5.2 this Friday evening/Saturday morning, depending on where you live. This will be a major upgrade because we are moving from 4.4 to 4.5, so I am scheduling the maintenance window for 4 hours to give myself plenty of time to complete all the upgrade tasks.

The maintenance window will begin at 4AM UTC on 12/6 and continue until 8AM. If you are in the Western Hemisphere, that's 11PM EDT on 12/5 until 3AM on the 6th.

Since this is a major update I will be taking the servers offline to make full backups. You can expect the site to be down for about half an hour while I complete this process. I'm addition the site will be down briefly several times while I restart the docker containers. As always, please be prepared for the site to go down at any time during the maintenance window.

On a personal note, I know I haven't been around much lately. I was looking forward to things getting back to normal after my dad's memorial, and then a week later I got laid off. Since then, I've been frantically trying to find something else but it has not been going great. So I'm faced with the reality that getting back to normal is out the window and I've just gotta keep moving forward however I can.

All of this is to say I am not abandoning Beige Party, and the instance is not shutting down. I've built up a pretty big backlog for myself but it is also the only real work I have at the moment, other than marketing myself to strangers, so I will be making more of an effort to prioritize the maintenance of this instance, because it is important to me and is one of the few things in my life right now that's actually working. And to the extent that it is working, that has always had more to do with the party-goers than it has with me, so thank you for that and thanks for bearing with me, as always.

Beige-Bless 🇧🇧

For anyone who signed up recently and experienced long delays in getting their accounts confirmed, that was due to me dealing with a lot of real life stuff right about the time that the BlueSky exodus was happening.

Everyone should be confirmed now but if you did not get a confirmation email please DM me. I am once again at the helm of this rickety beige boat and we are still accepting new sign ups.

Beige-Bless 🇧🇧

The thing to remember about social media is that it's human beings all the way down

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers! :bc:

Looks like we had an outage today do to the certs expiring. I had thought I had renewed those early, but evidently I did not. We've also got a bug fix version of Mastodon I need to install so I am going to go ahead and do that now since we're already in an unplanned maintenance period. You might see the site go down momentarily when I restart the docker containers but there shouldn't be anymore extended outages.

Sorry about this, and as always thank you for bearing with me!

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

This is a test

Hey folks, I want to give you all an update on what's been going on with me lately. I haven't been around as much as I should be, which is a generous way of saying that I've been dropping the ball quite a bit over the last few months. It would be easy to just say that I've been busy and move on, but that's not the whole story.

Since I started this instance I have tried to be very transparent about my limited technical ability so that everyone understands that this is very much a process of me figuring things out as I go along. What's been harder for me to be transparent about are my mental health limitations. I've told myself that I'm just having some anxiety or a mental block when it comes to administering this instance, but at some point, sitting on the couch, looking at my phone, knowing I should pick it up and check on the instance, but feeling completely paralyzed about it, I had to admit to myself that perhaps this is what depression feels like.

The fact of the matter is that I've been feeling pretty overwhelmed lately. It's not anybody's fault and it doesn't only have to do with Beige Party. It's a confluence of factors in my life and in the world in general that have settled on my chest like a heavy weight and made me feel powerless to do anything. I've compensated by trying to avoid any kind of conflict and that has included administering this instance.

I get it. People are angry, and they have a right to be. I'm angry too, and I don't always know how to process it. I'm frightened about what's going to happen in the next four, ten, and twenty years. There was a time when I held onto the fiction that we'd all wake up from this nightmare and things would go back to normal. Now I have to admit that the normal I'm pining for has been dead for at least twenty years, and it wasn't all that great to begin with. However we get through this, it's not going to be by looking backwards, but by looking forwards, and finding people we can trust and work with to make the world that we want to live in. It's going to be a long and painful process, and I'm afraid we're just at the beginning of it. But the only way going to make it through is together.

None of this is intended as an excuse, just an explanation of where I am mentally these days. I am going try to make a concerted effort to do better and not let things get away from me as much as I have in the last few months. I can't promise I will always succeed but I can promise that I will continue to try.

One thing I want to be clear about is that I am not abandoning this instance. When I registered this domain I did it for ten years and I intend to be here for at least that long. This is a great community that we've built over the last three years. That has everything to do with all of you and very little to do with me, but I will continue to do my part to keep it going because it's worth preserving the good things in a world that is becomingevet more dismal.

I want to thank you all for continuing to bear with me and placing your trust in me. I will do my best to continue to earn that trust. For the most part my my interactions here have been positive and it's something that I really value. I feel honered to be a member of this community.

As always, if anyone has any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to me directly. If I haven't responded in a timely fashion, please don't hesitate to poke me about it. Yes, I might get overwhelmed at times, but I still take my administrative duties seriously and I always want to do what's best for this community. I hope that I can continue to live up to that standard.

Thanks everyone, and beige-bless 🇧🇧

Hello! Welcome to the Fediverse! Please be cool. Please. I am begging you. Just. Be. Cool.

*tap* *tap* *tap* Is this thing on?

:bc: Attention Beige Party-goers :bc:

And we are back! I have completed my database maintenance and we are now on the latest version of Mastodon. I still have some more work to do on the database, but I can do that at a later date. I think that was plenty of downtime for one evening.

Beige-bless 🇧🇧

*slaps side of plane* This bad boy can fit so many emoluments in it

Air Travel: For when you absolutely positively must step in pee pee