Spent part of this past week looking into whether or not Codeberg Pages could be a suitable new home for my website. Alas, I don’t think it’s going to work out.
Repositories hosted on Codeberg Pages must be set to public, so my site is at much greater risk of being scraped for LLM training if I host it there. Codeberg gets scraped a lot, apparently. Not surprised.
I also just do not freaking understand Git, no matter how many tutorials I read. I tried to get aetheranne.ca up and running on my Codeberg account, and nearly wiped out my entire local build when I accidentally clicked on the wrong thing in VSCodium’s source control tab. I had to restore all my work from a backup I made last week, as every file in my existing master folder somehow got pulled out of every subfolder and sent to Trash.
I’ll keep looking, but I’m starting to lose hope that I’ll find the perfect free web host that doesn’t present some sort of ethical or technical stumbling block for me.
Around the Small Web
While looking into other free hosting alternatives for my website, I came across this illuminating post by Beesilisk of Midnight Solarium.
Neocities is commonly cited as an ethical alternative to other free web hosts, but in the statement Beesilisk links to, Neocities’ owner claims “we should embrace AI, harness its immense potential for good, and navigate its development and application responsibly, but with curiosity and love rather than panic.”
This statement is something I firmly disagree with for so many reasons I won’t even bother going into here.
Speaking of AI, if you check out Neocities’ Support Us page, Neocities claims to offer “full AI blocking control,” but when you hover over that statement to learn more about it, you learn that they’re only offering a “customizable, pre-populated robots.txt file.”
It’s 2026; many LLM crawlers don’t respect robots.txt, and likely never have. If you (like me) have an interest in blocking LLM crawlers from your site, robots.txt ain’t gonna cut it.
To be fair to Neocities (I guess), many web hosts are embracing GenAI and adding AI-focused tools to their free and paid hosting plans – Cloudflare included. At least with Cloudflare, though, you have access to WAFs that can block AI crawlers (assuming they identify themselves via their user agents and aren’t hiding behind residential IPs).
In addition to the above post by Beesilisk, I read a bunch of other good stuff on the small web this week, and especially enjoyed The Paper Pilot’s digital garden entry on what he calls “ephemeral identities”.
Speaking as someone who has experienced the discomfort of virality on social media, I absolutely appreciate having the freedom to start over on the small web and escape the often vicious reactions of online strangers.
Life, the Universe, and Everything
Saw a brilliant play this week that was written, performed, and produced by a couple of my husband’s university friends; it was an excellent reminder that we really need to attend theatre productions in our city more often. It’s so lovely to watch and listen to a well-crafted story performed in real time, sitting among a receptive and interactive audience.
Also did some touristy stuff with said friends. I always love seeing our city through visitors’ eyes; it reminds me how much I take for granted. However frustrated I do get with our weather, it is a very beautiful province.
It looks like Canada could end up becoming the EU’s first associate member!
I’d be fully on board with that, though I’m a little nervous to see how the US government might retaliate. We truly live in the stupidest timeline…
Shows & Movies I Watched
My husband and I started watching the first season of Furious, a drama about an FBI agent (played by Emmy Rossum) investigating a sex trafficking victim-cum-serial killer (played by Lola Petticrew). It’s incredibly dark at times, but extremely good so far!
I continued on with my X-Files re-watch while working out. Got through episodes 8-10 of the first season.
I’d forgotten that we get introduced to Max Fenig so early in the series! He was one of my favourite recurring X-Files characters. I’d also forgotten that he was the one who coined that “enigmatic Agent Scully” line, repeated (and slightly misquoted) by Mulder as “enigmatic, Dr. Scully” – which got used a ton in early X-Files fandom.
My husband and I finally returned to our (previously regular) Saturday movie nights with Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.
The film was … just OK. All of Wes Anderson’s quirks dialed up to 11, which is not always a good thing. The colour grading was rather nice, I guess? I say a little more about it in my media logs.
No matter how good or bad the film is, I always enjoy movie nights with my husband. 🙂 It’s such a comfort to just snuggle up on the couch for a couple of hours with a cat stretched out between our laps.
Games I Played … Er, Watched
So, I normally wouldn’t do this, but I watched a complete playthrough of the Lake House DLC for Alan Wake 2 on YouTube.
Why watch it instead of play it? Well, Control: Resonant comes out next week, and with that expense looming (it’ll be my sole day-one gaming purchase this year), I couldn’t justify spending $30 after tax on such a short DLC. I really wanted to experience the story, though, as it’s the last Control-related instalment in the Remedy Connected Universe before the events of Control: Resonant.
As fun as it would have been to actually play the Lake House DLC, it was still enjoyable to watch someone else playing it. A very cool blend between the visual and gameplay styles of Control and Alan Wake.