Well, this is take 2 on this because I ended up buying HTTPS to try to get this blog federated and doing that moved my whole site to a new server, which broke my database connection, so it was easiest to blow the whole thing away and start over.

If you saw my first attempt, just know I still can’t come up with a pithier title, but I’m turning this into my first Rant of the Moment on this site as well.

Just to redo my ground rules (condensed):

1. Not all content will be on this blog. I do have a "PG" rating, but AwardSpace doesn’t take kindly to "foul language" and I don’t want to lose my entire site over it, so I’ll try to avoid that. AwardSpace also takes very poorly to really any controversial content, so as a ground rule to myself, this will be a "Jerako Pizza before dark" kind of blog. Maybe someday that will make sense to everyone else, but it’s a very solid line for me personally on what "family-friendly" entails.
2. Not all topics will be discussed on this blog even if it is family-friendly. For example, AwardSpace’s rules make it very difficult to talk about any topics related to piracy with any kind of nuance, even for educational purposes. So to get this out of the way, no, I do not condone piracy. If you want my more nuanced opinions on it, I’ve written about it plenty elsewhere. Any references to emulation will assume the following:
   1. The original software and appropriate hardware to play it are legally owned, AND
   2. The emulation in question is being done with your one (1) legally allowed digital archival copy, dumped from your own physical hardware/media, AND
   3. You are using some legally provided means of running said software on non-original hardware. Obviously game video has to get onto YouTube somehow even when a system doesn’t necessarily have a convenient means of plugging it into a computer, so inasmuch as emulators must therefore exist, they are purchased from the original system creator or an approved partner and installed on the one (1) device that contains your one (1) legally allowed archival copy.
   4. OR the software has been digitally purchased and an emulator has been provided as part of said digital purchase.
3. I will not be dumping my Final Fantasy Wiki content here. This is a go-forward deal and it won’t be exclusive; I just wanted a place where I could get my content federated.

With that all out of the way, I still haven’t managed to get this thing federated despite my best efforts and it’s something I’ll need to contend with, because it seems to be permission issues and I just am not very smart when it comes to Linux. AwardSpace made it very easy to install WordPress and WordPress made it very easy to install plugins, but for whatever reason my Google-fu has failed me on how to get the blasted ActivityPub plugin to talk to the WebFinger plugin and honestly nothing makes me feel quite as stupid as when I can’t figure out a computer problem. Linux makes me feel like I should be hammering blocks through differently shaped holes. I will get it figured out eventually even if I have to blow away the whole blog again, but I’ll be able to do it with informed consent and export it first next time. So there’s that.

Otherwise, welcome! Thanks to AwardSpace for making their side of the process trivially easy and for their current 95% off(!) deal on upgrading to the Basic package for HTTPS. It’s less than US$3.00 for a whole year! And thanks to the authors of all the plugins I’ve installed to try to get this baffling mess working. It’s not you; it’s me.