I’ve decided to relaunch the IRCThulu effort after a sudden encounter from an old harasser named Tom Wesley.
I had a deal worked out with the major IRC networks that I wouldn’t develop it, as long as my work was left unhindered, but, the person I worked it out with has left staff and the two networks I go on don’t seem to believe it is an issue anymore, so, this is my cue to build away given the adversarial stance one of the networks has suddenly taken by a couple of renegade staffers. Up until this point, I’ve kept my terms of those agreements. It’s really too bad. Ironically, this was set off after years of everyone holding up their end of our agreement until a big shitfest of exclusionary douchebags in the debian space started a smear campaign against RMS and some other folks, which I helped shut down, so, they’re cleaning house of folks who don’t fit into their narratives, and just happened to pick out the one staffer holding the policy avalanche away that is IRCThulu with an agreement with me, and then proceeded to bait me for weeks hoping I’d respond with something mean they can use as ammunition to justify their restriction of my access to my work spaces. Seen it. Beaten it. Had it for breakfast, guys. I’ve spent years structuring all of this to be resilient to this very tactic.
What hubris.
I’m taking a different approach this round. Already built a POC for this, but I need scale. Instead of furiously coding everything all at once, I’m designing it one small piece at a time, making each piece good at what it does before moving onto the others. A slow burning, low energy, but highly inspired, approach.
I think first is the IRC client. I need a bot. Not just any bot. I need a bot deliberately designed to be hard to detect, easy to control, and extremely portable — while still being modern in design to make its feature set quite flexible to be able to do what I’m envisioning it should do and to enable the broader strategy at play.
Since this project is 1984 incarnate with a splash of nerdrage and cthulu reality-warping madness, I’ll want it to be verbose enough such that identity research features are possible with the data it relays, but not so verbose that data management is a burden.
*sigh*
Conflict is never pleasant…but if you have to fight in one, find a way to enjoy it, if you can. Inside each and every one of us are gods and demons, angels and ghosts, heroes and monsters — reachable as those archetypes which generate legends and history. They are tools of the human spirit. Find the right tool for the job, and if you’re adept with it you’ll end up making a new one from time to time.