Ég var að fatta að ég hef haldið úti vefsíðu á netinu í 20 ár! Fyrsta vefsíðan mín fór í loftið árið 1997, skömmu áður en ég byrjaði í menntaskóla. Hún var með rotating GIF hauskúpur sitt hvoru megin við hausinn efst og hýst á slóð sem innihélt tildu (~), eins og tíðkaðist þá.

Fyrstu árin hoppaði vefsíðan milli hýsingaraðila og undirléna, en að lokum keypti ég mitt eigið lén, sveinbjorn.org, árið 2005. Vefurinn hefur keyrt á heimasmíðaða vefumsjónarkerfinu mínu, Mentat, frá 2003. Það er enn langbesta vefumsjónarkerfið, enda sérsniðið að mínum þörfum (Fokk jú, Wordpress).

Heimavefþjónninn arakkis fór í loftið árið 2005. Hann var um tíma ofan í skúffu hjá foreldrum Magga vinar míns og hýsti sveinbjorn.org allt þar til vélin gaf upp öndina 2015. Þá var nýr þjónn, lítill Intel NUC, keyptur til þess að halda fjörinu gangandi. Sá þjónn heitir caladan, og nýtist sem Tor relay node og VPN fyrir mig.

Á gullárum bloggsins, 2002-2008, áður en Facebook tók yfir allt, var athugasemdakerfið á sveinbjorn.org lifandi vettvangur þar sem ég og vinir mínir og aðrir rifumst um pólitík og skiptumst á bröndurum.

Síðasta haust tók ég mig til og færði vefinn loksins í nýtt og betra form sem virkar vel á snjalltækjum. Í footernum stendur nú © 1997-2017 Sveinbjörn Þórðarson. Mitt elsta sköpunarverk sem enn lifir.

From The Cheery, Ordinary World of Fascism:

Nazism was a very different and distinctly Bavarian ideology -- a bizarrely aesthetic, art-heavy mutation of fascism.

What you see in the pages of Signal is Bavarian culture, with their deep love of food, sex, and drink combined with a dangerously intense feeling that this Germany is the Germany, and that Germany is the proper template for the world. I deal constantly with Bavarians, and they never tire of telling me, as an Italian in need of clarification, that Bavaria is the true Germany. They consider Northern Germans grim philistines, lacking all aesthetic sense, and as for Berlin—well, as they explain, it's nothing but commies, Jews and homosexuals.

A sign of dystopian things to come.

Soon enough, we'll have big-data-trained, machine-learning neural networks constantly analysing our credit rating, evaluating our work performance, ranking us in job and school applications, determining if we're fit to have children, and so on.

Ironically, the engineers devising these algorithms will have no real understanding of how they work, only that they meet some abstract performance criteria.

Mark my words: There's going to be lots and lots of incomprehensible and ridiculous "Computer Says No" in coming decades, when the Excel spreadsheet people "optimise" by offloading all bureaucracy and service jobs on to opaque, "authoritative" AIs.

Spot on:

Some British politicians suffer from an imperial reflex, however. For them, Britain lies at the centre of the world. We only have to state our aims and other countries will be generous enough to help us achieve them.

The British have never really accepted the fact that their Empire is gone and that they are now just another European nation, neither particularly rich nor powerful when compared to France and Germany.

True, Britain does outperform its Western European neighbours on several fronts: it is a uniquely miserable, unjust and unequal place thanks to the radical neoliberal experiment of the past 40 years. A corrupt, undemocratic financial centre in the Eurozone, burdened with an impoverished, unhappy, overtaxed and unneeded surplus population. And now it's leaving the Eurozone.

There's only one glimmer of light I can see in this whole Brexit business: The consequences are likely to be so bad that it may effect some kind of political change for the better in the long run.