Apparently I’m at 82% of my allotment (100GB) of disc space under my website’s current hosting plan. While not a pressing issue immediately—and realizing it’s taken me twelve-plus years to get to this point (although my usage has increased over the years and just in 2025 alone I used 11GB*)—at some point I’m going to have to decide what to do about it. Based on this past year’s usage, maybe not next year, but definitely sometime in 2027.

In the meantime I’m going to start posting all images in .webp form to save space—as much as I hate that format and it requires an extra step on the back end.

So I’m asking my readers for your input. If I want to keep my current plan, I’m going to have to delete stuff eventually. Should I go back and delete the first few years of the blog’s posts and pictures, or should I wipe the whole thing and start fresh when I reach the inevitable “disk full” message?

Or should I be proactive as that day draws near and upgrade my hosting plan?

Obviously not ideal, as you can see…

*damn, that’s a lot of pr0n and Trump memes! (I actually used 15GB each year from 2022-2024, so it’s actually down.)

 

From Alex Molas:

I started writing on my blog some years ago, and since then I’ve had a lot of reasons to stop writing. Here’s a list of why nobody cares about your blog

• • Your blog is not original. There are hundreds of blogs out there, what makes you think yours is different? You’re just probably repeating things you’ve read in another place.
  • You’re not an expert in your field, otherwise you wouldn’t be publishing in a blog, but writing papers and giving interviews.
  • You are only showing the world how stupid you are. If what you say is not better than silence, you better shut up.
  • If someone, at some point, cares about your blog will be only to criticize it. Your work is trash, and exposing it will make people notice you’re trash as well.

But all of these things are not a problem, because you shouldn’t care even a little bit about what other think. Here are my reasons about why you should care about your blog

• • You can use it as notes to your future self. After some years you’ll have a nice journal of how you have evolved over the years. Rereading your old texts is like communicating with your past self.
  • To release ideas that you have in your head and that you need to get out. Even if nobody else cares about them, writing them down can be a cathartic process.
  • To learn to write and express complex ideas. The best way to learn is to teach (even if nobody is reading you). As Paul Graham says ¹, writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought.
  • Even if the ideas you’re sharing with the world aren’t original you can enrich them with your personal view. As Bill Thurson said ² all of us have clear understanding of a few things and murky concepts of many more. There is no way to run out of ideas in need of clarification.
  • If you have lost time solving a superspecific problem then you need to write about it, it can happen that you end up being someone hero some day. It can also happen that you’ll have the same problem again and then you’ll be your own hero.
  • It’s cool to maintain a blog, even it’s only from the technical perspective. The feeling of complete ownership over something is really fulfilling, even if it’s just some bytes on a remote server in this ethereal world.
  • You can say whatever the fuck you want. It’s your blog, you don’t need to follow any rules. I just cursed and you can’t do nothing about it, because this is my blog and I do what I want. This will give you a sense of freedom that’s really cool imho.

PS. I was just about to publish this post, and then I started to think “why should I publish this text? Who is going to waste their time to read this crap?”, but you know what? I just don’t care what you think, here’s my post and you can do nothing about it 😁

I’m taking a break. I’m not saying I won’t be posting anything for a while (because we all know that’s impossible) but I’m definitely going to be cutting back.

Everything is fine; I just can’t any more.

Stay tuned.

As you’ve all noticed, you’re now greeted with an age-verification screen when you come to Voenix Rising and it’s because of this (from AZ Central with my own obvious commentary added):

Arizona’s Katie Hobbs signs bill requiring ID on porn sites

Arizona will soon become the latest state to require age verification when visiting websites with adult content.

Gov. Katie Hobbs, a Democrat, signed a bill on May 13 requiring websites and social media platforms that are more than a third pornography to verify their users are at least 18 years old. The companies operating the websites must require identification or use an age verification system.

The bill was sponsored by Rep. Nick Kupper, a Republican (because of course he is) from Surprise.

Hey Nick, how about making your search history public? What? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

“Arizona families have had enough,” Kupper said in a statement. “Hardcore pornography has been just one click away from kids for too long, and the companies behind it have looked the other way while cashing in. This law forces them to take responsibility and keeps minors off their platforms.” (He said without a trace of irony because how does he know hardcore pornography is one click away?)

Hobbs’ signature comes a year after she vetoed a similar measure over concerns that it violated First Amendment rights. A spokesperson for the governor did not answer a question about why Hobbs signed this year’s bill.

This year’s tweaked measure prohibits companies that do age verification from keeping personal information or sharing it with government entities. It allows parents and guardians to sue websites for not complying with the law, levying fines of $10,000 per day it does not verify a user’s age or up to $250,000 if a minor accesses pornography on the site.

The measure goes into effect 90 days after the Legislature finishes its work for the year, which is likely not until late June.

At the Arizona Capitol, Republican lawmakers backed the measure arguing it was a commonsense way to protect children from harmful online material, and gave parents more control over their children’s activities. Many Democrats and groups like the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona opposed it, contending it violated free speech and privacy rights, and was merely part of a conservative effort to eradicate pornography entirely. Good luck with that.

There were also questions of effectiveness. Sen. Analise Ortiz, a Phoenix Democrat, opposed the bill noting during testimony on May 6 that she easily found ways around internet blockers in middle school while trying to access the website MySpace.

Arizona joins more than 20 states that have enacted similar laws after 2022, though not all are in effect, according to the Free Speech Coalition, which represents the adult entertainment industry. More than a dozen states considered such bills this year, according to the coalition.

Now I don’t know about any of my you, but I certainly can’t afford $10,000 a day for being in violation after the end of June.

I considered several courses of action. Going through and plucking out all the nekkid menz and leaving everything else intact would be a Herculean task. “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”

And then again the age old question raises its head: what is pornography? Does it require penetration? Does it include simple photos of shirtless guys? Am I safe if I just crop out all the penises?

The other alternative I briefly considered was even more dramatic and unacceptable: simply wipe the site and start fresh. Admittedly that’s something I’ve considered on more than one occasion for various other reasons—not the least of which is worrying about running out of my allotted storage space on the server. But sorting my latest crop of downloads this morning I realized I could not continue to bring you porn-dogs your daily dose of male flesh.

So the final alternative—and not really knowing what the specific requirements would be with this bit of legislative billshit—would be to implement some sort of age verification checkpoint. I looked at all the free plugins available to WordPress and grabbed the one that looked the easiest to get up and running. (Sorry, I’m not paying anyone to trample my readers’ first amendment rights.)

The format (or in fact the entire plugin) may change over the coming weeks as I look into this further. If Arizona’s bill requires proof of age—as in submitting driver’s licenses or whatever—then the site will be wiped and rebuilt from scratch sans nekkid menz, because I will never require that from any of my readers.

I’m trying to make this process as unobtrusive as possible (such as requiring that you verify only once every 90 days), and it will obviously require a bit more tweaking as I learn the actual requirements of the new law.

Just wanted to bring you up to speed on what’s happening.

I was able to get the cached copy of the image removed from the interwebs, so hopefully this will satisfy the demand. I haven’t heard anything from my host, but for now it looks like I’m good…

Obviously the guy did not see the “Notice” aka Don’t Be a Dick section on the right. The notice came through my hosting company and I supposedly have 48 hours to remove the offending material for I’ll be shut down. I found the offending post and photo and deleted it. No big deal, right? Well, one link the attorney (yes, a fucking attorney) provided was to the i0.wp.com domain that I have no control over. It was created when I was using the Jetpack add-in back in 2021.

Based on similar requests i0.wp.com I found online, I’ve reached out to wordpress.org and their forums requesting that the image be deleted from their caches. If it isn’t removed, VoenixRising may go poof on Friday until it’s resolved—and possibly permanently.

If it’s shut down, you can follow me on tumblr while this gets sorted out. If I have to end up shutting down VoenixRising with this host, I’ll move to a different one and start fresh. I’ll keep the blogosphere updated updated via Tumblr.

TBH, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise. I’ve been flying under the radar as far as the whole NSFW content is concerned with my current host, and I haven’t moved to a more NSFW friendly host simply because of the trouble involved. But I may be forced to.

Apologies if the site is acting a bit…wonky. I don’t know if it’s just me (I’m currently using the latest beta of MacOS Sequoia) or it’s something on the back end at my host, but I’m noticing some strangeness with stuff loading. Sometimes the header will load in Safari, but not in Firefox. Other times various individual images will load in Firefox but not Safari. And don’t even get me started with the Duck-Duck-Go browser! I’ve re-enabled some backend tools to help with load times, but I’m not sure it hasn’t done more harm than good…

You’re welcome!

As undoubtedly most of you have noticed, Voenix Rising has been having a few…issues…over the past couple weeks. Based on the last time this happened, I knew I’d have to get my ISP involved to provide me the necessary information I needed to resolve the issue. (That information was not something I could get myself, so…)

Anyhow, without giving too much away, I applied the fix and all seemed well…until I noticed my scheduled posts were no longer working. Ultimately the solution to that should’ve been obvious, but thanks to a few WordPress plugins and going down some rabbit holes that led nowwhere, I was able to track the issue down to the changes I’d made to single file on the site after conferring with my ISP.

I’m not saying that this has fixed everything, but at least queued posts are working normally again and the various other errors I was seeing internally have been resolved. Time will tell if the bigger problem that started this whole exercise has gone away or not, but I’m holding out hope.

How do I have nearly 600 items in my Downloads folder?

Prepare to be inundated, boys…

I woke up this morning to this email from my web host:

I thought, “Oh FUCK. I just renewed my hosting a few weeks ago (a month ahead of time), so when does this shit actually go down? I knew my site was huge (I was for some reason remembering 1TB or so.), but did that mean after the hammer falls they would just randomly delete stuff to make it fit within the new size limits?

So I clicked on the link and saw the potential $950 charge for the Pro hosting. Not only no, but HELL no!

Naturally this sent my head spinning the rest of the day. Could I delete a lot of the older stuff? I remembered when I outright deleted everything without a backup and started fresh in 2012—and regretted it for years afterward.

I know I have a lot of inane garbage on this blog, but I’m still attached to it, however silly it is. (And truth be told, even I cringe at a lot of the older stuff I’ve written, as I’m sure I’ll do with my current word salad years from now.)

So the next question was could I find a new adult-content friendly host with unlimited storage and move everything?

The thought of moving hosts is about as enticing as a root canal, but I started googling “unlimited storage and adult content friendly.” I came up with a few names. Surprisingly, my current host was not among them….so I may end up having to move Voenix Rising at some point anyway if they ever figure out there are—gasp!—penises on this blog. (Frankly I’m surprised it hasn’t happened by now, considering the number of times I’ve had their techs poking around, trying to figure out why the site errors out so much of late.)

So while getting how-to pages on how to transfer domain names and whatnot, I stumbled across my host’s main page and saw the “Pro” hosting advertised for significantly less than what the email link showed me.

I paused for a moment to actually verify the size of all this drivel, and it turns out it was nowhere near 1TB. It was, in fact, only about 45GB. Still over the 40GB limit of my current hosting plan, but certainly not the monster I thought it was.

And that $900 pro plan? That was for three years, and I only renew yearly.

Once I saw that, I realized going Pro (which actually wasn’t unlimited, but rather topped out at 100GB…at least for new subscribers) was doable after all—especially since I’d be credited with the year of hosting I just paid in advance for.

Crisis averted. Voenix Rising will continue in its present form and at its present home until such time the issue of penii comes up.

I don’t know what’s going on with my hosting provider, but it seems every damn day something isn’t working. Today I can’t upload photos. I can’t FTP into the site. I can’t tell you how often I’ve gotten the dreaded Server Error message when attempting to access the site.

And don’t even get me started on their tech support…

For that reason, I’ll probably be moving hosts this weekend, so there may be a period this weekend when Voenix Rising is legitimately offline.