Updated freeflow slugs + redirects, added freeflow 5

.eleventy.js

@@ -83,12 +83,14 @@ export default function (eleventyConfig) {
   });
 
   // Passthrough copies
+  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src/.htaccess");
+  eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("src/robots.txt");
   ["src/assets"].forEach((path) => {
     eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy(path);
   });
 
   // Watch targets
-  eleventyConfig.addWatchTarget("./src/assets/css");
+  eleventyConfig.addWatchTarget("src/assets/css");
 
   // Frontmatter parsing
   eleventyConfig.setFrontMatterParsingOptions({ excerpt: true });

src/.htaccess

@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+RedirectPermanent /entry/2025/05/01/free-flow-1/index.html /entry/2025/05/01/freeflow-1/index.html
+RedirectPermanent /entry/2025/05/05/free-flow-2/index.html /entry/2025/05/05/freeflow-2/index.html
+RedirectPermanent /entry/2025/05/09/free-flow-3/index.html /entry/2025/05/09/freeflow-3/index.html
+RedirectPermanent /entry/2025/05/16/free-flow-4/index.html /entry/2025/05/16/freeflow-4/index.html

src/journal/2025/freeflow-1.md

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
-title: "Free flow #1: A heart-to-art conversation"
+title: "Freeflow #1: A heart-to-art conversation"
 date: 2025-05-01T16:30:00.00-05:00
 lastmod: 2025-05-12T00:31:00.00-05:00
 categories:
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ categories:
 tags:
   - post
 elsewhere:
-  ghost: https://gilosophies.ghost.io/free-flow-1/
+  ghost: https://ghost.gil.ink/freeflow-5/
 ---
 
 This is my first public attempt at stream of consciousness. Now I don’t _feel_ as creative of a mind as I might’ve been as a kid. Somewhere between now and adolescence I suppose I’ve become caught up in life and the world. Perhaps I still have a creative spirit, but I’ve been experiencing so much blockage with the creative process lately that I feel completely disconnected from it. It’s like when you look at an empty canvas or a blank page, and your mind goes just as blank. I get a bit paralyzed at the thought of actually creating something, unless I come prepared with an already well-formed idea. It could be just that my inner critic is taking over before I even begin.

src/journal/2025/freeflow-2.md

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
-title: "Free flow #2: For the human condition"
+title: "Freeflow #2: For the human condition"
 date: 2025-05-05T23:35:00.00-05:00
 lastmod: 2025-05-12T00:34:00.00-05:00
 categories:
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ categories:
 tags:
   - post
 elsewhere:
-  ghost: https://gilosophies.ghost.io/free-flow-2/
+  ghost: https://ghost.gil.ink/freeflow-5/
 ---
 
 As the wheel of american politics turns, the more inclined I am to view the u.s. as a plastic country, a plastic culture, one that has been hollowed out. Along with our identities and our abilities to create meaning from our experiences, they've been metabolized into social control, to feed systems that funnel wealth and power back to the already wealthy and powerful. Everything we have has been becoming more and more empty, more removed from substance and truth, concealing our society's most pain-inducing contradictions. As I listen to Justin Scott (@cypher.j on TikTok) discussing the kind of moment we're living in, I feel the current state of the world highlights important conflicts in the human condition that we've been grappling with for ages, especially how we survive as humans, whose survival do we strive for, and who gets to decide.

src/journal/2025/freeflow-3.md

@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 ---
-title: "Free flow #3: Discover purpose"
+title: "Freeflow #3: Discover purpose"
 date: 2025-05-09T02:27:00.00-05:00
 lastmod: 2025-05-12T00:40:00.00-05:00
 categories:
@@ -7,7 +7,7 @@ categories:
 tags:
   - post
 elsewhere:
-  ghost: https://gilosophies.ghost.io/free-flow-3/
+  ghost: https://ghost.gil.ink/freeflow-5/
 ---
 
 Life sometimes feels like it’s simply tugging me along, towards some unknown and incomprehensible destiny. I get the sense that I’m just along for the ride. It’s bound to get wilder and rougher, harder to recognize for what it was. So many surprises, things I couldn’t predict. Anxiety that comes with that, but so does beauty — little things to appreciate along the way, like looking out the window on a road trip or stopping on a hike to gaze at the sky or admire plants and rocks and animals. You get small, private joys that you don’t have to share with anyone else but yourself. Secret euphoria. As crazy as life is at times, I wouldn’t trade mine for any other; I will never get to be anyone but myself, and that’s the best part. It doesn’t always make sense, and it doesn’t have to. I really felt this strongly when I was sitting in the parking lot outside my dad’s appointment with the doctor, a mundane event that feels heavy not just in light of what’s happening in the world, but also because when you’re young you don’t always picture yourself doing these things.

src/journal/2025/freeflow-4.md

@@ -1,12 +1,12 @@
 ---
-title: "Free flow #4: The web, social media, and the way beyond"
+title: "Freeflow #4: The web, social media, and the way beyond"
 lastmod: 2025-05-16T15:05:00.00-05:00
 categories:
   - freeflow
 tags:
   - post
 elsewhere:
-  ghost: https://gilosophies.ghost.io/free-flow-4/
+  ghost: https://ghost.gil.ink/freeflow-4/
 ---
 
 Recently I’ve been sinking more time into developing my own website. I really like having a home on the web that is a bit more personal and unique. People talk about the web before social media, but is that dichotomy really real? The web has always been social, the internet an inherently social medium. Is all media social? The whole premise of the internet, at least in my view, is mass communication after all. Maybe the difference is like that between media generally and mass media, or more specifically mass _corporate_ media — lots of things are categorically media, but _mass_ media emphasizes size and reach. So, the internet is social media, but mass social _corporate_ media would be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Bluesky, TikTok, Discord, and so on.

src/journal/2025/freeflow-5.md

@@ -0,0 +1,26 @@
+---
+title: "Freeflow #5: Questing through life"
+date: 2025-05-22T14:38:44.00-05:00
+lastmod: 2025-05-22T14:38:44.00-05:00
+categories:
+  - freeflow
+tags:
+  - post
+elsewhere:
+  ghost: https://ghost.gil.ink/freeflow-5/
+---
+
+Recently my partner and I have played a lot of Baldur’s Gate 3 (I know — already off to a great start in this Freeflow) and it gave me an idea while I was driving home from work. I’ve contemplated more lately about how I have so many different threads spinning in my life constantly but never the bandwidth or time for all of them. Journaling has improved my habits significantly, as has writing these Freeflows, but I’ve been pondering what other changes I could make to solidify better habits and expand my personal growth into other areas of life.
+
+Which brings me back to Baldur’s Gate 3 — and this is hardly unique to BG3, this is an element of RPGs in general — but what if I divided my life into quest lines? I’m not the first to have this idea. There are already systems and apps and journals that game-ify habit-tracking and time management. But I’m particularly considering how my boyfriend and I have approached the quest system. During each act, the game presents you with a certain set of things you can complete in any given area, and it’s up to the player to decide what quest tracks they want to do and what pace or order they take things at. It leads to a lot of variety that can accommodate real-life factors like how long you’re able to play or what mood you’re in. You can plow through an entire track in one go, or you can go around each quest line doing one task at a time. Sometimes the quests intersect so advancing in one quest also moves along another, or one quest’s end leads to another’s beginning. It’s never a big pressure to forge ahead, and you can really take your time witnessing the game world and story unfold and noticing how much work the developers put into every little bit of it.
+
+The entire time you’re progressing through the game, your quest log updates to give you clues about what to do next, the options that exist then and there, and details related to the bigger story. And that’s what I want to experiment with for organizing my life, as a supplement to the Bullet Journal method. A quest page would start with a major task or bigger goal I have, then I could basically document my steps towards that goal. I would proceed one task at a time, writing about what happened at each stage and then adding the next task to complete. Then I could pull from these quest pages into my daily bulleted list. To make it more fun, I might add a fantasy/RPG flavor to the writing. A very simplified example might look something like this:
+
+> ## Clean Gil the Green’s pocket dimension
+> 
+> + [x] I swept the dust out of the kitchen. Now I should check if the garbage bin is full.
+> + [x] I discovered that the garbage bin was full, so I took out the bag. But I was out of trash bags and couldn’t replace it. I need to buy some from the store.
+> + [ ] I bought trash bags and took out the garbage. Now that the kitchen is clean, I can begin tidying up the bedchamber…
+> + etc.
+
+Obviously I wouldn’t need to take this super seriously. It could also come with a garden page, for planting tasks that aren’t immediately actionable but could be done further down the road. For now, I think I’m going to experiment with this and see how much I enjoy it.

src/robots.txt

@@ -0,0 +1,133 @@
+# Currently borrowed from seirdy.one. Will add my own blocks
+User-agent: *
+
+# I opt out of online advertising so malware that injects ads on my site won't
+# get paid. You should do the same. my ads.txt file contains a standard
+# placeholder to forbid any compliant ad networks from paying for ad placement
+# on my domain.
+User-agent: Adsbot
+Disallow: /
+Allow: /ads.txt
+Allow: /app-ads.txt
+
+# By allowing us access, you enable the maximum number
+# of advertisers to confidently purchase advertising space on your pages. Our
+# comprehensive data insights help advertisers understand the suitability and
+# context of your content, ensuring that their ads align with your audience's
+# interests and needs. This alignment leads to improved user experiences,
+# increased engagement, and ultimately, higher revenue potential for your
+# publication. (https://www.peer39.com/crawler-notice)
+#  --> fuck off.
+User-agent: peer39_crawler
+User-agent: peer39_crawler/1.0
+Disallow: /
+
+## IP-violation scanners ##
+
+# The next three are borrowed from https://www.videolan.org/robots.txt
+
+# > This robot collects content from the Internet for the sole purpose of #
+# helping educational institutions prevent plagiarism. [...] we compare student
+# papers against the content we find on the Internet to see if we # can find
+# similarities. (http://www.turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html)
+#  --> fuck off.
+User-agent: TurnitinBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# > NameProtect engages in crawling activity in search of a wide range of brand
+# and other intellectual property violations that may be of interest to our
+# clients. (http://www.nameprotect.com/botinfo.html)
+#  --> fuck off.
+User-agent: NPBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# iThenticate is a new service we have developed to combat the piracy of
+# intellectual property and ensure the originality of written work for#
+# publishers, non-profit agencies, corporations, and newspapers.
+# (http://www.slysearch.com/)
+#  --> fuck off.
+User-agent: SlySearch
+Disallow: /
+
+# BLEXBot assists internet marketers to get information on the link structure
+# of sites and their interlinking on the web, to avoid any technical and
+# possible legal issues and improve overall online experience.
+# (http://webmeup-crawler.com/)
+# --> fuck off.
+User-agent: BLEXBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# Providing Intellectual Property professionals with superior brand protection
+# services by artfully merging the latest technology with expert analysis.
+# (https://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html/)
+# "The Internet is just way to big to effectively police alone." (ACTUAL quote)
+# --> fuck off.
+User-agent: CheckMarkNetwork/1.0 (+https://www.checkmarknetwork.com/spider.html)
+Disallow: /
+
+# Stop trademark violations and affiliate non-compliance in paid search.
+# Automatically monitor your partner and affiliates’ online marketing to
+# protect yourself from harmful brand violations and regulatory risks. We
+# regularly crawl websites on behalf of our clients to ensure content
+# compliance with brand and regulatory guidelines.
+# (https://www.brandverity.com/why-is-brandverity-visiting-me)
+# --> fuck off.
+User-agent: BrandVerity/1.0
+Disallow: /
+
+## Misc. icky stuff ##
+
+# Pipl assembles online identity information from multiple independent sources
+# to create the most complete picture of a digital identity and connect it to
+# real people and their offline identity records. When all the fragments of
+# online identity data are collected, connected, and corroborated, the result
+# is a more trustworthy identity.
+# --> fuck off.
+User-agent: PiplBot
+Disallow: /
+
+## Gen-AI data scrapers ##
+
+# Eat shit, OpenAI.
+User-agent: ChatGPT-User
+User-agent: GPTBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# Official way to opt-out of Google's generative AI training:
+# <https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/overview-google-crawlers>
+User-agent: Google-Extended
+Disallow: /
+
+# Official way to opt-out of LLM training by Apple
+# <https://support.apple.com/en-us/119829#datausage>
+User-agent: Applebot-Extended
+Disallow: /
+
+# Anthropic-AI crawler posted guidance after a long period of crawling without opt-out documentation: <https://support.anthropic.com/en/articles/8896518-does-anthropic-crawl-data-from-the-web-and-how-can-site-owners-block-the-crawler>
+User-agent: ClaudeBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# FacebookBot crawls public web pages to improve language models for our speech
+# recognition technology.
+# <https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/bot/?_fb_noscript=1>
+User-agent:  FacebookBot
+Disallow: /
+
+# I'm not blocking CCBot for now. It publishes a free index for anyone to use.
+# Googe used this to train the initial version of Bard (now called Gemini).
+# I allow CCBot since its index is also used for upstart/hobbyist search engines
+# like Alexandria and for genuinely useful academic work I personally like.
+# I allow Owler for similar reasons:
+# <https://openwebsearch.eu/owler/#owler-opt-out>
+# <https://openwebsearch.eu/common-goals-with-common-crawl/>.
+# Omgilibot/Omgili is similar to CCBot, except it sells the scrape results.
+# I'm not familiar enough with Omgili to make a call here.
+# In the long run, my embedded robots meta-tags and headers could cover gen-AI
+
+# I don't block cohere-ai or Perplexitybot: they don't appear to actually
+# scrape data for LLM training purposes. The crawling powers search engines
+# with integrated pre-trained LLMs.
+# TODO: investigate whether YouBot scrapes to train its own in-house LLM.
+
+User-agent: facebookexternalhit
+Disallow: /