Society

I had a perfectly nice domain and then the Taliban ruined it

~ AF

Sheesh, I’d found the perfect domain for the home for my random, yes, opinionated, writing on the internet. opinionated.af. I am opinionated.af. Get it, it’s a joke because my initials are AF, and I’m opinionated. And weird – there was this little country also with the initials AF and I could register a domain with that suffix. Golden.

But then, of course, as happens, the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan, and consequently the .af country code top-level domain (ccTLD), to which my golden domain unceremoniously belonged.

Over the past few months, I’ve been getting a sequence of more urgent emails from my registrar, gandi.net – we can no longer administer this domain, you have to transfer it to another registrar before it expires. But… transfer it… to whom? I couldn’t find another registrar that would take it, and then when I finally found one that said they could do it, they would only take PayPal and didn’t even have a web control panel for making configuration changes, which I’d have to do via email, not the modern e-commerce experience I was looking for with all of the assurances that afforded. And then I found one that was really expensive and decided to bite the bullet and try (despite not feeling great about giving any money to the Taliban at all, but hopefully my use of this domain would outlast them in the fullness of time), but by that point it was too late – gandi told me the domain couldn’t be transferred, and then the registration expired and I needed to wait 90 days for it to go back into the pool for reregistration.

But then that time came and went, and the domain never showed up as being available for registration again. It appears to have been shut down entirely by the registry, or I can’t get any actual information about it, which might as well be the same thing.

So… that sucks.

I can understand that countries with responsibility for administering their country domains want to restrict their usage, but I’m also of the feeling that country code TLDs should not be the way to get desirable vanity domains that are meaningful words. It’s a real problem that ccTLDs are common 2-letter suffixes, and they’re the only way to get these kinds of vanity domains.

I didn’t want to pay thousands of dollars on a new “premium” domain that would be less appropriate than the one I had, so opinionated.af.yachts it is, for now. [Update: I missed some emails while on vacation and neglected to renew the af.yachts domain for $16, and when I tried to reclaim it, they wanted $5000 to register it again as a premium domain. So… opinionated.af.motorcycles it is…]

On the sexism of Playboy

~ AF

Hugh Hefner died, and a lot of people are suddenly talking about what a great figure he was.

I’m sure there’s a lot of history here that I don’t know – I only have what I’ve gleaned from what little personal attention I’ve paid over the years. I get that Playboy was the thing that broke the mold of porn sleaze and brought porn into mainstream “respectability”. Or at least, the thing the opened the door to that. But even in my youngest and most impressionable days, the porn it offered was never really all that palatable to me, and in retrospect whatever respectability it brought seems downright sexist and regressive. Sure, the women were naked, but they were also clearly being subjugated even if they were there by choice. The image of the Playboy Bunny was never appealing, for probably the same reason that I find strip clubs to be the least sexy places on the planet, including lamprey-infested volcanic bat caves (to the bat cave!). The Bunny has little agency, she’s a passive … thing, there only for the enjoyment of predominantly rich men or men who want to think or act like they’re rich.

I’m sure Hef had a bunch of fun parties and enjoyed his life, and gave voice to a number of writers who would otherwise have needed another platform, but that life has never been one I aspired to or admired. It always seemed exceedingly lonely and thin, surrounded by women who were only or primarily there because you had stuff, not as active or equal partners in anything. The Playboy lifestyle is very much the kind of thing that someone like Trump would enjoy. It doesn’t seem graceful, elegant, or stylish, but a bit boorish and somewhat repugnant. Second guessing history is a weird thing, and while I can acknowledge the liberation that Playboy did for sexual freedom, taken at face value, it seems like a relic best left to the past (which is probably fine since the internet seems to have mostly killed it anyway).