The Annual $12 Existential Crisis
Description
A two-panel comic meme format known as 'Two Buttons' or 'Daily Struggle'. The top panel shows a console with two large red buttons. The left button is labeled 'admit to yourself your dream is dead', and the right button is labeled 'pay $12'. A hand is shown hesitating between the two choices. The bottom panel features a cartoon man in a red shirt, sweating profusely and wiping his brow in extreme anguish. Overlaid on this panel is the text 'DOMAIN RENEWAL'. The meme perfectly captures the annual dilemma faced by developers and entrepreneurs who own domains for side projects that have since been abandoned. Paying the small renewal fee represents clinging to the hope that the project will one day be revived, while letting it expire is a final admission of defeat. The original post caption was a simple '🥲' emoji, conveying the shared pain
Comments
35Comment deleted
My domains are like Schrödinger's startups: as long as I pay the renewal fee, they are simultaneously alive and dead
The only piece of that “weekend MVP” still in prod is the domain - apparently my denial TTL outlives every DNS record
The real tragedy isn't the $12 annual fee - it's explaining to your accountant why you're writing off 47 domain renewals as 'R&D expenses' while your GitHub shows the last commit was 'initial commit' from 2019
Every senior engineer has a portfolio of domains that serve as a monument to optimism and a testament to the gap between 'I'll build this next weekend' and 'it's been three years.' That $12 annual renewal isn't just a fee - it's the subscription cost for maintaining plausible deniability that you haven't given up on your revolutionary idea. The real engineering challenge isn't the tech stack; it's architecting a rationalization framework robust enough to justify another year of DNS records pointing to a 'Coming Soon' page that's been coming soon since 2019
Paying $12 to give the project another 365-day TTL is the cheapest SRE practice I’ve ever approved
Side projects obey CAP: can't have dream consistency and partition tolerance without paying the $12 availability tax
Domain renewal: $12/year to refresh the TTL on my side‑project delusion for another 365d
I just had this issue a few weeks ago Comment deleted
I had to admit one project is dead💀 Comment deleted
This is funny but sad Comment deleted
How many domains (projects) do you have? Comment deleted
Yes Comment deleted
Literally right now thinking about a bill in total for 350$+ solely for domain names to pay 🥲 Comment deleted
what kind of domains do you hold...? Comment deleted
Do you mean for alive projects or just domains with nothing behind? 🤣 Comment deleted
all of them xD Comment deleted
I mean, there’s just too much to list here xD Comment deleted
that explains the bill 👀 Comment deleted
Eg it’s just a list of the domains for a single projects (but different localisations) new-world.guide newworldguide.de nwguide.pl newworld-pt.com nwguide.cn nwguide.es nwguide.it nwguide.fr nwguide.ru Comment deleted
Which is in fact half-dead and requires an urgent update… since like august or something Comment deleted
Tho still with thousands unique visits from search engines per day Comment deleted
damn qwq you even got different TLDs Comment deleted
Did you want to create something similar to wowhead or something? I thought new world is dead lol Comment deleted
Yeah, indeed Comment deleted
Somehow achieved it but proper data processing/client unpacking requires too much time to maintain Comment deleted
what do you mean? :) didn't quite understand. you wanted it to be user-generated? like icy veins if you have heard of it Comment deleted
It was meant to be based fully on data extracted from the game client (and it is) because lumberyard is a fullstack game framework with all data being included into the client, eg including drop chances, etc Comment deleted
do they also go full batshit on client obfuscation like mihoyo or Comment deleted
Nah, they just write dogshit spaghetti 😄 Jokes aside, from the reverse engineering perspective they do have too many people making updates manually not via code but via game engine ide Comment deleted
Oh, that does sound annoying. Runtime dump is the last bastion that usually works fairly well, static dumping though is usually HELL with a setup like this Comment deleted
Not runtime dump! What is decoded is an actual game data on the game client Comment deleted
Yeah but it's sometimes way easier to use reflection to pull it out of the client rather than try to parse the assets statically if they change structure too much Comment deleted
ah i see. good to know :) wow guys used to reverse engineer the client and network communication in order to parse it and create emulators (like mangos). didn't know amazon released their own engine Comment deleted
beebyte + vmp + control flow flattening + rsa xor mt64 traffic + shuffling protobuf + shuffling cmdids + encrypted metadata + inlined decrypt constants in accessors + kernel anticheat Comment deleted
android has shitty tencent anticheat, no Comment deleted