(no subject)

Aug. 27th, 2025 11:31 am
angrboda: Viking style dragon head finial against a blue sky (Default)
[personal profile] angrboda
I. Pictures from my summer holiday have been posting every other day over on my pillowfort. I wanted to have them post between 11 and 12 midday. This is not what has happened. I don't know why Americans can't just use a sensible way to read a clock. Oh well, it's not a disaster. I have enough posts scheduled that the last one will be in end September. Husband also gave me some photos that he took and I'll put up some of those as well.

II. Luna's appetite is yo-yoing a bit. After we came back from our holiday it started getting difficult, and then the other day she had another little hairball, and now she's eating well again. I really think the issue is hairball related rather than kidney issues, but we'll see. She's got a vet visit scheduled soon to have her teeth checked and the vet wanted to try and get a blood sample for her kidney values at the same time. It's easier for everybody, especially the elderly cat, if we can do both these two things at the same time without having to knock her out.

III. Still very motivated about the new bed project in the garden, but Husband says wait until later in the year for a higher chance of success and also because he says after we've had some proper rainy days, it'll also be easier to dig it up. So I'm trying to keep up steam here until I can order the plants and start digging a big hole! I kind of want to order them now just because I'm excited, but since I can't plant them anyway that would stupid. Plant nursery people can look after the same pots way better than I can in the meantime.

IV. Summer holiday has come to an end. Back to work kicking and screaming as per usual. Well, actually, I have seriously tried really hard not to complain too much about it this year, but some grump slipped out Sunday evening and Husband laughed at me.

V. Holly is having a nap on my lap at the moment and she's dreaming something. It's immensely cute, but the twitching tickles madly.

VI. Sunday also marked the return to watching opera from the Met in our little cinema. This one was The Barber of Seville which was very good and funny. I've been listening to bits of it again since. There are a couple of titles in the program for the next season that we would like to see, but some of them unfortunately won't be possible. These are only shown one time, so it's not like you get a choice. Rigoletto coincides with a family event, and Tristan and Isolde is shown on a Friday because it's so super long (5 hours!) AND we already have tickets for the music house that same evening. Neither of us are really up for that kind of marathon! The Met does have it's own streaming service with over 800 titles on it and it's not even very expensive, so we've been considering trying that out.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

hey, fight this mime

Aug. 19th, 2025 09:12 pm
marginaliana: Aziraphale sheltering Crowley with his wing (Good Omens - shelter)
[personal profile] marginaliana
Things:

--I've been watching a playthrough of Clair Obscur and one mechanics thing I'm noticing particularly is how each character has their own catchphrase(s) in battle. Before each move, Gustave will say the same damn thing. I've seen this in turn-based fighting games before but it's somehow especially aggravating in this one. The game is otherwise great but I find myself frequently mouthing 'For the ones who come after' and then saying 'shut up, Gustave!' (I also have said "Shut up, Gustave!" on other occasions as well.)

--Just announced: Silksong coming out on Sept 4!! Massive excite for that. I am too shit at dexterity-based games to play myself so will be waiting for Playframe's playthrough and I'm not sure how long he'll hold off before starting it but I'm already chomping at the bit.

--Have had to spend several days at work on a depressing project. My normal focus area is intellectual property and though that is a genuinely important part of the legal system, on a daily basis seeing which giant semiconductor company wins the slap-fight does not particularly move me emotionally. Whereas spending hours reading the details of [horrible thing] really kind of fucked me over, mentally.

--Recent boardgaming weekend was a delight - I particularly enjoyed Unstable Unicorns which is deeply silly, and also Person Do Thing which is a great party game that you don't need to buy to play, just go to the website.

--I'm trying to figure out if I can propose to my mother a place for us to meet up for Christmas that wouldn't be where she lives (Texas) because tbh I just don't want to go there for a million reasons, only some of which have to do with politics. But her walking ability is pretty limited and I don't know that there's any point to going somewhere with tourist stuff if she can't really do most of it. I'll probably just suck it up and go to TX. Which, if I'm going to, I should buy plane tickets now and stop waffling.

--I have agreed to help one of my coworkers with her September 1 move, because I am a sucker. My wrists are already fucked from everyday life and I can't wait to see how extra fucked they're going to be after carrying boxes from a u-haul next weekend. Whee. Why did I say yes to this?? Oh yeah, human decency. I remember now.

--Still here.

(no subject)

Aug. 17th, 2025 01:20 pm
angrboda: Viking style dragon head finial against a blue sky (Default)
[personal profile] angrboda
Came home from our summer holiday yesterday. We had a summer house on Funen, one of the larger Danish islands. I followed my challenge to take more pictures. Despite [personal profile] rmc28's suggestions, no name really stuck. I did do it, though! I took so many pictures and some of them actually came out. Some of them turned out a bit blurry, especially the ones from the zoo. I think I'm a bit of an aggressive zoomer, but I'm only working with my phone here.

I have queued up a bunch of picture posts from our trip over on Pillowfort. The first one posted today, and I've set them up to post another every two days over there. If you want to see them, they're all public, and you can go here: https://www.pillowfort.social/PurplePrimula

If you are interested in your own account, you can use this invite link. It's multi-use.
https://pillowfort.social/users/sign_up?invite=LuuQGZlUVrJq2RByEs85mg

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