Week in review: Week to 6 September

7 September 2025 07:02 pm
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
. I didn't write a full journal entry all week. Fortunately, my habit of making brief notes about my day is solidly ingrained, so I still had something to work from for this blog post. Read more... )


. At the board game club, we played Bomb Busters again. We got through three missions, completing two successfully on the first attempt and requiring a second attempt for one after I lost track of one of the conditions and blew everyone up by cutting a wire that I was incorrectly certain was safe.


. This week, I read a couple of the short children's books that have been lurking unread on my shelves for longer than I can remember (though probably not since I was a child myself; I'm pretty sure both are books I picked up from secondhand book sales). Read more... ) The Island on Bird Street was my September pick for the Randomize Your TBR reading challenge; Jacob Two-Two didn't fit any of the pending challenges, I just saw it on the shelf and decided it would make a nice break from the kind of thing I'd been reading lately.


. During the time that my immediate precursors were occupying this house, the bathroom was remodelled and new fittings installed. Read more... ) There's something about that which feels emblematic of the modern world we live in.


. I nearly managed to finish my latest jigsaw puzzle in under a week - I've been catching up on a lot of podcasts lately - but last night I found myself with three spaces left in the puzzle and three leftover pieces which each seemed to be the right shape and colour for a space but didn't... quite... fit. Read more... )


. On Tumblr, there was a poll asking "What is the longest book series you've read?" My first thought was the Liaden series, currently at 27 novels with at least one more on the way. Then I remembered that I've read the entire Discworld series from beginning to end, and that's 40+ novels depending on how you count them. And then I recalled that I've done the same with the Doctor Who New Adventures, which is just over 60 novels. So far I haven't thought of anything else longer than that.


. From the CinemaStix youtube channel, a two-part video essay on the making of the movie Gladiator, with a focus on how much the key through-lines of the story were constructed in production and post-production: part 1 is about the script and part 2 is about the editing. One of the things covered in part 2 is how they rearranged the final act of the movie to cover for the untimely death of one of the actors, something that was achieved so successfully that, although I knew it had happened, it had never occurred to me until I watched this to wonder what his character would have done differently if the actor had survived.

Publicity

3 September 2025 08:01 pm
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[personal profile] watervole

 The Morris Federation are doing a recruiting push, backed up by a lot of short videos.  Here's the one for Anonymous Morris 

 

We're a team with wide variation in age, etc.  See my family photo!.  Taken at Wimborne Folk Festival (I'm the oldest one. The rest are my son, daughter-in-law,  grandson (very young) and my grand-daughter by my daughter.  Theo and Oswin, you can deduce, are cousins.

Dreamwidth's photo hosting is clunky beyond belief...  I do wish they'd put a bit of effort into making it work better.

  

 

Code deploy happening shortly

31 August 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

Fiction log - August 2025

1 September 2025 08:27 am
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
Fiction books
(anthology). The Night Marchers and other Oceanian stories
Charles Dickens. A Tale of Two Cities
EM Forster. A Room with a View
Kahlil Gibran. The Prophet
Cherry Wilder. A Princess of the Chameln
Jay Williams. The Practical Princess and other liberating fairy tales

In progress
Cory Doctorow. Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (e)
Julian Rathbone. The Last English King
Helen Simonson. Major Pettigrew's Last Stand (e)

Non-fiction books
(none)

Non-fiction books in progress
Richard Fidler. Ghost Empire
Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (e)

short, screen, and stage )
books bought and borrowed )

Top of the to-read pile
Uri Orlev, tr. Hillel Halkin. The Island on Bird Street
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

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

Week in review: Week to 30 August

31 August 2025 11:48 am
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
. At board game club, we had another Sunday afternoon session, and also the usual evening event. At one or the other, I played Dune: Imperium, The Tainted Grail, Mansions of Madness, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: Trick-Taking Game (only the runner-up for most awkwardly named LOTR-themed game I encountered this week, because I also came across Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings™ Game). Three of those were co-operative games, which we won with margins of varying widths; Dune: Imperium is competitive, and ended up a very close competition, with only one victory point separating the winner from the player who ended up in last place.


. I finished reading The Night Marchers, my April book for the random selection reading challenge, without ever warming to it. My chances of getting caught up in the story weren't helped by the fact that the printer hadn't trimmed the page block cleanly, so I had to keep stopping several times a chapter to separate the pages with a letter opener.


. I got a good time at Parkrun again: not as fast as last week's record, but still faster than the previous record.


. In the afternoon, I sat out on the front porch in the sun for a while, reading, and watched a butterfly and a couple of bees investigating the flowers that are starting to appear on the volunteer plants in the front yard.


. I've started reading Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town by Cory Doctorow, one of the reading challenge options for March. I'm not sure what I think of it yet.


. I've already finished the jigsaw puzzle I started last week. Either I'm getting really efficient at organising and solving jigsaw puzzles - which is not necessarily a positive, because the value of them is in having one around when I need to relax by bringing order out of chaos, not in having finished them - or I've been in particular need of the relaxation lately. (Work has thrown up a few challenges lately, and so has the committee.)


. I wrote a journal entry every day this week. A couple of times I didn't get it done in the morning, and was tired in the evening, and considered skipping a day, but then I told myself it would only take about half an hour and then it would be done, and I could probably manage that, and so far I've turned out to be right.
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.

Week in review: Week to 23 August

26 August 2025 12:06 pm
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
. I reached a milestone in 750 Words: one year since I resumed keeping a journal and began what has become by far my longest streak. Though the streak count (which goes by days when I actually wrote an entry) only just reached 300 days, which gives you some idea of how shamelessly I've been exploiting the generous allocation of vacation days on the occasions when I haven't found time or haven't felt up to stringing words together.Read more... )


. Sunday was the first meeting of the new committee since they were elected in the AGM. Read more... )


. On Monday, I woke up while it was still dark. As I lay in bed, I found myself singing a riff on "Morning Has Broken" that started by observing that morning had not yet broken and ended with the conclusion that this might be a good opportunity to do some productive work done before the day started and distractions arrived. I did not in fact get any productive work done, because when I got up I went on the internet to look up a rhyming dictionary and try to improve one of the rhymes in the song, and from there I was perfectly capable of distracting myself.


. This week at the board game club I wound up on the casual card games table and played Monty Python Fluxx, UNO Show 'Em No Mercy, and Flip 7. Read more... )


. I've been listening to a fair bit of classical music this week. It started when I watched a video about The Shawshank Redemption and then decided to listen to the full version of the Mozart aria that's featured in one scene, which led to Youtube suggesting other bits of Mozart to listen to. I also, unrelatedly to that, saw a post with a linked video about a violin piece by Bach which is designed so that it can be played both forward and backward and that if it's played forward and backward at the same time it forms a pleasing duet.


. The week at work has been interesting, with several challenging projects that were stressful to be faced with but satisfying to have completed successfully.


. Parkrun went well. Read more... )


. I've started another jigsaw puzzle.

Book Chain, weeks 23 & 24

26 August 2025 10:42 am
pedanther: (Default)
[personal profile] pedanther
#25: Read a book that was acquired or added to the TBR before the previous book.

A tricky one, since the previous book had been languishing unread on my shelves long enough that I don't have a record of when I acquired it. I read a couple of books for other challenges while I thought it over, and in the end I went with A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens; I'm not entirely sure that I've owned this specific copy since my youth, but in any case I've been meaning to read it since then.

A classic, which meant that I went in knowing the famous quote at the beginning and the famous quote at the end and almost nothing of what happens in between. I enjoyed Dickens's narrative voice and many of the characters, but felt that some of the bits that were probably supposed to be most dramatic didn't really land for me.

(I was inevitably reminded of the Doctor Who episode that includes a homage to the ending of the novel, but not just for that scene: the same episode includes a notoriously clunky bit of dialogue in which someone is described as being "as truthful, honest, and about as boring as they come", a description which might also serve for the central character of the novel, who is honest and upright and mostly serves as a catalyst for the actions of more interesting characters without becoming interesting himself.)


#26: If the previous book had an odd number of pages, read a book with an even number of pages, or vice versa.

I wasn't entirely sure if my copy of A Tale of Two Cities counted as having an odd number of pages: it did if you go by the last numbered page, but not if you ignore the scholarly appendices and went by the last page of the main text. I decided to cover my bases by picking a book which also had scholarly appendices and worked as a counterpart either way.

So now I'm reading Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, a non-fiction account of the rise and fall of Constantinople interwoven with a visit to present-day Istanbul. It's not quite gripping me yet, but I'm enjoying filling in the gaps between the bits of Constantinople's history that I knew before.

(no subject)

24 August 2025 09:27 pm
watervole: (Default)
[personal profile] watervole

 Sorry I'm posting so little at present.  I had Covid.  Yet again.  And it leaves me so drained afterwards...

I think I'm past the worst now, but it really is frog climbing well (for every two steps forward, you slide one backwards) territory.

I'm finally starting to clear the worst of the email backlog.

What with sciatica and Covid, I've been very behind on pretty much everything for the last year (probably the last three...) and I've fallen behind on a lot of morris and sword dance stuff that needed doing.

At least I've found a volunteer to take over event organising for the morris team (bagman).  I'm breaking him in very gently, as he's had his own health problems and I don't want to over-load him.

And I've finally written down the instructions to a sword dance that we perform to 'Wellerman'.  I'm hoping we can video it at Swanage Folk Fesitval.

If I'm fit enough to dance in 2 weeks time....  I had to miss it last year due to pain/exhaustion.

Fingers crossed!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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