Semimonthly Media Log

Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:03 am
raptureofthemoon: (Default)
[personal profile] raptureofthemoon
This is something I was doing in my journal/bullet journal this year and figured I'd continue it on the blog. Whether I'll keep this semi-monthly or go more to a monthly or bimonthly basis will remain to be seen. 
 
 
Reading

I'm in the middle of Joanne Harris's Chocolat. I actually started it in mid-July but then gave myself a bout of eyestrain while playing PEAK.

So, I had to take off a couple of weeks while I recovered, got a much overdue eye exam and then spent time getting used to new eyeglasses. (I'm onto progressives now, though it's a very mild prescription. The distance vision is for my astigmatism — which is now in both eyes...yay... — and the zoom-focus at the bottom for reading isn't that zoomy. Though it's still taking some getting used to.)

Anyway...Chocolat. I'm loving the writing style. Descriptive without being overly verbose. There's something autumnal about it. Sweet incense, soft rain, colorful leaves skittering down an empty street.
 

Watching
 
A few weeks ago, friends introduced me to The Amazing Digital Circus. I don't...entirely have thoughts about it beyond: it was interesting and weird and I can probably parse deeper meaning from it.

I need to rewatch it on my own to fully digest it. 

 
Playing
 
I've been playing more PEAK than anything, largely solo and largely successfully. This game is rather ridiculously addictive. But that seems to be a theme for games that have a fairly simple and straightforward goal. 
 
Since it is September and I can already anticipate the weather shifting...I'll probably be starting up another run in Skyrim. Potentially using my archmage character who's the focus of my Pushing Boundaries series. (In short, I'm hoping starting up another run will get me writing on this piece again.) Skyrim has been my core autumnal game since it was released (too many years ago to think about...). 
 
Stardew Valley is still in rotation  I started playing this game in the fall of 2023 and it's been a staple ever since. It's actually what inspired me to plant my own blackberry bush, which, as of this writing, has 8 - count them, 8 - blackberries starting to ripen. (Well, six, now. I ate three of them yesterday. They were very tiny...but very juicy, so that gives me hope. I'm altering my approach in the spring by planting some additional brambles - another blackberry and a couple of blueberries - and flowers to attract pollinators. My tiny little dream is to be able to make preserves from my own plants.)

And coming in third on my current playlist is Tiny Bookshop. A cozy bookselling game that makes me want to buy a trailer and run away to the coast. 

When September Begins

Sep. 1st, 2025 10:17 am
raptureofthemoon: (helena)
[personal profile] raptureofthemoon
There's a certain, not quite definable change when the year turns from August to September.

It must be more internal than external. The world doesn't shift that much in a single day, from 31st to 1st.

But the light feels different this morning. Brighter, distant, a touch colder. The air is softer, sweeter. The world more hushed (a highlight after yesterday's end of summer pool/birthday party bustle).

The ash trees are greener against the cobalt sky. The honey locust has already been shaking loose some of its pinnate leaves. I've left them lying in the front yard; they're turning gold in the scorch of the afternoon sunlight. The lemon balm is lush and green, the wild bergamot has gone leggy and the Drops of Jupiter is starting to don its purple blush in preparation for fall. 

The equinox is just around the corner.

And I'm not ready for the descent into the dark. 

I do love the autumn. I love the shift in the weather, the change of the leaves, green chili roasting, the accessibility of pumpkin spice and apple spice to feed my coffee and tea habits. I even like getting the yard and plants prepared for winter and future spring.

But I feel like I just climbed out of the dormant season. I feel like it was just spring. Fall can't be just around the corner, winter lurking behind it.

It doesn't help that winter has been a season of cat loss over the last five years. Our 14-year-old orange tabby on January 5th, 2021 and our 19-year-old grey grump on December 10th of 2024. 

I've told the remaining two girls they have to keep chugging along for a while. They can't go anywhere this year. I need a buffer.

Also, they will be my last pets.

At least for a while. My heart needs a rest. As does my brain.

It's too hard trying to do much away from home when you have pets, especially as they get older. The girls are 16. I feel guilty for leaving them too long. And worried something will happen while I'm away. Which is partly why our upcoming trip to see family has been stressing me out. They'll be well looked after. Our neighbor is doing the bulk of the work and a friend is coming by once a day to give lunch and socialization/play. 

I had been looking forward to this trip when we first planned it, over a year ago. It's been delayed three times, on account of house upkeep (a new roof our insurance kept giving us the run around about) and cat health (a flare of pancreatitis and inflammatory bowel back in the spring) and having to plan around the work schedules of two adults.

Now it's largely feeling like an obligation trip, but I'm hoping I can find pleasure in the slow travel and keep the cat mom worries and guilt at bay until we're back and I can settle into the coming autumn from the comfort of home.

Untitled Snippet

Sep. 1st, 2025 10:10 am
raptureofthemoon: (Default)
[personal profile] raptureofthemoon
Six Sentence Sunday: Post six sentences from whatever you're working on. 

This is from a Bad Batch fic that will be part of my Written in the Dust series

Tech would have liked to take his time walking through the city, examine the architecture a little closer, catalog some of the plants, breathe in the salted, ocean air.

But Crosshair was in a mood.

And when Crosshair was in a mood, it behooved someone to follow him. That someone was usually Tech.

Which, he supposed, was only logical. He had been doing it most of their lives, from the evenings Crosshair would disappear, tucking himself into a little used storage area he'd turned into a nest when the stress of training got to him, to the nights he let the war or Regs or some torrent of thought get to him and lost himself in the seediest streets he could find, looking for a fight or a fuck, whichever came first.


Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 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.

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.

All the Yesterdays

Aug. 28th, 2025 11:53 am
raptureofthemoon: (Default)
[personal profile] raptureofthemoon

It's been long enough since I used this site, I've half forgotten how it works... (Like riding a bike, it comes back quickly.)

I was going through my old LiveJournal a bit earlier. (I admit, I was feeling a little nostalgic. A little maudlin).

I started that journal in September of 2001. I was 18.

It's nearly September, 2025. I'm 42. 

You wonder where the years go...and with a journal like that, you can quickly and easily see the progression from smart but not-quite-wise teenager to smarter and wiser 20-something to smart, jaded and tired 30-something who trails off on posting because there is just too much stuff on the daily to spend time navel gazing the way she used to, especially when it comes to navel gazing online in a semi-public forum. 

But I do miss journaling like this, taking the time to write about my day or dump out whatever thoughts were swirling in my head. (I've tried long hand journaling this year with a mix of bullet and traditional and I'm finding it to be...mostly a reminder of how fast time flies. I plan to finish the journal, but I need to revisit my approach in 2026.)

I miss the connections I used to make. (Some people I still have as friends here on Dreamwidth. Some I carried over to other social media for a while. Some have disappeared into ether of the internet. Some of have died.) 

I'm still planning to keep this mostly as a fandom oriented space (though, as you can see - well "you" being the nebulous idea of a person who may actually be reading this blog from time to time - I don't even post fandom related content very often, as my creativity has taken a dive over the last however long) but with maybe the occasional visit to what I'm doing or thinking on the day to day.

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.

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