The Somnium Files
Sep. 3rd, 2025 09:55 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Pintsize and Date would get along pretty well
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Book2-25
Sep. 3rd, 2025 08:00 pmsidequested_feed
The post Book2-25 appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
The Big Idea: Rich Larson
Sep. 3rd, 2025 05:58 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Stories are there for us through good times and bad times. They can comfort us, perplex us, or connect us. Follow along in author Rich Larson’s Big Idea for his newest book, Changelog, where he seeks to connect us all to his grandmother.
RICH LARSON:
What’s the point?
That’s the only Big Idea that comes to mind as I watch my grandma gasping in her sleep. What’s the point of writing an essay to promote a book full of stories barely anyone will read? What was the point of me writing all those stories in the first place? What’s the point of writing anything?
Changelog doesn’t matter much today, so I’ll tell you about my grandma: not the shrunken, angular version of her on the hospital bed, but the earlier iterations.
She was born in a Mennonite village in Ukraine in 1927. She survived the Holodomor, the artificial famine imposed by the USSR – this bit of history is repeating itself today, both in the Russian government’s invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli government’s starvation of Gaza.
Her sister Mary died of fever, her brother Fritz from tuberculosis of the bone. Her father was arrested for writing religious poetry, and put in a cell so crowded that if one man rolled over, everyone had to roll over. He was released when the Soviets needed more mechanics, but came back white-haired and gaunt.
Her village was liberated by German soldiers, because things are always more complicated than we would like them to be – this is a fact she pared away when she immigrated to Canada. Her journey west was long and dangerous, full of loss and reunion and wild coincidence that would never pass in fiction. The day she mentions most often is the day she swam for her life:
She was seventeen, and a Russian officer, drunken, victorious, was picking girls from the crowd of refugees trying to cross the Elbe River. Her brother John saw a boat close to shore, and whispered for her to swim. She threw herself into the icy water; the officer staggered after her but dropped his pistol in the river. She reached the edge of the boat. Some hands pushed her away, fearing the Russians would fire on them. Stronger hands pulled her in.
A year later she came to Halifax on a cruise ship full of Displaced Persons. The train ride that followed was so long she feared it would carry her all the way around the back of the world and leave her in Siberia. She arrived in Chilliwack instead, on Christmas morning. She remembers twinkling lights and supermarket stalls overflowing with oranges.
She lived with distant relatives and set herself to learning English, falling asleep with th and wh on her tongue. She cleaned houses in Vancouver, where two old British women gave her cold mutton for lunch. Her stomach was unaccustomed, so she wrapped it in a napkin and hid it in the garbage – but then their great big dog came sniffing around, so she had to stealthily transfer it to her bag.
She became a nurse, and years later forgot her nurse’s watch at a relative’s wedding. The young crooked-faced farmer who returned it became her husband. She wrote poetry; he quoted her Shakespeare. They homesteaded twice in rural Manitoba, and paid off the farm just one year before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. They had three children, one of whom was my mother.
Knowing facts and anecdotes about my grandma is not the same as knowing her. Knowing her is more like this:
You stumble in from playing in the snow, and she yanks off your mittens and claps your ruddy hands to her warm cheeks and yelps in mock-pain and says oh! icicles!
You sleep over at her house and wear your dead grandpa’s pajamas, white with pale blue stripes, and she makes thin pancakes and watches Spider-Man cartoons with you.
You trek to her house in summertime and she meets you halfway, and when you arrive there’s ginger ale – she mixes hers with cranberry juice – and fresh buns, or cinnamon rolls, or the chocolate-chip brownies you now bake whenever you need to befriend new neighbors.
You have your first heartbreak, already in a different city, and she listens, then quietly asks what did she look like, because she knows that’s important, that a person is more than a name and a decision.
You stay with her for what you don’t realize is the last time, and every day you walk around the pond, using momentum – der Schwung – to get down the grassy ditch and up the other side. She teaches you Scrabble and regrets it because it’s then the only game you want to play. In the evenings you watch Jeopardy or Murder She Wrote.
You call her from dozens of different cities, and every time she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? When your mom says her memory is starting to go, you don’t believe it. Your grandma is warm and sharp and funny as ever.
You surprise her with a visit, make plans to see her the next day. When you buzz her door from outside the apartment, she says Richie! Where in the world are you now? and she is not joking. You begin to pre-mourn her.
You pre-mourn her for years, and it still rips your heart out to see her lying here. Her bed is tilted nineteen degrees. Two wild roses sit in a jar of water beside her.
That’s not knowing her either.
Her voice is faint now, and she doesn’t have her teeth in, and she slips between English, German, Plautdietsch, sometimes Ukrainian or Russian. More and more often, her eyes look confused. I try to cherish every last spark – like yesterday, when I said I wish I could see what’s going on inside your head, and she puffed a laugh and said so do I.
And I guess that’s the point.
I’ve been writing stories all my life, and they’ve served me in a variety of ways. When I was a kid, they let me escape sad rooms like this one. As I got older, they became anchors in time, each story reminding me of where I was, who I was, who I was with when I wrote it. They let me try, over and over, to understand things that will never make sense and put endings on things that don’t end.
But the biggest reason I write is this: you’ll never know my grandma, and you’ll likely never know me, but writing stories – whether hewn whole from life or filtered through imagination – feels like closing the gap just a little. I’ve always wanted so badly for someone to see what’s going on in here.
Changelog: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
20 Years of “Being Poor”
Sep. 3rd, 2025 02:43 pmscalziwhatever_feed
I was reminded via a recent Metafilter post that this year marks the 20th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and consequently, the 20th anniversary of me writing my “Being Poor” post about it, which was my way of answering the question, sometimes asked sincerely and sometimes less so, why some of New Orleans’ poorest citizens did not leave the city when a massive storm was bearing down on it. The piece was written in anger and sorrow and frustration, and was in many ways was a life-changing piece of writing for me. It remains one of the best things I’ve ever written.
Ten years ago I wrote a long retrospective on the piece, why I wrote it and what it’s meant to me and others. Nearly all of what I wrote there still stands, so I’m not going to repeat the content of that post here.
What I am going to add today is just the observation that the horrors that caused me to write “Being Poor” twenty years ago have not been avoided in the current day; if anything, things are now worse. Most prominently at the moment, we have a government that neither cares about the poor among us, nor is much interested in helping those of us who need help, whatever help that might be. It is an intentionally cruel and contemptuous government, which is echoed down on state and local levels in many places. It’s harder now to climb out of poverty than it was twenty years ago, and easier to slide into it.
The cruel and contemptuous, in government and out of it, will tell you that poverty is about the choices you make, and I am here to tell you, from experience, that far more than that, it is about the choices we make. We have chosen, in the aggregate, to make things difficult, well beyond that ability of most individuals in poverty to make useful choices much of the time, or to make those choices stick without luck or other outside intervention. You can’t tell people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps when we’ve designed a world where boots cost more than what they have, are hard to find, and will fall apart when they use them. You can’t harangue them for not climbing the social ladder when the ladder we’ve provided is greased and the rungs are broken or missing. You can’t blame them for not improving their lot when we’ve given them so few tools to do so, and are working to take away what tools they manage to have. You can’t sell them the American Dream when we’ve put that dream behind a wall, for the pleasure of the few.
The cruel and contemptuous know this, and it doesn’t matter to them. At all. And they are in power.
And so, we will have more poverty and more disasters and more people wondering, some sincerely and some rather less so, why people just didn’t leave whatever it is that will need leaving. We know the answer to that. We’ve known now for decades. But we refuse to change. And so here we are, again, and still.
— JS
Further Thoughts on the M4 Mac Air and Pixel 10 Pro
Sep. 2nd, 2025 11:52 pmscalziwhatever_feed
First the M4 Mac Air and then the Pixel 10 Pro, because, I don’t know, we’re going from largest to smallest.
M4 Mac Air: The first thing I note is that I think I forgot how much I enjoy this particular form factor for a laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really am happy with my MacBook Pro, but it is an actual beast of a machine, big and heavy and kind of a pain in the ass to take places. Again, I bought it more or less as a desktop replacement, so I’m not faulting it for these facts; it’s doing what I intended it to do. But it is a lug to carry, and not a computer you can comfortably one hand as you move about the house.
The Mac Air, on the other hand, I’m happily carrying around all over the place, and I’m genuinely looking forward to traveling with it when I head out to Portland this weekend and on tour later in the month. It is literally no problem just to pick up and move around. It’s a pleasure to type on (which is what it has over my iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard), and everything else about it just works: The screen is pretty nice, it’s loud enough when I play something through its speakers, and the battery efficiency is such that I’ve been running it unplugged for a couple of days, writing, scrolling social media and watching YouTube, and haven’t gotten close to draining the thing. It’s basically a perfect portable computer, or at least a close to perfect one for me.
This is not entirely surprising as the various reviews I’ve read and watched have pretty much said the same thing; the general consensus is that for the non-power user (which is nearly everyone who is not a coder, a serious PC gamer and/or someone working with tons of video), the M4 Mac Air is probably as much computer as you need. I’m inclined to agree with this. My use case of writing, browsing and some light photoediting does not come close to maxing out the capabilities of this chip, and while I chipped out a little bit extra for more RAM and SSD space (which also got me a slightly better-specced processor), the base model with 16 gigs of RAM would not exactly be hurting doing what I’m doing, either. Spec snobs will note that the screen on the Air is not OLED and only refreshes 60 times a second (unlike iPad Pro, which has the OLED, or the screen on the MacBook Pro, which has variable refresh rates up to 120 times a second). However, having a recent Mac Pro to compare, allow me to say: I literally don’t care. The screen is perfectly good. I don’t notice the lack of OLED or high refresh rates when I’m using it, and I’m not running it next to the MacBook Pro to notice the supposed deficiency. It’s fine.
In the real world, the drawbacks I’ve noticed on this Mac Air are thus: Having both USB-C/Thunderbolt ports on the same side of the computer is a very minor annoyance, and the small size of the computer means that when I am sitting in my office Eames Chair, the cats choose to pretend they don’t see me working on the Air and want to sit in my lap. Which is cute! But makes it hard to work. I would also say, with respect to the Sky Blue color of my particular laptop, that what Marques Brownlee said about it is correct: This is homeopathic blue, like Apple made a silver laptop and then whispered “blue” to it as it was being put into its packaging. Dear Apple: Don’t be afraid of actual color.
(Oh, and: apparently this M4 is optimized for “AI” but nothing I use it for needs it to run AI, and if the computer or the programs I use offer to run AI, I usually just shut off that capability because I already have a work flow established, so, meh?)
But, yeah. Great little computer, it’s doing everything I wanted it to, and can do considerably more than that if I ever need it to. Good purchase, A+++, would buy again.
Pixel 10 Pro: So far, I’m using this almost exactly like I used the Pixel 9 Pro before it and the Pixel 8 Pro before that; honestly, on a day-to-day basis the way I know that I actually switched phones is that this new one has a slightly different color. Now, Google just downloaded Material Design 3 into my phone so all my on-screen buttons and some of my apps look different, so I guess there is that. But that doesn’t really change how I use the phone all that much.
But what about all the new “AI “stuff they packed in the latest Pixels, that are supposed to be the big market differentiators to everything else out there? I hear you ask. Well, I already talked about the most prominent example of that, being the “Pro-Res Zoom” AI which kicks in when you zoom the camera above 30x, and you may recall I was not hugely impressed with that. I am more impressed with the “AI Enhance” photo function, which does not redraw your entire photo but rather adjusts color/brightness/etc automatically. I’m not sure it really qualifies as “AI,” it’s just applying tweaks, but it’s generally pretty good at it. There’s now also a function where you can edit a picture by talking to your phone rather than moving sliders around and such; you can ask the Pixel 10 to remove someone from a photo, or brighten the sky, or, say, remove the background entirely and replace it with an “AI” generated image. The former is cool, I suppose; the latter once again gets us to the point where your photo is no longer a photo and is instead just an image based on a photo you once took. Whether this is something you want, I leave you to consider. I don’t have much use for it personally.
The other “AI” stuff I haven’t really encountered yet, mostly because none of it is really useful for someone staying at home and doing not a whole lot of nothing. I’m not speaking to people who don’t share my language, so an auto-translate that speaks a different language in a voice similar to my own is not a priority, and when I’m spending time in my home office I’m not needing my phone to surface my flight information while I’m texting. I’m traveling this week so maybe it’ll come in handy then. But right now? Yeah, it’s not doing much for me. For the moment, at least, none of the new “AI” features of the Pixel 10 Pro are ones that I have much use for.
Which is not to say I don’t like this phone. I do; as a smartphone, doing all the things I want it to do, it’s great. The cameras are very good just as cameras, the phone is snappy enough opening apps and doing the stuff I need it to do, and I still very much appreciate having the stock Android experience on the Pixel, without all the crap other manufacturers or carriers add on to their phones. Pixel still has the best iteration of Android, if you ask me.
I don’t regret getting the Pixel 10 Pro (especially as my old phone was showing real wifi connectivity issues). It’s an excellent phone I would highly recommend to any Android phone user, if they are in the market for a new phone. But if you already have a phone you’re happy with, and you’re not someone who cares about “AI” to any great extent, there’s nothing here that would make you want to exchange the phone you already have. It’s a good phone! Just not necessarily in the ways Google is selling it as.
— JS
California Sober Now on YouTube
Sep. 2nd, 2025 09:52 pmscalziwhatever_feedAnd what, you ask, is “California Sober”? Two things: One, it’s slang for the sort of person who doesn’t drink alcohol or use other drugs but might partake of weed. Two, it’s a comedy short written by Yamini Nambimadom and Isabella Zanobini, and directed by Juliette Strangio, that I was an executive producer for, which is now available on YouTube for general viewing. The plot: “After an unexpected drug test puts their blowoff mall jobs at risk, best friends Lola and Tyler spend an afternoon on the hunt for clean pee with the help of an eccentric crew of mall employees.” Zany!
How did I become an executive producer on this short? Basically, I gave the filmmakers money. I knew Isabella Zanobini via a production company that had optioned one of my properties; that option didn’t get off the ground but when I saw that she and her friends were crowdfunding a short, I thought it would be nice to pitch in. I had no other responsibilities on the project other than tossing some cash their way, but they were nice enough to give me an EP credit anyway. Hollywood, baby!
Whether this short leads to anything more for any of the people involved remains to be seen, but if it does, I suppose I will get the satisfaction of knowing I helped them a tiny bit along the way. In the meantime: Look! A comedy short! Enjoy.
— JS
The Big Idea: Charlie N. Holmberg
Sep. 2nd, 2025 05:17 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Sometimes, books require a lot of planning and outlining, and sometimes you just need to start and it ends up revealing itself along the way. Such was the case for author Charlie N. Holmberg, much to her type-A dismay. Follow along in her Big Idea to see how she skipped the outline entirely for her newest novel, The Shattered King.
CHARLIE N. HOLMBERG:
I literally wrote the book on magic systems.
Okay, I wrote a book on magic systems. Charlie N. Holmberg’s Book of Magic, to be precise.
But this isn’t about that book. It’s about the book that came from that book.
Almost all my novels start with a magic system. Some element, some power, some spark from which plot, character, and setting bloom. I wanted to guide others in finding this spark, so in this Book of Magic, I included a handful of appendices to help people jumpstart their magic systems. One of these appendices is a list of commonly used magic systems in fantasy novels. This list allows the writer to do one of three things: 1) use one of these systems to keep their learning curve shallow, 2) avoid these systems to find something more original, or 3) take one of these systems and put their own spin on it (you know, like Stephanie Meyer did with Twilight).
I was mulling over this while playing Final Fantasy XVI with my husband and thought, okay, Charlie, take your own advice. How would you make something incredibly common new and exciting?
I picked healing from the list. Started playing around with it.
And then I sparked.
What if healing wasn’t done directly to the body, but via a representation of the body? In some sort of dreamlike, liminal space created by magic and accessed only by those who could wield it. Like a dream, this liminal space could take on all sorts of visuals: a painting, a garden, a castle wall. Any sickness or injury would appear as something off or broken—tears in canvas, wilting flowers, cracks in stones. I call this space a “lumis” (because it sounds pretty), and no two are exactly alike.
Cue the video game I’m playing, Final Fantasy XVI. I really liked one of the main characters: Joshua. Joshua, a prince, was born powerful, but also sickly, and nothing seemed to be able to heal him. So what does a monarchy do when none of their doctors can’t heal one of their own? They force the task upon the magical peasants, of course.
And that is where The Shattered King starts. Against the backdrop of war, a healer is forced to leave her family and journey across the country to the capital to try her hand at healing the unhealable prince. She has every intention of failing. The sooner she disappoints the nobility, the sooner she can go home.
But what Nym Tallowax considers to be low-effort magic ends up doing more for Prince Renn than any healer before her. Now if she wants to go home, she’ll have to cure the ailing prince first.
But for whatever reason, Prince Renn’s lumis refuses to be healed.
This idea really took me by the horns—so much so that I started writing it before I had an outline. I’m a type-A personality. All my novels have notebooks, storyboards, and thorough outlines. But the need to make this one happen usurped everything else.
It made me [insert choking noise] discovery write.
I started it in the middle of a family vacation and finished it in fifteen days, an all-time record for me. For kicks and giggles, I asked my editor if she wanted to see it (and let’s be honest, this was mostly because I wanted a reason for her to pay attention to me). Shortly after, my publisher informed me that they wanted to completely rearrange my release schedule to put this book first. Whatever spell this story put me under apparently worked some sort of magic on them, too. And while I know there’s a few readers out there who are getting tired of the romantasy trend, romantic fantasy is my JAM, and I’m happy to butter readers’ biscuits with a little bit of my own.
The Shattered King: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
Supplemental Kitten Update: The Kitten Has a Name
Sep. 2nd, 2025 01:28 pmscalziwhatever_feed
Meet (again) Saja. The name is Korean for “lion,” and also, of course, fans of K-Pop Demon Hunters will catch the reference to Saja Boys, the demonic-but-terribly-cute boy band from the film who sing fizzy ditties about wanting to consume your soul:
In this regard the name is doubly fitting because a few days ago, when we decided to keep the kitten, I spontaneously started singing to him, to the tune of “Soda Pop”: You’re my little kitty/So furry and so pretty/You’re my fuzzy butt/My little fuzzy butt! So perhaps it was just fate.
The name was suggested in yesterday’s comment thread by “godotislate,” so thank you for that, G, you did us a solid. Now our cat has a name!
— JS
Promises, Promises
Sep. 1st, 2025 10:09 pmquestionable_content_feed
Yay stop trying to be coquettish it's weird
Book2-24
Sep. 1st, 2025 08:00 pmsidequested_feed
The post Book2-24 appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
Kitten Update: All Hail the Fuzz Butt
Sep. 1st, 2025 03:02 pmscalziwhatever_feed
So, we kept the black kitten.
I want to stress this was not the plan all along. I did in fact have a new home scheduled for this kitten, but then, more or less at the last minute, the people at the new home had a change in circumstances that made receiving a new kitten not possible. Which is fine, sometimes that happens. This gave Athena, who had been angling to keep the black kitten, another chance to plead her case, and by this time both Krissy and I had spent enough time with him to warm to the idea. So the original kitten recipient’s unfortunate loss is our now our gain.
We did, of course, have some concern as to how the other pets might receive to the new kitten, and the short answer is, it’s been mixed, but not disastrously so. Charlie loves and is obsessed with the kitten and follows it wherever it goes, and fortunately the new kitten seems to like Charlie. Smudge was like “oh, I guess there’s a new kitten now,” and doesn’t seem to be overly bothered.
Sugar and Spice, on the other hand, are unpleased:
However, so far their response has been to avoid the new kitten when possible rather than to attempt to murder it, and there already have been instances of the new kitten napping in the same room as one or the other of these two without bloodshed. I so suspect that, as with the arrival of Smudge a few years back, there will be a week or two of adjustment to the new kitten being all up in their space, and then a new “normal” where everyone has their new general territories and life goes on. We’ve had four cats before, and these three cats were part of that living arrangement. I suspect they’ll get used to it again, and quickly.
It’s helpful that the kitten is exceedingly well-tempered, at least so far. He’s not a jerk to the other cats, nor is he afraid of them or of Charlie. He’s very affectionate and curious when it comes to the humans, and overall seems pretty comfortable with his surroundings. He acts like this has always been his home, which is reassuring. He’s still a kitten, mind you, which means getting into a little bit of trouble and being inconveniently underfoot and so on, all the usual kitten stuff. But that’s what makes kittens adorable, and everything suggests that when he’s not a kitten anymore he’ll be an excellent cat.
What we don’t have yet is an official name for the kitten. Earlier, Athena suggested “Shoyu,” which is a type of soy sauce (the kitten’s black fur has a brown sheen in strong light), but it’s not sticking. I’ve offered up “Śuri,” which is an Etruscan volcano god, whose name derives from the Etruscan word for “black,” but this may be too esoteric. I think what we may end up doing is just letting the kitten be around and seeing what name fits him. I will say that I’ve been taking to calling him “Fuzz Butt” as a shorthand, and while I don’t think that’s going to end up being his official name, it’s useful on a temporary basis, and also, entirely truthful. Some official name will present itself in time. Yes, you are allowed to offer suggestions in the comments. Please note we may ignore them entirely. But I know that won’t stop you.
So, please welcome this new kitten, He Who Is Temporarily and Unofficially Known as “Fuzz Butt,” to the Scalzi household, and also as the newest official Scamperbeast. He’s a delight and we look forward to lots of adventures with him. He is an accidental kitten, but then, “accidental kittens” is what we specialize in around here. Our cats have a history of just showing up. We wouldn’t have it any other way.
— JS
Code deploy happening shortly
Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenancePer the 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.
SRE Weekly Issue #492
Sep. 1st, 2025 01:47 amsre_weekly_feedThree days ago, PagerDuty had a major incident, severely impacting incident creation, notifications, and more. Linked above is a discussion on reddit’s r/sre with lots of takes on how folks deal with this kind of thing.
u/Secret-Menu-2121 and others
It’s not telepathy; it’s about building common ground. This article explains what that means and the components that comprise common ground in an incident.
Stuart Rimell — Uptime Labs
An introduction to database connection pooling in general, and RDS proxy in specific, complete with a Terraform snippet.
David Kraytsberg — Klaviyo
This article explores the difference between simple and easy, their relation to complexity, and the effect of production pressure.
Lorin Hochstein
What does “High Availability” actually mean? It turns out that it can mean different things to different people, and it’s important to look deeper.
Teiva Harsanyi — The Coder Cafe
This short but sweet untitled LinkedIn post goes into the importance of understanding the entire context rather than focusing on an individual’s mistakes or omissions.
Ron Gantt
Whether you’re just getting started implementing SLIs and SLOs or you’re a veteran, you’ll want to read this one. It charts the progress of organizations as they successively refine and mature their SLIs, and more importantly, it explains why the later stages matter.
Alex Ewerlöf
Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts
Aug. 31st, 2025 12:28 pmdenise posting in dw_newsA 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.
📝 weeknotes (aug 24-30, 2025)
Aug. 31st, 2025 10:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tozkaIs it still a weeknotes if I write massive amounts of text? All the other ones I’ve seen are shorter and more list-heavy. Well, whatever.
📩 Writing this from Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA, with one kitty sleeping behind me on a heated blanket and the other two dozing in the homeowner’s bedroom (one on the bed, one under it). I have the back door open and it’s great weather, mid-60s and sunny– though my writing desk corner is shaded most of the day, which makes it easier to see the screen. I can see the garden from my desk, and so far have chased off the groundhog twice from breaking in and stealing tomatoes. I have on a new-to-me merino wool sweater on that I got from a thrift store a few weeks ago for like $7, which is my favorite shade of purple: a deep wine color. It’s soft and doesn’t itch like most wool things. The WALL-E soundtrack is playing as background noise.
Life Updates
The first half of the week was spent in a semi-sick state– not actually ill, but just bleh feeling, compounded by too much computer use tbh. I finally forced myself outside on Thursday and went walking around, and found a MASSIVE burdock just at the edge of someone’s yard which inexplicably cheered me up.
🐈⬛ The cats have been total sweeties this week (despite one day when a cat threw up his breakfast in 3 places, and another one left a poo just outside the litter box) and keep sitting on my lap/near me– compared to where we were at the start of this sit, when they were so nervous they hid under a bet all day, this is great! But of course I’m leaving in a few days and now all I can think about is how much I’ll miss them. 🙁
The only thing that solves that problem is going to another catsit, and luckily I have another one lined up right after this one.
( Read the rest of this entry » )Crossposted from Pixietails Club Blog.
Haunted Toilet — Best Craigslist Post This Decade
Aug. 31st, 2025 11:29 amjesse_the_kFree Toilet – Haunted. Slightly Used. You’ve Been Warned.
Posted 7-Aug-2025 from the north side of Madison
In a dark room, a standard toilet seems to glow white
( click for pic )
Do you have guts of steel, a strong back, and a questionable sense of judgment? Then boy, do I have the throne for you.
As Paul Harvey intoned, the rest of the story…
I’m giving away a toilet. Not just any toilet. A porcelain enigma, a mystical butt-bucket, a vessel forged in the deepest depths of a cursed Home Depot clearance aisle.
It flushes with the fury of Poseidon’s trident and occasionally emits sounds that suggest it’s trying to communicate in Morse code. It once screamed. Not like the pipes—like a person.
The backstory? This toilet was installed in my guest bathroom, affectionately known as “The Chamber of Screams.” Three guests used it. Two of them have since moved to Canada without explanation, and the third refuses to make eye contact with me at barbecues.
What you need to know:
Flushes. Sometimes violently.
Bowl glows faintly during thunderstorms.
Came with a bidet. Now it just hisses and sprays randomly like a venomous snake.
Every full moon, the tank fills with glitter. Unclear why.
One Yelp review from a plumber simply said “no.”
I just want it out of my house. You must pick it up yourself and sign a waiver that I am not responsible if it follows you home.
NO SCAMMERS. NO WITCHES. NO EXORCISTS (already tried). Serious inquiries only.
If you’re brave enough to sit upon the throne and live to tell the tale, contact me ASAP.