Ink to Film Podcast Recording at WorldCon
Aug. 29th, 2025 01:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-JRHSABM24
This includes the special message to me that the show's cast sent, which was awesome.
***
I'm still sick, but getting better bit by bit.
Beyond the dark emptiness of space, beyond dreaming, lies the Tenebrium. Only you can unearth its mysteries, defeat the twisted horrors that lurk there, and keep humanity from becoming prey.
In Ex Tenebris, you play a ragtag team of investigators, protecting the Republic of Stars from terrifying supernatural threats. You will face sorcerers and cults, dark technology from lost civilisations and the slobbering terrors lurking in the nightmare realm of the Tenebrium.
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.
It is a mere 20 days since my last reading notes post. I do occasionally wish that I had it together to do this weekly, and write more comprehensive reviews, but eh, when it happens, it happens.
(started or progressed)
"late diagnosed". Sweetie you are 25
. (which, yes, is late diagnosed using specific definitions, but this hasn't been defined, and I've a lot of friends getting diagnoses in their 40s and 50s. Possibly 60s). there are also several for uni that haven't made it into the reading record.
nothing! For a value of nothing that includes the fact that I've taken two books from the little free library near the office, looked at the first few pages, and then returned them. One was about the Corn Laws in the UK, and while it might have reached the point that I agreed with the author, the way the whole thing was being framed was very much 'these stupid people didn't understand what was being done for their own good'. And the other was a history of Singer (I don't remember if it was the sewing machines specifically or the company) that I decided was probably really interesting but I have too many other things I want to have read in my life, and I'd rather read something else (at which point I think I started Siege of Burning Grass, and I am still of the opinion that was the right choice even if I've stalled on that one)
Having now acquired a uni laptop for study, I'm handling the different parts of my life better. One of the things that I'm really starting to embrace is Obsidian.
After a couple of false starts, I've moved my daily journalling there--I've created a template, and literally the only thing I require of myself each day is that I click the button that generates the daily note. Some days I don't do more than that, but as the template has a couple of verb tags, I come back afterwards and revisit. So far I mostly haven't been adding any details, but I am copying my 750 words in there, and if then afterwards at some point I will read through those (tag: to-do/tidy) and see whether anything resonates. This is a deliberately asynchronous process, because dumping the everything is cathartic, and I won't know what is going to resonate.
One of the interesting things is that I'm capturing bits and bobs of ideas, and not really worrying about where they go. It is possible that I'll never look at them again, and that is okay. but it is also possible that at some point I'll do a search on a word, see the set of things, and make a map of content. This is not a curated garden, this is a bushland with paths.
But! it means that I have draft blog posts that I remember to go and look at, because I have tagged them as blog/draft, and thus I have successfully separated out 'I have a thing I want to write' from 'dealing with posting'. Which is probably going to mean that things will be posted in clumps (this post is going straight into the editor, which is not the current normal).
from the drafts archive
Bookbub: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of Summer 2025 (Jeff Somers) - supposedly a 'curated' list; I saw a number of new to me authors. There were three that I'm lukewarm about and have added to the list, and the rest I was bored by the descriptions. I suspect this is part of an ongoing issue with the way that blurbs are written, as I'm increasingly uninterested
added
Transfer orbit: 11 new books for July - unsurprisingly, some overlap with the previous list; the only one I could have added was already there from the above list.
Gizmodo: 82 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books Arriving in July - this is really too many books. I have skimmed, but wasn't committing to reading everything. Unsurprisingly, there are repeats. The blurbs here were shorter, and yet worse. I did add a couple to the list, but I'm a bit dubious. The Arthuriana one is intriguing, but book 3 of a series; the new Rivers of London one is of interest to Artisanat
added:
New Scientist: The best new science fiction books of July 2025 - some of the same books, with more interesting summaries. I am, however, a grouch, and added a single book to the 'maybe' list
maybe:
Yesterday, I chose to leave uni at 4:30pm, because I had more than half an hours work of Stuff left to do (I did get it done, but later than planned; that is not the point of this post). Which meant that as I was nearing home, it was still a lovely bright day, and it wasn't raining.
so, instead of heading for the interchange, and hoping to make it for the other bus, I got off across the road from the shopping centre, with the intention to walk home (roughly 2km) through the suburb. Back up plan was that if this turned out to be a Bad Idea, I could call for pick up. Which was a possibility--I'd walked up to the Tavern for an afternoon catchup, which involves Too Many stairs, and only some of them have convenient (if tediously slow) lifts, each taking me a single floor. Which meant I'd used the cane to get there and back. And done a bit of stretching when I got back to the office to discover that I was the last one in, and someone had turned the lights out.
But! back to the walk home. Lovely day, peaceful opportunity. I resisted the nearly overwhelming temptation to pull out my phone and my headphones, and put on a podcast in order to spend the time productively. Instead, the goal was to exist, in space, with no task but to be in the moment.
And it was lovely.
I spotted a lot of flowers--a daffodil, some white bulbs that I should recognise and don't, azaleas and/or camellias (really need a refresher on those), grevillia, something pretty in purple, and many that I admired and don't recall.
Someone's mulberry is already fruiting, with tiny green fruits the size of my smallest fingernail covering it enough to look like leaves.
A house has vanished, to be replaced by a concrete pad that doesn't look large enough, so I'm wondering whether it will be two stories. A front garden has vanished, leaving grey sand to blow away.
I watched two buses go past--the one I might have caught, from too far down the side street to hear it, and one the other way thundering past as I was nearly home.
I stopped to take a photo of gum nuts (proper gumnuts, I might remember to post that and explain why).
I wandered past the tennis courts at the school where two adults and two kids were split up teaching the kids variously to hit a tennis ball with what looked like a totem tennis bat, and to ride a bike with trainer wheels. Just past there were a pair of tweens with a football, trying something fancy, based on the general behaviour.
It wasn't warm, and I was glad for my jumper, but there wasn't much wind. As I walked, the probably muscles in my right leg slowly untangled, and I went from unsure about this as an idea, through 'just another bit, then I'll know' into 'oh, actually, this is pretty good'.
I managed mindfulness for a reasonable amount of the walk. I did get a bit bored and grumpy at myself, and lost the meditative feel when I was about five minutes from home, which was coincidentally about a minute before Artisanat messaged to see where I was at and whether I was wanting a lift from the station. But at that point there was little point in asking for a lift, so I stomped on home.
I don't mind walking, but I'm dreadful at doing it recreationally. This, where it was a necessary path between where I was and where I wished to be, is a good compromise, but finding the spaces in my life where it fits is challenging. As the days get longer, I hope I'll remember that this is a net positive to deal with the pain, and that the more I walk, the more I can walk.