Yvi

It's now been suggested to me that, like job applications, I cast a much wider net in terms of sending out novel queries and pitches. The logic's fairly sound, and I can't recall if there's any specific advice or industry information I've gotten to have me disregard it out of hand. I've heard that it's good to tailor queries to specific agents, but in terms of not sending out plenty of queries, I'm drawing a blank. So maybe there's something to it. To doing something, at least.

In the absence of going anywhere, whether to gigs or the movies or out with friends, it's as good a use of my time as any I can think of.

Three weeks to the day of Rosh Hashanah is an auspicious way to start a month. The season as a whole, really. It's not summer right now, no matter what produce I can find in the markets - it hasn't been for a while now, I just haven't admitted it yet. This year it ended for me on the 18th, waking up the morning after a big gullywasher cleaned out the last of the lingering humidity and giving me two weeks of the kind of days that wind up in movies and on postcards. And now it's September, with fall officially beginning.

Yes, that was the day after the Tom Cruise retrospective wrapped.

I've still got some cherries and rhubarb and plums in my fridge, and a quarter of a honeydew melon. The melon and cherries won't last much longer. But I'm not cooking with pumpkin until October, if I can help it.

Happy news of the day: Whoopi Goldberg wants people to watch more women's sports. So if you sign up for a free account on Pluto.TV and search for AWSN (All Women's Sports Network) you can watch a selection of women's sports matches and news and documentaries for free. Huzzah!

Thanks to The Happy Newspaper for the tip.

Per 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.

Picking up a new fandom used to mean picking up a new icon. It turns out I already had one. I'd thought it was nice looking and atmospheric with no knowledge whatsoever about the character in it, and to no one's surprise, I managed to pick out my favorite without even trying.

Going from MASH to Top Gun to Friday Night Lights is something where I could easily pull out a through-line beyond that it's a trio of ensemble casts working within and against the rigid structures they're living in, whether or not it's by choice. Something about maintaining a sense of self and self-worth both externally and internally, but I'm only about halfway through the first season. I know that it ends well, but not how it ends, or how it gets there, and I'm enjoying the process quite a bit.

There's no word for the feeling of watching something and being hit with the thought, "So that's where that icon comes from!" Sometimes it's reading and getting to a quote, sometimes it's a fraction of a moment caught up in a 100x100 square. But since the experience isn't unique, simply highly specific, I might a well just call it "fandom."

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.

Protip: If you are trying to convince people on the non-commercial platform of AO3 to give you money for fanart, or links to their bank information so you can scam them, don't leave identical gushing-but-generic comments on two of their fanworks.

Fellow fanwork creators: if you get this sort of solicitation, report it to Abuse.

For no reason I'm capable of understanding, starting sometime yesterday, my iPhone and iPad stopped connecting to my home wifi. The network was there, the devices acknowledged it, and my desktop was always able to tap into it through the relevant connecting device. The desktop's too old to have inbuilt wifi capabilities, but the iPhone and iPad were new enough they've got it, except it wasn't in them. They kept saying the password was wrong. I checked on the wifi router provided by the phone and internet company and typed it in, several times, and neither device acknowledged it as correct. I tried the trick of having the devices forget about the network before trying to reconnect, and it didn't work.

Resetting the route managed it, somehow. I'd be better able to understand what happened if the desktop also didn't get it for a while, but it did, so I have to wonder where things got messed up. Because there was a problem that got fixed, and it wasn't a problem for everything.

Reminding myself I want what's on the objects more than I want the objects themselves, I'm in the process of ripping my Fringe complete series box set so I can get around to watching it. I did the same for Friday Night Lights already, and I'm trying to tell myself I shouldn't keep the sets around even if I fall in love with the shows. It was great I was able to snag them so affordably. And I don't need them.

If there were still in-person fandom conventions, I'd bring them to a swap table or offer them up for a raffle, but we don't have such things anymore - at least not anywhere it's practical for me to travel to right now. It's a shame, because that kind of swap table mentality is one of the best for getting rid of stuff. How it's going to be picked up and taken home, and you don't have to believe anything else.

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.

I used the last of the season's rhubarb to make my sister in law G. a tart birthday cake. I didn't try any, because she didn't want to slice it, but based on the batter and the sound of the crust when I tapped it, it came out the way I'd hoped. Not too sweet, with a bit of pucker you don't often find in cakes. If I make it again, I'll keep it at just one cup of sugar and use more rhubarb. Also, seeing about a lemon juice glaze to give it one last punch-up.

My dad's book group isn't meeting this coming Wednesday. However, I've still been tasked to bake for my parents' roof party in a few weeks, and I've decided on mocha and parsley for an extreme contrast. While I said I'd be happy to do this, I was told by one of my parents' friends that I was more or less tasked to make three cakes: two for the party, one for him. I'm thinking something with plums. Or possibly carrots. I'll see where the market takes me.