I have used the energy and power of the rewind/fast forward button to mainline some Teen Wolf and make some progress with that WIP. I am down to three scenes in Counterclaims—all of which are from 'De-Void,' because I decided to write all the painful stuff first. I spent last night barreling through 'Insatiable' and am so, so glad to be almost through the bottleneck of having to describe character deaths and attendant responses. That part is all written and needed to be written and is done, and took forever because it legitimately upset me to work on it.

Meanwhile, when I first mapped the final chapter of the far rosier Sidelined, it had twenty necessary scenes overall, and over the course of writing, it has grown to twenty-eight. The story has been doing this since I started, so I'm not very surprised. Twelve of the scenes are still incomplete. The first chapter went up on March 21st last year, and I'm hoping I can at least beat that date, but can I finish it during this shortest month of the year? Will my remote control provide the energy boost needed to finally stagger past the checkered flag? Time will tell...

Serious goal for the year ahead: Shorter chapters. They snuck up on me and all of a sudden I realized I've been posting single chapters longer than the entire four chapters of Trust, and the resultant final edits and html take forever to weed through. And they're a lot to ask of a beta, I think. Shorter chapters! Seriously.

Erase/Rewind just got recontextualized as my ultimate anthem for frustrated fic writing.

Yellface (spayed, *16) decided to sit on me last night. Thorn came in and snuggled me. Yellface sniffed their hand politely as we held hands. The first time she'd ever encountered Thorn's hand without some cranky meowing. (Right now Yellface will sniff and rub her face on an extended finger, but will say things about it.)

Many minutes of stillness later, Thorn said something.

Yellface suddenly took notice of an alien hand near her territory, stood up, and gave a snake-strike grazing bite to the nearest hand, followed by a swat.

My hand, naturally.

I uninvited her from the bed and found an alcohol wipe. She broke skin but didn't draw blood. Today only the deepest scrape is visible, if you're looking for it.

Oh, cat.

Back in August of 2025, we announced a temporary block on account creation for users under the age of 18 from the state of Tennessee, due to the court in Netchoice's challenge to the law (which we're a part of!) refusing to prevent the law from being enforced while the lawsuit plays out. Today, I am sad to announce that we've had to add South Carolina to that list. When creating an account, you will now be asked if you're a resident of Tennessee or South Carolina. If you are, and your birthdate shows you're under 18, you won't be able to create an account.

We're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)

Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/

In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.

I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability.

In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)

In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.

I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to.

I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.

1.
Requisite superbowl posting: I moved to Patriots territory as an adult, and that means that I find the constant chatter about them annoying and thus wanted them to lose and would've found it extremely funny if they'd scored zero points overall. They did score some points in the end, but they sure lost terribly anyway!

I have also now seen the only part worth seeing, which is the halftime show, which was very good! It just also made me think about how...

brief bit about USA Politics

There's this oddity to watching it and going "this looks like, and feels like it's for, the community I live in" (the town I live in is if not outright majority Hispanic/Latinx very close to it, and majority Puerto Rican within that), when it also feels like a political statement to have a Puerto Rican performer as the star and for him to sing in Spanish, celebrating that heritage, as a contrast to the constant background noise about ICE in Minnesota (and elsewhere; that's just the main area making national news, not the only place ICE is hunting).

I don't know that I have any coherent thoughts about that. Just, well. USA politics sure are something, and The Big Football Game is a platform for them.

2.
Talked to my dad on the phone yesterday for almost two hours. Got the Family Update from him, which is about what I expected: my mom is stressed, my grandmother is doing better, my twin is As He's Been with a lead on Doing More Stuff Actually, which is good.

It's interesting talking to my dad because it's very. Well. I talk to him and I see patterns of behavior that I exhibit manifest in him, in much the same way and for much the same reason. And I'm just like. Well, I sure am your child in some very specific ways, aren't I. It's never going to be one-to-one, of course, but it's... still nice to see.


3.
It is perhaps going to start being NOT HORRIBLY COLD in a day or two, with the metric of "not terribly cold" being "highs consistently above freezing", which is still cold but a lot more tolerable than the month of ARCTIC FROST we've been having. It means snow might slowly start melting! And that leaving for work at the coldest point in the day is going to be less "oh god I hate being outside even if it's only for a minute or two".


4.
in the continued vibe of "ah yes actually share bits of this as I write it", this is still mostly set-up!

I'm a bit, I could name the trading company something less on-the-nose about them being shitty, but consider: nah. That's something relatively easy to change later, and there is an island chain that'll eventually be relevant anyway, so...

“The Southern Chain Trading Company.” Ames didn’t see any change in expression on Vesta’s face, but her beard hid some of the subtleties. “I haven’t heard of them before, and was hoping you had.”

“Southern Chain.” Vesta frowned. “They’re… new here. If I thought you had any interest in business, I wouldn’t tell you more for free, but most of what I hear is that they’re building themselves up right now. They’ve only recently established a business house in Anaxa—they came up from the south, from Rakorran or Recharron or something like that—and are mostly trading southward, but they’ve bought a few things from Yscor—we’ve better prices for certain goods, even accounting for shipping down the river.”

Ames nodded thoughtfully. “That would explain why they sent me a letter.”

Vesta looked at him, dark eyes glinting under furrowed brows. Slowly, she said, “If they offer you something, don’t accept unless it’s more than Rhei would give you. I don't think they know the northern coast well enough to give you a good deal, and I know you don’t want to leave.”

“I know.” Ames inclined his head in half a bow. “I want to hear their offer. I doubt I’ll accept it.”

It's time for another question thread!

The rules:

- You may ask any dev-related question you have in a comment. (It doesn't even need to be about Dreamwidth, although if it involves a language/library/framework/database Dreamwidth doesn't use, you will probably get answers pointing that out and suggesting a better place to ask.)
- You may also answer any question, using the guidelines given in To Answer, Or Not To Answer and in this comment thread.

Okay, I watched the first three Doctor Who serials back at the end of December, but it took a while to get my thoughts to cohere into an actual post. I would love to keep going in order, but I don't know how feasible that is with the lost episodes. We'll see. This first episode was just fascinating, so the post got a little long. ( Read more... )

My new DVD player has been a lovely thing in many ways, but what I originally took for the fast forward and rewind buttons were actually skip scene buttons. Naturally, this is completely antithetical to ease of canon review (or just, "hey, I missed that line of dialogue, what?") so today I dug out the remote that came with the DVD player, and which I had blithely ignored heretofore. After all, I had reasoned, the DVD player comes with a host of buttons. Surely everything I need is already—

Wrong! In addition to no rewind, there is no mute, which is also super helpful in canon review (mute is truly the best way to hyper focus on body language, I have found).

So I dug out some AAA batteries (three left in the pack), installed them, pointed the remote at the screen, and excitedly clicked.

Nothing happened.

I pressed harder. Tried other buttons. Shook the remote mournfully. Dug out the manual, feeling ridiculous, because who needs a manual for using a remote control?

Sure enough, the manual just told me to put in batteries, point and click. Thanks.

So I popped the batteries out, planning to put them in again in opposite slots, and noticed one of them had a messed up end. Instantly disposed of that, scrubbed my hands and grabbed the remaining AAA battery, which looked fine. Snapped the remote closed, pointed, clicked...

Success!

I then amused myself for a few minutes rewinding, muting and otherwise enjoying the freedoms which come with a remote control.

This was a roundabout way of saying I haven't made a post in a week, and this was my way of rectifying that. :)

I got a steroid shot in my right knee on Wednesday, and miraculously I can almost walk again.

I'm still spending a lot of time in bed, but I don't have to strategize about bathroom trips. One cane is sufficient.

My estimate of snow depth turns out to have been a little exaggerated. About 16-17 cm in this part of the garden. Elsewhere in the garden I measured 23, but apparently failed to get a photo of that. The other two photos are from a few days ago, documenting a couple of garden visitors.

Also, the projected -20 next sunday was downgraded first to a still severe but less unusual -13, and then to a much more reasonable -5. They are however saying there's a risk of second load of snow next week. Lovely... Hopefully that's going to get downgraded as well.

(Husband, who can work from home, finds shovelling a good trade-off for the excitement of a lot of snow, and is keeping a running Snow Watch commentary...)

Hello on Friday!  Looking back at the day today -- or yesterday, if today hasn't gotten going yet -- how did it go?

   - I thought about my fic once or twice
   - I wrote
   - I did some planning and/or research
   - I edited
   - I've sent my fic off to my beta
   - I posted today!
   - I'm taking a break
   - I did something else that I'll talk about in a comment

Looking forward, how are you planning to spend your weekend?

   - I'm going to make up for not writing all week by having a writing marathon
   - I'm going to keep writing at my current rate and see how it goes
   - I have other plans, but I might have time to get some writing in
   - I'm going to take a break from writing

I was only at work for about an hour yesterday before sending myself home again. It was one of those times where you're unsure if you're actually a bit sick or if you're just tired and it'll clear up once you get going. Well, it didn't and I managed to leave before it got bad.

Unlike the previous time we were threatened with a snow storm, this one actually happened and all public transport from here is currently cancelled so I wouldn't have been able to go to work today anyway. However, because it's a sick day, I won't have to pay for an unexpected day off with holiday hours. So my timing isn't actually all that bad. Silver lining and all that, although I would have preferred to not be sick. Husband works from home on Fridays anyway, so he's fine.

It's still snowing out there, but we've got most of it now. We have gone from an orange warning to a blue warning overnight*. Not sure how deep it is, but I would estimate maybe 20-30 cm. The bird bath is so completely covered you can't even see that it's there, so that's an indicator of how deep it is.

The warmest temperature on the forecast for the next nine days at the moment is 0°C, so it's not going to go away anytime soon. In fact next weekend we might get down to -20°C at night. This is extremely unusual for this country, even at night!

Snow plough just came by. Our street is in the second priority category, so that's not bad if they got to us already.

*Scale is Red-Orange-Yellow-Blue, with blue being the mildest. I'm not sure I've ever experienced a red one.

These questions were suggested by that_one_girl.

1. What did you want to be when you were a kid?

2. What is your proudest accomplishment so far?

3. What is your dream job?

4. Where do you see yourself in 10 years?

5. What does it take to make you happy?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

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**Remember that we rely on you, our members, to help keep the community going. Also, please remember to play nice. We are all here to answer the questions and have fun each week. We repost the questions exactly as the original posters submitted them and request that all questions be checked for spelling and grammatical errors before they're submitted. Comments re: the spelling and grammatical nature of the questions are not necessary. Honestly, any hostile, rude, petty, or unnecessary comments need not be posted, either.**

On Sunday I was like "I am dragging myself to aikido out of obligation and habit" and my friend C was like "yeah you look beat". Aikido was good, though, two of K-sensei's students who mostly only show up to her Tues/Thurs morning classes were at weapons class, and showed up early to learn some more basic weapon stuff, which meant that when I showed up my typical ~15min early I got pulled into immediately demonstrating an exercise and then practicing in with the others.

Also went "yeah, the absolute hardest thing to do when practicing ma'ai with weapons is for uke to not flinch" to one of those students, prompting sensei to pause class so that she could more formally talk about how difficult yet important a practice this is. Because, well, the natural instinct when someone is stabbing at you with a weapon is to move out of the way. This is an excellent survival instinct! However! That is not the practice when nage is supposed to be learning how to enter in such that they can properly stab through uke.

On Monday I woke up and was like "I feel like shit!" and have proceeded to spend the entire week thus far dragging myself to work because Capitalism while keeping myself vaguely person-shaped via cold medicine. This has worked out alright mostly because for the majority of this week I haven't had to do anything particularly cognitively difficult at work. (Tasks included: "Put up linears on this floor", which was interrupted by "Be firewatch for the person doing welding", before I was allowed to return to that first task, and then told to do various other things that meant putting up one set of linears that should've taken a few hours took like three days.)

I also went to bed at like 8:30pm last night (due to being at work from 6:30am-2:30pm and class from 5pm-7:45pm... not counting commute time for either, of course...) and woke up this morning like "wow I feel like a person!" until I got up and was like "oh we have CHANGED kinds of feeling ugh, not removed it, rip".

Things I have spent time doing:

- Catching up on the Great Gundam Project (podcast), by which I mean I have now caught up to like last autumn/the end of the Dragonball Z season (which is about the Gundam adaptation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is apparently surprisingly good, but they spent more time talking about DBZ, their backup/non-Gundam show) (considering that this is a podcast I listen to in large part for going "please let me gain knowledge of anime people talk about but which I am only occasionally interested in watching", learning more about DBZ is genuinely a delight.) There is still so much more GGP to catch up on. xD This is a great podcast for listening to during work so long as I'm working alone, because I think it's generally entertaining and also I don't care if I miss a bit due to NOISE or BRIEF CONVERSATION, since I'm not invested in the details of the anime. (I am invested in The Episode Number Pokemon Name Game, though. I do not care about Pokemon. I do not know Pokemon. I think making the host who did not grow up playing Pokemon guess what Pokemon the episode number belongs to is a very funny game because I also do not know Pokemon and so listening to someone go "uh it looks like this, maybe it's called [something related to what it looks like]?" is very fun.)

- Watching FatT's Outward letsplay (which is technically a patreon bonus for their side podcast about videogams xD), by which I mean putting it on as background noise and looking over at the video every time Jack and Austin start going "oh no" or "what's THAT". The idle noise of people playing a videogame I don't have specific investment in but do enjoy seeing progression for is such a particular form of entertainment that usually I only like as background for doing chores, but hey if I'm feeling meh it works well more broadly.

- Thinking about, but not writing, story xD Like. How does one make it impossible to know what happened to someone who got kidnapped when "you can magically communicate short messages to known people over distance and get a response" is a given? The answer is magic warding, which is Deeply Concerning when other states that get No Connection (rather than No Response) would be, like. Unconsciousness/death. (Sleep probably feels different.) (This isn't even going to come up until I get through another few things!)

- I have also been keeping up with FatT: Perpetua, FatT: Realis, and CR: Araman and am enjoying them all. xD No deep thoughts, they're all fun but in very different ways/genres.

Hello on Thursday, sorry about missing yesterday, it was a crazy day with a major computer issue that thankfully got solved eventually.

Anyway, how's the day going so far for fic? (If you haven't gotten started on your day as yet, how did yesterday go for writing fic?)

    - Excellent!
    - Terrible
    - Somewhere in between
    - Nothing doing

How much time have you spent on writing fic today, roughly?

    - None
    - 30 minutes or less
    - 30-60 minutes
    - 60-90 minutes
    - More than 90 minutes

In five words or less, how do you feel about that?

I haven't forgotten you, Dreamwidth, but I am very stressed right now and writing posts/replying to comments thoughtfully takes so much energy :(

Well, that was rather a full day.

We started with an appointment with a solicitor regarding setting up wills, which, while unpleasant, turned out to not be as unpleasant as expected. I liked the woman we spoke to. She seemed friendly and had some input on which details might or might not be relevant for us, and some of them were about things we hadn't even thought of.

Finished the day off with a vet appointment for Holly, who has an inflamed tooth. The veterinary nurse agreed with me that it looked Capital S Suspicious, so she's now booked in for the full works. X-rays, teeth cleaning and possibly removal of the bad tooth if they can do it at the same time. She said she could make the booking with extra time for the extraction, but it ultimately depends on what they see on the pictures. If it's more complicated than just the one tooth, it will take too long. I have previously been told it's also a question of there being a limit to how long they can safely keep a cat knocked out. They'll do some blood tests on her at the same time, which is a non-mandatory routine check of organ functions. With several previous kidney-cats, it's not non-mandatory to us.

Roll on the weekend, with book swap day at the library and opera in the cinema!

Hi all!

I'm doing some minor operational work tonight. It should be transparent, but there's always a chance that something goes wrong. The main thing I'm touching is testing a replacement for Apache2 (our web server software) in one area of the site.

Thank you!

Hello on Tuesday!  How are things going in the world of fic?

Did you write?

   - Yes!
   - No!
   - Not yet!

If yes, what kind of writerly activity did you engage in?  How do you feel about it?
If no, what were the obstacles/situations that affected your writerly pursuits?  What will you do differently tomorrow to get more writing done?
If not yet, because the day hasn't gotten going yet, what kind of writing activity are you planning (or hoping) to accomplish?