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kossai) wrote2025-08-31 09:11 pm
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dw_maintenance2025-08-31 07:37 pmPer 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.
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theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-31 08:40 pm'What Else Is On?' is a collection of things from elsewhere on the web that I want to share.
Hello again, link fans! It's the final day of Blaugust! I hope you've been enjoying my many posts, and if you've been participating, then I hope it's gone the best it could for you! If you haven't been following, I just followed curiousquail's lead and set up a blaugust tag to collect all of this month's posts in one place for posterity!
Before we get started, I have a request: I'm starting to run low on anime GIFs of people using computers for my 'What Else Is On?' posts. I haven't gone out and searched for more on my own yet, but I thought it might be fun to solicit suggestions from the blogosphere if you have any! Throw your links down in the comments, or wherever you prefer to communicate with me!
Now then, what else is on?
Disturbance At The Heron House - R.E.M.
Seeing as this was the month I got into R.E.M., it seemed fitting to use one of their tracks for this month's WEIO. This is one of my faves that I discovered this month, on what is probably my favorite album of theirs. A solid, mid-album sleeper hit.
Anyway, R.E.M. are great. Highly recommend checking out their lengthy discography.
A good bundle of assorted life tips from our friends at Defector!
Take My Hand - Jay Castello, Unwinnable
A lovely write-up of a journey to the top of Nobody Is Mad At You Mountain in Peak.
A collection of some good vegetarian recipes that I mostly want to save for myself, but also I love when people share their cooking discoveries/faves/triumphs!
Chicago is good - Megan Carnes
More from Megan here, and I'm definitely biased in my inclusion of this one, but I can confirm that Chicago owns.
Very busy today with traditions and rituals - Laura Michet
It feels very, very good to share a symbolic action with other people. It feels very good to share, and it feels great to teach people to participate.
Yeah! On this blog, we love and support silly little traditions and rituals.
The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work - Jason Koebler, 404 Media
Great, clear-eyed reporting from Jason Koebler on the devil's bargain some in the media are striking, either in the hopes of surviving Google Zero, or in a blind, investor-minded pursuit of Shiny Thing.
No, posting alone won't save Palestine but you should do it anyway - the Tangent Space
Don't give up before you start. And don't give in to false narratives and bad-faith arguments before you open your mouth.
A fun look back at some gaming-themed dial-up stories.
if you love it, download it - erysdren
And finally, a reminder and a guide from erysdren that the things you love won't be around forever. Download that shit.
Defunctland After Dark: That Helicopter Thing at Chuck E. Cheese
We just recently watched this more casual video from Defunctland of Kevin Perjurer trying to find out more about that helicopter thing that used to be at Chuck E. Cheese, and it's a lot of fun to see his process, hear him get excited in real time, and watch him try not to get sidetracked by various details. I think he puts out more of this sort of thing on the Defunctland patreon, which is a compelling selling point!
Let's Figure Out Some Animal Crackers - Nicky Flowers
Just a great video from Nicky, showing off and trying to identify some pretty fucked up looking animal crackers.
Ice Cream Truck (ASMR Animation) - hayang
Had a few of these ASMR animations of a cat doing various activities, and they're nice to watch and very cute! Some of them get kinda weird because ASMR YouTube is kinda weird, but this one is nice.
Free, Browser
I don't fully understand this one, so I'll crib from Weird Fucking Games' description: "Interpret the meaning of three sets of objects in this contemplative experience with a retro yet mysterious feel."
Mysterious it is! And you get a little printable zine of your interpretations at the end! Takes about a minute to complete.
Free, Browser
Another by ill omens! This one, I understand. It's a puzzle platformer in which you need to touch the pink runes in the right order, connecting them with a magic thread as you do, and then loop back to the first one you touched without crossing over the thread in order to open the portal to the next level.
I'm making it sound more complex than it is, you'll get it as soon as you start playing, and it's quite fun!
Free, Browser
A powerful personal history and manifesto about the individualism inherent to early software, and the creation it enabled, in contrast to today's increasingly locked-down and user-hostile reality.
You really gotta walk through this thing. Takes about 20 minutes.
Draw a fish!
Thanks for reading! Til next time! đ
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.
kossai) wrote2025-08-30 02:58 pm
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-30 04:48 pmI've had the Switch 2 since launch week, and I have thoughts!
They did it. They fixed it. It just runs well now. Everything loads quickly, you can scroll without stutter. It's good.
I also understand a little better Nintendo's reasoning for not having music in the eShop, because all videos autoplay with sound when hovering over a game's listing. Which is a terrible decision, imo, and still a bullshit reason for not having shop music, but I at least understand what they meant now.
The screenshot experience has been improved in two ways:
First, you can finally just send that shit to your phone via an app. No more QR code bullshit. There's a limit of I think 100 screenshots at a time that will be held in the app, but hey, that's a lot of screenshots.
Second, I really like that when you take a screenshot on Switch 2, and the "Screenshot Taken" dialogue pops up in the corner, you can press the home button, and it will just take you right to that screenshot. And then if you press the home button again, it takes you right back to the game. Nice to have this process streamlined! Feels very thoughtful.
256GB to start with is so so so much better than the 32GB of the Switch. But with lots of games being much bigger these days, that will still probably fill up faster than you expect.
This is a little tough to explain if you don't already know what it means. Basically, Nintendo is taking all of your digital games and treating them like a physical game card in the sense that they can only be "loaded" on one system at a time, which was sort of already the case, but now you can move them between systems and loan them to people.
I am of two minds about this. On one hand, it creates a little extra unnecessary faff when you're just trying to play a game on a secondary Switch, like if you have a Switch hooked up to a TV and a Switch Lite to play on the go (in bed). On the other hand, they have made it so that you can now loan out your digital games to a member of your family group.
For example, I own Breath of the Wild physically, but bought the DLC digitally. For the longest time, my girlfriend wanted to play the BOTW DLC on her account but couldn't because fucking Nintendo fucking separates those things out arbitrarily and gates them like that if you haven't given them their pound of flesh. And she couldn't play on my account because there's only one save file, and it would've wiped mine out. SO SHE JUST COULDN'T PLAY THE DLC.
Extremely stupid! So now I can loan her the DLC and she can play it without having to buy it. And yeah, she should just be able to do that because we live in the same home and share a Switch and she should be able to just play any digital game I buy without the fucking cops showing up, and yeah, I should be able to "loan" her my digital games indefinitely like I would be able to with a physical game, rather than whatever arbitrary time limit Nintendo imposes, after which time I need to go and re-loan it to her.
But it's fucking something I guess. You know? Like give me something.
I mean this varies from game to game, but everything I've played is buttery smooth. The new 60FPS versions of BOTW and TOTK are great. Actually, my girlfriend who has played hundreds of hours of both games at 30FPS played the Switch 2 versions and was immediately like, "I don't like this," so your mileage may vary.
But all the menus, UI, and shop are super snappy and smooth. Switch 1 games I've played are super smooth. Switch 2 versions of Switch 1 games and Mario Kart World (the only proper Switch 2 game I've played) run super smoothly. And the new GameCube emulator runs great as well. Speaking of...
Switch Online + Expansion Pack subscribers now get access to GameCube games on Switch 2! At launch, the only games available were Wind Waker, Soulcalibur 2, and F-Zero GX, though they've since added Chibi-Robo, which I was very excited to finally play!
Everything runs well, and I'm looking forward to Nintendo adding more games.
The screen is so beautiful. Colors are so saturated and poppy. It gets so bright and vibrant. Looking at it makes me want to play games on it. The people online who complain about it not being an OLED are losers and freaks with no life. You really care that something is an LCD and not an OLED? Go outside once.
However, I will say that certain Switch 1 games that were not designed with this screen in mind, or haven't been updated to take advantage of its resolution, look a little fuzzy in handheld mode. It's by no means a deal-breaker, but just know that a lot of your old games will not look their best in handheld mode.
It's not a piece of shit now. They thought about it for more than two seconds and made a kickstand that isn't a piece of shit. It's great.
I really like how they feel! They're bigger, they feel better in my hands, I love the magnets, and the sticks definitely feel smoother. Seems like they didn't do anything to prevent stick drift from coming back, so that will probably still be a recurring, annoying, expensive issue, but time will tell.
You would think there's not much to say about the dock because it's just a piece of plastic that connects the thing to a TV. But the first thing I noticed when slotting the Switch 2 into the new dock is that there's weirdly a lot of play between the Switch 2 and the front and back of the dock. Maybe this is to prevent scratching the screen when docking and un-docking? But it's weird, like you can wobble the console back and forth while it's sitting in there. Feels loose and unsteady. Just a strange detail in a console experience where everything else feels pretty tight and considered.
Switch 2 good! I like it! It's very big, so I don't really like holding it for a long time, my Switch Lite is still the GOAT in that regard, but that screen is goddamn gorgeous. And everything I've played runs like a dream on it.
I haven't played it much since falling off of Mario Kart World (an excellent game that will get its own post at some point) about a month or so after launch, but I haven't been playing much of anything in that time, really, so that might be a me thing. I've had a lot going on lately, and I haven't been able to stick with a game for a bit for some reason.
There's also the small matter of it still feeling like there aren't a ton of games for this thing. I mean, you can play pretty much any Switch 1 game on it, and all of NSO, but when you buy a new console, you want a lot of exciting new experiences that take advantage of all that the new thing has to offer. This is something that will naturally be alleviated over time, though, so I look forward to a new crop of Switch 2 games to get excited about.
kossai) wrote2025-08-29 10:53 am
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-29 03:36 pmWhile doing research for my AOL memories post, I was hit by a lightning bolt in the form of the above video.
This promo would play in front of our copies of both Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective, and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? that came in various boxes of cereal in the year 2000. It was a wild time. CD-ROM games came in cereal boxes, gold paved the streets, single-income families could afford modest houses, etc.
This man's voice saying "This CD is brought to you by" is my fucking Manchurian Candidate activation phrase. I've heard him say this approximately one million times. We got sucha kick out of the guy jumping off the cliff and the reverberating "ow" that we would wait for that bit to play before skipping to the game. We played these games so much, especially Carmen Sandiego: Word Detective. That game owns. The art and animation is insane.
I never knew what Lightdog was as a kid, because even then I would skip past the ads as soon as I could in order to get to the game (I don't think we ever made it far enough to even see the Pfizer ad). Apparently, it was a "family-friendly" filtered internet service. So basically the future we're currently headed towards.
They struck a deal with General Mills to bundle CD-ROMs inside cereal boxes with an ad, their launcher, and a full version of a game. As far as I can tell, other available games included Clue, Monopoly Junior, and Lego Creator. It doesn't seem like the promotion was terribly successful, because Lightdog went belly-up the following year. At least, I'm pretty sure they did. I remember reading that somewhere when I was writing my AOL post, and now I can't find a damn thing about Lightdog anywhere. Which doesn't disprove that possibility...
Anyway, I just had to share this because it hit me like a ton of bricks. The comments for this on YouTube were full of people just saying "Carmen Sandiego" or "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire." I just had to save it and host it myself for posterity. Anyone else remember this?
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-28 09:53 pmThis month, AOL announced (or didn't, I think someone just found it on their webite) that they're discontinuing their dial-up service on September 30, 2025. For folks of a certain age, AOL is synonymous with a very specific era of the internet, and with an absolute overabundance of compact discs offering increasing amounts of hours of free access to it.
I am one of those folks, and I thought it would be fun to share some memories I have of that time.
There was a time in America when you couldn't spit without hitting an AOL Free Trial CD. They came with other software, they came in the mail, they came in gosh darn cereal boxes. In one sense, they were a plague, and certainly a massive waste. But for two kids whose parents had finally introduced a computer to the household, and who desperately wanted to see what the internet had to offer, the promise of 1000 Free Hours (along with vague assurances that it would help us with our homework) really helped us plead our case. Besides, with so many of these discs around, I don't think we actually paid for internet access for years.
One of my first memories of using the internet was to visit the Lego website, because I was very young, loved Legos, and couldn't think of anything else to look for on the web yet. You can still view a version of what the site looked like around then via the Wayback Machine.
My favorite thing to do was play a game simply called "Brick Game," for which you needed to be a member of the Lego "Web Club" (which is what they called a free online account). This is a standout memory for me because Brick Game was a competitive game that you would play against another person from somewhere else in the world, and I can still remember my parents being amazed by that fact.
Get ready to see a comment from my sister on this post, because I think THE memory of the early internet for both of us is, for some reason, trying to watch the intro to The Powerpuff Girls, presumably on the Cartoon Network website.
I can still remember watching the stupid white progress bar on the stupid old QuickTime Player plugin, as it loaded second by second over the course of what could have easily been 15 minutes. We would start playing, hit the buffer wall, it would buffer another second, and we would restart from the beginning.
"Sugar, spâ" Buffering
"Sugar, spice, anâ" Buffering
OVER AND OVER AGAIN.
I don't think we ever got to watch the full video because it would've taken too long, and we got bored, but now a good chunk of that intro is burned into my brain forever:
"Sugar. Spice. And everything nice. These were the ingredients chosen to create the perfect little girls. But Professor Utonium accidentally added an extra ingredient...Chemical X! ::explosion:: Thus, the Powerpuff Girls were born! Using their awesome super powers, Blossom, Bubbles, and Buttercup..." something something truth and justice? That's where it gets foggy.
I don't know why I remember this, but I distinctly remember my mom and aunt using a website called iWon. I looked it up, and it sounds like it was probably a scam, but seemingly not in any hugely detrimental way. Maybe more of a sham, then.
My understanding is that you would sign up for an account, and then be entered into a chance to win money (for charities(?) and possibly also yourself(?)) by clicking on links and playing online games. This is the same generation that told us Wikipedia was not a real source. Adults didn't know shit about shit.
While I was putzing around the Lego website, my sister was getting down to business scoping out anime fansites to print out Digimon and Sailor Moon screenshots from. I visited these sites too, after my sister found them, but she was the heavier user. She had binders full of screenshots and fanfiction and the like.
The two that I can still put names to were Lelola and DigiTenka. Lelola was a general anime fansite, while DigiTenka, as you may have guessed, was dedicated to Digimon. Incredibly, Lelola is still online, seemingly owned and operated by the same person who started it back in the day. The old Lelola is gone (though you can still find it on the Wayback Machine), replaced with a very sweet message from the owner, and it appears they use the domain as their personal site. That rules.
I couldn't find any info on DigiTenka, but in researching this section, I also remembered DigiExperience.com. This was another Digimon fansite that was apparently an affiliate of Lelola, which would explain how we found it.
I don't have a ton of memories of using the site itself, but I remember being absolutely inundated with commercials for MaMaMedia.com during after-school and Saturday-morning TV. It was supposed to be some kind of edutainment thing, but mostly what keeps MaMaMedia in my head (apart from the name being fun to say, and also easy to confuse with Macromedia) was the weird repetitive music that played on the site.
Again, I couldn't have been there more than a handful of times, but the music imprinted on me for some reason. I haven't been able to find it anywhere, and it wasn't in any of the commercials. I don't know quite how to describe it except that it was very of its time, and I can only imagine it coming from small, crappy, beige computer speakers.
Our foray into the world of Flash animations and games peaked a little bit later than what I remember as the AOL Years, but it was definitely in there. It all started for us when our cousin took us down to his basement and showed us The Demented Cartoon Movie, now available on YouTube. That was a world-shaker for me. That era of my life can reasonably be split into before and after seeing TDCM. It made me want to make things. It (and other things) made me want to learn Flash. It may be, in some small way, responsible for the fact that I am a motion designer today. Wild.
But there were plenty of others out there. Sites like MiniClip, StupidVideos, and the inimitable DancingBush.com (thank god this was archived, I still get this music in my head) provided hours of entertainment. I can remember more than one sleepover at my friend Alex's house where we spent all night looking at absolute nonsense on his parents' Gateway PC until the wee hours together. Good times.
This isn't so much a specific memory, but AOL Keywords were everywhere for a time. Before Google, it was a little harder to find things on the web. So AOL created a simple way to type in a word or phrase, and find the website you were looking for.
I don't remember ever using them myself, but for the longest time, I remember TV shows saying "use AOL Keyword: XYZ" as a way to find them on the web, rather than sharing their actual URL. "Use AOL Keyword: PBSKids" was a big one. I guess people thought URLs would be too hard for normal people to grasp, and there was no good way to reliably find the thing you were looking for on the web just yet.
This is more memories than I expected to dredge up! My early computer use in the AOL era was more about playing games and poking around the operating system itself than it was about surfing the web. I feel like my internet use didn't really take off until a little while after the AOL boom. But the memories I do have are clear as crystal (obviously), and I'll always look back fondly on this era and the "You've Got Mail" of it all.
You can take the person out of the 1000-hour free trial, but you can't take the ::horrific modem noises:: out of the person.
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-27 09:50 pmI'm trying to remove what few Microsoft products I use from my life, since they're definitely materially supporting Israel's genocide in Gaza, and the BDS movement has broadened their boycott of the company. I don't have an Xbox, I don't subscribe to Game Pass, I don't use Office or OneDrive. I don't pay Microsoft for anything at all, actually. But I want to stop using their products, paid or not, where I can. And unfortunately, they're currently a big part of the process of making this blog work, in the form of Visual Studio Code and GitHub.
But they don't have to be! The great thing about having a static site is that it's just a collection of files that I can take just about anywhere and use any number of tools to turn those files into a website.
GitHub is a problem for another day. I mainly use it because it hooks into my web host Netlify in a way that makes updating my site and publishing posts really easy. I see people talking about Codeberg right now, but I would have to reassess the rest of my posting workflow in order to use it, I think. But again, that's for another day.
Today, I want to post about an alternative to VSCode, Microsoft's free code editor that I've been using to build my website and write blog posts for a few years now. I gave it a shot back when I was first building this version of my website because the person whose tutorial I followed was using it, and I ended up really liking it. The fact that it combines an editor, file explorer, and terminal all in one place just makes my specific workflow a lot faster and more enjoyable.
The first, best-looking alternative I found, and the one I'm using right now, is VSCodium, an open-source version of VSCode.
I initially envisioned this post as a review of VSCodium, because I expected to go through some sort of a trial period with VSCodium, and to have lots to say about what makes it different, and what I like or dislike about it, but it hit me with a bit of an anti-climax because it's exactly the same as VSCode. It looks the same, it acts the same. It's actually, literally just VSCode.
On VSCodium's website, under the "Why Does This Exist" heading, they say the following:
Microsoftâs vscode source code is open source (MIT-licensed), but the product available for download (Visual Studio Code) is licensed under this not-FLOSS license and contains telemetry/tracking.
Followed by this quote from a VSCode maintainer:
When we [Microsoft] build Visual Studio Code, we do exactly this. We clone the vscode repository, we lay down a customized product.json that has Microsoft specific functionality (telemetry, gallery, logo, etc.), and then produce a build that we release under our license.
When you clone and build from the vscode repo, none of these endpoints are configured in the default product.json. Therefore, you generate a âcleanâ build, without the Microsoft customizations, which is by default licensed under the MIT license
So VSCodium is literally the same program as VSCode, just with all of Microsoft's tracking garbage stripped out (or rather, never added). Which is great! But then that got me thinking, is that enough to make it a new tool? Does that move it far enough away from Microsoft for my purposes?
The underlying VSCode code is still developed and supported by Microsoft, even though it's technically open-source and anyone can contribute, and yada yada. If you were trying to remove Google from your life, would switching from Chrome to Chromium accomplish that?
I don't really have a conclusion here! I really like VSCodium as a piece of software, because it's literally the same piece of software I already really liked, just without a bunch of stuff I wasn't using and didn't want. But at the same time...it's the same piece of software, no? I don't really know enough about the world of software development to know if VSCodium is far enough removed from Microsoft to matter here.
I also don't think this is a huge deal, or that this particular piece of software is a major point of pressure for the BDS movement, so I'm not agonizing over it, but I thought it would be an interesting question to pose, and good to post about even though I'm sure everyone in my sphere is aware of the Microsoft boycott.
I think where I come down on VSCodium in particular is "it's probably fine?" But there are also plenty of other fish in this particular sea. I really like the trappings of VSCode/VSCodium, but I'm sure there are other free & open source options out there that are just as good. And there's nothing keeping me from just firing up Notepad++ and a cmd window instead.
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-26 09:50 pmThe cavalcade of Florida backlog posts continues! I think this should be my last.
The day I acquired The Cool Spot Phone, we also visited an outdoor garden decoration type place that my folks just call "Rusty Place," because it's full of metal outdoor decorations, and many of them are somewhat rusty. You'll see, I'm sure.
But many of these decorations were also 100% certified Cool (or at least Weird) Guys. These are those guys.
Standouts for me are the frogs playing ladybug checkers, any and all turtles, the manatee, big giraffe, and cactuses. I love the shark wearing sunglasses. The pumpkin face haunts my dreams.
beehaiku) wrote2025-08-26 03:36 pmI'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.
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-25 09:30 pmAfter writing about my last keyboard driving me nuts, I decided I should just splurge on a really nice new one while I have a job and (some) money, especially since it's a tool I use all day every day.
After looking around a bit, I settled on the Keychron Q1 Max in Shell White, with Gateron Jupiter Red switches. I even found that my local MicroCenter, which is just a few short stops away on my subway line, had the exact model with the switches I wanted in stock for $30 cheaper than it's currently listed for on the Keychron website! That MicroCenter has a pretty nice keyboard section, so I was able to go in and try out the board before committing to a purchase. It's so nice to have a brick and mortar computer store to go to!
It's a 75%, which is a little bit bigger than the KBDCraft board I'd been using, and a little smaller than the Varmilo I retreated to when the KBDCraft started to drive me nuts. It's kinda nice to have a function row again, but I'm so used to the escape key being a row lower that I keep instinctively hitting the tilde key, which is very funny. Muscle memory is a hell of a thing. There's also a nice little knob that controls volume by default, but can apparently be programmed to do other things, though I haven't tried to do that yet.
It seems pretty easy to customize, though, so I can set up some of the shortcuts and macros I got used to with my last board. It's also got a Win/Mac switch, which activates some different layers with different shortcuts on Windows and Mac, which is really nice, since I work on a Mac, and use a Windows PC for personal stuff.
It can be used either wired or wirelessly over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi, but I'm a wireless hater (apart from headphones most of the time), so I'll be using it exclusively wired. I didn't get this nice coiled cable for nothing. Of course, I've since found this other nice coiled cable. It never ends, folks.
The stock caps are pretty nice, and very readable. I like the font and accent colors. But I've got a new set of caps coming that I bought myself for my birthday this year that I'm very excited about. It's a set called "Motif" by Akuko Labs, and I have no idea when it's shipping. It's apparently still in production.
So far, after a weekend and now one full day of work, I like the new keeb very much! It's a little louder and clickier than my previous board, but not in an obnoxious way. It's pleasantly thok-y. It's also extremely heavy, or at least much heavier than any board I've had in the past. Its body is all metal, and feels super sturdy and well-built. This feels like a board I'll be using for years and years.
If you have the means, and you need a new tool that you use every single day, buy yourself the nice thing. It's worth it every time.
alyaza) wrote2025-08-25 11:08 amearlier this month i read There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone; in the course of that reading, a section of Part Two stood out as demonstrating many of the worst, most ghoulish aspects of housing politics today. today we're going to focus on one of these aspects: the intentional murder of public housing.
i'm sure most of my audience doesn't need me to tell them that public housing was intentionally murdered; however, you might be unfamiliar with how this was done in practice. it was not just that public housingâover a number of presidential administrationsâwas racialized into housing suitable only for non-whites; that public housing was stigmatized as poverty-stricken, portrayed as crime-infested, described as full of drug-addicts and degenerates, and written off as âmonstrous, depressing places,â in the words of Richard Nixon; or that public housing was defunded by a thousand, bipartisan cuts. it was that public housing, in many cases, was violently dismantled by capital in the service of profitâa neoliberal spin on the "slum clearance" of old. case in point, Atlanta, which Goldstone notes served as the model for contemporary dismembering of existing public housing stock:
[Beginning in 1994] Atlanta Housing Authority embarked on an ambitious campaign to dismantle the cityâs public housing. Democratic mayor Bill Campbell appointed RenĂ©e Glover, a former Wall Street lawyer, to serve as the CEO of the agency. Under her leadership, AHA showed little interest in refurbishing Atlantaâs dilapidated projects, where a remarkable 13 percent of the cityâs population (and 40 percent of schoolchildren) were livingâa greater proportion than in any other American city. Rather, the agency rebranded itself as a âdiversified real estate companyâ and took on the new mission of creating entire communities âfrom the ground up,â as Glover put itâwhich meant tearing down public housing complexes, giving eligible families vouchers, and enlisting private developers to build, own, and manage mixed-income communities where the projects had once stood.
But AHAâs innovations didnât stop there. Inspired by efforts at the federal level to move people from âwelfare to work,â AHA became the first housing authority in the country to impose a strict work requirement on its beneficiaries. These measures, declared an admiring column in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had turned the cityâs housing authority into a âconservativeâs dream.â When Glover described her approach as revolutionary, she wasnât exaggerating. The Atlanta Model, as it came to be known, was soon adopted as the blueprint for redevelopment in Chicago, Miami, and a number of other major cities.
the beauty of this mass-privatization for capital was the immense value and profit it provided to all of its participantsâwith the exception of actual tenants, who were left to flounder at the whims of the housing market and almost wholly cleansed from their long-time neighborhoods. particularly indicative of the fate of social housing tenants was what happened to the Techwood Homes project (once the pride of the Public Works Administration). despite "$1 billion of private investment that poured into the area" after its demolition in 1995âor rather, because of that $1 billion in private investmentâthe vast, vast majority of its tenants were displaced in favor of upscale tenants from which a much greater profit could be derived. again, quoting Goldstone,
In Atlanta, as in other booming cities where apartment vacancies were at an all-time low and rents in the private market were soaring, [Section 8] voucher holders suddenly found themselves competing for fewer and fewer eligible units. Many voucher-accepting landlords saw that they could extract greater profits from unassisted tenants.
to say nothing of the aforementioned stigmatization of public housing tenants (and low-income tenants generally), which wrought consequences far beyond the bounds of public housing projects like Techwood Homes. even though Section 8 wasâin effectâa compromise with capital, capital-holders fought obliged participation in the program and, through the decades between the New Deal and present day, grew increasingly oppositional to the tenants reliant upon it for shelter. when Techwood Homes was demolishedâalong with every other public housing project in Atlantaâit reflected the belief that people dependant on Section 8 are not worthy of anything. there is no money to be made off of them; they are not responsible enough to deserve shelter, even from the government.
the result has been exactly what you would expect. even before the onerous requirements applied to voucher holders, many privately-operated apartments simply do not take Section 8 and render the value of holding a voucher moot. the "socioeconomic mobility" that is ostensibly offered by Section 8 is totally vaporous under market conditions, because a Section 8 tenant is invariably a unit operated at a relative loss for a landlord when the precious few vacant units to go around are a profiteer's dream. in the absence of public housing, there is no possibility here but a sort of social purification.
kossai) wrote2025-08-25 08:27 am
in dreams , kossai have ... 4 ways ? that communicate with characters .
tie in first place for most common is : telepathy , and just nothing at all . telepathy - able to just project thoughts for dream characters to hear , dream characters do not comment on this as odd or anything . nothing at all - kossai do not need to communicate , dream characters just implicitly know what need and react accordingly .
second place : sign . find that still often likely to be nonsensical when examine in reality , but characters understand just fine .
third place : voice . least common by far . this voice do not usually resemble reality , and often come with other features like stutter or slowdown .
honourable mention to : AAC device . not actually use AAC device to communicate in dreams so much as AAC device is plot device occasionally . this is likely because AAC device require at least some level of read in order to use , and kossai can not read nor use technology accurately in dreams . more likely to show up in dreams that , for example , AAC device was stolen , or AAC device malfunction . but still able to perfectly communicate with dream characters through other means . silliness .
kossai) wrote2025-08-24 03:21 pm
theworksofegan_feed) wrote2025-08-24 04:23 pmContinuing the theme of clearing out draft ideas I've been meaning to post since the start of the year, let's take a look at some cool clouds I saw while I was visiting my folks down in Florida for the holidays!
For all of its political faults, Florida's actual natural environment and big ol' sky are very cool and fun to observe.
The ride from the airport featured this great cloud shelf. That streak in the top left is a reflection from the car window, not anything actually cool.
Got to see this incredible sunset our first night!
Birds!
A wider shot of this patchy, web-like formation.
The sunset just got more and more impressive the longer we watched.
Tighter shot of that crazy solar-flare-lookin' cloud.
Pink streaks feat. contrail.
The moon! And a planet of some sort I think! Jupiter?
Bonus pic feat. ducks!
Bonus bonus pic of actual visible stars at night!
dismallyoriented) wrote2025-08-23 04:31 pm