Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] 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.

brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

“Great art is somehow already in the future, showing us a place we haven’t arrived at yet. Not just to entertain us but to make us grow.” — Jan Younghusband, in Loaded: The Life (and Afterlife) of the Velvet Underground (Dylan Jones), p. 173.

Clarke Award Finalists 2012

Aug. 31st, 2025 09:05 pm
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll
I will be too busy to post tomorrow.

2012: O2 offers free wifi to multitudes, which I only now realize may be have been referenced in Kingsman, researchers determine that despite a century having passed, the Titanic remains at the bottom of the Atlantic, and in a glorious celebration of the effectiveness of the modern British educational system, doctors warn Britons not to drink liquid nitrogen.

Poll #33559 Clarke Award Finalists 2012
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14


Which 2012 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
0 (0.0%)

Embassytown by China Miéville
7 (50.0%)

Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
4 (28.6%)

Rule 34 by Charles Stross
8 (57.1%)

The Postmortal by Drew Magary
0 (0.0%)

The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper
4 (28.6%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.


Which 2012 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
The Testament of Jessie Lamb by Jane Rogers
Embassytown by China Miéville
Hull Zero Three by Greg Bear
Rule 34 by Charles Stross

The Postmortal by Drew Magary
The Waters Rising by Sheri S. Tepper
mekachu04: off topics, comments (VOIDWALKER)
[personal profile] mekachu04 posting in [community profile] anime_manga
Fandom: One Piece
Author/Artist: Mekachu04
Title: July Punk Aibou Sketches
Pairing: Eustass Kidd & Killer
Rating: teen? it varies from gen/all audience to teen
Word Count: art
Highlight for Warnings: *some implied death/violence but nothing graphic. all are unfinished sketches so clothes might not all be there. *
Disclaimer: Kidd, Killer, the Kidd Pirates and other characters belong to the world of One Piece by Eiichiro Oda. I'm just playing in the sandbox
AN: I'm trying to draw something everyday. So most of these are drawn at about 3-5am in about an hour or two at work during the down time.


started a 50 sentence challenge toward the end of the month with a sketch for each sentance

thumbnails linking to each day under cut )
dialecticdreamer: My work (Default)
[personal profile] dialecticdreamer
Shifting Plans
By Dialecticdreamer/Sarah Williams
Part 1 of 1, complete
Word count (story only): 1901
[End of March 179-]


:: As they get ready for the day, Trokhym throws a small twist in their previous plans. Part of the “Lost Son” story arc in the Frankenstein’s Family universe. ::




Laszlo woke very early. His eyelids flung themselves upward as his lungs heaved eagerly for the crisp springtime air. He washed in cold water, frigid but not bearing a skin of ice, and dressed carefully. Tucked into the vardo, he brushed his hair and braided the queue, just to make it harder for David to grab at it.

The thought made him freeze.

The memory, blurred by more than a decade, softened into wistfulness.
Read more... )

Computer Salad

Aug. 31st, 2025 06:41 pm
l33tminion: (Default)
[personal profile] l33tminion
Last weekend, went back to Cleveland with Julie to pick up Erica and meet some of my extended family for a family reunion. Was pretty great. Melissa was there, but Elliott and Simon were absent, since Simon's been traveling a bit rough lately and he was due to start a new preschool soon after.

On Wednesday, Erica started fourth grade, the two intro days followed by a four-day weekend.

On Saturday, I did a bunch of activities with Erica, including going to the Farmers Market and doing some cooking. We went on the tour of the Taza chocolate factory, which has been on my activity to-do list for a while, since that's very close to our house. I made cucumber salad, for which for some reason my mind kept trying to substitute a more nonsensical phrase.

Today, I baked ginger-lemon scones from the Flour cookbook with Erica, which she picked out as a cooking project. Turned out well.

We had an appointment this weekend to get our seasonal vaccines, but it was abruptly cancelled. I'm hoping that things will get sorted out. But the CDC seems to be in an insane state right now, and the government's vaccine policy seems to be at root straight-up in favor of more people getting sick.

(I'm reading A Wind in the Door to Eria and it's uh interesting timing in the context of Sec. Brain-Worm's comments about "mitochondrial challenges".)
canyonwalker: Hangin' in a hammock (life's a beach)
[personal profile] canyonwalker
When we decided to cut short our Canada trip several days ago I immediately started thinking, what else can we do instead? By coming back Friday night we'd have a whole, three-day weekend (Labor Day in the US) ahead of us. I feel like whenever we have an extra day like that we have to go somewhere, as time for travel is so limited for us US working stiffs. There are so many places we could go! And yet... I'm also ready for a break from travel. Thus enter Plan B— or is it more like Plan C at this point? Taking it easy at home.

Relaxing in the pool on Labor Day weekend (Aug 2025)

Of course, "taking it easy at home" doesn't just mean moping around, sitting in the dark. It's summer, and the weather's beautiful. We're spending afternoons out by the pool!

Saturday we went out for lunch together, ran a few shopping errands, and came back to relax in/by the pool for a few hours. We grilled hot dogs for dinner.

Today (Sunday) is more of the same. Well, not the same, but similar. 😅 We went out for lunch again then relaxed in/by the pool for a few hours. We'll run a few errands late in the afternoon then come home for dinner. My plan for tonight is grilling burgers.

Recent Reading: Siblings

Aug. 31st, 2025 01:03 pm
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7

This review will be briefer than I wish, because I’ve got two fingers taped up (injury) and it makes typing a pain. This morning I finished book #12 from the “Women in Translation” rec list, which was Siblings by Brigitte Reimann, translated from German by Lucy Renner Jones.

This book was published in 1963, just two years after the Berlin Wall went up, but takes place in 1960, before the Wall. It’s a book about three siblings, but really it’s a book about Germany’s future. The core of the novel is the relationship between the protagonist, Elisabeth (“Lise”) and her brother, Uli; and their views on the German state.

Lise is an adamant supporter of the German Democratic Republic (GDR; aka communist East Germany) and communism as a whole. She views it as her generation’s chance to right the injustices of a capitalistic world. Uli, on the other hand, while supportive of communism, resents the GDR for what he views as a lack of opportunity and its petty politics. At the start of the novel, Uli has decided to defect to the west, and Lise and her partner Joachim are trying to convince him to stay.

Throughout these efforts, the shadow of their eldest brother Konrad hangs over them—Konrad has already defected, years earlier, and is firmly settled in West Germany, though not without struggle.

This book is very politically philosophical. As mentioned, it’s about Uli and Lise (and Konrad), but it’s really about the future of Germany. Not yet 20 years out from the end of WWII, this is not an easy question (and there is a lot of finger-pointing to go around about who did what for the Nazis while they were in power). The book definitely leans in favor of supporting the GDR. While Uli and Konrad have their gripes about it, these are generally cast, through Lise’s viewpoint, as self-centered, or fig leaves for their real issue, which is that they cannot let go of a capitalist ownership mindset. Even where she acknowledges their complaints as valid—such as Uli’s frustration at the stunted opportunities for anyone who is not a Party member—her attitude is essentially that they need to tough it out for the sake of making the communist experiment work, or that it’s a reasonable trade off to avoid what she sees as the cruelties of capitalist West Germany.

It's the closest I’ve ever come to reading a pro-communism book (even Soviet authors I’ve read have been pretty staunchly against the Party, a la Lydia Chukovskaya’s Sofia Petrovna), which made it interesting in that respect, as well as in how it addresses the ways the split of Germany affected individual Germans and German families.

However, the prose is very “tell not show” and this, combined with the highly philosophical nature of it, kept me at arm’s length from the characters and their lives.

Nevertheless, it’s fascinating from a historical perspective.


denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

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.

Byron

Aug. 31st, 2025 01:52 pm
drglam: Me, in the mirror (mirror)
[personal profile] drglam
 My sweet little man Byron is almost certainly leaving me soon.

Here he is enjoying some sun today
https://bsky.app/profile/drglam.bsky.social/post/3lxpeliaqas2v

And Sunday when he seemed fine.

https://bsky.app/profile/drglam.bsky.social/post/3lx3ywhtkis2q

Thursday at the emergency vet, when we thought he might have some time

https://bsky.app/profile/drglam.bsky.social/post/3lxidnmsitk2e
[personal profile] cosmolinguist

I woke up in the early hours of this morning from an intense bad dream. But when I described it to D this morning as "my usual 2025 nightmare...my friends and I fighting in the streets," he made a perfectly understandable but inaccurate assumption: "what, like a fight club?"

No, I said, not fighting each other. Fighting nazis.

But being very silly about which of our friends we could best in physical fights ("well P's out, she has a broken leg" "...do we have to fight each other?"), while snuggling in bed on the one morning a week I don't have to get up as soon as I'm awake, did a great job of dispelling the visceral misery the dream left me with.

Saved from angst by silliness, this feels like the story of my life these days heh.

Goddammit, Verizon

Aug. 31st, 2025 09:38 am
canyonwalker: Y U No Listen? (Y U No Listen?)
[personal profile] canyonwalker
Our phones have been on the blink. Again. Because Verizon is incompetent. And lies about it. 🤬

Several days ago, when we were traveling in Canada, both our phones suddenly couldn't find the network. We tried various forms of "turn it off, turn it on again" (airplane mode, turn off/turn on cellular network, reboot phone, etc.) but nothing seemed to work for 30 minutes. We had flashbacks to when a similar thing happened in Panama last December that took a hours to fix with the help of Verizon tech support. Fortunately when it happened last Monday our phones starting working again after about 30 minutes.

Fuck Verizon. Incompetent liars.Then it happened again-again yesterday (Saturday). We were out getting lunch and shopping locally. First Hawk's phone went into "SOS" mode indicating it couldn't find any cellular network. She tried various forms of rebooting but none worked. Then about 2 hours later my phone did the same. I also tried various forms of restarting/rebooting. I even updated the software on my phone in case the glitch was related to older versions (though mine was less than 6 months old). It was all to no avail.

With Hawk's phone kaput for 3 hours and mine kaput for 1 hour, Hawk placed a call to Verizon tech support. Actually it wasn't a call, it was a chat session on their tech support portal. It went unanswered for 40 minutes.

At that point I started wondering, No response, not even a chatbot, on a chat service, for 40 minutes? Their tech support must be totally overwhelmed. That means likely this isn't just an "us" problem!

Hawk searched online and found lots of people complaining about the same problem.

Verizon, for its part, was responding that it was an "isolated" problem that affected "only a few people". The sheer number of people complaining online shot the shit out of that claim.

My phone came back online yesterday evening. Hawk's phone reconnected this morning. Is the problem solved? We're not sure. Verizon's continued downplaying of the apparently widespread outage gives us no confidence.

brithistorian: (Default)
[personal profile] brithistorian

I just finished reading Cherie Priest's It Was Her House First. It's a really good book and I highly recommend it. It's a haunted house book set in the Seattle area, centered around the ghost of a silent film era actress and her house, now badly in need of restoration. It's got an interesting twist that I've never seen before in a haunted house story, but I can't really say anything else without spoiling it. I hope you give it a shot, and I hope you enjoy it.

August 2025 in Review

Aug. 31st, 2025 09:31 am
james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


I didn't win any awards in August but I did review 22 more works. James Nicoll Reviews is now 34 reviews away from its 3000th review.

August 2025 in Review
canyonwalker: Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Travel! (planes trains and automobiles)
[personal profile] canyonwalker
Canada travelog #21
Back at the hotel · Tue, 26 Aug 2025. 10:30pm.

Today finished on a good note, hiking-wise. We hiked two two-fers, for a total of 4 waterfalls: Albion and Buttermilk Falls, then Sherman Falls and Tiffany Falls. All was not good, though, as at the start of the day we had a problem with dry balls. And it wasn't just Ball's Falls that were dry but several others we had on our list to visit, too. While driving around during the day we decided it'd make sense to cut our visit to Canada short as we'll run out of things we want to do well before Sunday.

Tonight, after dinner and a soak in the hot tub, while Hawk was snoozing (she hasn't slept well recently) I rebooked our flights and shortened our hotel stay and car rental. The plan now is we'll go home Friday night instead of Sunday night.

What's the Cost?

Hawk agreed to leaving early provided the cost of rebooking plans wasn't significant. Cost was a major factor for me, too. If going home early is just a cost sink, we could figure out something to do in Ontario. The numbers work out such that, at worst, it's a wash, dollar-wise— but we still get two days of time back. And, best case, we save a few hundred bucks. Here's the math on the costs:

  • Departing hotel 2 days earlier: $327 savings

  • Returning rental car 2 days earlier: $104 savings

  • Figuring the cost of rebooking flights is a bit tougher as I bought one on cash and one on points. Mine, paid with cash, cost $260 more than my original flight. Hawk's flight I got for 15,000 points, with a travel credit of $271 net she can use within the next 11 months.

  • If Hawk can manage to use that credit before it expires, it's a great exchange for the 15,000 points we paid. $271 ÷ 15,000 = 1.8 cents per point (cpp), much better than the average value of 1.1cpp I value UA miles at.

Curiously, the numbers work out to a wash if Hawk's travel credit expires unused 11 months from now. If she can use it, then $271 is what we'll have saved by going home 2 days early.

james_davis_nicoll: (Default)
[personal profile] james_davis_nicoll


Marooned on a backwater planet, a down-on-his-luck actor sets out to transform his new home. Will he survive success?

Always the Black Knight by Lee Hoffman
rionaleonhart: revolutionary girl utena: utena has fallen asleep on her schoolwork. (sort of exhausted really)
[personal profile] rionaleonhart
I recently posted this meme to my Tumblr:

Ask me whether I’ve written a thing (ship, trope, dynamic, category of fandom, etc.) and if I’ve written it, I’ll link you. If I haven’t written it, I’ll tell you how I would write it if I did.

(The meme is called 'fic author Never Have I Ever', although obviously you can ask whether I've written something even if you've written it yourself!)

Here are the resulting questions, and my responses!


[personal profile] keltena: For Never Have I Ever – 2nd person?

Ooh, good question! I’ve only written second person a couple of times.

Caged (Deltarune, 2018) was my first Deltarune fic, written when only the first chapter of the game had been released. The narration of Deltarune is written in second person, so I felt it made sense to use second person for Kris’s perspective!

I can’t remember my exact reasoning for using second person in Astray (Life Is Strange 2, 2019), but I think I can make a good guess! Daniel Diaz, at the age of nine, is the youngest character I’ve ever written from the perspective of, and I was concerned about getting the right narrative voice for him. Writing in second person let me remove the narrative voice from Daniel slightly, so I didn’t have to worry so much about making sure it felt authentically nine years old. I did still try to capture some element of Daniel’s voice, though!


[personal profile] doreyg: Epistolary for the Never Have I Ever meme?

Note from the future: I actually misunderstood what 'epistolary' meant when I answered this! For some reason I’d got it into my head that epistolary fiction had to involve an exchange of messages (letters, emails, notes, telegrams etc.); I hadn’t realised it was just telling a story through documents of any sort. So it turns out that the Visitorverse chapter I mention below does, in fact, count as epistolary fiction!

Oh, I’ve actually never tried writing epistolary fiction! The closest I’ve got is this chapter from the Visitorverse (Assassin’s Creed, 2015), told in the form of in-universe documents: an email and three interview transcripts.

I’ve read some very cool epistolary fanfiction, but I think I’d struggle to write it myself. People have such different speaking and writing voices, and most canons don’t provide a lot of in-universe written material, so I rarely get the opportunity to familiarise myself with the characters’ writing styles!


[personal profile] runicmagitek: for the Never Have I Ever ask: arranged marriage fic?

This one I’ve really never written at all! Possibly because most of my ships don’t really lend themselves to being married. I don’t think I’ve ever written about characters being married if they’re not married in canon, come to think of it. (Well, there’s Aveline/Shay in the Visitorverse, but one of my cowriters had previously established them as married within our shared universe, so they were married in... fic canon?)

If I did write arranged marriage fanfiction... hmm. I think this trope could be fun in Death Note, actually. Light and L get an arranged marriage to each other; they ignore each other completely because they’re busy murdering and trying to catch Kira, respectively; they slowly realise that the person they’re married to might be their enemy.


[personal profile] marmolita: have you ever written sex pollen?

Sort of! I haven’t written literal sex pollen, but I have written characters having (fade-to-black) sex as a result of some sort of mind-altering influence.

In canon, just before transforming, the werewolves in The Quarry seem to get a little giddy, having their moods and urges amplified. It seemed like a good excuse to write a fic in which lycanthropy essentially functioned as sex pollen: Burning (The Quarry, 2023, Laura/Travis, non-explicit mutual dubcon).


[tumblr.com profile] goforthequill: Have you ever written a fic about culture shock?

Oh, interesting question! I think Overwritten (Severance, 2024) might qualify? Mark reintegrates, meaning that the half of him who’s spent his entire life in an office suddenly has to cope with being in the outside world, and he doesn’t really know how to handle it.


I really enjoyed doing this, so, if you're curious about whether I've ever written something in particular, feel free to ask in the comments!

August 2025

S M T W T F S
     12
3 456789
10 1112 13141516
17181920212223
24 25 2627282930
31      

Most Popular Tags