Sidra

I really appreciate when authors of longer fics occasionally put a note in the author's notes at the end of a chapter saying it's a good break point if you're binge-reading. Because yes, sometimes I do find it hard to stop, and it helps to have the author say that the next few chapters are intense and flow closely and you might prefer to pause before them rather than in the middle of them.

I start my new job tomorrow! My brain is a hive of bees.

I've been out of work since I was laid off in July 2024. It would have been really inconvenient to be working for a lot of that time, as I was helping my brother see our mother through her decline and death from dementia and also having some serious health issues of my own. (And Mom left me some money, which allowed me to say "I'm too stressed to job-hunt" and then not job-hunt, a rare luxury that I'm very grateful for.)

But I have to admit I've also been bored and restless and lonely. It will be nice to have co-workers, and tasks, and a paycheck again.

On the other hand, it's been thirteen months since I consistently had to be any place in particular in the morning. And the cat is going to be sad.

I've been knitting while watching "Frost", a police procedural from the '90s-00's, and it has been interesting to see how things develop along the way. Improving social attitudes as well as improving visuals! And it has been fun to spot the stars along the way. My favourites have been Joanne Froggett (Downton), Inspector Barnaby from Midsommer Murders (Neil Dudgeon, looking unexpectedly tasty) and Anton Lesser, who about twenty years ago looked a lot younger than I thought he would. From other roles I've seen him in (Endeavour, Andor) I probably thought he was born old.

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I have a running list of song lyrics to use as headers for my posts (thanks, dine, for the idea) and my eye skipped a bit as I was checking through, to give me

diet coke and a vengeful god

Anyone care to identify the two songs that comprise that line?

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

Thanks to The Happy Newspaper for the tip.

Per the dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

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.