ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
This is an advance announcement for the Tuesday, September 2, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. This time the theme will be "communication styles." I'll be soliciting ideas for journalists, writers, radio hosts, counselors, linguists, leaders, public speakers, explorers, traders, diplomats, negotiators and mediators, partners, housemates, siblings, parents, teachers, clergy, superheroes, supervillains, teammates, alien or fantasy species, failure analysts, ethicists, activists, rebels, other people who deal in communication, writing, speaking, translating, parenting, teaching, adventuring, negotiating, mediating, leaving your comfort zone, discovering things, giving instructions, troubleshooting, improvising, adapting, cleaning up messes, cooperating, bartering, taking over in an emergency, saving the day, discovering yourself, studying others, testing boundaries, coming of age, learning what you can (and can't) do, sharing, preparing for the worst, expecting the unexpected, fixing what's broke, upsetting the status quo, changing the world, accomplishing the impossible, recovering from setbacks, returning home, newspaper offices, writer nooks, radio stations, counseling centers, trading posts, classrooms, schools, churches, sharehouses, campfires, coffeehouses, bookstores, supervillain lairs, makerspaces, nonhuman accommodations and adaptations, farmer's markets, starships, alien planets, magical lands, foreign dimensions, other places where communication happens, momentious conversations, mysterious manuscripts, confusing transmissions, negotiations, lectures, romantic complications, sudden surprises, travel mishaps, the buck stops here, trial and error, intercultural entanglements, asking for help and getting it, enemies to friends/lovers, interdimensional travel, Get a Life Program, lab conditions are not field conditions, superpower manifestation, the end of where your framework actually applies, ethics, innovation, problems that can't be solved by hitting, teamwork, found family, complementary strengths and weaknesses, personal growth, and poetic forms in particular.

Among my more relevant series for the main theme:

An Army of One is developing its own neurovariant culture with unique communication quirks.

The Bear Tunnels introduces modern principles to people in the past, including literacy.

The Blueshift Troupers travel to different planets solving problems.

A Conflagration of Dragons has the Six Races (plus the dragons) who all have different cultures, making it challenging for refugees to communicate with each other.

The Daughters of the Apocalypse has people trying to find enough resources to survive, with a distinct split between Before and After dialects.

Eloquent Souls presents a setting where soulmarks are common, leading to many odd expressions as people try to make their Words distinctive.

Frankenstein's Family features two scientists running a valley in historic Romania, along with a pack of werewolves, a couple of vampires, and a mummy.

Hart's Farm is a free love community with lots of interesting relationships and ways to communicate.

Monster House is suburban fantasy with a diverse household.

Not Quite Kansas includes an awkard trio of a college student, a former cop, and their demon who often encounter challenges with communication.

One God's Story of Mid-Life Crisis follows Shaeth as he works on becoming the God of Drunks, with a surprising amount of heartfelt conversations.

Path of the Paladins involves a lot of communication between humans but also deities.

Peculiar Obligations features Quakers and pirates trying to get along.

Polychrome Heroics has ordinary humans, supernaries, blue-plate specials, superheroes, supervillains, primal and animal soups all trying to get along and figure out how to make a functional society.

Quixotic Ideas has a more positive world with integrated magic, where people usually manage to solve problems with communication rather than violence.

Schrodinger's Heroes is about saving the world from alternate dimensions. The group is very diverse in background and communication styles.

Or you can ask for something new.

Linkbacks will reveal a verse of any open linkback poem.

If you're interested, mark the date on your calendar, and please hold actual prompts until the "Poetry Fishbowl Open" post next week. (If you're not available that day, or you live in a time zone that makes it hard to reach me, you can leave advance prompts. I am now.) Meanwhile, if you want to help with promotion, please feel free to link back here or repost this on your blog.

New to the fishbowl? Read all about it! )

Music Monday

Aug. 25th, 2025 10:04 pm
muccamukk: Orville Peck in a red Nudie suit, singing and playing guitar, while a pink and white musical score swirl behind him. (Music: Orville Peck)
[personal profile] muccamukk

Obsessed with the guitar here, for real.
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

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

Book review: The West Passage

Aug. 25th, 2025 05:44 pm
rocky41_7: (Default)
[personal profile] rocky41_7 posting in [community profile] booknook

Title: The West Passage
Author: Jared Pachacek
Genre: Fantasy

Today I finished The West Passage by Jared Pachacek. This is a fantasy novel about a massive palace that encompasses the entirety of the state where the protagonists live and is ruled over by the godlike and somewhat tyrannical Ladies. The ancient Beast, the enemy of the Ladies, is threatening to rise again, as it has done in the past, which leaves our protagonists, Pell and Kew, youths of the Grey Tower, to try to raise the alarm.

I’m usually a fan of stories that throw you right into things, but The West Passage did leave me turned around for a while. I struggled to conceptualize what was being explained, and it’s definitely a book that asks a lot of your powers of visual imagination regarding the palace.

However, I loved the general creativity of this book. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy novel so firmly and intentionally grounded in the medieval. A lot of Western fantasy is generically medieval/pseudo-medieval (a la the Ren Faire), but The West Passage clearly took time to more securely set itself in this era. The technology is not always strictly medieval, as this is a fantasy world with all manner of fantastical beasts and tools, but the medieval setting is far more than window dressing here. To cap off the mood, the book is peppered with charming medieval-style illustrations at the start of each chapter and separating each “book” within the novel, showing our protagonists on their adventure.
 

Read more... )

 

enchantedsleeper: rainbow hello kitty (rainbow kitty)
[personal profile] enchantedsleeper posting in [community profile] smallweb
Hi, everyone! Though I can't really believe it's almost September, we're fast approaching the month in question and that means it's nearly time for... Small Web September! \o/

I'm pleased to say that I'm bringing back SWS for another year and I hope you'll join me in doing small web stuff for the month of September! If you aren't familiar with Small Web September or can't remember exactly how it works, that's okay: all the information you need will be in this post!

What is Small Web September?

Small Web September is a month-long event run right here on [community profile] smallweb, and it's designed to be a chill, friendly and accessible event for anyone to make progress on a small web project. This can be anything from a personal site/indie archive to a shrine or directory, or maybe a it's list of resources you've always wanted to put together, or a set of graphics for small web projects! Whatever you'd like to work on, as long as it's small web-related (by the helpful definition in our comm intro post), it belongs in the event and we'd love you to bring it to Small Web September.

How does the challenge work?

Read more... )

Monday Update 8-25-25

Aug. 25th, 2025 02:36 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Artwork of the wordsmith typing. (typing)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
These are some posts from the later part of last week in case you missed them:
Today's Smoothie
Stir-Fry
Food
Early Humans
Birdfeeding
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
Email Aliases
Philosophical Questions: Money
Heat
Early Humans
Books
Music
Birdfeeding
Follow Friday 8-22-25: Active Communities on Dreamwidth Summer 2025 A-I
Today's Adventures
Birdfeeding
Affordable Housing
Birdfeeding
Read "The Bottle Wall" by Smokingboot
Cuddle Party

Affordable Housing has 39 comments. Robotics has 47 comments. Food has 34 comments. "Philosophical Questions: Looks" has 50 comments.


[community profile] summerofthe69 is open! You can see the calendar here and the current themes are Tropefest 69 and a double theme of Fighting or Fucking AND Monsterfucker.


There are no open epics at present.


The weather is much cooler here.  :D  Seen at the birdfeeders this week: a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches, a male cardinal, and a hummingbird. Currently blooming: dandelions, pansies, violas, marigolds, petunias, red salvia, verbena, lantana, sweet alyssum, zinnias, snapdragons, blue lobelia, perennial pinks, oxalis, moss rose, yarrow, anise hyssop, firecracker plant, tomatoes, tomatillos, Asiatic lilies, cucumber, yellow squash, zucchini, morning glory, purple echinacea, black-eyed Susan, yellow coneflower, chicory, Queen Anne's lace, sunflowers, cup plant, gladioli, firewheel, orange butterfly weed, cypress vine. Tomatillo and pepper have green fruit. Tomatoes, ball carrots, and groundcherries are ripe.

Birdfeeding

Aug. 25th, 2025 02:15 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith
Today is cloudy and warm.

I fed the birds.  I've seen a mixed flock of sparrows and house finches.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- We did some work along the south side of the house.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- I put out water for the birds.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- I did a bit of work around the patio.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- I did more work around the patio.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- I watered the new picnic table and the septic garden.

I picked 4 red cherry tomatoes.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- I watered the old picnic table and the house yard plants.

EDIT 8/25/25 -- We did more work along the south side of the house.

I watered the telephone pole garden and a few of the savanna seedlings.

Cicadas and crickets are singing.  The first sliver of moon is visible.

As it is getting dark, I am done for the night. 

hex {he/him}

over 25yo. mostly into fandom in a meta way, nowadays, but i also like SFFH books & tv. sometimes (very rarely) I write fic. currently into digital minimalism and looking to be less on social media and more on here or on the indie web.

tags