netpositive | Reading

I spent most of the summer not doing my usual morning ritual*, just...travel, and Pinewoods, and surgery, and everything else. With the start of the school year I've gotten back into it, and wow, I have missed reading y'all's journals so much, I'm sorry to have deprioritized it because dreamwidth really is the only social media that I spend an hour on and feel refreshed and connected afterwards.

I'm glad y'all are still out here writing (and if you're someone I follow who hasn't posted in a while, I'd love to see posts from you too!)

~Sor
MOOP!

*Morning Ritual, which has gone through many iterations since 1995, but is mostly fundamentally the same: Wake up, get a bowl of cereal, open the comics, read comics until you've read all of them or it's time to go to school.

Comics were newspaper from first grade until I went to college (one of my favourite things about The Comics Curmudgeon is that he and I cut our teeth on the same Baltimore Sun comics page), by which point the webcomics slowly shifted until they were a morning game. I've got about two dozen tabs I open each morning these days, all comics except for the last two, which are a personal forum for the pie shop folks to blog about their lives, and here. The good kinds of social media!

sorcyress

Tonight's adventure was going to a Jazz Emu concert with a bunch of my polycule!

The concert was at the Sonia, where I hadn't thought I'd ever been, but I looked up at one point to see the old sign for TT The Bear's Place and had my heart sing. The stage is a lot higher than it used to be, which was good for a concert where we were mostly sitting in chairs looking up to the stage.

He sang a bunch of new songs, interleaved with comedy Bits and other general nonsense. It was a lot of fun to go see a show for a guy who I kinda know of, but don't obsessively follow. Sometimes it's good to have a hundred people for whom you're the ninth favourite thing. I was delighted when he closed out with three of his already known and published songs --it was both fun to hear a live version of something at least two partners have separately made me watch, and REALLY fun to jam out to songs that I didn't know but the people around me were incredibly into. People watching is so good!

After, Tess-Todd-Phoebe-Austin went off to get ice cream, and me and Tuesday loitered for a bit. I purchased a cassette tape, mostly for the utter delight of purchasing a cassette at a kinda divey venue in the year that starts with a 20. This is 1980s shit, and I'm thrilled to be part of it!

We were rewarded by the man himself poking his nose out for the half dozen die-hards who had loitered. He was very clearly exhausted --and his accent is much easier to pin down when he's not Performing, so when he said "I'm exhausted from jet lag" I could make a much better guess about what that meant. But it was pleasing to get in the quick "you did awesome, it was a lot of fun!", and also nice to get that little peek behind the scenes.

It was a really delightful night, and a good reminder that actually there are some pretty awesome little concert spots tucked around my city, and I should find more of them and go to more shows just for the fuck of it. I mean, who has time and all, but live performances are a lot of fun, and I like having them in my life.

~Sor

MOOP!

PostScript: Okay, holy shit, was glancing at the wikipedia page and found out that before he was in full Jazz Emu mode, he wrote one of the best twitter threads of all time? It's rare to have such a Neil Cicierega moment that's not actually by NeilCic!

(the thread is the top song from every decade dating back to the 14000s BC. Grab your headphones, it's very stupid and funny)

[A Neil Cicierega moment is that moment when you are laughing at something funny on the internet, or reminiscing about something old, or being amused by a weird cool thing, and then you realize that it is yet another project by That One Guy]

sorcyress

Gosh I'm happy right now!

I am fucking _exhausted_, there were two days this week I had to get up at 5 so I could finish prep before work, I think I'm averaging four hours of sleep a night for the last week, my doctor would definitely not be thrilled if he knew how I was attempting to be in surgery "recovery", but gosh I'm happy right now!

I'm happy because school is humming nicely and four out of my five classes are gonna be pretty smooth and the fifth one at least is one of the ones that's cotaught so Maggie and I can tag in and out of the worst of it and commiserate after school.

I'm happy because some of the strategies we're trying this year are Actually Working, and yes yes, it is extremely early days, but like, group roles actually help the kids step up and work together and gives them better structure??? enough peer pressure and they all actually use the phone bag in the back of the room??? Amazing.

I'm happy because yesterday I got the most formal email in my life and I am _delighted_ because the entire essence was just "yo Teach', I wanna see if I'm ready to take Alg2 at the same time as Geometry, see you during your student hours to chat more?". Bless weird 14 year olds who are trying so hard to be Professional Adults.

I'm also happy (I am _ecstatic_) because today I got to watch a student struggle through a problem with her group, ask for help twice and both times get variations on "what have you tried so far, okay you're on the right track, keep going [and no actual help]" and then the third time tentatively showed me her answer and I was able to give her a fistbump for nailing it and she was *delighted* to have solved this problem she didn't think she could do.

I'm happy because my dance class last night spontaneously had four brand-new-never-done-any-dance beginners, all of whom came as a little cohort as friends, and they all seemed to do a lot of smiling and laughing and having fun, and three out of the four wrote their email addresses to maybe come back in the future? It was wild, it felt great to me, I hope it worked for my other dancers too.

I'm happy because today I managed to do all my copying for Monday after school *and* leave by 4pm, which meant I could go down to First Friday and hang at the pub with coworkers for a couple hours and get some real valuable social time. A science teacher I haven't seen in ages gave me a super bright "HI!" when I showed, and I had a marvelous talk about how great our union and new contract is with a pair of brand-new English teachers, and [one of] the art teacher[s] I have a crush on was just leaving when I arrived and was all like "oh dang :(" and then made a half move towards me and a very tentative "do you hug" and I was like, my friend, you have absolutely nailed the vibe, yes, I love hugs, this is great.

I'm happy because I got to walk home from that with my work-bestie and we had a great conversation, including mutual flailing about his super-intimidating and organized wife and my super-intimidating and organized metamours and how it's awesome to have these people in our life who love us but also aaaaah! I still don't think I have any interest in being full out as polyam at work, but I am _thrilled_ to have a few actual work _friends_ who I can be open to sometimes.

And I'm happy because while I have a ton of grading I should do this weekend, I don't have much, and I get to hang out with Austin and my roommates and rest and be mellow.

The world is a shithole, let's love each other and have fun. <3

~Sor

MOOP!

wcg

Happy Kalends of Septembris! Are you ready for the Ludi Romani?

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

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.

denise posting in

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.

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I know some of these people some of the time some.

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Like a hundred fifty people singing about DVD logos? That part was great!

:D

Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!

Code deploy happening shortly

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

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