vvalkyri: (Default)
[personal profile] vvalkyri
or maybe not i dunno.

I'm down on a long penninsula south of virginia beach right now, with Joe and Bernadette and there's been a bit of an object lesson in "sleeps 2 adults and 3 kids" and it's somewhat tempting to sleep in the living room/kitchen instead of my bedroom in that I absolutely do not recommend these mattresses even stacked, and it's cold tonight so at least the lack of a/c is less of a problem.

today we went to great dismal swamp. the earlier part of this was about 1.5 hours of walking out and back on a gravel road to a trailhead before deciding to go to somewhere else in the car. At that point I was kinda wishing that I had gone to acro. But the rest of the time, the time on the boardwalks was cool. I hadn't seen cypress roots before. Freaky. And the lake. And the swamp near it.

Yesterday I stayed with a couple acro people paddleboarding out to some concrete battleships that are used as breakwater (a bit sad my waterproof camera didn't get better pics), and got some [abrasive] acro in while J and B got really sweaty in their hikes.

Day before, 22k steps including a whole lot of beach.

Sadly it'll be another rather cool day tomorrow. Probably will try to get to the beach at least tho. This morning I was simply way too exhausted and went back to sleep after breakfast.

Back in DC there were 10s of thousands at the We Are All DC march and that was good. Come the 19th there's the We Are America march, where folk started today from Philly.

I've been looking at socials some. And everythign is argh. Turnberry said something about how I'm doing the good fight and I'm like "I'm mostly useless and if it gets to that I'll just die." Conversely he got AR14 training back in 2013.

I'm really not enjoying looking at White House and State Department socials and thinking "It's like Idiocracy but make it malevolent."
dancefloorlandmine: (Gigs)
[personal profile] dancefloorlandmine
With my weekend plans having changed with about a week's notice, I was reminded (by Jim Bob on the album playthrough on Bandcamp) that there were still a few tickets left for the second album launch on the Saturday. Second album? Yep. Jim was releasing two albums at the same time 'Stick' and 'Automatic'. This isn't a double album, but two completely separate albums. 'Stick' is the punkier number, while 'Automatic' is more of a full-band thing. 'Stick' was launched at the sweaty punkpit that is the Fighting Cocks in Kingston, while 'Automatic' was being launched at Rough Trade East off Brick Lane.

Up to London, some loitering outside chatting to other folks about shared histories of seeing 1990s bands, and then, by way of collecting my copy of the album on the way in, to the space that had been cleared of music racks in front of Rough Trade East's small stage - and then to continue the chatting for most of an hour until the clock ticked around and the band strolled onto the stage. Jim Bob was carrying an electric guitar, backed by a band of electric guitar, bass, drums, and two keyboard players.

And then they set off, playing through the album tracks in order. A couple of tracks featured a slight stumble, as this was the first time these tracks had all been run through live, but it was a good-humoured gig and audience. The songs on the album are the usual Jim Bob mix of whimsy, observation, and biting lyrics. Once the album play-through was completed, there was just enough time for an extra song, with the band managing to play through Carter's Lean On Me, I Won't Fall Over¹ and finish with seconds to spare before the curfew.

And then to join the queue to leave by way of Jim's signing table, with an extended comparing of notes regarding disappeared venues with the guy behind me in the queue, who turned out to have lived in Croydon in the late 80s and early 90s.



A full photo album is here.

¹ One of my favourite Carter songs.

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.

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.

August summary

Aug. 31st, 2025 11:01 am
jack: (Default)
[personal profile] jack
> Social

Ely peacock's tearoom. Buying physical books! K birthday and 20,000 leagues under the sea.

Poly Meet. Main munch, DS munch.

Dinner with Rachel's family.

Capybaras and As You Like It with Tim, Pearl, and Tim's parents.

Run DnD (Lovely people. Second and fourth wednesdays, now changing to second and penultimate wednesdays).

Colin and Kirsten wedding blessing in Synagogue, and Ceilidh.

Mathsjam

Coton Manor Garden with Mum and Rachel to see FLAMINGOS!

Kerry and Simone BBQ.

Hosted grantchester meadows picnic. About 12 lovely people. A little swimming. Next time, clear directions to location, somewhere with shade, somewhere with less deep mud on river bottom.

Jamaican vege dinner at metamours'. So Clover, Mao.

> Creative Hobbies

Updates to open source running app Fitocracy. For my use an in PR. Add pace as well as speed. Add average speed current interval.

DnD planning. Experimenting with a scenario across a few sessions for less prep.

Musing on Space Opera RPG. Musing on Vampires Ball and coffee shop LARPs.

Made butterscotch brownies.

> Exercise

Managed several consecutive runs without much breathing difficulties. Feel like I'm getting a proper workout in my legs and body again.

2x jog to parkrun and back (not early enough to actually do parkrun). 1-2x lido.

> Countryside

Walking with Claudia

Pootled in river by Hauxton nature reserve

> Misc

Sharpen knife.

Dealt with roof patching people.

Watching fantastic four first steps. Reading many web serials, physical books. Playing Slay the Spire and Starvaders.
Solving LOK puzzle book with Rachel.

Struggle with WFH. Maybe need a break before trying again.

I keep meaning to be here

Aug. 30th, 2025 08:11 am
vvalkyri: (Default)
[personal profile] vvalkyri
Just got home from a truly excellent trip to the San Francisco area, where I stayed with [personal profile] whitebird and his winery friends and [personal profile] ciphergoth and Carlos and my cousin and his fiance, and managed to meet up also with Lindsey and Rob many years ago DC Acro (getting them to their first acro jam in San Fran after they moved there 2 years ago) and [profile] megnaab and Dhananjay and Dierdre (all together in Menlo on the way to Ciphergoth) and a mask evangelist Fusion dancer named Alice, including vids of dancing by the water.

Even got to go all the way in the ocean, which was very much a surprise. And since one of the things I missed by being in San Francisco was a burn at a nudist camp, there was something completing in that ocean being a clothing optional beach.


I got to be out of here in half an hour or less to make it to lone bears kids barmitzvah, so there's more I want to write but I guess not just now.

What inspired me to actually show up on dreamwidth was there's all this talk of a certain Orange person maybe he's dead and I keep thinking I'm not sure that helps. Honestly I think it's going to be harder. Vince's still going to do everything out of project 2025 and probably listen just as much to Miller. Not being total chaos and making utterly WTF statements will normalize.


Showing up on dreamwidth meant I saw the Mississippi announcement and talk of Proton VPN as worthwhile. . . and in the comments learned of some other VPN that secretly screenshots everything you do:

https://www.koi.security/blog/spyvpn-the-vpn-that-secretly-captures-your-screen

I know what I did this August

Aug. 28th, 2025 12:10 am
lovingboth: (Default)
[personal profile] lovingboth

Once I got the agreement that I could try to see as many things as possible during the Edinburgh Fringe, I looked up what the record was. It turns out that someone saw 304 shows in 2014.

We'll come back to what I think of that later, but until then the official record was 169, done in 1994. Insert 'those are rookie numbers' meme from The Wolf of Wall Street: I knew I could do more than that.

But if I stuck to the PBH Free Fringe, not least because of how low my income is at the moment, how many are possible? A look at the 2023 'Wee Blue Book', and counting how many shows were in each hour, limiting that to no more than 23 - the PBH does three full weeks plus an additional weekend, so you can't see more than 23 shows in any hour slot - came up with 203.

This year, I managed to see 217 different shows. Read more... )

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