All day on Wednesday, I thought it was Thursday, and all day yesterday, I thought it was today. But it was not! So I do have some Wednesday books posting to do, now on Friday!

What I've just finished
The Oleander Sword and The Lotus Empire by Tasha Suri, the second and third books in her Burning Kingdoms trilogy. Overall, I thought these two were much more engaging than the first book, and I wanted to know what happened next, but I wasn't blown away by them like I was by her Books of Ambha duology (which I highly recommend!).

Also I've read both Into the Riverlands and Mammoths at the Gate by Nghi Vo. I enjoy these novellas quite a bit and these two were wonderful. I especially liked the martial arts references in Riverlands and how Mammoths was about grief and stories, two of my favorite topics to read about!

What I'm reading now
The Brides of High Hill, the next Singing Hills Cycle novella by Nghi Vo. I've just started it but I'm enjoying it so far.

What I'm reading next
I am just happy to be reading at all so I cannot say! I thought the next Craft Wars book was out in September, but it looks like it's not until the end of October, so I guess we'll see!

Speaking of books, though, last night I watched the Netflix adaptation of The Thursday Murder Club and I enjoyed it - the casting is A++ for the most part (Helen Mirren is perfect as Elizabeth and Ben Kingsley is great as Ibrahim. And Pierce Brosnan remains ridiculously handsome.) - and I think 95% of the streamlining they did was fine, because there were a few two many twists and turns in the book, but spoiler for both book and movie ) I haven't read any of the other books in the series, though I'm sure I will eventually, but I hope it does well enough that they can make a few more movies with this set of actors.

Now I have to go take my strawberry summer cake out of the oven. I was invited to a cookout tomorrow at my sister's at the last moment, so I have to have a cake to bring!

*
oursin: Brush the wandering hedgehog dancing in his new coat (Brush the wandering hedgehog dancing)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 29th, 2025 04:45 pm)

Had the news today that I have been awarded a Non-Stipendiary Fellowship at [Esteemed Research Institution in My Discipline]! For next academic year at least. Yay me!!!

***

Dept of, gosh, some people have a very weird notion of Effix, wot: I can't link to this because it was all in screenshots on FB, but anyway -

Person posts in a romantasy forum that they reviewed book by A Well-Known Author asserting that it had been written by AI, on the grounds that it used a number of bog-standard cliche phrases that (we suspect) hurried and harried writers in a popular field in which you are expected to keep on churning out the product are wont to resort. (In fact I suspect that they crop up to a significant extent in your average romance novel and that many authors' fingers type them quite automatically.)

Well-Known Author intends to sue for libel.

Person who posted review, and claims to be an impoverished grad student (we ask ourselves in what possible field, seriously hoping not law, philosophy, or literature), is all wo wo wringing hands about this, and wonders if it is a plea in mitigation that they did not actually purchase work in question but obtained it 'by other means'.

I depose that if you are going to pirate a work and not pay the author, you are in no position to whinge that They Did Not Write It or indeed, complain at all. If you take a free book from a box that somebody has left on the wall outside their house for passersby to help themselves, you do not then go and knock on the door because somebody has scribbled on the pages and it is by no means a pristine copy.

nilchance: original artist terry moore; blonde staring at canvas with nude male and black handprint (fandom)
([personal profile] nilchance Aug. 29th, 2025 09:49 am)
it's the day for our Frostmaiden campaign, barring schedule disasters, so here's a song that reminds me of my paladin Skink:

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 29th, 2025 09:46 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] lilysea!

(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

Awwwwww.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Early setback:
Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.

***
In other news, I managed to assemble the UnderDesk Elliptical Thinggy and it works.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 28th, 2025 09:45 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] 88barbara_hambly88 and [personal profile] sollers!
hannah: (Stargate Atlantis - zaneetas)
([personal profile] hannah Aug. 27th, 2025 10:31 pm)
For no reason I'm capable of understanding, starting sometime yesterday, my iPhone and iPad stopped connecting to my home wifi. The network was there, the devices acknowledged it, and my desktop was always able to tap into it through the relevant connecting device. The desktop's too old to have inbuilt wifi capabilities, but the iPhone and iPad were new enough they've got it, except it wasn't in them. They kept saying the password was wrong. I checked on the wifi router provided by the phone and internet company and typed it in, several times, and neither device acknowledged it as correct. I tried the trick of having the devices forget about the network before trying to reconnect, and it didn't work.

Resetting the route managed it, somehow. I'd be better able to understand what happened if the desktop also didn't get it for a while, but it did, so I have to wonder where things got messed up. Because there was a problem that got fixed, and it wasn't a problem for everything.
So here's a question for you, especially if you do office-type work: when did people start sending pictures of things instead of actual documents in a work-related setting? And WHY???

I have had this happen repeatedly recently, and then instead of just going on with my work easily, I have to email back and ask for a version in a program that I can edit. (If I don't need to edit, I will sometimes just print it as a PDF so I can attach and send it to people, but that is still an extra step I have to take because someone else couldn't put their work in a work-appropriate format.)

Personally, I get not wanting to share a linked document - I do it but I kind of hate other people in my documents because of version control issues (...or maybe just control issues? 😬😬😬) - but anything is better than a useless JPEG pasted into the body of an email when what I ASKED FOR was a list of attendees for a meeting I may need to sort, or a purchase requisition that I will need to update.

As a related item, stop with the QR codes! Our HR department sends emails about training opportunities or other events and is like, "Use the QR code to register!" Like, how about no? And certainly not when it's an event to which we are inviting board members, some of whom are LITERALLY in their 90s and not tech-savvy. What is wrong with a nice LINK to a FORM on a regular WEBBED SITE?

I guess I am feeling very Abe Simpson yells at clouds today, but come on. These are not things that make work easier! (Well, maybe it's easier for the people who do this, but then they have to deal with my annoying follow up emails, so is it really easier for them???)

In other news, my younger nephew got a promotion that required him to move to California in a hurry, so he flew out last night. I will miss him! Who will I call now when I need a tall person to do things in my apartment??? (Just kidding! It's a great opportunity for him, and he is some kind of regional manager now with a region that includes Hawaii, so my sister and I are already like, "let us plan a trip to visit him IN HAWAII!" [note: I will likely never be able to afford a trip to Hawaii, but a girl can dream.])

*

What I read

Finished A World to Win, and decided not to go straight on to next.

Read Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art (Dance to the Music of Time #8) (1966), which is a very different angle on WW2 as Nick Jenkins is stuck in a backwater with Widmerpool. A particularly grim episode in its much quieter register.

Started Elaine Castillo, Moderation (2025) which started out fairly strongly, then hit a saggy point, and then I discovered I'd been a bit misled over its genre position, and anyway didn't feel much like continuing.

Picked off the shelf Susan Kelly, And Soon I'll Come to Kill You (Liz Connors #5) (1991), from the period when I was reading a lot more crime novels like this. It's not bad - at least Our Heroine has a plausible reason for getting mixed up in criminal matters, as a journalist specialising in crime reporting, but she has the almost obigatory for period/genre cop boyfriend. This one was probably a bit atypical of the series as a whole as it involved someone with a grudge against her (there are several suspects for Reasons to do with past reporting etc) stalking her with malign intent.

Andrea Long Chu, Females (2025), because I'd found Authority interesting and read something about this but while I am all for rediscovery of the out-there voices of the 'second wave', riffing off V Solanas was just a bit niche.

Laurie R King, Knave of Diamonds (Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes, #19) (2025) - Kobo deal at the weekend - seriously phoning it in - scraping the bottom of the barrel -

On the go

Val McDermid, A Darker Domain (Inspector Karen Pirie #2) (2008) for some reason Kobo were doing a serious promotional deal on the McDermid Pirie series at the weekend so I thought, why not?

Up next

New Slightly Foxed perhaps.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 27th, 2025 09:53 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] hazelk!
hannah: (Friday Night Lights - pickle_icons)
([personal profile] hannah Aug. 26th, 2025 09:48 pm)
Reminding myself I want what's on the objects more than I want the objects themselves, I'm in the process of ripping my Fringe complete series box set so I can get around to watching it. I did the same for Friday Night Lights already, and I'm trying to tell myself I shouldn't keep the sets around even if I fall in love with the shows. It was great I was able to snag them so affordably. And I don't need them.

If there were still in-person fandom conventions, I'd bring them to a swap table or offer them up for a raffle, but we don't have such things anymore - at least not anywhere it's practical for me to travel to right now. It's a shame, because that kind of swap table mentality is one of the best for getting rid of stuff. How it's going to be picked up and taken home, and you don't have to believe anything else.

Woman on social media claiming that "Cancer is trying to heal, not kill.... A cancerous tumor is basically a bag the human body creates to collect toxins that are contaminating the bloodstream." (Apparently this goes back to 2021? still in circulation because I spotted it in the wild today.)

Apart from anything else here, I'm trying to think how this actually works - okay, it collects the toxins, but she was also saying you shouldn't have operations or get involved with, you know, that nasty actual medicine? In particular that biopsies are Really Really Bad and cause the tumour to explode and spread toxins throughout the body. (This notion derives from one book by a struck-off doc relating to his theories about needle biopsies in the specific case of prostate cancer.)

But what is the mechanism once it's collected the toxins? does it just sit there? does it detach and float away? really one has questions. Does one want a bag of toxins just hanging about on one's body? (Maybe a wartcharmer might be called for?)

I was reminded of the theory, current for centuries, that there was 'good' pus which aided in the healing of wounds, so surgeons were all 'yay laudable pus'.

I wonder if anyone, ever, had the theory re TB, that the consumptive coughing up blood was getting rid of 'bad blood'*, jolly good, restored health is on the way....

*I'm sure I've previously mention my paternal grandmother who was reassuring about my copious and not infrequent nosebleeds in childhood and adolescence on the grounds that it was getting rid of 'the bad blood'. Yes, historian of medicine wishes I'd done an oral history interview about these lingering remnants of humoural theory.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
([personal profile] oursin Aug. 26th, 2025 09:52 am)
Happy birthday, [personal profile] hivesofactivity!
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 Aug. 25th, 2025 10:04 pm)

Obsessed with the guitar here, for real.

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.

.

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