Unsurprisingly, today I was very tired!

The fact that it was cold enough my ankle started bitching didn't help, either. :/

Anyway, A was good! :D Tiny exhibit was fun! Also I now have a massive roumb dragonite it's the best. (Mama is SUPER MAD, sigh.)

Um. Something something I keep drifting off trying to finish this post so uh I think I'll just. Go bed now. Yes.

So tomorrow I'mma meet A and we're gonna go poke a tiny art exhibition and etc.

So of course I'm still up at fucking almost 5am. I need to leave the house in about five hours!!! Omfg brain WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS. /o\

Anyway other than THAT... one of the chooks laid an egg again! :D They're clearly feeling much safer! This pleases me~!!!

I also cleaned out both the coop and the run and put in a bunch of straw for them in the run, so they should enjoy that. :3 :3 :3 Mama stayed out the back with me while I did that, just in case of foxes. Likelihood is pretty low, but, well. Makes me feel better if nothing else!

Nothing much other than that, though. Except I'm still fucking awake-! (I maybe played a LOT of minecraft this evening. In my defense I've been rearranging my storage and figured out a way to integrate botany pots into it and that is brain eating levels of fascinating because I am a super nerd, sigh.)

So today I finally got my shit together and did the stud finding thing, and I was at the point where I was trying to get the shelf up onto the top of the bookshelves just to check if the places I'd marked would work (ie, not in the middle of the shelf). Aaaaand... it was too heavy for me to manage something that long on my own, so I had to get Mama to help, and... well. ( Physics is hard. )

So that's super annoying and I'm not sure what to do about it.

Other than that... nothing too interesting. Did get those shinies in pokemon, which is good! Haven't fought the new boss yet, but hopefully will be pretty straightforward... And one of the new set of mass outbreaks I've already got the shinies for, so I only need to catch four shinies total this time! :D Also ONE OF THEM IS VULPIX, which is SO EXCITING eeeeee :D :D :D :D :D

Sooo made the stupid call, have to get info on their special form from ex-work, so who even KNOWS when that'll get back to me. :/ :/ :/ So annoying!

Other than that, nothing amazing today really. I am Officially Late with the pokemon event, too, gotta get those last two shinies before I download the new update whoops >>;;;; Gonna have to focus on that tomorrow, rather than minecraft!

Something something bed now, I feel like there was something else but I forget orz orz orz

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.

I woke up properly - in that I didn't immediately want to go back to sleep - at about 3pm today, heh. So I think I'm more or less better now? But that was a LOT of sleeping orz orz orz. And walking around the block with Mama was. Exhausting. Bleh. Still, at least it was over pretty quickly, honestly! Just annoying while it was happening.

REALLY did not do much else today, though. Played some Minecraft after tea, but that's about it, hahaha. Tomorrow is a weekday though so I'mma have to make another fucking phonecall uuuuuugh, I'm gonna be on hold for like an hour again I just know it. =_= Still, if I call when I wake up, they'll at least _answer the goddamn phone. Eventually.

Anyway still pretty early for me but I'm sleepy already so I'mma bed, yes. >: Sleeeeeeeep.

Yeah, today I have been sick. Got up and was up for like three hours! Watching the stream Azy was doing! Aaaand then I had to go to bed because I felt like crap and didn't quite throw up but I was close, you know?

Surfaced for long enough to have a drink in the middle of the afternoon, and then was out of it until dinnertime. Even now I've only been up another like. Four and a half hours, and it's really mostly been this long because I was waiting for my hair to dry properly before going back to bed. (Showering is good for you though so didn't object when Mama insisted.)

Anyway my bones hurt and I'm so tired so back to bed for me! Ugh, so annoying, ruining all my plans, fucking body...

To-Do list was partially successful!

I did the first two things on it, but when it came to the third... well. It was a 'do an art' type dotpoint, and I definitely tried, but also. Failed. Drawing is hard!

Didn't get to the last dotpoint (shinies), but will take the switch to bed with me and try there for a bit, I think.

Going to bed earlier than normal, because Azy is planning on streaming in the morning (my time, it's late afternoon over there). Hopefully I'll sleep! If I don't so much, well, at least I don't have anything I have to do tomorrow. Other than shower again, bleh, but I've got a family thing on Sunday I said I'd go to. Bleeeeh.

Didn't do a whole lot today, brain was pretty jiiiiii. Did help Mama move some furniture, though, so that was useful! And I showered!

Did manage to make myself find my to-do list notepad, so I've written down a to-do list for tomorrow! Hopefully that'll mean I actually do some stuff on it! >: >: >:

One of those things is going shopping with Mama, which we're doing in the morning, though, so I... need to go to bed... >>;;;;

Parents got home today! House is now louder, and also I am probably gonna get harassed into being awake during the day and not napping more, bleh. Not looking forward to that. But it's good they're home safe! :D

Nothing much other than that, mainly just me giving myself space to adjust. Also small housekeeping tasks, blah blah blah. Nothing too interesting.

Intended to go to bed a bit earlier than this but Oh Well...

Today there was a lot of moving things around, which was. Exhausting. But! It's done, so shit will hopefully not be flipped tomorrow, which was the plan!

Other than that... finally updated pokemon for the new set of shinies! Got 4/6 already, yay! And beat the raid boss pretty easily, too, which was nice. :3 Didn't even have to train anything up!

Um... I feel like there really should be more, but I've gone very jiiii so I'm just gonna. Go to bed now. Yes.

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.

Soooo totally bombed a phone interview thing today, so that sucked. Was one of those job agency ones so not much was likely to come of it anyway, but the way my brain went TOTALLY BLANK and I couldn't even remember basic-ass shit was uh. Not encouraging. Sigh. I fucking hate phone calls, though this shit happens to me in person as well. Bleh.

Still, at least I got a call and gave it a go, it's exp if nothing else. Maybe I won't freeze up so bad next time! >:

Other than that... bunch of cleaning/tidying, as planned! Finished watching Tonari no Youkai-san, which is an extremely cute mostly-slice-of-life anime. Not sure if I mentioned I was watching it here or not. Anyway, it's pretty clearly aimed at primary school aged kids, but it's super cute and the worldbuilding is fantastic. (The last episode did make my cry like a bitch because of course it did. Happy end though!!!) Definite rec there, particularly if you like worldbuilding!

( Home improvement project aftermath related grump. Damnit Sibling. )

But! I also made curry this evening! Pretty pleased with it, yesss. The chicken ribs are good, too! They have the whole rib bones in them, unlike with pork ribs where they're chopped up the other way, so they're pretty easy to eat. Might have had them before, in like, korean fried chicken or whatever? Not sure though, the rib bones are pretty distinctive and I don't THINK I have.

Other than that... nothing much! Will need to step up on the whole getting my shit together/tidied up things though I just realised there's only a couple of days before my parents are home now! At least I've kept up with the kitchen, despite my hatred of dishes...

I went shopping again! I did. Uh. More shopping than I expected to, even though I didn't get many things? Like. I bought stuff from five different shops that is so many. (For me. I know some people enjoy shopping, but I find it exhausting.) Most of it was food, but I also got a new hairbrush (badly needed, my current one is losing tines and is kinda bald in patches now), plus like. Toothbrushes and stuff.

Didn't actually make curry tonight ( I am sleepy so I rambled about food stuff for. A bit. )

Uhhh what else. Did some washing! And some tidying up of the stuff from the floor job, plus moving shit back into here. I really need to get back onto pokemon, there should be another set of shinies out, plus a raid. I'll at least put it on the charger tonight before I pass out, that's a start...

Speaking of I should definitely get ready for bed now ugh it's 4am brains why are you like this.

So I went down to the shops today, and I got rice! It's sushi rice, specifically! So tasty! I tend to buy Japanese rice, but my parents tend to buy basmati - which is also good! I like it a lot! But it means it's what we usually eat so when I'm the one getting rice I get something else for a change. And I DO really like Japanese-style rice varieties, so yeah. Happy me! :D

Did mean that I couldn't actually get a lot of other food, though. XD;; 5kg bag takes up most of my backpack! Add the milk (and they only had 3 liters, AGAIN, wtf), and yeah. Not a lot. Soooo I'll have to go back down again tomorrow and get meat and veg to go in curry! I remembered I had a packet of Golden Curry mix so I'mma make that! :D

Other than that, nothing major today. Reading, minecraft, you know. Standard me things.