fic_in_a_box_mod: (Default)
[personal profile] fic_in_a_box_mod posting in [community profile] ficinabox

We've finished request checks and sent a ton of emails!

If your username starts with A, B, C, D, E, F, I, J, K, L, M, N, P, R, S, T, V, W, or Y you need to check your email.

...yes, that's most of the alphabet. We sent a lot of emails about a lot of problems. Some of these emails concern things that will make us remove things from your requests or even delete your sign up altogether if we don't recieve a reply. We don't want to do this! Please email us back! You all have until 10:00PM EDT on September 4th to reply. We suggest checking your spam folder just in case.

Other notes/reminders:

  • While we contacted people about a lot of things, we did not generally contact participants about unenforceable DNWs unless we felt they were DNWs that were DNWing a requested tags or DNWs attempting to force creators into making something very specific. Some of you might still have DNWs that we would have a hard time enforcing because they're phrased too vaguely or something like that.
  • Please unlock/finish your letters asap.
  • If you're requesting swaps based on username rather than AO3 matching (like, if you've given us a list of usernames to swap with) make time after assignments come out but before swaps end to double-check that everyone you're requesting is still requesting the fandoms/relationships/mediums that you think they are.
yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
As we all start planning our nominations and requests, mods have been reviewing our rules around the number of fandoms that can be nominated and requested.

Traditionally, Yuletide has allowed participants to nominate a maximum of 3 fandoms to the tagset, with up to 4 characters each. We increased that to 4 fandoms in 2023 and got positive feedback about that change.

During signups, participants have been required to request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 6 fandoms if they choose. They must offer a minimum of 4 fandoms.

We've needed to limit the tagset size due to a combination of AO3 technical limitations as well as the logistical effort to confirm each fandom is eligible while avoiding duplicate fandoms. The good news is that we’ve found AO3’s tagset interface loads the moderation tools a bit faster lately. We've also developed more scalable processes and a group of wonderful, experienced volunteers to help with that checking. We think we can handle more nominations this year, but we won’t know until we try!

Change to nominations:


For 2025 only, we are going to increase the number of tagset nominations from 4 fandoms to 5 fandoms per person. The maximum number of characters will remain at 4 per fandom.

We’ll see how this goes, and whether the additional workload seems manageable to us, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

Change to requests:


For 2025 only, we are also going to increase the maximum number of fandom requests from 6 to 8. The minimum of 3 will not change. This means you must request at least 3 fandoms, and up to 8 fandoms if you choose.

Everything else remains the same: for each fandom, you will still be able to request up to a maximum of 4 characters. You will still be required to offer at least 4 fandoms with a minimum of 2 characters each.

Again, we will evaluate how it goes, and how this affects our workload, before deciding whether to keep the increased limit in 2026.

We hope this opens up some exciting possibilities for you in the 2025 round! Please stay tuned for our usual eligibility and evidence posts.

September check-in poll

Sep. 2nd, 2025 04:26 pm
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
There were five posts in the community in August:

On August 6, [profile] hermionesvioln posted about a ballot measure to restore voting rights for people in prison: Massachusetts Universal Voting Restoration: https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314335.html

August 7, I posted about calling RFK Jr about covid vaccine access:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314506.html

August 13, [personal profile] fabrisse asked people to contact our senators and congressmembers about the presence of the National Guard in Washington, DC:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/314678.html

August 27, [personal profile] watersword posted about a bill to make wage theft a federal felony:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/315039.html

On August 30th, I posted about covid vaccine access at pharmacies, which is partly a state-level issue:
https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/315293.html

Thanks to everyone who posted.

Here's a poll to tell us what you've been doing:

Poll #33566 August check-in
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13


In the past month, I

View Answers

called one or both of my senators
4 (30.8%)

called my member of Congress
5 (38.5%)

called my governor
4 (30.8%)

called my mayor, state representative, or other local official
4 (30.8%)

did get-out-the-vote-work, such as text banking or post carding
1 (7.7%)

voted
0 (0.0%)

sent a postcard/email/letter/fax to a government official or agency
6 (46.2%)

went to a protest
2 (15.4%)

attended an in-person activist group
1 (7.7%)

went to a town hall
1 (7.7%)

participated in phone or online training
1 (7.7%)

participated in community mutual aid
2 (15.4%)

donated money to a cause
8 (61.5%)

worked for a campaign
1 (7.7%)

did textbanking or phonebanking
0 (0.0%)

took care pf myself
7 (53.8%)

not a US citizen, but worked in solidarity in my community
1 (7.7%)

committed to action in the coming month
2 (15.4%)

did something else (tell us about it in comments)
1 (7.7%)



As always, everyone is free to make posts about any issues and actions they think the comm should know about. You can also drop some information into a comment to our sticky post if you'd like the mods to do it.

If you're looking for information on anything else, you can use our tags to check for any ongoing actions or resources relevant to the issues you care about. I (#redbird) try to keep the tag list up-to-date. If you need a tag added, you can DM me.
scintilla10: close-up of the Greek statue Victoire de Samothrace (Default)
[personal profile] scintilla10 posting in [community profile] recthething
Sharing some recs from [community profile] raremaleslashex and [community profile] caseficexchange (all authors still anonymous).

Brilliant Minds, Josh/Oliver (fic)
Bunnicula series, ensemble (fic)
due South, Fraser & Ray K & Dief (fic)
D&D: Honor Among Thieves, Edgin/Xenk (fic)
Jaws movies, Brody/Hooper (fic)
Legends of Tomorrow, Zari 1.0/Ray (fic)
Original Work, gen (mini comic)
Star Trek DS9, Jake/Nog (art)

Over at my journal.
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1882100.html



0.

With all the eager discussion of the possibility of Trump dying in office, I am in the delicate and unfortunate position of not actually being in favor of it.

Don't get me wrong. I, too, would enjoy to seeing something very bad happen to Trump. What I'd best like is him getting his just deserts – ideally being arrested, indicted, tried, found guilty, sentenced, having appealed, the appeal failing, appealing again, having that appeal fail, petitioning the POTUS for clemency and it not being granted, him being duly executed by the state as the traitor to the Republic and the Constitution he was proven to be. I'm not generally a big fan of capital punishment, but I am in fact willing to make exceptions; he seems to think he's an exception to a lot of things, and here I would agree with him.

But that's not going to happen, not in this time-line, and it's probably for the best that it doesn't.

Perhaps he will simply keel over dead, and I confess I will take at least a little bitter satisfaction in it.

And it's certainly not that I don't wish us all to be spared even another moment of this Trump presidency. Of course I do.

Alas, as much as I hate to crush the pleasant fantasy of us being redeemed by the deus ex machina of artheriosclerosis finally doing its job and carrying off our oppressor: Vance is worse. Much, much worse.




1.

It's perhaps understandable that you would not realize this.... Read more [6,770 Words] )

This post brought to you by the 219 readers who funded my writing it – thank you all so much! You can see who they are at my Patreon page. If you're not one of them, and would be willing to chip in so I can write more things like this, please do so there.

Please leave comments on the Comment Catcher comment, instead of the main body of the post – unless you are commenting to get a copy of the post sent to you in email through the notification system, then go ahead and comment on it directly. Thanks!
duskpeterson: The lowercased letters D and P, joined together (Default)
[personal profile] duskpeterson

BLOG FICTION

Tempestuous Tours (Crossing Worlds: A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands #2). A whirlwind tour of the sites in the Three Lands that are most steeped in history, culture, and the occasional pickpocket.

Latest installments:


EARLY ACCESS

A Visitor's Guide to the Three Lands: Novel and Side Stories (Crossing Worlds), which includes an expanded version of Deadly Introductions, is now available to my Patreon and Ream readers. The omnibus will go into general release next month.


NEWS

Early access previews at Patreon and Ream

I'm now providing one-month-early previews of my new e-book fiction through Patreon and Ream. I want to give a treat to readers who financially support me, while still making those stories quickly available to the rest of my readers. The early access model seems to be the best way to handle that.


General news and upcoming fiction )

Ways to offer me a tip, financial or nonfinancial )

Sign ups closed! Check your email!

Aug. 31st, 2025 11:00 pm
fic_in_a_box_mod: (Default)
[personal profile] fic_in_a_box_mod posting in [community profile] ficinabox

Signups have closed! There are two unmatchables! Please check your email if your AO3 name starts with G or M!

There are three people who are not open to extra gifts, if your name starts with E, G, or I please check your email!

We will be checking requests over the next day or two, so please keep an eye on your emails in case we find any issues we need to contact you about.

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.

neotoma: Bunny likes oatmeal cookies [foodie icon] (foodie-bunny)
[personal profile] neotoma
Two brown-eyed susan (Rudbeckia triloba) plants, 7 lbs of yellow peaches, donut peaches, mixed plums, magness pears, figs, hardy kiwi fruit, goat mozzarella, a baguette, dark chocolate walnut cookies, anaheim peppers, and roma tomatoes.

I got compliments on my shirt (Velvet Night button-down from MorningWitch) and my packbasket.
maevedarcy: (nabrielise)
[personal profile] maevedarcy posting in [community profile] recthething
I'm starting a Rarepair Recs series of posts (for ships with less than 250 complete works on AO3 using the otp:true filter) and I have shared two  rec lists on my journal with several works in various mediums.

Sense8
Relationship: Kala/Rajan/Wolfgang
Medium: gifsets, fanfic, podfic
Link here.

The Bastard Son and The Devil Himself
Relationship: Annalise/Gabriel/Nathan
Medium: gifsets, fanart, fanfic, fanvid
Link here.
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.

yuletidemods: A hippo lounges with laptop in hand, peering at the screen through a pair of pince-nez and smiling. A text bubble with a heart emerges from the screen. The hippo dangles a computer mouse from one toe. By Oro. (Default)
[personal profile] yuletidemods posting in [community profile] yuletide_admin
It’s time to start thinking about Yuletide! Here is our schedule for this year. Please note that the time of some deadlines has changed from last year. This may mean the date in UTC has also changed, or that the date relative to your own time zone may have changed.


2025 Schedule

Monday 15 to Friday 26 September: Nominations (end 9pm UTC 26 September)
Tuesday 14 to Friday 24 October: Sign-ups (end 9pm UTC 24 October)
Sunday 26 October: Assignments out (may be earlier)
Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

Please check back closer to the time if you want to be sure about deadlines! Deadlines in other timezones may be closer than they appear. If your region has a seasonal time shift during the above dates, your relationship to the deadline will also change. We recommend using timeanddate.com to check when each deadline is for you before it occurs.

New Year's Resolutions

We just sent an email to everyone who took part in Yuletide 2024 and who needs to complete a New Year's Resolution story before signing up again.

We use the email that's associated with your AO3 account. This is a good time to check what that email is! If you have any doubts about whether you received it, you're welcome to check your status with us by emailing yuletideadmin@gmail.com. Please include your AO3 name.

Who needs to complete a New Year's Resolution

If you took part in Yuletide and defaulted after the default deadline, or you submitted an incomplete story at the posting deadline, or you defaulted in Yuletide twice in a row, we generally ask you to complete a New Year’s Resolution story before you sign up again.

See the rules for defaulting on AO3

If you defaulted in a previous year, we will not have sent you a new reminder. We issued a general amnesty for ordinary defaults before the 2023 round, but if you were told you needed to complete a NYR due to turning in a placeholder story or a similar problem, you are probably still on our NYR list. Please check with us if you aren’t sure!

How to fulfil the requirement

Stories written for the purpose of re-qualifying for Yuletide must be posted to the New Year's Resolutions 2025 collection before you sign up to Yuletide 2025. They must be over 1,000 words, written for a specific person's past Yuletide prompt, and given to that person. You can write for any Yuletide 2024 prompt, or you can choose an older Yuletide prompt as long as the fandom in which you write is small enough to still qualify for Yuletide (that is, there are fewer than 1,000 fics on AO3 that are in English, complete, and over 1,000 words long).

Purpose of New Year's Resolutions

The NYR system exists for several reasons:
  • It's an incentive to encourage people either to default early, or, to push on through and post something

  • It works as a warm-up, or as practice, or as a way of proving to yourself you can finish a story to a prompt

  • It's a contribution to the project of getting more stories written in tiny fandoms

  • It's a way of ensuring that past prompts don't get entirely forgotten.


If you had to default in a past year, we are aware that this may have been for a carefully-considered reason or in a difficult time. Needing to complete a NYR does not mean we think you're terrible. Even members of the mod team have needed to write NYRs in the past. We hope you use it as an opportunity to write something you enjoy.

People are also welcome to write NYR stories just for fun! The collection will stay open for late fills until Yuletide 2025 sign-ups close (approx Oct 24).

2024 prompts



Prompts for Yuletide 2010-2024 can be found through the relevant individual collections and the NYR collections (see the Yuletide parent collection).

Contact Mods | Participant DW | Participant LJ | Pinch Hits | Discord


Please either comment logged-in or sign a name. Unsigned anonymous comments will be left screened.

Covid vaccine access at pharmacies

Aug. 30th, 2025 10:34 am
redbird: closeup of me drinking tea, in a friend's kitchen (Default)
[personal profile] redbird posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew
Because RFK Jr. is out to get us, CVS (and possibly other pharmacies) isn’t shipping the updated covid vaccine in 16 states. https://www.idse.net/CDC-News/Article/08-25/CVS-stops-COVID-shots/78068

In Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Nevada, state law says pharmacists can’t give vaccines that aren’t CDC-approved. In another 13 states, they can, but it requires a prescription.

These are state laws, so call your state respresentatives.

Here’s a script, and the Massachusetts phone numbers:
Read more... )

This is in addition to calling your doctor’s office (if you have one) to ask for the vaccine.

This one will be [curr ev]

Aug. 30th, 2025 04:20 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Current rumors engulfing Bluesky have me recalling an old Communist-era Russian joke:

Every day, a man walks to a news stand and pays for a copy of Pravda, unfolds it, looks at the front page, and throws it in the trash. Every day he does this, for months, until finally the news seller asks the man, "So what is it you are looking for on the front page every day?"

"I'm checking for an obituary."

"Comrade, the obituaries aren't on the front page."

"Oh, this one will be."

48 Hours Until Signups Close!

Aug. 29th, 2025 09:53 pm
fic_in_a_box_mod: (Default)
[personal profile] fic_in_a_box_mod posting in [community profile] ficinabox

48 Hours Until Signups Close!

Time to get those sign ups in!

Signup Closing Reminder

Signups will be closing on August 31st at 10PM EDT (Countdown) ! You have until then to finish signing up or any edits to your signup!

If you are someone who would like to create for a non-fanfic medium, check out the instructions on the signup post (link) for how to offer mediums! You have until August 31st at 10PM EDT to send in any of those offers.

After signups close we will be spending several days on matching and on checking the signups to make sure their are no issues. Please check the signups instructions (link) to review some unique to FIAB requirements such as DNW labels or minimum request details, this will help us get through checking requests faster!

Some general reminders:

  • All of the Do Not Match requests sent in have now been processed and replied to. If you sent one and we haven't replied, something has gone wrong! Please email again or contact us via the screened contact post on Dreamwidth.
  • All of the medium matching requests for people who aren't making fic sent in have now been processed and replied to. If you sent one and we haven't replied, something has gone wrong! Please email again or contact us via the screened contact post on Dreamwidth.
  • We did some early request checking to find problems before sign ups close, while people can still edit their own sign ups. These emails went to roughly 1/4th of the people signed up. Please check the email associated with your AO3 account! Some of you will have tags or even whole requests deleted if you don't follow our email instructions. We've now stopped pre-checks and further sign ups will just get the usual post-sign up close emails from us if there are problems.
  • Please keep checking the email associated with your AO3 account after signups close. Every year we have a few people with sign up problems that mean we have to delete them from the exchange, which we don't want to do. Emails will probably go out 24-48 hours after sign ups close, but might go out earlier to later. We would suggest you check your email at least once a day until initial assignments come out.

Late Nominations

If something you want to request isn't in the tagset, you can still nominate it over on the late nominations post! Late nominations will close 24 hours before signups close on August 30th at 10pm EDT.

We're very strict with formatting for late nominations, so make sure you check the guidelines on that post and maybe check some of the other nominations that were requested before posting.

Swaps

Swaps are currently open (check out the swaps post for more information on what they are and how to request them!) and will remain open until September 7th. You will receive your assignment at least 24 hours before swaps close.

Community Recs Post!

Aug. 28th, 2025 09:56 am
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv posting in [community profile] recthething
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fancrafts/fics/podfics/fanvids/fanart/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.
watersword: Scales on a blue background and the word "Justice" (Stock: justice)
[personal profile] watersword posting in [community profile] thisfinecrew

The Don’t Stand for Taking Employed Americans’ Livings (Don’t STEAL) Act is being reintroduced to Congress; it would make wage theft a felony nationwide.

Wage theft costs American workers more than $50 billion annually. That is more than the value of all robberies, burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts combined.

Contact your representative and tell them to co-sponsor and commit to voting yes on this.

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.

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[personal profile] duskpeterson

Much more prominent than the sling is a statue of the Living Dead that stands near the altar. Carved and painted in the northern style, the slave stands naked except for an iron mask in his hand, representing the moment upon which he receives his freedom. His face is scarred from wearing the mask for so long, but in his eyes lie hope.

Although the statue is intended to represent all of the Living Dead, both men and women, it is based on the likeness of one of the last men to be freed from slavery before the Emorian occupation: Kester son of Hoare, who died in the attack upon Council Hill by the Emorians. Although free at the time of his death, he was present at the palace on the day of the attack because he had voluntarily chosen to return to his place of slavery, in order to help other slaves survive their misery. The statue was commissioned and paid for by Kester's son, the present High Lord of Koretia.


[Translator's note: Kester's story forms part of Death Mask.]

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[personal profile] justmarriedmod posting in [community profile] yuletide
[community profile] justmarriedexchange is a marriage-themed multifandom exchange for marriage tropes of all kinds: convenient, accidental, undercover, arranged, forced, and so on. The requirements are 1500 words for fic, clean lineart on unlined paper for art, and a complete recording of 1500 words or 10 minutes for podfic.

We have some post-deadline pinch hits, currently due August 29th 11:59PM UTC (countdown), or negotiable.

PH 48 - Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), Hazbin Hotel (Cartoon), 黄金の太陽 | Golden Sun Series, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)

PH 49 - Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses, 鸣潮 | Wuthering Waves (Video Game), Limbus Company (Video Game)

If you might be interested in one of these pinch hits, you can find more details or claim the pinch hit at the post here. Thank you very much!

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