Friday, August 29th, 2025 01:57 pm
Some of you will have noticed that my habit of nearly-daily updates stopped around Worldcon. You can probably guess why.

Meanwhile, Kuma Bear posted an update on their travels in Europe, as their trip heads into the final two weeks. Earlier today, I booked a hotel room for them in Vienna, thanks to all of the IHG points we accumulated between her travel and mine in July and August. Fingers crossed that the Garner Hotel in Vienna is as nice as the photos and reviews make it out to be.
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Friday, August 29th, 2025 09:12 pm
Bears has beens ridings lots ofs trains withs girls. Ins fews weeks wills haves tos stops withs trains as wells bes goings homes. Bears has beens havings goods times ons these nices trains
Friday, August 29th, 2025 08:56 am


Two sisters quest up a climate-change-and-blight ravaged coast and across the seas to find their missing sister.


Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei
Thursday, August 28th, 2025 02:38 pm
I just had a reassuringly boring dental visit. I called yesterday because I'd been having pain on and off for the previous three days, and they gave me an appointment for this morning.

I felt much better last night and basically OK this morning, but I still wanted the dentist to check in case there was a problem—intermittent symptoms can be hard to diagnose. The dentist looked inside my mouth, poked in a few places, and took two X-rays, finding nothing wrong. His best guess is that something was caught between my gum and bone, and I got it out by cleaning my teeth yesterday; I don’t know why the previous three days of brushing and flossing hadn’t done the job.

The dentist did see a little tenderness in the area that had been hurting, and wrote me a prescription for something to rinse with. Other than that, call if there are further problems, or come back in three months for my usual cleaning.

I am pleased with the outcome: it stopped hurting, and the dentist confirmed that there's nothing wrong, so I don’t need unpleasant and possibly expensive dental work.

The dentist said to hold the prescription rinse in my mouth for “a few seconds,” then rinse with water, and I only need to rinse that side of the month. The printed prescription label says 30 seconds and not to rinse for 30 minutes afterwards, which I assume are the standard instructions for this medication.
Thursday, August 28th, 2025 09:08 am


Recent supplements for the HOSTILE tabletop roleplaying game

Bundle of Holding: Hostile Hot Zones
Thursday, August 28th, 2025 08:58 am


First contact on the lightless surface of an alien moon.

Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
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Thursday, August 28th, 2025 12:37 pm
Many apologies, this offer launched last night but I was very busy and forgot it was happening


HOSTILE HOT ZONES (new)
       https://bundleofholding.com/presents/HostileHotZones




Eventually remembered this - various supplements for military and civilian adventures, with quite a lot of material included if you go for the full package. Not sure it's for me, but there might be stuff of interest if you're into the game and setting.

Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 08:43 am
Another collection of comments to other people’s journals:

[personal profile] elise was asking about "ways to learn to wanna when you're gonna hafta"

I said:

Sometimes I get things done by reminding myself that I don't have to want to do them, as long as they get done. Meaning that I'm not going to enjoy the task, but maybe I want to have done it, or maybe I'm leaning on bits of habit. That mostly works for small things: it's easier to think "don't have to like it, as long as it gets done" about relatively short things, like brushing my teeth, than about anything longer or more complicated.

Typing this, I realize that this is something I mostly do/need to do late in the day. Even with meds, I run out of executive function well before I run out of day (or evening).


[personal profile] cosmolinguist posted about feeling like everyone else hasn't just stopped talking about the pandemic, they're not thinking about it, and he quoted his manager saying "something like 'You're the only one who remembers covid.' Not in an accusing way or anything, just making an ob. Clearly based on the fact that I'm still masking and I've never seen any of my colleagues wear a mask at in-person gatherings."

My comment was:
As I said [on Mastodon], it reminds me of something Siderea posted about in 2018-19: a hundred years ago, in the 1920s, people didn't mention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though flu was still killing a significant number of people every year (as it still is today). People did write about World War I, and men who died there, and there were novels about the young women who were never going to marry because of the gender imbalance, but it looked from 2018 as though there was an agreement or decision not to talk about the pandemic.

Six years ago, that seemed odd; four years ago, I was deliberately posting almost every day just so I would have a record of what those first months of the covid pandemic had been like.



A comment to [personal profile] buhrger, who lives in Alberta, about finding a new doctor:

It's not just your area, or province, that is short on doctors who are accepting new patients. A couple of months ago, we were talking to a friend of Adrian's, Ruth; they are both dissatisfied with their current doctor, but Ruth has had trouble finding another that she can get to reasonably. Oddly, I am seeing a nurse practitioner in that practice, and am entirely happy to keep seeing her, and not just because I don't want to roll the dice on someone else taking me and my combination of medical things seriously while still taking as given that I am a competent adult.


Comment to [personal profile] ambyr’s post about characters with an annoying sort of genre-awareness:

I haven’t read any Moreno-Garcia, but that shape of genre-awareness feels all wrong to me. I'm fine with characters having no idea they're in a horror novel, or a detective story, or whatever. And I'm fine with characters being aware if it's something like "if he's really a vampire, we should make sure all the doors are locked, buy some garlic, and not invite anyone inside," or with "there's no such thing as a vampire, what is this person really hiding?"

For example, I'm amused by the Terry Pratchett books where the characters know that million-to-one shots often work, so they're carefully trying to contrive those long odds against themselves before trying to do something like shoot a dragon. For me, that works in part because it's a given that the Discworld runs partly on Narrativium, and is out at the far end of some sort of probability curve.

"Don't separate the party" is a fiction-flavored way of saying :don't wander off" or "we should stay together" that doesn't require us to think we're actually in a work of fiction--but I would be annoyed by a book where the characters routinely said thet, and then someone ran off without saying anything or taking useful equipment entirely because the plot required it.


#burger and I were talking about (not) carrying cash:

If I’m out and about (not just going for a walk in the neighborhood) it’s usually for some sort of errand, and even if the main goal is to pick up a library book I’ll be passing shops and it often makes sense to go inside: maybe this branch of CVS has the specific earplugs I’m looking for, maybe the supermarket will have good berries.

That’s separate from the fact that I carry cash and credit card in the same wallet as my ID and other useful cards including my transit pass. Some of that is just-in-case planning: if one kind of thing goes wrong, I may need ny health insurance card. If I’m picking up certain prescriptions, they want me to show ID.

But mostly, having enough cash to get home in case I lose, or someone steals, my wallet is an old, ingrained habit. Once upon a time, that meant always having a subway token and a coin for a pay phone. Now, I keep a $5 bill in my daypack, and one in each of my coats that has a zipper pocket. It’s a firm enough habit that the daypack also has a Canadian $5 bill, just in case. (I didn't put a five-pound note in my pack when we were in London. Maybe I should have.)
Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 08:50 am


A collection of speculative fiction stories from Walter Jon WIlliams.

Facets by Walter Jon Williams
Tuesday, August 26th, 2025 12:24 am

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.

Monday, August 25th, 2025 09:14 pm
This is a repeat of the "deep-space alien horror" SFRPG Hostile from Zozer Games, based on the Cepheus Engine and previously offered in April 2022

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2025Hostile



Last time I said "My impression is a game that works pretty well if your players can live with corporate betrayal, virtually unkillable monsters, and the other tropes of this side of SF. I'm not entirely sure I want to play in that sort of universe at present, but it's well worth a look and pretty cheap." I don't see any reason to change any of that.

Another bundle for this system is coming soon.

Monday, August 25th, 2025 04:04 pm


Hostile, the deep-space alien horror rpg from Zozer Games.

Bundle of Holding: Hostile (from 2022)
Monday, August 25th, 2025 12:27 pm
2011: The VAT is improved by altering it from the hard to remember 17.5% to the more memorable 20%, the government continues efforts to replace the Incapacity Benefit with an alternate program in which applicants have cinderblocks dropped on them from a height and there is absolutely no news involving PM Cameron and a pig.

Poll #33534 Clarke Award Finalists 2011
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 33


Which 2011 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?

View Answers

Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
17 (51.5%)

Declare by Tim Powers
20 (60.6%)

Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers
0 (0.0%)

Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan
4 (12.1%)

Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
3 (9.1%)

The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
10 (30.3%)



Bold for have read, italic for intend to read, underline for never heard of it.

Which 2011 Clarke Award Finalists Have You Read?
Zoo City by Lauren Beukes
Declare by Tim Powers

Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers
Lightborn by Tricia Sullivan
Monsters of Men by Patrick Ness
The Dervish House by Ian McDonald
Sunday, August 24th, 2025 07:34 pm
I joined [personal profile] adrian_turtle this afternoon for a One Million Rising gathering/training session on zoom, led by one of her comrades from Talmud study. This was 90 minutes, distilling or summarizin six hours of training Aliza did recently.

There was less new information and ideas than I'd hoped for, but I'm glad I did it. I had nothing else specific to do with that chunk of time, and it didn't take away energy from some other form of activism. (In fact, I had called my congresswoman and senators half an hour earlier, while Adrian and [personal profile] cattitude were out shopping.)

Aliza presented some of the material from a specifically Jewish viewpoint/context, including that this organizing and resistance work could be part of preparing for the High Holidays. I'm not observant, but introspection is a useful activity.

I am now on the One Million Rising email list, and will see if anything interesting comes of that.
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Sunday, August 24th, 2025 12:40 pm
Here is the recording that I did (using Lisa's camera gear) of the 2025 WSFS In Person Site Selection Business Meeting, which was the fifth and final meeting of the 2025 Worldcon, all others having been held entirely online. This meeting was entirely in person, although it was streamed. Remote participation was not possible. Hybrid meeting for a gathering this large are more complicated than in-person meetings and entirely-only meetings put together and probably multiplied by ten or more.



This was the most difficult of the videos to produce. The camera generates a series of shorter videos to keep the individual file sizes down. I stitched them together in Adobe Premiere Pro, then compiled the video, setting to working before I went to bed on Friday night. Sometime around 2 AM Saturday, I woke up and found that the compilation was complete, and I then uploaded it to the YouTube Worldcon Events channel. This took many, many hours. This should have told me something was wrong. In retrospect, I think I had the settings (Premiere's settings) at much too high of a bitrate. The file, for a video just over two hours long, was 11 GB. That's too big, and it came back to bite me.

I checked to see that the video was working, but I didn't watch it all the way through, and sent out notifications. What I did not know until people started reporting it to me was that around 45 minutes into the video, the images turned into surreal junk. My guess is that YouTube choked on the high-bitrate original and garbled it. I deleted the video and did a new compilation with a different present, and then I turned the bitrate down from that. The resultant file was less than 4 GB, which still seems high to me, and it still took more than two hours to upload even on my relatively good home connection, but this time it finally worked.

Fortunately for me, the posts I'd made to a couple of Facebook communities were still in moderation, so I could cancel the posts and re-post with a working video.

This is not the Worldcon's official video, nor was I in an official position with this year's Business Meeting. The 2025 Business Meeting team says that they do plan to edit the various BM videos of the meetings that were public (i.e. not held in executive session) and then post them to the Worldcon Events Channel. I am not involved with that.

I am glad that I did not try to do this compilation/uploading during Worldcon itself. It would have taken wey too much time, and I think it unlikely that the connection speed in my hotel room would have been anywhere near sufficient to make it work. I'd probably still be in Seattle waiting for the file to finish uploading if I'd tried doing it.

This posts is public, as is the video. You are welcome to share this with anyone you think might be interested, and you don't need my permission to do so. It would probably be better to just go to the YouTube video and share it directly.