I'm Not Afraid to Keep On Living

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.

I am fascinated by reading antique magazines and the fiction published in them, and I don't want to imply that I'm not enjoying it, but... sometimes it's very hard to sympathize with the wealthy, or even the upper middle class.

Of course I'm used to literature being by and for the wealthy further back in history, and I don't say that I read about them without class consciousness, but somehow it's not as hard when it's from the 19th century or earlier. Maybe it's just that it's longer ago, or maybe it's because the society is more alien to me and harder to view through a personal lens.

But with these American upper middle class magazines from 1900-1940... well, the middle class was exploding in size and not all fiction or nonfiction was by and for the wealthy!

It's disorienting reading things about "every American girl" or "every new bride" in the 1920s that actually mean every American debutante. All four of my great-grandmothers got married in America around that time and none of them were worried about cruise ships and couture hats. (One was a nurse, one was a schoolteacher, one was a farmer's daughter and a farmer's wife, and one was a daughter of servants, from a big Catholic family.)

My tolerance for the wealthy perspective in fiction and nonfiction is lower the closer it gets to the present. I always have to overcome a strong impulse of disbelief that you're supposed to seriously sympathize with the idle rich, or people with maids, or the sphere where only people from recognizable New England families "count". Of course those people exist, but this is a big circulation women's magazine! Where are the average middle class women? The average middle class housewife was not a former debutante in 1908! But Woman's Home Companion could easily give the impression that she was. (Maybe there was a competing magazine that was preferred by the working middle classes. I'll try to find out.)

I posted a few weeks ago about Florentine omelette, a recipe we really liked, after I saw it mentioned in a book (neither of us had heard of it previously).

Florentine or à la Florentine is a term from classic French cuisine that refers to dishes that typically include a base of cooked spinach, a protein component and Mornay sauce. Chicken Florentine is the most popular version. Because Mornay sauce is a derivation of béchamel sauce which includes roux and requires time and skill to prepare correctly, many contemporary recipes use simpler cream-based sauces.

A Florentine omelette doesn't have Mornay sauce; it's just an omelette with spinach and cheese filling (parmesan and gruyere traditional). However, eggs Florentine is a common café/diner dish from the UK and Australia, a breakfast sandwich with a poached egg, spinach, and sauce on an English muffin. (People seem to expect Hollandaise instead of a Mornay sauce in that case.) Chicken Florentine might be the oldest version: that idea is out there, but it might be apocryphal too. The history of the term and the style is colorful but probably not accurate:

Culinary lore attributes the term to 1533, when Catherine de Medici of Florence married Henry II of France. She supposedly brought a staff of chefs, lots of kitchen equipment and a love of spinach to Paris, and popularized Florentine-style dishes. Food historians have debunked this story, and Italian influence on French cuisine long predates this marriage.[4] Pierre Franey considered this theory apocryphal, but embraced the term Florentine in 1983.[5] Auguste Escoffier included a recipe for sole Florentine in his 1903 classic Le guide culinaire, translated into English as A Guide to Modern Cookery.

(Quotes from Wikipedia, Florentine (culinary term))

Because Chicken Florentine was trendy in the US in the mid 20th century, the popular English-language versions of the recipe have suffered from simplification. Recipes from the midcentury reportedly used mushroom soup. Modern ones overwhelmingly use cream instead of Mornay sauce; it was necessary to put "Mornay" in the search terms before I found any recipes with it (because 1. it's not hard to make a roux, like what are you talking about? & 2. we wanted to try the more authentic recipe). We looked at three and used this one because the Mornay sauce called for wine, mustard powder, and nutmeg. We didn't use gruyere, though, just parmesan, and served it over white rice and it was sooooooo good. So delicious.

 
Also -- where the hell does the time go?

Needed to do a bunch of chores this afternoon. Started early because it was thundering, and might rain.

1] Filled the cat-feeders -- one in back yard, one in garage, two in barn.

2] Changed the pump filters in pond. Discovered the pump was partially clogged with strands of feathers or grass. HOW??? That's what the filters are for, dadgummit! So took the pump apart to clean it.

[3] Did a "first-rinse" of filters, left them to soak for later cleaning.

4] The ducks (?) keep knocking the plastic planter-saucer off the second water tub. (For the little birds to perch and drink. Post for "one day.") WHY??? So I got my tools and some wire, made a couple of "hooks" to hang over opposite edges, anchored to the supporting bars below.

[5] Went down the drive to dump bags of milo seed for the birds.

[6] Took the empty bags to the garage. I stuff all the empty bags into another bag until it's full and I take it to the trash. This bag is almost full; I think these bags will be the last until I staple it shut. As I approach (I have gates over garage opening, not a door), I see an elongated dark thing on the top of the crumpled bags. I'm trying to remember what I've thrown away that meets that description, drawing a blank. Then I get closer -- about three feet away -- and it moves, raises its head! It's a snake!

I learned long ago to "startle in place" -- thanks to brothers that thought it was fun to try to spook their sisters. I took a half step back, quietly said, "Oh. My. God," and evaluated the snake. Very slender -- about 1-1/2 fingers' thickness -- and very dark, almost black, mottled pattern. Small head, with no "shovel-shape" as it attached to the neck; definitely not a rattlesnake, and this part of the country doesn't have any other venomous snakes. (Not that a rattlesnake would have changed my actions; I simply would have left faster!) It started to crawl away from me, got into a 5-gallon bucket laying sideways on the plastic bin that the bag was leaning against, turned around and headed out. Pretty long for it's slenderness -- maybe 3-1/2 feet or so.

No idea why it was on those bags; they only carried grain, nothing a snake could eat. But maybe -- probably -- mice have been checking out the empty bags, and the snake smelled that? Its head didn't look big enough to swallow a mouse, even with an unhinged jaw, but if it thinks it can, I'm all for decreasing the mouse population.

I probably don't need to say that I didn't stuff the empty grain bags into the almost-full bag; tossed them on the floor till later, and left the garage.

[7] Got into the house and discovered that 1 hour and 45 minutes had elapsed! What? How? I didn't do that much!!!

*looks over the list* Well... yes I did. Hadn't intended the need to clean the pump, or to devise a way that the ducks can't knock down the planter-saucer. But even so, the list would probably have taken 50 minutes, which just seems wrong. It's so easy to say, "Need to fill the cat-feeders, change the filters, dump bird seed." Seems like all that should take 30 minutes, at most. But there's a lot of walking between house and barn (a couple of times), or house and pond (a couple of times), and house and bird-feeding area. Still, dammit... I wonder if some psychic entity is stealing a minute here and a minute there, without me noticing, to make me take longer.

Well, that's life in rural America. Now I need to divide a batch of chili into lunch-sized portions and freeze them. Then I need to put out new fly-traps -- about 20 minutes? I'll need to time it.

I've made an executive decision -- laundry will wait until tomorrow.

I'd rather be reading fanfic. Sometimes adulting sucks.
 

On Thursday I went to Turku to take the driving theory test at the Ajovarma office. I passed! However:

I had paid in advance and scheduled this test several weeks ago. I made the reservation at home, from the computer, and immediately saved the date with a bunch of reminders in my calendar.

But when I got to the test site they didn't call my name at the appointed time. One of the desk workers asked me if I had an appointment and when she scanned my non-driver's ID card, she said, "Oh, you don't have an appointment today, but you had one yesterday!"

I had somehow managed to put the appointment in my calendar wrong, even though I thought I checked it so carefully! (I stopped myself from saying "I have ADHD!" with very great difficulty.)

She was very nice and helpful, though. She said she would reschedule my appointment and the payment would still be good; she found an opening that same day three hours later, and then when I said I could wait, she said actually the testing room wasn't full and she could let me take the test right away. So she did.

I have a total of (I think) 5 hours of driving lessons left, the first of which is in two weeks, when my instructor is back from his vacation. In the meantime, it's the second half of Wax's annual vacation starting today, and we will hopefully be trying chicken florentine for the first time this week.

 
I had an email today -- Sheila, AKA Buewolf458 here on DW and AO3, has died. She had suffered from dementia the past few years, and died peacefully in her sleep. She leaves behind a large number of fandom friends who are mourning her passing, and a large body of work at AO3.

A week ago -- Aug 8 -- I got the news that Ande, AKA Andeincascade at DW and AO3, has also died. I don't have any more information than that.

I met both ladies at a few Moonridge events; they were both fun to hang out with. That's one of the worst things about getting old; people we knew in our "younger days" leave us behind.

Anyway, if any of you know other spaces where either of these women once participated, feel free to pass on the news.
 

I've mentioned before that our van is a 1999 Citroën Berlingo. We named him Bernie because he's an old white guy. Bernie was a white van man's van: he belonged to a company for twenty years and sat in their warehouse being taken care of, but mostly not used, so he was in practically mint condition when we bought him in 2019, but he only cost 2000€. Now contemporary Finnish driving education is teaching me about safety features that are common or required in modern-day cars that he doesn't have: traction and skid control, smart cruise control, side door airbags that you can disable in the back, front and rear fog lights, a screen that recommends which gear to use, warning messages when you exceed the detected speed limit.

Obviously a 1999 van doesn't have any of those. But waxjism has also been scaring me for weeks saying he's too old to have anti-lock brakes, but today I finally read the manual and he is not. He has anti-lock brakes! That one was the only one that was seriously upsetting (the car I learned to drive in didn't have any of the others: it was a 1993 Buick Skylark).

I have to get up early to go to Turku to take the driver's license theory test tomorrow, and today I took the practice theory test again as soon as I got back from my last driving simulator lesson, and failed with the worst score I've gotten on the practice tests yet (42/50 "situation" questions). Then I took it again immediately and passed with a perfect score for the first time.

I've taken the practice test 7 times in all, but I've also gone through all the practice question sets, which amounts to 60 tests' worth of situation questions and 40 tests' worth of verbal questions (with repetition!), and I have consequently pretty much been at saturation for a while. I can't predict whether I will miss situation questions when I do a set, but that's not because I haven't learned the material, it's because the questions are not at all like a situation you actually encounter while driving; they're more like a sort of Where's Waldo-esque detailed visual search game plus logic puzzle. About half the time I miss them because of something like not noticing that the car is on a priority road (when the sole clue that it's a priority road is the tiny triangular edge of the sign with 80% of the sign cropped off on the extreme edge of the image blending into the windows of an apartment building in the background) or not noticing that it's on a one-way street (when the sole clue that it's a one-way street is some painting on the road facing the wrong way that you can only see if you look in the left side mirror image but it's very small). So I just have to take methylphenidate and count breaths and try to make sure I take my time. And try not to get distracted.

(After the theory test I still have driving lessons in a real car, and then the driving test.)

Tristana never misses an opportunity to eat hair. She can't have toys with feathers, and she has to be watched like a hawk when I'm brushing or grooming bunnies, because she will stalk the balls of discarded fur with a surprising amount of tenacity and sneakiness. She frequently manages to steal tiny tufts of bunny fur from the edges of doorways that Rowan passes through (which always accumulate a small fringe of faintly-waving fronds every few days if I don't clean them off), but since bunny grooming is a discrete activity that requires a lot of attention, it is usually possible to simply carry the fur away and put it in a closed trash can that she can't reach without incident (although there have been past incidents with her stealing fur from the trashcan, but she's never managed to get very much).

So half an hour ago Tristana started being both extremely distressed and moderately distressing: ( cw: vomit )

(When picturing a ping-pong-sized ball of fur, recall that Tristana, while fully grown, is tiny. She was a runt and never fully made up for two weeks as an infant when she didn't gain weight. She weighed 2.3 kg or about 5 lb last year, and she is slim and wiry, the typical bundle-of-twigs/greyhoundish Oriental breed build.)

She's finished regurgitating now, and we put a bowl of clean water and the turtle bed, opened up so she could crawl inside, on the heated floor of the upstairs bathroom for her, and she immediately slunk in there to think about her misfortunes. I mean, to feel sorry for herself, not to analyze; I doubt she has any idea the fur-eating was related to her current distress.

But backing up to about midday today, earlier I had brushed Rowan and then neatly rolled up the excess fluff into a ball like I always do; but instead of carrying it into the kitchen and hiding it in the trash under the sink where Tristana couldn't get it, I left it on top of the trashcan because I was going to come right back and use the same trashbag to change the liners in the bunny litterboxes. I was going to put the soiled paper on top of the fur, so it would have been just as inaccessible. However, I got distracted and forgot.

So this is actually kind of an ADHD tax.