Title: The Winter of Our Contentment Author:kat_lair Fandom: The Witcher Pairing: Geralt/Jaskier Tags: Huddling For Warmth, Sharing Body Heat, Winter, Cold Weather, Getting Together Rating: T Word count: 4,581
Summary: Jaskier is cold. Geralt is warm. The solution is simpler than anticipated. Author notes:Written for the prompt 'cold'. Beta by the lovely smallhobbit. The title is, very obviously, play on the 'now is the winter of our discontent' line from Shakespeare's King Richard III.
I am once again behind on everything (not just podcasts) so have the latest Maintenance Phase, "Seed Oils." I mostly missed the right-wing hysteria over seed oils, but Aubrey and Michael do a good job explaining it for normies who have real problems.
It's also a notable episode because it has a great quote from Andrew Tate of all people: "I can tell you losers have never had real enemies. You're afraid of sunflowers." I wish this wasn't an Andrew Tate quote because "I can tell you've never had a real enemy" is a phrase I would like to incorporate into my regular vocabulary.
There's something vaguely occult horror about one of the big driving engines of politics being people who are afraid to die, and think that if they just eat the right thing, death will never come for them. All the time setting up a situation in which people can't be vaccinated against deadly and preventable diseases. All these people obsessing over sunflowers while their kids are dying of measles, they repeatedly infect themselves with covid, and they've given up on FDA measures to control the amount of sawdust in their bread.
We Do This Til We Free Us for Slow Book Club, which had its first (online) meeting Monday. We discussed parts 1 and 2. We'll discuss parts 3, 4 and 5 next month. I thought the discussion was really good! It's open to new members, so if you would like to jump in, let me know.
Always Coming Home for Solarpunk Futures bookgroup, later today (Thursday). This bookgroup is also online and open to new members, so if you are interested in discussing Always Coming Home this evening, let me know.
The Meadow for Classics bookgroup Artful for 1000 Books To Read Before You Die Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books for Fort Collins Reads The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton for Tawanda bookgroup Lonely Castle in the Mirror for SF bookgroup
Mathematical Mindsets for ideas on working with a kid who is way behind where school wants her to be in fourth grade
The Paper Playhouse and Craft The Rainbow due back at the library soon.
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Just finished; Nothing, my life has been clown shoes lately.
Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This is so horrifying. Obviously, the genocide and destruction of the political process is the most horrifying thing about it, but the neat thing about evil is that it's fractal, and the interpersonal stuff is much more visceral. Like Joel Kaplan sexually harassing Sarah shortly after she's almost died in childbirth (because, yeah, you can be one of the top people at Facebook at the height of its success and almost die in childbirth. America!). Or the weird obsession Sheryl Sandberg has with getting women to nap with their heads in her lap on her private jet. These people are so creepy and awful, and nightmarish as you think Mark Zuckerberg is, this memoir depicts him as much worse than that.
Which isn't to say that Sarah is great—she paints herself as a naïve idealist, but the scale of awful at this company is such that after a certain point, you kind of roll your eyes every time she notices that it's bad. But that's storytelling for you. Highly recommended.
Damn it's been a month. Lots of things happening in August, honestly, many of them orange or yellow. Here are some pictures and some words to go along with them.
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.
Title: Celebrate Tonight Author:kat_lair Fandom: Primeval Pairing: Nick/Stephen Tags: Celebrations, First Kiss, University Rating: PG Word count: 1,295
Summary: “You just won a massive fucking grant,” Stephen says. “And sure, other people contributed but you’re the Principal Investigator. You’re the one who’s kept us alive to reach this point, for that matter. You deserve to be selfish. If just for tonight.” He takes a step forward. Author notes: A lil birthday fic for spikedluv! Unbetaed so if you catch typos/grammar mistakes, you absolutely should tell me about them. The grant mentioned is a real one so if you're doing innovative, high-risk, high-reward research in environmental sciences in the UK then consider applying :D
I'm surveying September community activity interest over at tar_valonHERE. So if you would like positive ways to cope with the TV-show cancellation and defiantly keep the Wheel of Time fandom alive, please do pop over to tick some boxes. Much appreciated!
After having this on my to-do list for an embarrassingly long time, I downloaded and ran Libation, a bit of open-source software to de-DRM your Audible purchases.
The walkthrough is really easy to follow. At first I used the default download settings, and got a file (m4b) that worked fine on my laptop, but my portable music player had some kind of trouble with the encoding. (It did play the file, but it was all crackly and poppy, like an old record.) Then I switched to “just download as an MP3,” and those worked fine.
…I had a lot more Audible purchases than I remember. Mostly “audiobooks I would’ve borrowed from the library if they were available, listened to once, no desire to re-listen.”
But it’s well worth having unlocked copies of the Murderbot books. And the Locked Tomb books. And this one book I don’t even remember reading the first time, so I don’t have to jump through any hoops to play it again and find out if I liked it or not.
Trans Segregation in Practice. Report on the impact of the Supreme Court decision on the lives of people, Trans and cis, in the UK by Trans Actual. I read it even though I knew what was going to be in it and it still broke my heart.
So, last night I had to take Blair to the UrgentCare because she was running with our dog and rolled her ankle real bad. Luckily there was no break and no fracture, but there might be some tendon or ligament damage. We'll have to rest and ice it, manage the pain, and see what happens.
Because it was her driving foot, she could not attend her friend's birthday party alone. So, because I knew she would not want to miss it, I volunteered to drive her two hours there and two hours home, that's right, a four hour drive so that she could go to dinner. I wasn't going to go, because I wanted a nice quiet slow day at home by myself and also because I don't like this particular friend, but it was worth going. The food was good, anyway!
On the way home, we overestimated the number of gas stations available to us and as we drove through the long, empty country roads in the dark, the car slowly ran out of gas, counting the remaining miles down. Down, down, down, no gas stations in sight. Fortunately she has a hybrid, so we were able to get the EV mode going, though to do that we had to let the car cruise at a cool 25mph with our hazard lights on. It was very stressful and scary. There was no service out there. If we ran out of gas on the side of the road out there, I honestly don't know what we would have done.
As it was? We rolled into a gas station, at last, with three miles remaining. Literally on fumes.
Also almost ran over a family of raccoons crossing the road, but managed to screech to a halt before that could happen. Avoided a coyote pup, too, and a fox.
Title: Flashback Author:kat_lair Fandom: The Lost Boys Pairing: Michael Emerson/Sam Emerson Tags: Vampire Hunters, Implied/Referenced Underage, Sibling Incest, Post-Canon Warnings: I whacked an AO3 Underage Sex warning to this even though no sex happens and Sam is of age under some jurisdictions... Rating: T Word count: 2,553
Summary:
In December, in rainy Oregon, Michael misses a call. He doesn’t plan to. It’s not his fault. There are… extenuating circumstances.
The kind with fangs.
Author notes: Continuation of Delayed Reaction. For the prompt 'initiative'. Unbetaed so if you spot a typo or grammar mistake, you absolutely should tell me.
Bad news first: Welp, adding The House In The Cerulean Sea to the list of “books that get hailed as progressive masterpieces because they tick a bunch of identity boxes and everyone is happy at the end, but they’re not actually, you know, good.”
Our protagonist (Linus) is a social worker who reviews specialty orphanages for kids from magical species. He gets sent to a particularly isolated orphanage, ends up getting personally-attached to the plucky orphans there, falls for the guy who runs the place (Arthur), and (supposedly) learns some Valuable Lessons about prejudice and acceptance along the way. The morals are announced with zero subtlety, the emotional beats are all completely predictable, and systemic social prejudice keeps getting defeated by the heroes making inspirational speeches. A few bits are genuinely charming or clever — but the rest of the book doesn’t live up to them.
An example of what I mean by predictable: Linus shows up at the orphanage, gets the initial tour, and finds out that one of the kids sleeps in Arthur’s room (iirc it was just-slightly separate, some kind of converted walk-in closet). Arthur says “it’s nothing untoward, he just has nightmares, so I comfort him.” Linus instantly accepts this with no follow-up questions. I thought “in the real world, this would be sketchy af, but Arthur is obviously the designated Wholesome Love Interest, so it’s going to be fine.” Sure enough, it never came up again.
The setting is hard to get a grip on. It’s a version of our world — the kids study the Canterbury Tales and listen to Buddy Holly — but you never get any clear details about what country they’re in, or what decade it is. Record shops are still in business; phones are still on cords, and the orphanage doesn’t have phone service at all; but Linus’s office has computers, and the country has same-sex marriage. (Homophobia never comes up as a concern at all, even when they’re specifically facing off against religious bigots.) One of the orphans is supposed to be The Antichrist(TM) — which everyone accepts as a fact, but there’s no detail on who decided this, or how they figured it out, and none of the characters ever put any thought to “how do I feel about the reveal that Christianity is Confirmed True?” (…I’m pretty sure no non-Christian religions are even mentioned. The heroes are all just vaguely secular.)
The “happy ending” is that all the orphans get cross-species adopted. (By Arthur and Linus. Arthur is magic — this is treated as a big surprise by the narrative — [ETA] but not the same species as any of the kids. Linus is human.) There’s not even an effort to reconnect them with their own cultures. There’s almost no worldbuilding about where the rest of their communities are, or how they’re integrated into society in general. Only one kid even knows an adult from her own culture, and it’s another person who lives in isolation near the orphanage.
Look, I’m not out here saying “nobody can write a good fantasy allegory for real-world atrocities.” But, dude. Don’t take something that was part of the atrocity, and paint it as the happy fluffy ending in your allegory! It’s not enough to just read about the facts of history — you do actually have to internalize the lessons from it!
(The fact that residential schools were started by Christian missionaries, with the explicit goal of stealing children from their own cultures and either indoctrinating them or killing them, makes this book’s non-engagement with religion even more dissonant. You would think putting The Antichrist(TM) in a pseudo-residential-school would be a setup for some kind of commentary! Like “the abuses from Christians toward him and his fellow orphans, not to mention toward the gay supportive adults in his life, actively push him toward the Antichristing lifestyle,” or maybe “surprise, he was never really The Antichrist at all, that’s just a fantastical twist on the way the system demonizes non-Christian children.” But no! Nothing comes of this at all.)
I’ve heard that the sequel tries to address/fix some of this. Maybe just the part about “it’s not heartwarming to cut off the marginalized orphans from any kind of connection to their culture.” And, listen, I can believe it — it’s the kind of problem where, after the readers of the first book pointed out the wild oversight, a well-intentioned, progressive-minded author would try to revise/retcon it in the second book. (Can we call this “pulling a Becky Chambers”?)
For the sake of people who liked the series, I hope that’s true. But none of this was gripping or engaging enough that I’m inspired to read on and find out firsthand.
Gonna throw in a re-rec of Cathy Glass’s foster-caring memoirs instead. I kept wishing TJ Klune had taken some inspiration on “how to write realistic, well-rounded displaced children” (not to mention “good caregivers with healthy boundaries”) from stories like hers. The one I thought back on most was The Saddest Girl In The World, which (although you wouldn’t know it from the generic summary) involves a mixed-race foster child, so Cathy writes about grappling with “what specific cultural needs does this kid have, and am I, a white person, understanding them well enough to do right by her?”
—
On to a brighter note: Nettle & Bone was really good!
So much that, when I finished, I immediately went looking for a sequel. No such luck. (It’s by T. Kingfisher, aka Ursula Vernon, so maybe I should just reread Digger now.)
It’s set in a fairy-tale-inspired world, without being a direct remix of any specific story, in a way that makes it comfortable and familiar without being boring or predictable. The main character, Marra, is a third-born princess, who spends a bunch of her life in a convent to keep her “saved” in case she needs to be put in a politically-arranged marriage later. So the bulk of the plot takes place with her in a state of “okay, I’m in my thirties and have learned some specific practical skills (knitting, midwifery, stable-shoveling), but wow, there are a lot of things about General Adulting that a princess/nun doesn’t get experience with.”
(The religion is only vaguely Christian-shaped, in the way the political situation is vaguely medieval-Europe-shaped. Also: as a nun, Marra specifically serves a saint that there aren’t actually any surviving records about, so her convent is openly just winging it about what kinds of devotion The Lady would’ve wanted. It’s fun.)
I like both the magical godmothers we meet. I like the animal sidekicks (there’s an evil chicken, and a skeleton dog). I like the way Marra’s real-world skills help the plot along — not in a way that’s gimmicky or contrived, just grounded and believable. Everybody feels like a real person, having real reactions to things. There are a few surprises towards the end, and they come together in a refreshing “didn’t see that coming, but now that it happened, it makes perfect sense” kind of way.
The book opens mid-magical-adventure, then flashes back to give us Marra’s whole backstory. Good writing choice, because the backstory got a little slow, and if we just started at the beginning I might have given up. As-is, I plodded through to get back to the juicy parts, and I’m glad I did.
Just finished: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This held up on re-read—it's still my favourite of her work (admittedly I haven't read her latest) and is just this perfect exploration how it feels to be 15 and simultaneously enraged with and in love with the world.
Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction, edited by Sonia Sulaiman. Somehow I missed this coming out last year despite—I thought, anyway—being on some kind of list from the editor. Anyway. It's quite excellent. Stories range from the hauntingly beautiful "The Third or Fourth Casualty" by Ziyad Saadi, about a group of children swimming and drowning, to the gorgeously defiant "Gaza Luna" by Samah Serour Fadil, to the absolute ugly-cry of "The Generation Chip" by Nadia Afifi. It's hard to pick a favourite—there are a lot of bangers in this collection. Anyway, you should read it.
Currently reading: Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn-Williams. I would probably never read this if Mark Zuckerberg hadn't tried to have it banned, so good job with the Streisand Effect. It's pretty entertaining, though. The author pitches a job that doesn't exist to Facebook because she's naïvely convinced that the company is going to change the world in a good way (ha. ha. ha.) and then gets progressively more disillusioned when it turns out she works for the worst people. Also she almost got eaten by a shark when she was 13, which is a metaphor. But also she almost did get eaten by a shark when she was 13.
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