I bought lottery tickets today

Aug. 29th, 2025 06:01 pm
[personal profile] brickhousewench
Powerball is up to $1 billion today. So I bought lottery tickets when I went grocery shopping.

I don't play the lottery regularly. But I've started buying tickets more often the past year or two. Partly because I'm started to get tired of working. Partly because I need something to dream about (and "spending my lottery winnings" has been a favorite daydream since my college days) and you can't win if you don't play. And partly because they've rigged the games for bigger prizes, and it's hard to resist buying a ticket when they get into "I could afford my own private island" numbers.

So, fingers crossed that I win. Because if I do a lot of people are getting their mortgages and medical debt paid off. And Libraries are getting funded. And oh yeah, Muskrat ain't going to be the only billionaire trying to buy a President for the next election. 😉

Hey Neighbor

Aug. 28th, 2025 01:24 pm
[personal profile] brickhousewench
For months now I have been hearing random yelling in the building. It’s pretty upsetting when you hear just a random shriek that sounds like someone is being murdered. There have been times when it’s been so disturbing that I’ve gone out into the hallway, not sure if I should be calling the police or not. This has been going on for months, and it’s been driving me NUTS.

There was just a really loud, incredibly long shriek, long enough to finally let me confirm that the noise was probably coming out of apartment #3.

So I went down and knocked on the door. Repeatedly. I could hear the voices in the apartment getting quieter. Nobody answered the door. I knocked again. Still no answer. Then the TV turned off. I think I knocked five or six times? Because I really wanted to talk to someone, but no one answered despite the fact that I could hear them in there! I finally went back to my desk, but I kept an ear cocked.

A couple minutes later I heard someone come out of the apartment and head down the hall towards the door of the building. I stuck my head out, and it was the mom. I asked if anyone in their apartment had been screaming, and she shook her head no, nobody was screaming. She asked if I had knocked, and I told her yes. That I’d been trying to figure out where the screaming had been coming from, because every time I think someone’s getting killed.

She told me again that no one in her apartment had been screaming. I said I thought that maybe it was someone playing a video game and screaming when they scored points or something? But that it still upset me, because of one time that the Wasband and I heard screaming from the downstairs neighbors having a fight, and then suddenly, clear as a bell, the wife yelled, “Put that knife down!” and we immediately called the cops.

She again denied that anyone in her apartment was screaming (She has a teenage daughter, which is why I was thinking video games
), but she also didn’t walk out of the building, she turned around and walked right back into her apartment. LOL, I hope she went to tell her daughter to shut the f*** up.
[personal profile] brickhousewench
https://slate.com/life/2025/08/travel-finland-happiest-country-united-states.html

But it wasn’t just that it was pleasant to be outside. On this walk, something clicked for me. It was nice to be doing something that had no specific purpose. What was the point in eating a leaf off a tree? There wasn’t one, particularly. It was just nice to do. In a society where it isn’t quite so drivingly necessary to prove your worth and make money to spend on supporting yourself, you’re more allowed to just eat the tree. You’re more allowed to just go for a walk, dip your body in the cold sea for a minute or two, sit in a sweaty wooden box. Everything around Finns gives them permission to do this—rather than implies that this is an unproductive use of your extremely limited, exchangeable-for-goods-and-services time.

Quietness is certainly a defining feature of Finns, though. Walking down Helsinki center’s yellow-terraced streets, you don’t hear raised voices. It is not uncommon to find yourself in a conversation with long periods of silence, which in London someone would be rushing to fill. My tour guide, Kathrin, a woman in her early 30s from Luxembourg who has been living here for 10 years, said that once you get used to the quiet, it’s a precious thing. “It’s OK to be an introvert in Finland,” she said as we walked past people having their coffees outside on cafĂ© tables and park benches alone in the sunshine.


Who knew that the secret of being happy was guilt-free, quiet, unproductive time? (Introverts, that's who!)

I am booked until Christmas

Aug. 27th, 2025 08:44 pm
[personal profile] brickhousewench
When my sister and I visited my parents in April, I said I would probably come back at Christmas time and help mom clean out some more of the stuff she has crammed in every drawer and closet. And I penciled that in my calendar as when I would make the visit.

Today my sister emails me about when in October do I want to go rent the beach house so that she can buy her plane tickets? WTF? The plan was to go through more junk in the house, not vacation at the beach.

Anywhoo, I looked at my calendar, and there is literally not a week between now and Christmas that I do not have either a work commitment (Offsite in Berlin, virtual offsite, Hackathon week, monitoring the Docs channel in Slack, our annual Open Source user conference), a doctor's appointment (one year follow ups for my gallbladder yeet, a colonoscopy, a mammogram), events I want to go to (a local cat show, King Dick's at the new site), or events that I've already bought tickets for (Comedian Josh Johnson in Boston, John Cleese and a showing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail in Lowell, New England Crime Bake, a screening of Stand By Me with Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell, and Corey Feldman in Concord, NH). I am literally booked with at least one blocker to spend a week away from home ever week between now and Christmas. So, I guess I'm sticking with my original plan. If my sister wants to visit the folks at a different time, that's her choice.

Now I feel really old

Aug. 26th, 2025 09:50 am
[personal profile] brickhousewench
Now I feel really old.

My email this morning informed me that I had a new achievement on Live Journal! Even though I left that platform for good back in 2017.

Apparently I've been blogging for 20 years now.

Not that I needed a reminder this morning about how freaking old I'm getting.
[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.

(no subject)

Aug. 25th, 2025 04:55 pm
[personal profile] adore
Re: bookish things. There's a sale of indie books happening: Narratess Indie August Sale. A lot of $0.99 books with a few free ones and $1.99 books thrown in. I picked up a dozen books because there were quite a few cozy & queer books among them. I've started tracking my reading on Pagebound, it's an anti-AI alternative to Goodreads and it's really cute. I love the colours. I kind of wish I'd tracked my reading before, but it makes more sense to do so now than ever before, because I actually have a goal: to 'progress' in my enjoyment for reading, cognitively and emotionally. Maybe it won't feel like it used to, but I know I've improved a lot until now, so I'd like to keep more detailed track of how I improve from here on. It'll be useful to see which books help me do that.

Re: life/work. Several client projects have wrapped up, so my workplace shortened my notice period to the end of this month. I won't have to drag it on until mid-September, yay! This is my last week at work here. I can't wait to move on.

Re: fandom. CIX are having a comeback in September! It's my first CIX comeback so I'm very excited, especially after seeing the teaser pictures. The members all opened individual instagram accounts, which makes instagram a better place lol. Yonghee's VERY SECOND POST on instagram basically brought me salvation: tumblr link so that you don't have to visit a meta site. ISN'T THAT THE MOST BEAUTY YOU'VE EVER SEEN?

So, yeah, I'm on tumblr now, with the username consciousferality (because I'm hungry to partake in CIX fandom somehow). Unfortunately most CIX fandom seems to be happening on twitter, which I am only dipping into now and then because I remember the last time I was on stan twitter. It was Bad for my Mental Health. On the other hand, fangirling over k-pop is Great for my Mental Health, so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯
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