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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.

denise posting in

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.

You'd think it would be self-evident that there are gays and lesbians and trans and non-binary people from all walks of life and at every conceivable point on the political spectrum. Certainly they vary immensely in terms of whether they're huddling at the back of the closet, peering through the keyhole or totally out and proud, but you can bet they're there. And everyone deserves to come out (or not) on their own terms.

To my mind, the purpose of a Pride Parade is twofold. On the one hand, it's to celebrate who we are, who we love, who our friends and family and colleagues and allies are, and the progress we've made over time towards a more harmonious gender-diverse society. On the other hand, it's to remind everyone that there's still plenty of work to be done: locally, regionally, nationally and internationally and also at the level of the individual and the culture. Shifting hearts and minds, questioning and altering long-held assumptions and traditions, and so forth.

When the early gay rights marches took place in the 1970s, the common enemy seemed obvious: The Establishment. Authority figures, both personal and institutional. They might be parents, teachers and other school officials, employers, police, the infamous Fruit Machine ... I don't want to tar all of these entities with the same brush, but the villains were typically found amidst those categories.

I was dismayed to see how Ottawa's Capital Pride March essentially disintegrated yesterday:

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/ottawa-pride-parade-dissolves-after-palestinian-demonstration-blocks-route/ar-AA1L7SxN

Yes, Queers for Palestine would have been perfectly justified in carrying placards stating who they are and what they stand for. They did not, however, have the right to hijack the parade and demand that certain parties meet with them immediately, demand that everyone agree with them and that they apologize for having disagreed with them previously. Frankly they're shooting themselves in the foot with tactics like that, as even folks like me who generally support their political agenda (and there are lots of us) are turned off by their approach.

I really think pride rallies should do what they do best: celebrate and promote gender diversity and advocate for the progress we still need. Instead, they are dividing and disgusting their allies from within the movement. Capital Pride looks to me like a bureaucratic nightmare and quagmire.

Smaller groups within the Pride week events have, it appears, been a little more successful in achieving their goals: the Trans March and the Dyke March, for example, and the myriad one-on-one and small group conversations that other events may have spawned.

Yes, the Pride March has always been a protest as well as a celebration. Yes, the personal is political. But does it have to be Polarizing Partisan Political?

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Location: home
Current Music: Get Together (Youngbloods)

Yall, the bowed musical instruments have finally made it to the electronica party. This is the coolest damn thing. Audio required, video also extremely worth it if accessible. 3 min 17 sec.

2025 Aug 11: Open Reel Ensemble: "Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble":

磁気テープを竹に張って演奏する民族楽器「磁楽弓（じがっきゅう）」三重奏による調べです

This is a trio performance on the “JIGAKKYU,” a traditional folk instrument made by stretching magnetic tape across bamboo.

Watch on YouTube

ETA: I want to state for the record, contrary to what a lot of commenters on YT are saying, it is not that what is cool here is just how wackily innovative it is to use a reel-to-reel this way. The only reason this is going viral is because of how musically good it is; nobody would care about it otherwise, and I submit for evidence the half century plus of prior art of abusing reel-to-reel recorders in the name of music-making you have probably never heard of, because a lot of it wasn't very compelling as music so nobody ever brought it to your attention. What's most shocking here is how musical it is, and how they use the innovation to do something new in music recognizable as such. It isn't good because it's innovative; it's innovative because it's good.

As far as I am concerned, the great problem for electronic music has always been what I think of as the Piano Problem: the music is made by operating a machine, so there's a machine between the performer and the music. Great pianists master operating the machine so beautifully they make the machine disappear. But this is what makes piano playing hard. So much of what we love in music is its organicness, the aspects of it which are so beautifully expressive because of how intimately the performer's body interacts with the instrument.

Heretofore, the only ways to bring that kind of sound to electronic instruments were to use breath controlled midi controllers (electronic woodwinds), use an electromagnetic interface (e.g. theremin), or get really fantastic on keys. Or give up and embrace the mechanical nature of the instrument and use it for repertoire the excellence of which does not rest in expressiveness (q.v. Wendy Carlos' Bach recordings).

This instrument conclusively brings the organicness of bowing and all its delicate expressiveness to electronica. The result is simply gorgeous and I hope this creative vein is further mined.

It is a mere 20 days since my last reading notes post. I do occasionally wish that I had it together to do this weekly, and write more comprehensive reviews, but eh, when it happens, it happens.

finished

My Throat an Open Grave (Tori Bovalino) - teenager from Evangelical Christian small USA town wishes their younger brother away. Much darker than Labyrinth, does some very clever things with traditional story tropes. 4.5 stars. review
What Feasts at Night (T Kingfisher) - reread. Not the Kingfisher I was planning on reading, but eh. 4 stars. review
Of Melodies and Maledictions (Maddox Grey) - prequel novelette, good world building and characters, but I resented being treated as if I couldn't see the plot detials shaping the story. 2 stars. review
Within Prison Walls: Being a Narrative of Personal Experience During a Week of Voluntary Confinement in the State Prison at Auburn, New York (Thomas Mott Osborne) - very well written kinda long form journalism, kinda memoir, about the social experiment of a prison reformer spending a week in prison. 5 stars. review

active

(started or progressed)

The Siege of Burning Grass (Premee Mohamed) - this is on my phone, and I haven't been on the bus, so I got about a third in and then haven't touched it in a week
Unmasked: The Ultimate Guide to ADHD, Autism and Neurodivergence (Ellie Middleton) - finding this much less readable than the Aussie one that was specifically about ADHD, and thus struggling to maintain momentum. Also, I keep stopping to write grumpy reading notes. Such as "late diagnosed". Sweetie you are 25. (which, yes, is late diagnosed using specific definitions, but this hasn't been defined, and I've a lot of friends getting diagnoses in their 40s and 50s. Possibly 60s).
After Story (Larissa Behrendt) - continues to be emotionally hard going; I've read a chapter in two weeks

there are also several for uni that haven't made it into the reading record.

paused

The Spider and Her Demons (Sydney Khoo) - forgot I'd borrowed this, got a 'return or else you are out of renewals' notification, got about 2/3 read in the time before I could get to the library. Very annoyed that I can't opt out of automatic renewals, but not enough that I'd done anything other than be annoyed at a librarian who kept trying to tell me it was a good process.

abandoned

nothing! For a value of nothing that includes the fact that I've taken two books from the little free library near the office, looked at the first few pages, and then returned them. One was about the Corn Laws in the UK, and while it might have reached the point that I agreed with the author, the way the whole thing was being framed was very much 'these stupid people didn't understand what was being done for their own good'. And the other was a history of Singer (I don't remember if it was the sewing machines specifically or the company) that I decided was probably really interesting but I have too many other things I want to have read in my life, and I'd rather read something else (at which point I think I started Siege of Burning Grass, and I am still of the opinion that was the right choice even if I've stalled on that one)

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

This week's questions were suggested by

canuckfetish.

1. Have you ever stayed in a hostel? If so, where? Did you like it? If you haven't stayed in a hostel, would you?

2. What is your favo(u)rite airport that you've been to? Why?

3. What is the best museum you have visited on vacation?

4. Have you ever made friends while traveling whom you keep in touch with on a regular basis?

5. Have you ever had a conversation with a seatmate on a plane?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

It has occurred to me that "microform murders" might be a good title for a post about how all of us, even those who consider themselves vegan, unwittingly murder (or at least kill) gazillions of microscopic life forms every second of every day, just by going about our day-to-day life. But that's not what this post is about. Instead, I'm going to report on how an actual microfilm machine inflicted grievous bodily harm on my partner's right arm, and the adventure that ensued.

If you'll bear with me, I'll backtrack a bit. Somewhere around the early 1990s, the Carleton University library was divesting itself of a whole slew of surplus microform readers, selling them dirt-cheap to anyone who wanted one. The librarian in me jumped at the chance. At that time, the Canadian Library Association (CLA) had reels of microfilm of historic newspapers for sale. Wouldn't it be cool, I thought to myself, if I could have a microfilm machine of my very own, so I could peruse all those old papers in the comfort of my own home?

So anyway, I bought one, for around $5 if I recall rightly. And it sat in our basement for a few decades. Because by the time I got around to the kind of newspaper browsing I had in mind, library and internet technology had advanced, we had home internet that you didn't even have to dial up to get, and it was much easier to doomscroll at home and look at all those old news stories and ads for corsets from days gone by.

Fast forward to 2025, our troubled oil tank and furnace are gone and the heat-pump installers are here doing their thing at this very moment. They started yesterday and expect to finish today. But our work started over the weekend and earlier this week, when we shifted some stuff out of the basement to make way for them. And one of those pieces of stuff was the microfilm machine.

On Monday, I was in one of the bedrooms listening to the late afternoon radio show, as I often do on Mondays. We don't get a newspaper on Mondays any more and after the weekend I tend to feel starved of news, especially local news. Suddenly I heard a moan coming from the hallway.

My partner was injured. After bringing that blasted microfilm machine up the basement steps, they had tripped slightly on the top step and fallen on top of it, sustaining a large gash to their right arm, close to the hand. Stitches would be needed. My partner was down on the floor, having felt quite dizzy and broken out in a cold sweat.

"What do you need?" I asked. The response was essentially: I'm in your hands, do what you think best.

OK. I hastily rounded up some gauze pads and an old hand towel from the bathroom to further deter the blood flow, which had already at least slowed, though not completely stopped. I was hoping to avoid an emergency room visit, so I grabbed an appointment card for the family doctor from the bulletin board by the front door, and phoned her number.

Naturally I got an answering machine. "If this is an emergency, please hang up and call 911." There followed a dizzying telephone-tree of touch-tone options, including talking to a nurse, leaving a message, contacting some sort of after-hours service and so on. I actually did all of those things, but the upshot was that there was no one available at that time to provide the necessary ministrations. An aside: I don't drive, but was perfectly willing to call a taxi. But which hospital would be best able to accommodate us? It seemed futile to call a taxi to drive randomly around in rush-hour traffic from one emergency room to the next, hoping to get in somewhere.

Anyway, after talking to a couple of people on the phone, it emerged that a 911 call was probably our best bet. "The paramedics are really good," said one of the people I spoke to, and there's quite a bit they can do on site or in the ambulance to get things stabilized, even if you're in for quite a wait in Emergency after that.

So wow. My first 911 call. Ever. There have been a few harrowing emergency room visits, but they were before 911 service came to our neck of the woods. And indeed, the paramedics were excellent. They knew the right questions to ask, they instructed us, they determined which hospital we should go to (the Queensway Carleton), and once we got there they ensured my partner was registered and wrist-banded and wheelchaired and settled in the Emergency Department waiting area before leaving for what was probably a hard night's night.

The Emergency Room people were all excellent too, even though our health care system is totally broken. There were triage nurses monitoring patients' vital signs throughout the night. Crises were dealt with with remarkable calm and efficiency, with super-urgent cases apparently swiftly dealt with (though with people directed off in different directions according to their specific situations, it's hard to know). But for many of us, it was a very long night.

My call to 911 happened at 5:05 PM Monday. We emerged from Emerge some time between 8:30 and 9AM on Tuesday morning. Took a taxi home and fell into bed for about 3 hours. My partner's family doctor's office had already arranged an appointment for them to get the stitches out, right after the long weekend.

We're both still a bit sleep-deprived, but we're now fed and watered and the universe now seems to be unfolding as it should ...

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: home
Current Music: Dear doctor

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

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.

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Here we go! It's gonna be long though.

You can see the list of finalists here and the list of winners (with stats and such) here.

Overall impressions: People have good taste. Most of the winners, as you’ll see, weren’t that surprising to me, and I had a high degree of agreement in the categories I cared about. I was particularly happy to see three Indigenous winners.

I’m very much a prose person and it shows; I am interested in most of the other categories, but my time is limited, so while I tried to check out as many of the finalists as possible, I didn’t get to everything. If I hadn't read/watched/listen to most of a category, I didn't vote in it. I focused my time on novels, novellas, and short stories and care most about those.

It’s a ranked ballot so I voted for multiple works in many categories, but to avoid this going forever, I’ve only talked about my top choices.

( opinions )

Having now acquired a uni laptop for study, I'm handling the different parts of my life better. One of the things that I'm really starting to embrace is Obsidian.

After a couple of false starts, I've moved my daily journalling there--I've created a template, and literally the only thing I require of myself each day is that I click the button that generates the daily note. Some days I don't do more than that, but as the template has a couple of verb tags, I come back afterwards and revisit. So far I mostly haven't been adding any details, but I am copying my 750 words in there, and if then afterwards at some point I will read through those (tag: to-do/tidy) and see whether anything resonates. This is a deliberately asynchronous process, because dumping the everything is cathartic, and I won't know what is going to resonate.

One of the interesting things is that I'm capturing bits and bobs of ideas, and not really worrying about where they go. It is possible that I'll never look at them again, and that is okay. but it is also possible that at some point I'll do a search on a word, see the set of things, and make a map of content. This is not a curated garden, this is a bushland with paths.

But! it means that I have draft blog posts that I remember to go and look at, because I have tagged them as blog/draft, and thus I have successfully separated out 'I have a thing I want to write' from 'dealing with posting'. Which is probably going to mean that things will be posted in clumps (this post is going straight into the editor, which is not the current normal).

from the drafts archive

Bookbub: The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of Summer 2025 (Jeff Somers) - supposedly a 'curated' list; I saw a number of new to me authors. There were three that I'm lukewarm about and have added to the list, and the rest I was bored by the descriptions. I suspect this is part of an ongoing issue with the way that blurbs are written, as I'm increasingly uninterested

added

Infinite Archive (Mur Lafferty) - because it is book three in the series; and I'm interested in where it might go
Lucky Day (Chuck Tingle) - maybe
Hemlock and Silver (T Kingfisher)

Transfer orbit: 11 new books for July - unsurprisingly, some overlap with the previous list; the only one I could have added was already there from the above list.

Gizmodo: 82 New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books Arriving in July - this is really too many books. I have skimmed, but wasn't committing to reading everything. Unsurprisingly, there are repeats. The blurbs here were shorter, and yet worse. I did add a couple to the list, but I'm a bit dubious. The Arthuriana one is intriguing, but book 3 of a series; the new Rivers of London one is of interest to Artisanat

added:

Arthur by Giles Kristian - book 3, but Arthurian
The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths

New Scientist: The best new science fiction books of July 2025 - some of the same books, with more interesting summaries. I am, however, a grouch, and added a single book to the 'maybe' list

maybe:

Circular Motion (Alex Foster)

amazon_syren

Okay. So.

Thing One: I have - finally - a job interview.
It's just the interview, so who knows.
But I didn't actually expect to get this far, given their initial "we're hoping for an early August start-date" and I didn't here from them until a few days ago.
So, I need to relocate the job description and double check all the ways I'm an excellent fit for the job. Consider any questions I've got about the org (which I'm currently on the Board for, though obviously I'd be stepping down if the Hiring Committee decides I'm the candidate to go with). Stuff like that.
I am, I suspect, not the only Board member who's applied for this job.
I also know that it's a job that's going to come with a big chunk of stress - which I don't love - and which is paying $24/hr for an "average" of 8 hours/ week, wherein "average" means "4 hours/week three quarters of the year, and 20 hours/week from January through March. (If I land this, Job One is going to be applying for grants to give ME and the Artistic Director substantial raises and ongoing employment for another 2-3 years).

Thing Two: I have the house to myself for the evening.
Woohoo!
I made myself little crab cakes and am eating coffee ice cream and looking at how to do easy embroidery stitches like "lazy daisy" because I just mended a tear in the shoulder of one of my flimsy cotton dresses, and I used a much lighter shade of grey yarn to do the mend. I thought: "Maybe I can embroider something interesting on this tiny darn!" and maybe I can.

Thing Three: My lovely wife has suggested that we take an archery course together over the winter.
I'm into it! The RA Centre isn't currently running Archery stuff - they're reviewing their archery programming and making some decisions, I guess? - so I don't know if it'll be an option come ~November. The alternative is XQuest which is out on Industrial Avenue (quite a ways from home) but is at least running classes.
Do I love the thought of scraping together $565 to cover five 1.5-hour classes for the two of us? Not really. But I know archery's expensive, so It's A Thing. And I like this.

Current Mood: relaxed
Current Location: The Redeau River House
Current Music: Black Moon Lilith videos on YouTube

Yesterday, I chose to leave uni at 4:30pm, because I had more than half an hours work of Stuff left to do (I did get it done, but later than planned; that is not the point of this post). Which meant that as I was nearing home, it was still a lovely bright day, and it wasn't raining.

so, instead of heading for the interchange, and hoping to make it for the other bus, I got off across the road from the shopping centre, with the intention to walk home (roughly 2km) through the suburb. Back up plan was that if this turned out to be a Bad Idea, I could call for pick up. Which was a possibility--I'd walked up to the Tavern for an afternoon catchup, which involves Too Many stairs, and only some of them have convenient (if tediously slow) lifts, each taking me a single floor. Which meant I'd used the cane to get there and back. And done a bit of stretching when I got back to the office to discover that I was the last one in, and someone had turned the lights out.

But! back to the walk home. Lovely day, peaceful opportunity. I resisted the nearly overwhelming temptation to pull out my phone and my headphones, and put on a podcast in order to spend the time productively. Instead, the goal was to exist, in space, with no task but to be in the moment.

And it was lovely.

I spotted a lot of flowers--a daffodil, some white bulbs that I should recognise and don't, azaleas and/or camellias (really need a refresher on those), grevillia, something pretty in purple, and many that I admired and don't recall.

Someone's mulberry is already fruiting, with tiny green fruits the size of my smallest fingernail covering it enough to look like leaves.

A house has vanished, to be replaced by a concrete pad that doesn't look large enough, so I'm wondering whether it will be two stories. A front garden has vanished, leaving grey sand to blow away.

I watched two buses go past--the one I might have caught, from too far down the side street to hear it, and one the other way thundering past as I was nearly home.

I stopped to take a photo of gum nuts (proper gumnuts, I might remember to post that and explain why).

I wandered past the tennis courts at the school where two adults and two kids were split up teaching the kids variously to hit a tennis ball with what looked like a totem tennis bat, and to ride a bike with trainer wheels. Just past there were a pair of tweens with a football, trying something fancy, based on the general behaviour.

It wasn't warm, and I was glad for my jumper, but there wasn't much wind. As I walked, the probably muscles in my right leg slowly untangled, and I went from unsure about this as an idea, through 'just another bit, then I'll know' into 'oh, actually, this is pretty good'.

I managed mindfulness for a reasonable amount of the walk. I did get a bit bored and grumpy at myself, and lost the meditative feel when I was about five minutes from home, which was coincidentally about a minute before Artisanat messaged to see where I was at and whether I was wanting a lift from the station. But at that point there was little point in asking for a lift, so I stomped on home.

I don't mind walking, but I'm dreadful at doing it recreationally. This, where it was a necessary path between where I was and where I wished to be, is a good compromise, but finding the spaces in my life where it fits is challenging. As the days get longer, I hope I'll remember that this is a net positive to deal with the pain, and that the more I walk, the more I can walk.

Today I want to talk about birthdays. I'll start with this very informal survey - weigh in if you wish:

What is the best time of year to celebrate a birthday? Summer or winter? Is it better to have a birthday close to a time when everyone around you is celebrating (like Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving or a major national holiday? Or conversely, is it better if it falls on a day when nobody feels like celebrating?

Amongst my family and friends, there is quite a flurry of August birthdays, my own among them. On balance, I think I'm glad I have a summer birthday. Growing up, it meant I didn't have to go to school on my birthday. During my 9-to-5 years, I was quite often able to arrange to take holidays that included my actual birthday.

The downside to that, of course, was that if I actually wanted to throw a party and invite my friends and classmates, chances were good that they'd be out of town. Or if they were in town, chances were that I wouldn't be.

So anyway, although I got invited to a fair number of parties in my youth and childhood, I was into the double-digit ages before I held a birthday party of my own.

By that time, we were all starting to consider ourselves far too mature and sophisticated to play silly kiddy-games like musical chairs and pin the tail on the donkey. A popular option amongst teenybopper celebrants in those days was to go out somewhere, like to a show, and then perhaps enjoy a special meal somewhere.

The very first birthday party I ever had occurred in 1965, when I and a small group of friends attended that year's blockbuster movie, The Sound of Music:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059742/fullcredits/?ref_=tt_cst_sm

60 Jahre später gehe ich nach Österreich (und zwar Graz und Salzburg).

Next month, I'll be taking a trip with Western Alumni to Austria to tour various sites where the Sound of Music was filmed. And maybe enjoy a concert or two, sample some wine and Sachertorte, see some sites associated with major Austrian literary greats like Musil, Broch and Zweig ... there's quite a bit of "at leisure" time in the schedule, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Prost and stay tuned!

Current Mood: cheerful
Current Location: home
Current Music: The Hills are Alive...

Hey, it's a new Wizards & Spaceships episode! In "The Science Bros Answer Your Science Questions Part 1," you can find out what happens if you jump out of a spaceship* and other pressing sci-fi and fantasy questions.

* Don't.

anais_pf posting in

thefridayfive

This week's questions were suggested by

aforkintheroad.

1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?

2. What motivates you to keep going every day?

3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?

4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?

5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?

Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.

If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!

😔 Another month when I have to ask for help with rent again. (My landlord lets me split it into two payments, but uh the second payment is coming up fast)

A GoFundMe for keeping my business (and me) afloat.

Just finished: Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer. I went to art school semi-on-purpose. Which is to say I always loved art, loved drawing, but was it my passion? Who knows what a 13-year-old's passion is? I was nerdier about other things. But I was bullied in grade school and wanted only to get away from my tormentors when I finally graduated, and so I auditioned for the art school as an escape. I was good at drawing, good enough that they plucked me out of my boring town and away from everyone I hated. There I had teachers who truly were passionate about art, and art history, and I fell in love with not just the paintings and sculpture and architecture but the stories and personalities behind them. We scrimped and saved so that I could go on the school trip to Italy and there I got to see the art, and fall in love with Florence in particular, and walk in the footsteps of Michelangelo and Leonardo and Machiavelli and Lorenzo the Magnificent and it was the most incredible thing to happen to me in my life thus far.

So anyway reading this book was like reliving that, only—as Ada Palmer says throughout the book—"Ever-So-Much-But-More-So." Because there is more history than I knew, or learned since, more stories, more people, about 100 pages of footnotes, and it's contested history, histories complicated by someone who loves this era even more than I do. Despite the book's heft, it's a very fast read. Also I cried a l'il. Fight me. But read it.

Currently reading: Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is a re-read of my favourite SM-G book For Reasons and my God, Meche is even worse than I remembered. I love her. Ahaha. What a nightmare child.

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denise in dw_news - Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs
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