Monday DE: I like mine with a hug

Sep. 8th, 2025 01:31 pm
splash_of_blue: (Obsessive Compulsive Kettle Disorder)
[personal profile] splash_of_blue posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Afternoon all! Sorry I missed last Monday.

As we enter Pumpkin-Spiced Latte season (ew) -- how does your pup take their coffee?
genarti: Ocean water with text "no borders, no boundaries." ([misc] no boundaries)
[personal profile] genarti
A Letter to the Luminous Deep is a book that should have been so far up my alley it was knocking on my back door ready to come in for a cup of tea, and instead it didn't work for me at all. I'm writing it up partly because I think the ways it (imo) failed are interesting, and partly because tastes differ and I suspect some of you may enjoy it very much.

Okay, so. The premise, which is what hooked me initially, is that this is an epistolary story about fantasy deep sea exploration and sibling bonds. It's set in a world in which there is no land except a single atoll; long ago, people lived in sky cities, but some kind of cataclysm ended that, and now everyone lives either on the atoll, on floating residences of various sorts, or (fairly recently) in underwater habitations. One of these is the Deep House, the deepest underwater home yet made.

A year before the start of the book, reclusive E. Cidnosin began writing to shy scholar Henery Clel; E. lives in the Deep House, which her mother built, and Henery is fascinated by the Deep House and the largely unexplored depths of the ocean. The two of them grow increasingly close, and then, at some point and in some way, die or vanish -- it's not initially clear which. Whatever it was, a year later, E.'s sister Sophy and Henerey's brother Vyerin strike up a correspondence and begin to trade their siblings' letters and journal entries and so on, along with their own letters, bonding as they try to discover what happened to their beloved siblings. The story thus unfolds in two timelines, as Sophy and Vyerin go through E. and Henerey's writings sequentially and share their own thoughts and reactions. Some of the letters they're sharing are their own from a year ago, written to their siblings at the time, so for Sophy in particular we get past and present events intertwined. (In the one-year-ago timeline, Sophy was on a scientific expedition to a deep marine trench, though busily writing letters to E. about it.)

It's a really cool conceit! Other things I like: very mild spoilers )

...And unfortunately, that's pretty much where it stops, in terms of what worked for me. from here on out this gets more negative, with some vague but not detailed spoilers )

I think part of my problem here is that I love domestic stories, and I love books with very low, personal-level stakes, and I love books about ordinary people having everyday struggles, and I love books about hope and the restorative power of kindness... but I also believe in the power of misunderstandings and petty frustrations and supply chain logistics and all the bits of sand in the gears of life, and so I absolutely bounce hard off a lot of the books currently being written as "cozy," and this is another victim of that. I wanted a domestic epistolary story about siblings and the material culture and scientific inquiries of an ocean world; I got coziness that, unfortunately, felt like cloying cotton candy to me. I suspect that some of you would react similarly, and for others, what I found cloying would be charming and relaxing coziness. And that's clearly what the book is aiming for, so if you're in the latter camp, I hope you have a great time with it!

Me, I'll just spend a moment pining for the book I wanted it to be, which is not the same as the book Sylvie Cathrall wanted to write.

(no subject)

Sep. 6th, 2025 12:18 am
skygiants: Himari, from Mawaru Penguin Drum, with stars in her hair and a faintly startled expression (gonna be a star)
[personal profile] skygiants
[personal profile] genarti and I have been working our very slow but delighted way through We Are Lady Parts, the British sitcom about an all-Muslim punk rock band composed of opinionated women with beautiful and compelling faces. I'd been seeing a lot of gifsets of these faces before we watched the show and I am pleased to report that they are even more beautiful and compelling at full length. For those of you who have missed the gifsets, please enjoy Lady Parts performing "Villain Era":



The two most protagonist-y protagonists are Saira, the band's lead singer/guitarist, who is at all times extremely punk rock, and Amina, a stressed-out trad-Muslim scientist with terrible stage fright, who really has to work to access her inner punk rock. The cast is rounded out with Ayesha, the angry lesbian drummer; Bisma, who plays the role of maternal peacemaker until she starts to chafe at it; and Momtaz, the band's go-getter manager. The first season focuses mostly on the question of whether Amina can conquer her own inhibitions enough to contribute her excellent guitar skills and huge Disney eyes to the band after Saira press-gangs her into joining them. The second season brings the whole band up against the music industry more generally, and the various ways that the public pressure of moderate fame starts to push each of them into re-examining their self-image and relationships to their music and identity. It's a good show! I liked it very much!

Also, like everyone else in the world, we have recently watched KPop Demon Hunters. Also a very good time featuring banger music tracks -- I'd seen it described as 'a series of really good music videos' and broadly I agree with this assessment -- plus twenty pounds of fun kdrama tropes stuffed into a five-pound bag. Probably would not have felt compelled to write anything about it except for the fact that by an accident of timing, we ended up watching the season finale of Lady Parts the day after we watched KPop Demon Hunters which made for a very funny accidental wine pairing. Both funny and telling to go from high-level spoilers for both KPop Demon Hunters and Lady Parts )

(no subject)

Sep. 5th, 2025 03:45 pm
camwyn: A gray sewing machine with the Singer logo on its knob (sewing machine)
[personal profile] camwyn
Debating making myself a new long-sleeved shirt for office use this fall. The dress code started off as business casual, went to 'vaguely business casual tops and jeans and moderately respectable sneakers' after COVID, and periodically flicks back to 'wear suits and business shoes' on days when we have clients visiting the office.

that being said, I am considering how many sharks I can get away with on this top.

Thursday DE: I need you to swear

Sep. 4th, 2025 07:58 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
This morning I managed to spill coffee creamer on myself in the car.

Unrelated, what is your character(s) favorite swear words or phrases?
chanter1944: Uhura in the foreground, Chekov looking quizically at something off to the right in the background (TOS - Chekov and Uhura: nerdy joy)
[personal profile] chanter1944
Whoever it was who suggested Second Copy as a backup for one's personal files (I've got a short list of people I *think* it might've been, but don't want to namecheck the wrong friend), drinks are on me if we ever meet in corporeal space. Alcohol not required, but not prohibited either. This gratitude brought to you by the gal who had her files backed up securely, thank God, and could copy them over from said backup once the errors on her current flash drive were repaired (I probably jostled the thing, and it glitched). W-H-E-W!

Seeeeeriously, whew!

Tuesday DE

Sep. 2nd, 2025 07:19 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
How is your character with goals? Do they make them? If they do, do they just go along with the normal day to day or do they have a plan? Charts and graphs?

(no subject)

Aug. 31st, 2025 11:43 pm
skygiants: clone helmet lit by the vastness of space (clone feelings)
[personal profile] skygiants
Sometimes you hit the end of a book and immediately think 'I'd like to read that over again' because there's some sort of big twist that you know will make you experience the whole thing differently, and sometimes you hit the end of a book and think 'I'd like to read that over again' not because of any Major Plot Reveals, but because the book is woven together in an interesting enough way that you want the chance to fully appreciate how all the pieces fit now that you've seen the full puzzle.

This second case was my experience with The Fortunate Fall, a cyberpunk novel from 1995 that came back into print last year and that I did not quite manage to read in time for the Readercon book club (so I extremely appreciate [personal profile] kate_nepveu's extensive notes on it including the intertextuality with Moby Dick.)

The book is narrated by Maya Andreyeva, a 'camera' -- a cyborg news-reporter modified to provide not just full sensory experience but also associated memories, context, etc. to the viewing public. When the book begins -- well, when the book begins, it has already ended, as Maya tells us; her whole audience has already experienced all the relevant events through her eyes, and now she's telling it to us again, in a narrative that she can control and that's on her own terms, contextualizing only what she wants to contextualize and hiding what she wants to hide. Which is a very fun way to begin a book, by consciously keying you into its distortions and elisions, and for the most part I think the text lives up to it.

Anyway, when not the book but the story begins, Maya has decided to put together a series commemorating the anniversary of a major [future]-historical tragedy, and has just gotten assigned a new screener for the project -- a sort of editorial figure who sits in between the camera and the audience, filtering out bodily functions and bad words and anything else that could be trouble for the network. Because of the amount of time they spend immersed in the heads of their cameras, screeners tend to become rapidly very enthusiastic and romantic about them! Maya's new screener Keishi is a beautiful and mysterious young woman who is, indeed, very enthusiastic and romantic about her! And definitely not keeping any secrets about her skills, her identity, or her reasons for being there working with Maya, no sir.

In true noir mode, Maya's initially normal-seeming historical research into a tragedy that's as long-ago and terrible and world-shaping for her as the Holocaust is for us ends up leading her increasingly out of the bounds of conventional society down a dangerous rabbithole, at the end of which lies forbidden knowledge about the world, forbidden knowledge about her own past, and forbidden knowledge about a really sad whale. And, following along with her, we as readers gradually start to piece together not only the particular dystopian shape of the world -- the parts that Maya already knows and the parts that Maya doesn't -- but also the shape of the story, the themes that it cares about and that have actually been driving the plot this entire time: embodiment, censorship, the atrocities we commit to end atrocities, and the power and beauty and absolute hard limits of queer love, just to name a few.

I don't know that everything about the book has fully aged well. I understand the well-meaning failure mode in cyberpunk that leads an author to posit a Monolithic Utopian Isolationist Africa when the rest of the world has gone to dystopian shit, but I think it is a failure mode. I also admit that I thought the entire grayspace digital-world sequence was a little bit boring. But for the most part the book is not at all boring, it's interesting in the way that only a book that actually trusts its readers to be doing an equal amount of work as they go is interesting. I did not in fact actually then read the book over again, upon hitting the end, because it was extremely overdue at the library [and I had five more equally overdue books on the pile] but I expect I will do so sometime in the nearer rather than the further future. Maybe I'll have the chance to hit another book club.

Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

TMI content, y’all have been warned

Aug. 30th, 2025 02:50 pm
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
[personal profile] camwyn
Today, on ‘Americans will measure in ANYTHING other than the metric system (even the honorary Canadians)’:

It happened in the shower, it’s tmi-chix worthy )

of all the nameless but notable figures in the Gospel out there, I never expected to find myself identifying with the woman with the issue of blood. Yeesh.

(no subject)

Aug. 29th, 2025 08:07 am
camwyn: Me in a bomber jacket and jeans standing next to a green two-man North Andover Flight Academy helicopter. (Default)
[personal profile] camwyn
Still here, just haven't checked in on the site in a while. It's been... it's been a day. Over and over and over again, you know?

(no subject)

Aug. 28th, 2025 09:28 am
bjornwilde: (Default)
[personal profile] bjornwilde posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Sorry for missing Tuesday and being so late today.

Is your pup an introvert or an extrovert?

Wednesday DE: Eight-Legged Freaks

Aug. 27th, 2025 10:30 am
thebattycakes: (i am)
[personal profile] thebattycakes posting in [community profile] ways_back_room
Hello Millways, sorry for the late DE!

Today's DE:

What are your pup's feelings about spiders?
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