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Allston Christmas, and fish drowners

So for those who aren't local, Be It Known that the vast majority of apartments here have leases beginning on or around September 1. Simultaneously and relatedly, the streets fill with U-Hauls and the sidewalks fill with random boxes and pieces of furniture marked "FREE". This last phenomenon is called "Allston Christmas" after a local suburb, but it happens across many towns in the area. It's like a big, disorganized Everything Swap.

I picked up two new kitchen pots from the squirrel, and ended up giving him an onion chopper device that he loves... amusingly this was not as a direct swap, but it worked out well.

Tuesday I spent about four hours helping a distant-ish friend pack stuff intended for a storage unit. I learned how to vaccuum-bag, which was cool, and MacGuyvered some garment-hanger boxes, and then was able to ferry a bag of stuff to the ballerina. And... silently I judged, because there was so much stuff. I came home, and the next day I got rid of a big bag of clothing and put out my own "FREE" stuff on the sidewalk and reorganized my kitchen. LOL.

Friday I spent nearly 8 hours helping my acro base unpack and organize. Our goal was to get all his boxes open / broken down / gone, and we did it. So satisfying. We took a 2BR place from a giant pile of boxes to a place that looked like he lived there (and had had a messy week). We also got to see a couch left on the sidewalk disappear within an hour, and the same for a few other things that just didn't seem to have a place in the new apartment. He has different hobbies and different stuff than I do, but his attitude about objects is so much more like mine that it made for an interesting contrast with Tuesday.

You are wondering: well, miss minimalist, did you get any free stuff this Christmas season? Yeah, I did. The two pots (I got rid of one), a pint glass, and a pair of parallettes from R (good for doing pushups without having to warm up my wrists first).

Overall a very domestic week. If you count the intended-to-be-final walk-through for my new condo, I put serious time into four different places. Then I went kitchen-feral on Saturday and made both quatre quarts cake and sushi. Workouts did go okay as well, but with less to specifically report.

I groused and griped about the final outcome of the Google-vs-DOJ antitrust case, which of course Google lost. ( If the powerful can be found guilty but then nothing happens to them, what good are the courts? ) The judge could have hurt browsing a bit, and instead he hurt all of tech. Maybe all of the country.

I learned a good new insult from an otherwise so-so book. The insult is "fish drowner", and I am taking it to mean someone who fucks up the apparently unfuckable. The person who snatches defeat from the jaws of victory, the person who manages to drown a goddamn fish. The person who maybe had one job, and had the power in his hands to break up a known monopolist, and... simply didn't do it.

Code deploy happening shortly

Per the 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.

Feels good to be physical

Overall, I had a really nice week of focusing on what I wanted to focus on, taking it easy in between energetic bouts of focus, and feeling good about all that. I went back to basics as was foretold by ~~the prophecies~~ my last post; cooked a bunch of chili on Monday and ate it all week for lunch, and did a lot of working out, and created a new tracker sheet for Things I Would Like to Be Maintaining. The day I did that is the first day I really did my desired two sets of pistol squats, so I got to write that down and be happy about it! I'm also flirting with my old straddle pancake program (owww, I can feel that) and trying to think how much cardio to do, and finding motions that really get at the jank in my shoulders. I've invented a sort of weighted chicken flapping action that I like a lot, for that last thing; I also have a backbend semiprivate buddy and a walkover semiprivate buddy, which is wonderful and makes me feel like I have companions for the journey.

I attended my town's condo board meeting, and watched them approve the conversion of my condo-to-be. Apparently one has to declare one's intention on that kind of conversion, and then there's a waiting period of a year before the conversion can happen?

Time was spent with the next generation of humans:

I hung out with the baby squirrel all day on Friday, and it was pretty nice. We made blue Jell-O with gummy sharks in it (more amusing than delicious, to my adult taste buds), and timed their laps on a bicycle in the small nearby cemetery while also getting to talk with apfelsingail, and hung out snuggling and playing Blue Prince for a lot of the afternoon. I didn't get hooked on Blue Prince last time I played, but this time I think maybe I'm more interested and might buy it for myself?

Today I took a long walk with Birdie, who's back from two weeks in Italy and more or less prepared for classes to start. We came back to my place and I dug up some baby pictures of her that she'd never seen, from when her parents brought her to visit my apartment in summer 2003, and she gave Caltrop a present of a little bird-shaped cat toy. We found a good spot for outdoor handstand photos over behind the high school, but didn't indulge... this time.

Time also was spent with my partners, of course: watching Wednesday with the bug, and going to the deCordova sculpture museum with the squirrel. The snuggle is real.

I've been listening to Someone You Can Build a Nest In, because it won the Nebula, and it's funnier than I expected but also extravagantly mid-2020s-progressive and full of plot holes; I have no idea how it won the Nebula. Or where the science fiction has gone, really, from the whole list of finalists. Even the Hugo finalists are packed with SF/F hybrids this year (the two SF entries are both by Adrian Tchaikovsky, who seems determined to move the "genre" industry toward SF as a solo effort and through sheer volume). Where's a science fiction fan to get her recommendations? Maybe the Arthur C Clarke award... though that's limited to books that are published first in the UK, maybe that's less restrictive than it sounds.

Mississippi site block, plus a small restriction on Tennessee new accounts

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.