marsdaydream | Reading

Sometimes it's easy to pick what I'm going to do my collage about each week. Sometimes I have to scrounge around a bit for a subject.

There was a moment this week when I started mulling, "Well, what has this week been about?" and it occurred to me that at that exact moment, I was stirring my coffee with a sterling silver spoon.

I have inherited a significant amount of sterling silver from my grandparents, and my mom has passed along some of hers to me early. Even before that, I have often delighted in fine things that gave my life a luxurious touch. When the girls were young, I occasionally would serve what we called formal dinners, where we practiced eating with elaborate place settings and talked about proper manners.

I've been experiencing a bit of a cash flow issue lately. Nothing serious; I don't mean that I can't pay my bills, but with some recent medical and car repair expenses, I have had to cut back on some things. I've stopped eating out for the time being, and sometimes I have to wait a few days, until after pay day, to pick up the next set of groceries.

Recently, I decided to pull out a set of small sterling silver espresso coffee spoons I inherited from my grandmother. I went out looking for a lovely crystalline receptacle to keep them in on my counter by my coffee pot, and I found one, touched with gilding at the rim, at a vintage store, for $5. I bought a bottle of lavender syrup, and I will sometimes put a small amount in my coffee.

My sister bought me some luxury hand soap for my birthday, and I have decided that I like it so much better than the soft soap I had been picking up at the grocery store.

When the belt has to be tightened, it helps to indulge in a few small luxuries.

Image description: Background: A luxuriously painted vaulted ceiling at Versailles. Bottom center: a miniature sterling silver spoon rests on a counter. Behind it: a coffee cup with a small glass jar with more miniature silver spoons. Right: a bottle of lavender coffee syrup. Behind the coffee cup: a bottle of luxury hand soap and a house plant.

Little Luxuries

36 Little Luxuries

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

pegkerr

Eric and took a one-day road trip to New Ulm this past weekend, a little Year of Adventure event. We ate lunch at a friendly bistro, Lola's and then spent an absorbing hour touring the childhood home of Wanda Gág, the owner of Millions of Cats. The two docents seemed absolutely delighted to have visitors and almost talked our ears off about the Gág family.

There were a couple of other stops, to poke around an antique store or two, and to take pictures at the statue of Hermann the Cheruscan ("Hermann the German"), the statue of Wanda Gág in front of the public library, and the Minnesota Music Hall of Fame. A very pleasant getaway.

Image Description: A Victorian Queen Anne home, overlaid with a black and white picture of a young woman holding an easel and paintbrush. Left: A guitar in the shape of the Prince Love symbol, made of musical instruments (the instrument's neck is a keyboard). Right: an iron lamppost. Center: the statue of Herman the German, sword raised, overlaid with a statue of Wanda Gág reading to a cat. Right corner: a black cat with an arched back. Upper right: logo for Lola Bistro.

New Ulm

35 New Ulm

Click on the links to see the 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022 and 2021 52 Card Project galleries.

hamsterwoman

There are too many moving parts in RL to write up at the moment (I need to write about my post-Covid weekend, the new air fryer, L's car shopping in progress, and the Return to Office extravaganza), but I haven't had a chance to write up any of that yet. So instead you get Taskmaster NZ and the first of the Worldcon days that was getting too long for LJ so I ended up breaking it up into two.

*

TMNZ s6e05 -- this was a less fun episode for me: I thought the tasks were not all that interesting, nobody did anything I really loved, and Jeremy's scoring continued to annoy me with nothing to distract me from it really. I mean, it was still a baseline level of fun, but was the episode this season I enjoyed the least so far. ( Spoilers from here )

TMNZ s6e06 -- I'm digging Pax's jacket, which is like the upholstery of your grandma's armchair, and also Bree's crossed swords necklace. And Jackie's wig du jour. ( Spoilers )

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Continuing on with the Worldcon account:

( Friday, Aug 15: panels )

By this point it was 8:30 p.m. and time to head over to the Terra Ignota fan fathering, but I'll leave that for the next post (right now I'm thinking that + the Saturday panels could be one post, and the Hugo Awards and my thoughts on the stats a different one, but we'll see; maybe Sunday will fit in there also...)

( A couple of photos -- mostly just Hugo bases this time )

pennswoods

The organization I am president of just had its first monthly board meeting of the new academic year this morning. It was good seeing everyone again. Lots of decisions to be made and plans for next steps including our spring elections. I am not planning to run as president again, unless no one steps into the role. I intended to be vice president so I could offer continuity and support to our new president.

Anyway, one of the non perks of being a president is being responsible for more than the average member and also having my choices reflect the valuations of the organization and not just my own. This is about Israel.

In the spring, we had a long discussion and voted that the board would need to approve the organization partnering with entities that did or did not meet the organization's values. By democratic vote, it was decided that individual members could affiliate or partner with whomever they want but if they were doing it on behalf of the organization or as a representative of the organization, then this would need to be agreed to by the board. Such a situation has come up. There is a sort of European grant application going in that requires inclusion of a network. Last fall, I joined the network and listed my affiliation as UNICollaboration based in Belgium. The application did not get funded but it being resubmitted.

The challenge is that the grant application is being headed by two colleagues, one from a Spanish university, and one from an Israeli university. The board voted that I could not join the network as a representative of UNICollaboration because the Israeli university is one that is not aligned with our organization's values. In other words, I can join the network but I will need to list my US university as my affiliation. I am not sure if I can be a member with a non-European (or European adjacent) affiliation.

I now obviously have to tell my two colleagues this, both of whom are members of the organization I am president of. I don't feel good about this and I am not looking forward letting these colleagues down and also probably alienating the Israeli colleague from the organization. My friendship with the Spanish colleague has already been tested by other decisions made by the majority vote of the leadership of this organization and I think he will be leaving this organization and no longer supporting it, even though he was its founding president.

I am writing this to process. I feel icky and spineless and also sad. Like I said, this does not reflect my all of my values. I guess it reflects some of my values. Unlike the asshole in the White House, I am not an autocrat and I do believe in the democratic values of the organization I am a part of. I'm not interested in throwing down and doing what I want and waiting for a court order or something to force me to stop (like being voted out for violating the statutes). So I am in fact acting within some of my values.

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

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.

denise posting in

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.

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life on mars?

it's the freakiest show

Reading

2025 52 Card Project: Week 36: Little Luxuries

2025 52 Card Project: Week 35: New Ulm

TMNZ s6e5-6, Worldcon part 3: Friday Aug 15 panels

The Constraints of Leadership

Code deploy happening shortly

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

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January 2019

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