i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

Went to the audiologist this afternoon as it was time for another hearing test. I hate hearing tests. But things are pretty much the same as two years ago, so that's good. Got off the bus a stop early and took the very very long way home.

As frequently happens after visiting the parents, I came home and have been watching TV. I've now seen both seasons of Ridley, on PBS Passport. I watched the first ep of the Lynley reboot on BritBox. I don't like the original TV series (my mother really likes it) and I didn't care much for the books, either. I wasn't sure about the reboot for about the first half hour or so, then it started to get interesting and I was disappointed that the next ep isn't out until Thursday. Last night I watched all four eps of BritBox's adaptation of Agatha Christie's Ordeal By Innocence, which in the end was rather creepy and twisted.

I've not been on Tumblr in about 3 days. It wasn't intentional. I just didn't get to it as I was reading the new JD Robb and am still making my way through Women in Whitecoats. But I've not missed it too much and I'm certaingly not going to be able to catch up at this point, so I think I'll just extend my break for a few more days. Once I get through the women doctors, I'm going to start the new biography of Luis Alvarez, Collisions.

So, perhaps getting the flu shot and the covid shot so close together wasn't the best idea? I've only ever had them months apart. I don't feel terrible but I also don't feel great. Malaise and fatigue, not congestion and coughing, thank goodness. I didn't set an alarm yesterday, though I did cardio when I finally got up, and I set it for late this morning but there will be no cardio today. I do have to go out later, so I'll turn that into a long walk on the way home.

Friday evening, I got a terrible pain in my right side. I was pretty convinced there was something wrong and I threw together a bag and walked over to the hospital, only to get there and feel fine. After talking to lurksnomore for a few minutes, I turned around and walked home. I'm usually not so convinced immediately and I do wait, but this was a very new and terrible pain. It has, thankfully, not recurred but it was definitely worrying. I'll add it to the list I've got for when I see my doctor next month. Yes, I keep a list. It's a post-it on my calendar for easy adding on to. I'll organize everything and put it into my doctors notebook before I see her. And she's prepared for it! The first time I saw her again after I started full-time at the esteemed!institution for the second time, I came with a post-it. Her response was, ok what's first? I do like my doctor.

Ok, now I need to find some food. I'm meeting conference!roomie on Zoom and then I'll have to find going outside clothes as I'm getting my haircut and then going to a PokemonGO trading meetup.

I made it home in one piece and *knocks on wood* without getting sick. My niblings are growing up - 7, 5, and 3 1/2! - and are becoming such very interesting little people. They're still a little loud but I think the youngest might grow out of that soon. Maybe. I hope.

I got my flu shot yesterday. Then in the evening I got an email from one of my state reps saying that our state had just changed its rules about the vaccine advice that determines which ones pharmacists are allowed to give and that insurance companies are to cover - basically everything that was allowed until the CDC started imploding. So first thing this morning I made an appointment for the new covid vaccine and went back to the pharmacy this afternoon.

Holy cow, it's the 30th anniversary of 2131 on Sunday! That's the night Cal Ripken broke Lou Gherig's streak of 2130 continuous games played. I vividly remember watching it on TV and I admit I cried.

What I've recently finished reading:

Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio went back to the library, because my hold on Summer in Orcus came in. Sorry, Chris, I might try it again sometime.

Summer in Orcus by T. Kingfisher - again a book that someone on my flist recommended. 11-year-old Summer gets whooshed to another world by Baba Yaga, supposedly to find her "heart's desire", though she isn't really sure what that is or how to get it, and oops, the world she's ended up in, Orcus, is in crisis. Other reviews compared it to Narnia (as a more-realistic version), although I didn't really see that - though that's probably because I'm not super familiar with Narnia other than having read it ages ago and mostly forgotten it, as the author's afterword actually mentions the Narnia influence. To me it felt almost like a skewed retelling of The Wizard of Oz: a girl and her pet dog (er, accompanying talking weasel?) pick up companions with issues on a road trip (following a road of a particular color!) to see a powerful being who turns out to be a lot less powerful than everyone thinks. It's even precipitated by a witch and a house! Anyway, I enjoyed it okay, though I kinda wish

spoiler

the Forester (or Summer, or Baba Yaga, or even Reginald) could have actually helped the Queen-in-Chains - I felt sorry for her, trapped by a rash wish made as a teenager. Some people, like the Forester, can grow (maybe literally!) to live with their limitations. Some need help.

What I'm reading now:

I'm rereading Velocity Weapon by Megan E. O'Keefe, which was given to me by a friend years ago, and I read and enjoyed, but after trying and failing to find the sequels at my library, gave up on. Now one of my library systems has the sequels, so I am going to read them, but I figured I should first reread the first book since I've mostly forgotten it.

What I recently finished watching:

The Leopard, the Netflix miniseries, which is apparently a remake of a 1963 movie; both are based on a historical novel published (posthumously) in 1958, by Italian writer Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. It's basically one noble family's drama around their (for the most part) inability to cope with the 1860 revolution that led to the consolidation of Italian states into the Kingdom of Italy. The family and the titular "Leopard", a minor Sicilian prince, are fictional but apparently based on Lampedusa's ancestors.

It's a costume drama with gorgeous dresses, heaving bosoms, and horses, mostly, plus a little history. It was enjoyable enough to watch, anyway, and it did inspire me to look up some of the actual history.

What I'm watching now:

Just started S2 of Wednesday! We giggled through the entire first episode.

hyounpark has recently started watching the 2022 revival of Quantum Leap, and tonight's episode? Revisited the World Series quake. As somebody who lived through that? ROFL, pedantry ahoy!

Me: "Hi Candlestick! ... wait, happy hour during Game 3 of the Bay Bridge Series? GET UNDER A SOLID DOORWAY NOW."
Me: "WHAT THE HELL YOU WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN ABLE TO SEE THE FERRY BUILDING FROM THERE IN 1989, NOT EVEN WITH THE FREEWAY COLLAPSE."
Me: "You can't get across the Bay in the time you have! The bridge is down, BART is down, that utility tunnel is at least FIVE MILES LONG, and even when you come up on the Oakland side you still have to get through the entire-ass Port of Oakland. And you're playing a white family, highly unlikely they would have lived in West Oakland at the time, so now you have at least another two miles of running to get anywhere where the apartments look like that and you could plausibly have none or very few Black neighbors, and OH WAIT YOU'D HAVE TO CROSS THE CYPRESS STRUCTURE TO DO THAT, which also fell down in the quake! Your 90 minutes are up, tick tick BOOM."
hyounpark: "Watching this ep with you is WAY more entertaining than watching it by myself would have been!"
Me: "And this didn't even account for going back to their new apartment in SF at least two miles in the wrong direction, RUNNING UPHILL, to look for the kid!"

*

The Strategist interviewed Sally Jessy Raphael a few weeks ago on some of her favorite things, and I feel seen.

"Let me explain. The first thing people say when they see me is, “Oh my God, you’re so short.” This is terrible. I am slightly under five feet. This means that if I go to buy grown-up clothes in the store, everything is too long. Everything. Every skirt, every pair of jeans, it doesn’t matter what I pay or where I shop. So, I have pinking shears. Everything I own, I pink with the pinking shears. It doesn’t make sense for me to go to Kohl’s and buy $9 jeans and then send them to be hemmed for $30. In New York, that’s what it costs to hem. So I gave up on having anybody hem them. And I’m having trouble threading my sewing machine. So pinking shears do everything."

I mean, not that I own a pair of pinking shears, but I'm always on the lookout for jeans that are short enough for me off the rack. Usually, they end up being some form of slim-to-straight fit cropped style, but the best pair of jeans I ever had was a flared sort of baby bellbottom style that I got at a clothing swap like 15 years ago. They didn't last terribly long (got holes on the inner thighs within a couple of years), but I loved the hell out of those jeans - they were button-fly (look, I bought my first pair of jeans with my allowance from the Gap in the early 90s and that's what I imprinted on), they had embroidered cuffs, they flared out below MY knee height just enough to balance my curvy hips better than any pair of then-trendy skinnies ever did, and I wore them at least twice a week while I owned them except in summer.

They were my holy grail of jeans, and I've been looking for anything like them ever since. I've tried on jeans from probably every American mass-market brand in the interim, but no. At this point, I own two pairs of Levi's Wedgie Straights because they are not "cropped" and come in a 26" inseam (so the knees hit where they're supposed to), and are suitable for the times when I just need plain old jeans that don't stand out. They are reliable. But they don't feel like ~me~ the same way these old jeans did.

I know the real answer is that I just need to buy a sewing machine and learn how to make my own jeans, but. Sigh.

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.

I have failed to keep up as much as I like/planned, but to be fair, I've been a little busy. I ended up working two days this week (beyond the meeting I had) because they needed help, so I stuffed envelopes like crazy. Fortunately, I am a very good envelope stuffer and stuff-putter-together-er. The past four days have been hockey!hockey!hockey! sort of. I mean, there have been hockey games, but since none of the other volunteers felt like doing the work, it kind of fell to me. I've done my fill of eating out lately though, because groups tend to want to do that.

Still the weekend went well, and by bb!hockeys are adorable, and the training came was filled with baby bb!hockeys. These people were born in 2010. TWO THOUSAND TEN. That makes absolutely no sense at all. They are INFANTS.

School is finished-finished. I turned in the very last assignment just now, and so I'm done. Should get my degree in a little less than a month, and yes please. Will I go on for more schooling? Probably not, but never say never. (I'm saying never). Possibly I will take random classes on line just for fun. Not for a while though. I have a lot of things I need to work on just in life-life without taking that on right now.

Tomorrow is going to see Jordan Klepper, Tuesday is school with the sixth graders and meeting the kids I'm going to spend most of my time working with, and then Wednesday is all the kids, and I'm already tired. I'm going to have to get back on some sort of schedule. Blech.

I'm trying a new exercise program this week. We'll see how it goes. I need to tone/firm up my arms because they are batwings, and I would like them not to be. Anyway. Life continues to be life, which I guess means it's doing its job.

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.