(no subject)

Aug. 26th, 2025 05:39 am
impy: (almost neon bats)
[personal profile] impy
Oh how I hate it when I wake up feeling fine and then slowly develop a headache. I'd normally think it's a lack of caffeine, but *gestures to drink* or weather, but I'm pretty sure we're currently not in the impending rain situation that would normally create such joy. So... dunno. Just lucky, I guess. Or waited a smidge too long before eating.


Anyway, I spent my weekend alternating between being a lump (sometimes for fun, sometimes because I felt like crap) and cleaning/pulling out the Halloween stuff that lives inside instead of in the storage shed. I did the writing desk a couple of weeks ago and it still makes me happy to look over and see it. I might add some lights at some point and maybe just leave as it is, but I might also add some JOLs or something. We'll see.

Yesterday the cat and I worked on two of the three pieces of furniture in the hallway that I decorate. Dusted and straightened the bookcase by the bathroom (Adora hopped up on the shelf I cleared off to inspect my work), then put some of the stuff from the tower on top. This isn't done by any means but I do dig the look for now.

Then I learned that Mums has changed her opinion on the little chest of drawers in the hallway. Once upon a time she loathed it nearly as much as I did, but for whatever reason we didn't get rid of it. Yesterday I argued that the home owners didn't care about it, but now I wonder if maybe I'm misremembering and we kept it because they played the "we understand if you HAVE to get rid of it but if you don't, we'd appreciate it" card. But I still think it was basically just really fucking heavy and we didn't have anything else that worked as a good place to drop mail, keep towels for the downstairs bathroom, etc.

For the last couple of weeks I've been lowkey plotting to replace it but haven't found anything suitable because I am not a farmhouse girly and I don't particularly like overly modern/plain shit. Gimme some personality, dammit. In a perfect, non bed bug worrying world, I'd go secondhand and find something that way. But fuck bedbugs, man. Not going through that shit.

Anyway, I asked Mums whether she'd given any thought to it as a what if scenario. Blank stare. Tried again. Multiple ways. Eventually I thought to ask if she even wanted it replaced anymore. No, she likes it. It grew on her over time.


Nooooooooooooooooooo.... this little bastard weighs a ton, has three drawers that hold absolutely nothing (two thin towels and they're done! Poof! Outta room!), and if you don't have it positioned just right, the front door slams into it OR you just know if you fall down the stairs you will hit your head on the corner and die.


I hate it. I didn't even realize how much I'd grown to hate it until recently when it finally occurred to me that I could replace it. UGH.

So for now, I've replaced the sheet that covers the box of books that haven't made it to proper shelving (we've got a lot of books, dude, I don't know what to tell you) and the random box of holiday lights, popped my trio of ghosts on top and then immediately groaned when Widget put his stuff on it after work. My art, man. Which is another reason I want to replace this thing. So I can decorate and still have it be useful. We shall see what I find, I guess. Maybe I'll find something that we both (all?) love.

For now I shall seethe in silence.
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

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.

pronker: barnabas and angelique vibing (Default)
[personal profile] pronker posting in [community profile] findthatbook
Chapters delineated the various Scandinavians in funny color illustrations, a section on each Danish, Norwegian, Swedish or Icelandic group, accompanied by appropriate paragraphs of descriptions in the fashion of a bestiary. The group I remember best are the Icelandic peoples because special attention revealed pride in their last name customs, Althingi, and generally posing as "super-Scandinavians." It may have been coffee-table-sized? Anyway, it was hilarious; I completely blank on the title. Thanks for any help!

Random indeed

Aug. 25th, 2025 01:56 am
impy: (hallo-kitty)
[personal profile] impy
Anyone else sit down to do something and wind up unexpectedly falling into a pit of fandom scrolling? It's not doomscrolling, it's realizing people have basically been screenshotting tumblr/twitter/wherever and uploading that to Pinterest and then discussing things there. I didn't realize how much of a thing this was until recently, and even then I don't think it fully set in until this morning when I sat down for my morning flip through the emails, landed on a Pinterest one, and fell down a three hour long rabbit hole of my fandoms co-mingling there.

Mostly it was Yellowjackets stuff, including the original pitch deck for the show and boy howdy was that a fun thing to flip through, but occasionally, as Pinterest likes to do, it'd remember that I will also lose entire hours to Interview with the Vampire fanart/stuff, so it decided to COMBINE them. Because of course there's gonna be crossover beyond just me.

So the first two hours involved me telling myself the lie that I was just gonna look at these three open tabs and not click anything else (liiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeessssssssss), and then just as I was actually closing the extra tabs, Pinterest's like, "sooooooooo... how 'bout some vampires?" and once I indulged them on that, suddenly it was like, "hey, what about Monster High and a crossover with MLP?" and I spent a good solid four minutes wondering why, in an otherwise YJ feed, there was an Apple White (from Ever After High) meme. Like it was a solid choice, but it was also very much missing the opportunity to put Jackie (from YJ) in it and I spent those four minutes wondering if I was just somehow missing her.

Post-work me is not the smartest, ok?

I'd probably have been there longer had I actual snacks to consume at the time, so there's that.

What rabbit holes do you fall down? Tell me so I feel less alone. I know you've done it at least occasionally!
impy: (BSC: MA loves)
[personal profile] impy
I guess with my unexpected night off, I can get back to the AG new-ness? We'll see if I blow this off because I want to read or the power goes weird. (Don't go weird, power.)


I posted awhile back about the AG ragdoll plush dolls and how they were coming and also gonna be stupidly expensive for what they are, and they dropped yesterday. They are absolutely stupidly expensive (fuck you, Tangerine Terror!) but they are also cute as a fuckin' button so we're gonna take a moment to acknowledge the insane price point being insane due to it being AG and also the state of the fucking union and then we're gonna concentrate on literally everything else. say fuck one more time, self.

Okay, let's go. We're gonna start with the plush dolls and when time permits, I'll either edit with the Disney stuff I've missed or just make another post.

I just wanna squish them all! )

Lord of the Far Island

Aug. 20th, 2025 01:36 pm
vintageromancereader: (Default)
[personal profile] vintageromancereader

Lovely Ellen Kellaway knew very little about her past. Orphaned as a child and taken in by her arrogant mean-minded cousin as a "poor relation," she was grateful when the handsome young son of a wealthy family asked for her hand. But mysteriously, the marriage never took place.

Ellen was unexpectedly rescued from a bleak future by a summons from her newly discovered guardian, Jago Kellaway, Lord of the Far Island, off the wild coast of Cornwall.

There, on the special island of the Kellaways, Ellen was drawn deeper and deeper into the secrets of a past as alive and threatening as the present. There the enigmatic Jago Kellaway offered her the fabled Island Necklace worn by the mistress of Kellaway Castle. Was it a promise of happiness - or a dark symbol of death?


Original Publisher: Fawcett
Original Year of Publication: 1975
Page Count: 320

The August 2025 #TBRChallenge is "Do the Hustle." My mind immediately went to the song, which is not exactly conducive to my personal Mount TBR, LOL. So I decided to pick a book from the mountain that was released the same year as the song. I actually had a couple of choices, and settled fairly quickly on this one. Victoria Holt + Cornwall = 1000% my jam!

Ellen Kellaway is a twenty-year-old Poor Relation, and she has never been allowed to forget this fact. Her mother left her father when she was 3 years old, returning to the home of her mother (Ellen's grandmother), and tragically died a few years later. Grandmother wasn't too long for this mortal coil, either, and when she passed away, Ellen passed into the hands of her mother's distant cousin, Agatha. Agatha enjoys doing good works, and being seen doing good works, hence taking the poor orphan child into her home.

Ellen was a companion for Esmerelda, Agatha's only child. Esmerelda, like everyone else in Agatha's vicinity, is cowed by her mother's overbearing dominance. Ellen is the only one who is not intimidated by Agatha, and she grows up to be pretty resilient, considering she is expected to perform gratitude 24/7 to Agatha for the roof over her head, the clothes on her back, and the education she's given by being allowed to share in Esmerelda's lessons.

Agatha has Great Plans for Esmerelda, which basically culminate in wanting her to marry one of the sons of the great Carrington family. The son that is the girls' age, Philip, is introduced to them when they are tweens. Philip takes an immediate dislike to the milquetoast Esmerelda, but Ellen's fiery personality won't let him get the best of her. The three of them grow up together, and Agatha is carefully maneuvering her plans so that at Esmerelda's coming-out ball, it is expected that her engagement to Philip will be announced, thus linking their two families.

Ellen is not given a coming-out ball; in fact, she is given a big push out of the house towards a governess post with Agatha's friend and the equally odious Mrs Oman Lemming. Agatha is desperate for Ellen not to outshine her daughter (though Esmerelda herself wouldn't mind in the least). But it is much to everyone's surprise when, on the night of the ball, Philip proposes to Ellen instead, insisting that he's loved her since they were children and no one would make him happier. Ellen is not in love with Philip, but she certainly can see that marriage to a dear friend would be a much better fate than being a governess for the notoriously awful Mrs Lemming.

So plans are made and are moving smoothly. Philip finds a house he'd like to rent so that when they are married, they have their own place. Ellen does not like the house - she gets a really awful gut feeling and can barely even step foot in the place. She's starting to second-guess her decision to marry so young, to someone equally young, especially knowing her mother's marriage was not happy.

Six days before the wedding, Philip is shot and killed. It is ruled a suicide, but Ellen fervently believes he was murdered.

Her life is now falling apart. Agatha crowing all the while that she knew the marriage would never actually happen; Philip's brother accuses Ellen of being the reason he killed himself; Ellen herself has a horrible fall over Dead Man's Leap (though she is caught on a bush instead of tumbling to her death); and it seems she has no choice but to go with Mrs Lemming after all. Only - she receives a mysterious note in the mail, claiming to be from her long-lost father's family, inviting her to "the far island" to meet her relatives. She immediately decides to do this, even though it means leaving poor Esmerelda and Philip's family behind, and walking into a great unknown.

Ellen has never been told anything about her family of origin, other than her father basically ran her mother off. She travels to Cornwall to await a boat ride to the island a few miles off the coast, and she immediately starts asking questions of the locals. She learns that Jago Kellaway, the head of her family and lord and master of the isle, is feared and respected. Nobody wants to talk about her late father OR her mother, but she is desperate for answers. She gets a nasty surprise when she meets Jago Kellaway for the first time - he is a man she met in London, who claimed to be a "connection" of the Carrington family, who followed her around and even cornered her in the creepy house. Jago explains their (distant) familial relationship and starts pressuring her to forget her past and move forward with her future, there on the island with him.

The island is lovely, and Ellen is able to settle there, but there are lots of mysteries poking at her from the gothic castle interior. What really happened to her mother? Did her father really not care for children? Why did he not seek her out until he was dying? Who is the mysterious "SK", whose journals Ellen finds in her room? And why are the only other female members of the family watching her so closely and jealously guarding their own relationships with people from the mainland?

This is a deliciously gothic story with a refreshingly bright heroine who knows what she's about. She is very resilient and has common sense, enough to know that Philip didn't really commit suicide, and that Jago is not all he appears to be. She knows that he is pressuring her to marry him and stay on the island, but she's not going to give in until she learns the truth about her family - even, and especially, him.

The plot moves at a fairly steady clip throughout. Ellen not only has a powerful gut feeling about places, but she's also had a recurring dream of a certain room since she was a child, and she is more curious than even to discover if its a real place once she lands on the island and starts exploring her mother's history. I pretty much figured out all the links in the chain from the moment "SK" surfaces in the story, but it was still fun to go along for the ride with Ellen as she doggedly pursues her goal.

I was not much of a fan of Jago, unfortunately. He is somehow "only thirty" but grew up with Ellen's father (???) and he has a habit of being melodramatic all the time. He really pushes Ellen to marry him fairly quickly, and when the reasons why surface (she is the actual heiress to her father's estate, not him, which would make her incredibly wealthy and give her control of the island, which he has made known far and wide he considers his own personal kingdom), I liked him even less. Ellen deserved better than him.

Still, this was a good read. If you enjoy Holt's gothics you will gobble this one up.


⭐⭐⭐ 1/2

fucking finally

Aug. 19th, 2025 03:05 am
impy: (minako: freakout good)
[personal profile] impy
It's a freakin' miracle, baby. I went through last night, on a whim, and sorted my swatch sticks. Finally. I can't say they're 100% done because they aren't ~perfect~, but they're all on rings with their friends in approximate color groups. I'd been making little steps forward on this, as I went through every couple of months and would tackle a color group and then add in any of the swatch sticks I had from my latest round of swatching.

Problem is, I mostly had left my purples til the end. Do you know what my favorite color is? What polish color I will buy, knowing full well I have eleventy-billion at home but who cares because this one is just so pretty?

FUCKING. PURPLE.

*cries*

I did learn that for someone who leans really hard into the blue leaning purples, the colors that gave me the biggest jolt of serotonin were bright purples with a reddish shimmer.

I also re-learned that I don't like certain things in polish, but I'm too lazy to try and word this properly, so at some point I'll either take pictures or look up examples of what I mean. Thankfully, some of these I have remembered over the past year or two, like purples with red/blue glitter or shimmer particles that are big enough to make out each piece. I just don't like it and I dunno why.

There was also a moment when I feared I'd lost most of my blue swatch sticks and would have to re-swatch all of them and nearly freaked out because blue is my second biggest color group. Luckily, I remembered I'd put them someplace "safe" since I'd mostly finished sorting them earlier this year.


If memory serves, so long as you don't count black/white/grey, or metallics like bronze/gold, my smallest color group is yellow by a laaaaaaaaaaaaaaarge margin. Even if you added the golds and other similar metallics, yellow is still the smallest group. This makes total sense because I look like ass in yellow and yellow polishes are notorious for having terrible formulas, or at least requiring three coats minimum, and while I'm no longer requiring one coat wonders, I do not have the patience for three coats of a color that's gonna look like shit on me from the jump.

Pinks are the next smallest and only as large as they are because I lump in pinky reds and pinky purples, and also because for a short period of time I told myself I could buy any pink I wanted, within reason, because I KNEW I didn't have very many pinks at all. Orange used to be until I realized I do, in fact, love certain shades of orange. I do not like oranges with pink shimmers though, and when I told Mums, she cheerfully said, "Peach!" and then we both mentioned corals. I buy corals and peaches for Mums and because the color reminds me of her, but most of the time I don't wear them because they look like ass on me. But circling back to the pink shimmer oranges, I really did mean a good orange polish with a pink shimmer. I have a couple I either bought before I realized this or without realizing it had a pink shimmer in the first place. Booooo.


Reds and greens are in the middle for different reasons. Reds probably have a higher percentage than they would normally because red is a color I've been gifted a few times, or it'll be part of a collection and if I'm buying the whole collection, I'm gonna wind up with a red, and reds pop up in pretty much every season because reds sell. I don't wear a ton of reds though, but the ones I love, I love HARD.

Greens I allow myself a decent amount of leeway with because green polishes are harder to come by and I like to encourage brands to freakin' release them. They're also the one color I can almost always guarantee I'll kick myself for not buying later (Talking about you, Essie's Sweater Weather). Greens also have a bigger array of color variations than reds, and there are some I don't mess with much (so sorry, Swampy Greens), and there are some you can guarantee I'll be diving into with wild abandonment (hello, blue leaning green glitters) so that helps things.

In general, the easiest/happiest ones to sort were the blacks (huzzah!) and the silvers, as both provided me a happy little selection of pretties that at some point I know full well my dumbass is gonna swatch on a wheel and then stare at it happily.



At this point, this is what I have left to do:

- Figure out which polishes haven't been swatched at all.
   I *think* this is just my last two Holo Taco orders, so that shouldn't be terrible. eta: yup, just the last two HT orders.

- Figure out which polishes need to be re-swatched.
   Apparently some Revlon polishes and topcoats have a chemical reaction with certain swatch sticks, so that sometime later they get this white film on them and it's annoying as shit. I need to go through and figure out which ones are affected by the topcoat issue and also see if just putting another brand of topcoat over will work (eta: iffy) or if that'll just be a waste of time, either because the film will get stuck between layers and ruin everything or just go through the new topcoat anyway.
   Also, some polishes in general kind of eat away at the swatch sticks but if you do a gel layer on the stick first, it'll negate that. I need to see if it's something I can do after the fact (doubtful) or if I just need to re-swatch the toppers and any unfortunate others. (gonna need to just flat out redo these, using the gel topcoat first, then painting)
   Finally, any polishes I painted on the underside of the swatch sticks probably just need to be redone in general because of either the aforementioned problems or humidity made them bubble. There's a polish that also turned funky on the swatch stick and I need to redo that one or see if the polish itself turned. Like a blue turned browny-orange. It's ugly as hell and the only reason I haven't gone hunting for it already is because it's from a brand I don't fuck with anymore so it's low on the priority list.

- Acquire more rings of the correct size.
  As it is, I have some on really big, too thick rings and a lot of the smaller rings are too full to add anything. Whenever I do go back through and fix things, I do think I will just go ahead and sort out polishes by finish types for the most part with the exceptions being any where I specifically want to keep similar colors together so I can compare them, regardless of finish.

- Figure out how to store/display them properly.
  This'll be easier once I get them on proper rings but I'd kinda like to figure this one out sooner rather than later.

- Figure out storage for the collection proper.
  I still think the various Helmers/not!Helmers aren't all that pretty but I don't really want to find a piece of furniture I love only to realize the hard way that the drawers cannot hold the polish. That would just not be a fun day. I suppose if I do go the Helmer route, I can just put the swatch sticks in the top drawer.


I figure my next polish play day that isn't swatching the HT polishes (I might do that today), will either be going through the sticks and writing down which polishes to yoink for re-swatching purposes, or just grabbing the toppers in general and going in on that, though that'll depend on whether I've got a gel TC for this.

(no subject)

Aug. 17th, 2025 09:15 am
impy: (eye roll)
[personal profile] impy
I liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiive.

But I'm not sure this will continue to be the case if work fucks up the AC system. Dude in a yellow vest game in Friday morning saying they were there to fix the AC. Okay, cool, which one? Hopefully the pharmacy one since it hasn't worked properly in eons and also there's a goddamn flood situation going on in the electrical room.

All of them, he says. All five.


I... uh... is this one of those situations where if you fix two of the three, it'll break the other three because otherwise I am confused. E back in pharmacy, A, and I all say that if they break the goddamn AC, we're not coming in. SM assures E it'll be fine. Yeah, Friday night the front of the store was nice and cool, but when I started to straighten up the side of the store I hadn't been on much previously, I realized the AC over there definitely wasn't working. Like possibly at all. o_O


Last night I notice the windows are all fogged up before I even get there and when I walk in, it's COLD. Like I'm almost on the "too cold" side, but not quite. The air is blasting and they must have fans on because you can feel it. Before I left this morning, they were back.

I'm worried due to what I've heard about how they run the AC in other stores. Then again, I gather one of the stores downtown hasn't had working AC this summer and every time they try and get some help, the first question is, "AC fixed? No? Then no."


Working on finishing reading Phantasma. For a book about being locked in a Hell house of sorts, there sure is a fuckton of sex.

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