notable quotables

Sep. 1st, 2025 01:10 am
ursamajor: droppin' the ball (d'oh)
[personal profile] ursamajor
[personal profile] 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."
[personal profile] 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.

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.

Page generated Sep. 9th, 2025 08:45 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios