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let them eat fancake

Fancake's Theme for September: Food & Cooking

Photograph of steel spoons and spices in a dramatic setting with added text that gives it the look of a gourmet magazine cover: September 2025. Food & Cooking, at Fancake. Steel teaspoons are arranged in an elogated oval to suggest a fish, with the bowls acting as scales and some of the handles left visible to create the fins and tail, giving the creature a spiky appearance. The concave bowls are dusted with a powdery orange spice for color and one spoon at the front of the fish is filled with a coarse black spice to create an eye. The fish is on a black surface with a rough texture and around it are three skinny green peppers, a mound of salt, a mound of orange spice, and a dipping bowl filled with a clear amber liquid.

It's farm to table—and every stop in between—at

fancake this month! Bring on over your recs for fanworks featuring hunting, farming, ranching, fishing, foraging, grocery shopping, farmer's markets, kitchens, restaurants, cafes, coffee shops, food carts, bars, wineries, breweries, waiters, bartenders, baristas, and, of course, cooking and eating.

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!

We're going to Wales!

Back in the Before Times, Geoff and I tried to take a trip every year. Then COVID hit, and we haven’t done any significant travel in six years. (I mean, that was New Zealand, so if anything was going to have to last us six years, that would be it.) But it’s six years later, we’ve had ten vax shots each, and tomorrow we are leaving for Wales!

travel blather herein

I am, of course, still paranoid about getting ill.

But I have a strategy, because I perseverate a bit on these things

We plan to mask as much as possible in public indoor space, just as we do at home; on my last trip to visit friends I perfected the eating-indoors-in-public method of

1. inhale
2. hold breath
3. unmask
4. take bite
5. replace mask
6. exhale
7. chew and swallow

and while it’s troublesome, on the other hand it seems to have worked. So that’s the plan for the plane flight and long UK train rides. Plus I have a mask with a SIP valve, so I can drink with it on. We’re hoping that we’ll be able to eat many meals outside, but we’ve reached the point of being okay with it if we can’t sometimes on this trip. (I mean, I say that now. I warned Geoff that he’ll have to expect that I’ll freak out a couple of times, that’s just part of the process. I have spent six years deliberately inculcating a phobia in myself! It took me a long time to get over the phobia of semen I deliberately inculcated in myself in the mid-1980s, too, but hey, I have never had either HIV or COVID, so I’m okay with harnessing neurosis, it works for me.)

Also I keep reminding myself of this post that I made long before COVID was a thing; it’s not like it’s the only risk involved in travel!

We’re doing a weeklong hiking trip with a company we’ve traveled with several times before, the kind where they move your luggage from B&B to B&B and you walk all day with a daypack and a lunch. (And hiking poles and raingear and their awesome GPS navigation app.) We love them; in fact, in March 2020 we’d already paid a deposit for a trip that summer, which we never got to take! (They refunded us, of course.) Their system is efficient and clear, we love the places they offer to stay and the routes they have us take, which are sometimes delightfully off the beaten track and are described wonderfully. “Watch out for the muddy bit”; “turn right just past the house with a chicken mural”; “there’s a great spot for a picnic lunch just over the rise”; and so on. Also I have no idea what kind of customer-management software they’ve got on the back end, but in arranging the trip we’ve corresponded with a number of different people, and every single one has been fully up to speed with what we’re doing, what our few special requests are, exactly when and how we’re arriving at the start and departing from the end, and so on. Nobody who has ever navigated customer service hell will take that for granted. And it doesn’t hurt that they’re the most reasonably priced such company I’ve ever found, in the admittedly limited comparison shopping I’ve done.

This walk is quite challenging, and we’re a bit uncertain we can actually do it! They tell you the cumulative uphill distance for each day’s walk, which is sometimes a lot (the worst day has an 820-meter total rise), and some of the days’ hikes are expected to take as much as eight hours, counting rest breaks. If we punk out, though, we can generally arrange to ride with our luggage to the next stop instead of walking to it, and they always make clear when there’s a local bus available, or a way to cut off a loop, or some other shortening option. Geoff and I have both been exercising pretty hard to get in shape for this, but I do think I could have done more.

We leave tomorrow: a friend will give us a ride to the train station, we take a train to Montreal, and then hopefully a free shuttle bus to the airport, but I’ve heard stories that the shuttle is often late or overfull. We can always take a cab, but if the weather is good -- the forecast has been iffy, but right now it looks okay -- we might just walk it. It’s only about half an hour, and it will be the only exercise we get for a couple of days, so the prospect has some appeal! But man, I miss living a twelve-minute drive from a major airport so much.

After we finish that week of heavy hiking, we spend two full days (three nights) in a pair of small coastal towns called Fishguard and Goodwick, where the plan is to spend one day rambling along the coastline, which is supposed to be gorgeous, and the other sea kayaking! There we’re staying on a smallholding that rents out one (1) bedroom as a B&B, and the couple who run it have been incredibly friendly and helpful with recommending activities and restaurants, offering rides (rural public transit is pretty thin on the ground), and so on; also their breakfasts sound amazing, and that’s a thing we always look for when choosing B&Bs! I’m bringing them a half-liter of local maple syrup as a thank-you gift; I don’t generally do that, since it is a business relationship, we exchange currency for goods and services, but they’ve really gone above and beyond, and I mean, they’re only barely a business.

Then we have another three nights in Aberystwyth, and I have very little idea what exactly we’ll do there ~~other than collapse~~, except that the National Library of Wales is there and I want to see what exhibits they have on, and there’s a scenic railway that might be worth checking out. Then one day on the outskirts of London, in a place chosen only because we can catch a coach from there direct to Heathrow the next morning. We’ll land in Montreal in the evening and spend the night in an airport hotel, before catching a train home the next day.

I am the main planner of our trips; Geoff calls me Logistics Girl. Which is fine with me, because I enjoy it, I’m good at it, and when I leave bits for him to do I always want to micromanage anyway, which is stressful for everyone. (But, I mean. I asked him to manage our getting to and from Montreal, while I took primary responsibility for everything on the actual trip; managing the domestic side included deciding whether and how to see his family there and/or ask them for airport rides and/or an overnight stay, and I didn’t want to be the person making those decisions. And he said sure, and absolutely understood that that should be his job. And then he sent me essentially a Google search link for airport hotels and asked which one I’d prefer. And I was like, which part of “I want you to do the work of researching options, weighing them, and choosing the best” did you not understand? I can do a damn Google search myself! I mean, I understand that he wants to be sure that I’m happy with the final choice, and I appreciate that, but then he can do what I do, which is narrow options down and present my top two or three choices, with a quick overview of the pros and cons of each, for him to consider.)

ANYWAY. He did do that after I cranked at him. And in fairness, I've found that I’m quite out of practice at logisticking, myself! Trying to track everything and figure out infinite options and piece together itineraries was unexpectedly stressful: where do we want to go, how will we get there, which railcard is our best option and how do we get it, is the layover time we have a reasonable amount of time in which to navigate this specific station, and on and on. Also so much has changed in the last six years; I never used to have to download umpteen transit apps, but on the other hand it's way easier and cheaper to get a foreign SIM than it used to be. And there has been a ridiculous pile-up of last-minute craziness:

I got a new orthotic this summer, and that meant that my hiking boots didn’t fit, so I needed new boots. Also, usually when you have a prescription orthotic you take the original insole out of the shoe or boot to fit the new one in, but I didn’t want to do that, because that’s where a lot of the padding is, and with the amount of walking I’m going to be doing I did not want to be doing it only on the unpadded sole and the fairly hard orthotic. So I was looking for boots that could fit both. I ended up buying three pairs in a week! First I went shopping and found a good enough pair; not great, but they were there and the store had a generous return policy, so I bought them as a stopgap and kept looking. Then in another store I found a fabulous pair that fit beautifully, but the pair in the store was damaged and they couldn’t get me another one, because the style was discontinued and remaindered. So I searched for it online and found what seemed to be the only pair of women’s 10s left in Canada, at massive discount because discontinued and remaindered, and ordered them with rush shipping -- and when they arrived they didn’t fit, because it turned out the salesman had given me a pair of men’s 10s to try on, instead of the women’s 10s I’d asked for. No wonder there was room for both insoles! And there wasn’t another men’s 10 of that brand and style to be found. But with that info I went back and tried on some other men’s 10s and found a really good pair of Merrell’s, a brand I’ve always had good luck with. The first pair of new boots got returned; the second pair, being discontinued and remaindered, were final sale, but they turned out to fit a friend who also needed new boots; and my old pair, which are still in decent shape, went into the thrift-shop-donation pile.

So that was one bit of craziness. Our long-delayed front porch project is finally going to begin construction while we’re away, which means we had to find somewhere to leave the car because our driveway will have a dumpster in it for construction waste and we’re not allowed to leave the car on the street; but fortunately a house across the way is empty and for sale, and the owner said we can park in his driveway. I started developing a stye like the one I had in the spring that got so bad I needed antibiotic ointment; but happily I still had half a tube of ointment left so I prescribed myself another round of it plus all the hot compresses I could manage, because I did not want to be dealing with an eye infection in rural Wales! I discovered by the merest fluke of luck that a bus service we're relying on was canceled as of Sept. 1, but I managed to find the replacement service, run by a different company, that is mentioned on the new company's Facebook page and nowhere else including not on their website or on any of the travel planning sites, and confirm that we can still make the train we're taking it to. The new bus leaves fifteen minutes earlier than the old bus, so if I hadn't stumbled across that notice we'd probably have been screwed. And then a few days ago I somehow managed to wrench my knee rolling over in bed, I don't even know. But although it hurt like fuck for a few minutes, by the next day it was just a vague ache, and the day after that it was fine. Thank god. I mean, a week before we leave? Argh.

Anyway, my do-before-leaving list has seventy items on it and just over sixty of them are now crossed off; and my packing list has sixty items on it and fifty of them are crossed off -- and many of the rest are things I plan to wear on the plane rather than pack.

All that said, though -- and it’s a lot to say! -- I’m really looking forward to this. Traveling together used to be one of Geoff’s and my great pleasures, and not being able to do it has been one of the great losses of COVID. I want to see amazing sights and eat amazing food and encounter new people. I want to hear Welsh! I want to exhaust myself and feel accomplished about having done so! I want to share all of the above with Geoff!

I also hope to blog the trip here, as much as I can. Stay tuned. But now I gotta go polish off a couple more of those to-dos...

the stinking flower

This past Saturday was the day that four thousand university students arrived in town, making it an excellent day to not be in town! Happily, there's an annual garlic festival on that day, about half an hour north of here, so just as we did last year, Geoff and I headed on up.

it's basically a small farmer's market, only focusing on garlic. I hadn't realized, before we went the first time, that there were that many varieties of garlic! I mean, I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, I'd just never really thought about it. In any case, my palate is not refined enough to bother about the subtle differences in taste among them: slightly sharper, slightly sweeter, slightly earthier, and so on. Also some are better keepers, but I don't try to store garlic for months, I just buy less of it more often, because I'm not farming it. But it's very fun to look around!

Although it's focused on garlic, there's other things on sale as well. Many of the garlic farmers bring a few punnets of veggies as well, and there's a lot of canned and pickled veg for sale. A beekeeper comes with a hive in a glass frame, so it's fun to watch the bees and look for the queen (she's always smaller than I expect her to be). We bought some honey from him last year, which was very good. There's also a soapmaker, and a couple of woodworkers; the friend we went with this year bought a beautiful turned elm bowl from one of them, and also a bud vase of . . . chestnut, I think? a darker wood, anyway, and then he gave her a second bud vase for free! One or two people were selling various knitted things, and for some reason there's also somebody selling bamboo sheet sets.

I tried black garlic, which I would think would be very much the sort of thing I like, and yet I did not like it. One dealer sells honey-garlic tarts, which Geoff tried last year and rather liked, and got another one this year to munch on, but I think they're vile. (And there's not a lot of food I think that about!) On the other hand, someone was selling jars of candied jalapeno slices, which have nothing in particular to do with garlic except I imagine they would go well with garlic; they're not candied in the sense of being entirely sugar-coated and sticky, they're more a very sweet (and spicy) pickle? We tasted them (all the dealers give out samples, because they're not dumb) and they were delicious. I asked the seller what he does with them, and he said they were great on nachos and grilled cheese sandwiches, and I said, "I guess I'm making nachos this week!" and bought a jar. I did indeed make nachos the next night, and they were indeed fantastic. Next I'll try them on on barbecue chicken pizza...and they look pretty easy to make as a refrigerator pickle, so I'll be looking up some recipes!

Beauty

There was a time in my life where I would not articulate what I wanted or needed from people, and then would take their "inability" to provide what I wanted or needed as evidence that I was fucked up and broken.

This coalesced a lot around birthdays, especially in my 20s. I wanted to be made a fuss of, but never told anyone that yes, I would like a card, or yes, cake would be great, or yes, why don't you come over, and then I would feel lonely and isolated and sink further into dark places when there wasn't a 76-trombone parade on September 3rd.

I learned over time to state my needs and make plans. Buy a cake! Invite people over. Life is so much simpler when it's not an elaborate guessing game you're secretly making people play. And I no longer worry that I won't have a fun day on my birthday because I not only tell other people "hey come on over!" but I do things for myself too! Bonus!

This is all by way of saying I have an enormous bunch of flowers in front of me which I bought for myself for tomorrow, and they are making me so happy. Because not only are they gorgeous, and richly scented, they match the color scheme of my living room because that's what I asked for - purples, creams, and lots of greenery. And my neighbor is the florist, so it's a lovely celebration of her artistry, too.

Other happy things - a plumber has been here all day working on my downstairs bathroom. Said bathroom is literally a former coat closet - there are still coat hooks on the wall (which I should take down). My plumber's best guess is that it was changed to a tiny little toilet nook in the 60s, and that the toilet has been there since at least the 70s. There's no sink, and so for the last several years I've had a little Japanese-tank sink, where you hook it up so that the clean water coming into the toilet tank first flows through a faucet so you can wash your hands. It's neat, and it saves water, but washing your hands with ice-cold water in, say, January is not awesome. And the toilet tank is enormous - newer toilets are so much more water efficient.

So I'm having the toilet taken out and replaced with a taller, efficient model, and a tiiiiiiny little sink plumbed in. The sink is 7 inches wide and 12 inches long, and it is adorable. I'm having hot and cold water plumbed in, and the bathroom will be so much more usable as of tomorrow!

Plumber has worked super hard all day, and has so much done. All the basement work is finished, and he's finishing up the water lines before he leaves for the day. He was listened to Eminem earlier this morning, but then switched to The Andrews Sisters. He is maaaaaybe 30 years old, and was singing harmonies with 1940s hits. I am so charmed.

And lastly ( I watched Thunderbolts yesterday and adored it. Spoilers ahead )

Pride!

Yesterday a friend and I went to see Pride, the 2014 movie about the queer support of the 1984 miners' strike in Britain. I'd heard wonderful things about it but never seen it, and the local film society had organized a showing for Labor Day, so off we went!

It was indeed excellent, really powerful and moving. I started getting chills at the opening music, and my friend and I both wept through parts of it. I hadn't thought about the juxtaposition of the AIDS crisis and the miners' crisis, but omg, I was flashing back to what it was like in the late 80s (even for me, and I'm not claiming to have been heavily involved in queer activism or at the heart of the catastrophe or anything. But I was queer, and I did live through that period, and I had friends who didn't...) I thought the movie did a great job of integrating the two ongoing concerns, especially with Mark's encounter with his friend at the club; that was a heartbreaking moment. The acting was spectacular, as was some of the scenery.

Thinking about the film the next day, I'm a little dissatisfied with how much of the story was simplified for the movie: we see so little of what LGSM actually did that the arrival of 5–10(?) busloads of miners at the 1985 Pride march seems wildly disproportionate. They're coming from places and union locals that we never saw LGSM interacting with or supporting. I wanted to see more about the lesbian-only group. Also, I disliked how Joe apparently teleported from London to Wales on his own just for the sake of a confrontation between him and Mark; I found that implausible even while watching it.

But the movie has prompted me to go look up some of the actual history, so I call that a win! And I really enjoyed it. Also I've watched a bunch of Bronski Beat videos today...

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2539 / Borstal Boy; Ludwig, S1

( Borstal Boy )

( Ludwig, S1 )

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men of steel

Suddenly, in Smallville...

My Smallville fics have been doing modest numbers over at AO3 for weeks now, due to, I can only assume, the new Superman movie. I've never had my old fics gain such sudden and sustained popularity because of a new installment to canon; in fact, this didn't happen with the previous Superman movies. Not that I was paying attention, but didn't Zach Snyder release like three of them? Or the same one three times? IDK you hear things.

Anyway, it's delightful that people are finding and enjoying my Smallville fics even if I have no idea how they're doing it. It's not like they're going to end up at the top of any filter sorted by engagement....or date.

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.

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.

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What We Do In The Shadows (2019-2024)

Last night I finished watching What We Do In The Shadows, and this morning I was sweeping up the kitty litter from the floor, just like I do every morning, and the kitten was there helping me by grabbing the broom, just like he does every morning, and as I raised the broom above his head, explaining that I was trying to sweep, I could hear Guillermo and that tired, flat voice he gets whenever he's trying to explain literally anything to the vampires.

Cats and vampires: Neither of them understands, or cares, what you're saying. And they hiss when they're angry.

historical farm life

Thanks to

dorinda, I've been introduced to the BBC's historical farm series, in which a historian and a couple of archeologists spend a year working a farm as it would have been worked in some historical period, ranging from WWII to the Tudor era. I really like them! They're not deep history, but seeing how things work in practice (what does it look like, feel like, smell like to thatch a roof? make cheese? light a coal range?) is fascinating, and the people doing it are delightful. It's generally the same three in all the series, with a couple others popping in -- I'm really sorry Chloe Spencer, who was in the first series, didn't return for the later ones, because I really liked her, and it was nice to see two women working together; after that it's just Ruth Goodman, the historian, with a couple of men. (Except that her daughter, a specialist in historical clothing, sometimes joins her, which is very fun!)

I love how the reenacters interact with each other. They all get along, and there's no manufactured tension, just occasional gentle joshing, as when Peter lost the dice throw and had to be the one to dig out the seventeenth-century-style privy they'd been using. ("This job is grim," he tells the camera.) The food is especially interesting to me! It looks more varied and tastier than I'd often have expected; obviously most of the recipes that survive from the earlier periods are on the luxe end, and they're portraying fairly well-off farmers, but even so, when you're sticking to period ingredients and cooking methods (no cooking oil or fat other than animal fat! sealing the oven door with flour-and-water paste!), I was expecting a bit more, well, pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold, you know? Which, to be fair, they do also eat. And the WWII urgency to massively increase domestic food production, which (not being British) I didn't really know about, drives that series in fascinating ways -- as do the effects of rationing.

It took me a long time to think, wait, are they really drinking raw milk in all these early-set series? It sure looks like it! At the beginning of the first series, I think it was, which reenacts 1620, the voiceover notes that, due to modern health and safety laws, they can't actually live in the cottage; but then later on they do seem to be living in it, given that they're using the privy at night (and washing clothes with ammonia derived from their own rotted urine), so I'd love to know more about that kind of behind-the-scenes stuff. Sometimes I almost yelp "At least tie a cloth over your faces!" when they're doing something like sweeping out decades of powdery dried birdshit from cottage rafters. (Did you know that the wing of a goose makes an excellent duster! I do, now!) But in general I trust that they took reasonable safety precautions, despite the occasional offhand comment about falling off a roof or being butted by a cow...and anyway the shows are 12-20 years old, so it's too late to worry about it!

But they're pleasant and interesting and warmly human and I recommend them to anyone who might like that kind of thing, because it's the kind of thing you might like! Also some of the scenery and cinematography is gorgeous.

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book report

Fly Trap, by Frances Hardinge

The continued adventures of runaway orphan Mosca Mye, her horrible goose, and Eponymous Clent, poet, thief, conman, and mentor.

This does a neat job of reminding the reader of the events and personages of the previous book, Fly By Night, while introducing a whole new city and its dark underworld. I enjoyed it even more than the first book. It's tense and inventive and the story doesn't let up for a second, with always something meaningful at stake.

Recommended! Though you'll probably want to read the first book first.

Contains: childbirth; incarceration; children in peril; rigidly enforced class system.

it's been way too long

have a recipe! I've made this twice in the last week or so, it's freaking fantastic.

Roasted Squash and Kale Salad

2 delicata squash
olive oil
2 bunches kale
¼ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp smoked paprika
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
⅛ ground cloves
⅛ cayenne pepper or red pepper flakes
½ Tbsp brown sugar
1 cup pecans, roughly chopped
½ cup dried cranberries
½ red onion, minced
2 Tbsp maple syrup
1 Tbsp Dijon mustard
1 Tbsp balsamic vinegar
1 tsp lemon juice

Preheat oven to 425°F. Halve the squash lengthwise, scoop out seeds, and slice into half-inch-thick semicircles. Toss squash pieces with a little olive oil and spread them on a couple of baking trays (I use silicone baking mats), overlapping as little as possible. Bake about 25 minutes, until some pieces are browning on top; flip them halfway through if you like. When they come out, dump them into a large bowl.

Meanwhile, strip the kale leaves from the stems and roughly chop the leaves. (I generally dice the stems and save them for soup or the like, but you can also dice them and use them here, or just toss them if you're not a fan.) When the squash comes out of the oven, pile the kale on the baking trays, drizzle the piles with a little olive oil, and toss and massage the leaves with your hands (watching out for the hot tray underneath) until they're well coated and a bit tender. Bake the leaves in the same oven until wilted and crisp in some spots, about 5-10 minutes. When they come out, add them to the bowl with the squash.

Meanwhile, combine the cinnamon, paprika, nutmeg, cloves, cayenne pepper, and brown sugar in a small bowl, add the nuts and 1 or 2 tablespoons olive oil, and toss to coat. When the kale comes out of the oven, spread the nuts on the baking trays (here is where a baking mat is great, since otherwise melting sugar might stick) and bake them in the same oven until toasted and candied, about 5 minutes. Add them to the squash and kale; be sure to scrape in any coating that has come off the nuts. Add the cranberries as well.

Meanwhile, in the same bowl in which you mixed the nuts and their coating (which surely still has a fair bit of leftover coating mix in it), whisk together the onion, maple syrup, mustard, balsamic vinegar, and lemon juice. Whisk in more olive oil, anything from another couple tablespoons to a quarter-cup. Taste and adjust. When you have it as you like it, pour the dressing over the salad and toss everything together. Eat warm or at room temperature.

Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

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.

Entry tags:

listen to this

myNoise.net update

While I was away from my keyboard at the start of the year, Dr. Stéphane Pigeon was busy creating a bunch of new soundscapes! Here's a round up of all the new generators he's posted this year:

The Nyquist Frontier: An electronic music generator that sounds like it's coming straight to you from the 1980s. I felt like The Pet Shop Boys were about to start singing at any moment. Comes with a little history lesson about synthesizers.

Glacier Lagoon: Recorded in Iceland! Lots of different water noises here, including ice. Play around with the sliders to combine them. I like the "Fresh Water" presets with lapping waves and some of the underwater recordings (the four on the right) thrown in.

Flock Of Flutter: Well, this isn't what it sounds like at all. It's not birds, it's a Swiffer duster attached to a motor that causes it to brush against crumpled kraft paper, creating a warm white noise (though perhaps closer to what's called pink noise), similar to the steady hum of a fan.

Organic White: A white noise generator created from carefully selected recordings of wind and rain. Unlike synthetic white noise, which is unchanging, this has a bit more texture and variation to it.

Indigo Amanita: Dr. Pigeon's attempt at Goa Trance, which I'm unfamiliar with, but is, apparently, a genre of electronic dance music that originated in the early 1990s in the Indian state of Goa. It's upbeat.

Floating: From Dr. Pigeon's description: An ambient soundscape for deep relaxation, Floating avoids rhythm and melody, using slowly evolving textures and warm low-frequency tones to help the mind slow down by removing musical expectations.

Upstream: This soundscape traces the path of a waterfall back to its source, a small stream.

Uganda Tales: Recorded on the shores of Lake Victoria in Uganda. I recommend trying the presets to experience the many different pairings of natural sounds, music, and human speech this soundscape offers.

Glacier Chorus: More from Iceland. This time it's underwater sounds recorded in a glacier lagoon. Dr. Pigeon writes, "At times, you might think you're hearing birds or sea creatures. But these sounds don't come from any animals. They all are the voice of the glacier itself. As the glacier melts, the ice cracks and groans under its own heavy weight and small rocks that were once frozen inside are freed and tumble down the ice. Underwater, tiny air bubbles that were trapped in the ice pop and fizz as they escape."

Gong Bath — ft. Reggie Hubbard: A meditation in vibrations, taken from a live recording during a public sound bath at Kripalu. Dr. Pigeon writes, "These are not sounds that say, 'everything is fine.' These are sounds that ask questions. That challenge your sense of ease. That's why gongs are so powerful in meditation: they don't lull you — they awaken you. They agitate the quiet — revealing what usually lies buried beneath." Which is a very generous way to say that this sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie.

The Architect's Eclipse: Space ambient music. This one sounds like a more relaxed version of the soundtrack to the movie Cube.

Icelandic Shores: A sea, wind, and rain noise generator. Very similar vibes to that of the beloved Irish Coast Soundscape, only recorded in Iceland. This is for you if you like your beaches cold and windy.

Now we're all caught up!

If you want to keep up with the myNoise news, Dr. Pigeon has left corporate social media, but there are plenty of other ways to get updates. You can follow myNoise.net on Mastodon or wherever you access the Fediverse. You can subscribe to his mailing list that notifies you of new soundscapes. Or you can follow the myNoise RSS feed in your favorite RSS reader or here at Dreamwidth at

mynoise_feed.