The First Labor Day Parade

Sep. 1st, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

The First Labor Day Parade
New York City’s Manhattan Island was the site of the nation’s first Labor Day parade on September 5, 1882.

Read More...

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise 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.

Haze Sweeps Over the Mediterranean

Aug. 31st, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Haze Sweeps Over the Mediterranean
An oblique photo from the International Space Station captured haze spilling from valleys in Italy and France and streaming south along the Italian peninsula.

Read More...

Sex Education, Season 4

Aug. 30th, 2025 08:48 pm
[personal profile] swaldman
I finally finished this, what must be years after it came out.

It wasn't a patch on the first season. Or even on S2/3. There were some really cringy episodes where I had to stop watching, and force myself to finish later.

I feel that Otis's story was largely told somewhere during S3, with parts left to close out. Maeve's story had a little left, but not a lot. This season was mostly about Eric, and also about Jean. And that's fine. They had significant and worthwhile stuff to tell, and I think it would have worked better if it had pivoted to being more about them. But they kept the focus on Otis even though there wasn't much more to say with him except as part of others' journeys, and that led to some really stupid contrived plotlines and so forth.

Still, it was a nice ending. I was pleased that there was some resolution and optimism for everybody, but that it wasn't happily ever after for everybody concerned.

Stopped moving for a little while

Aug. 30th, 2025 03:35 pm
ashkitty: (in a hole in the ground)
[personal profile] ashkitty
This summer has been crazy - July was the Gender and Medieval Studies conference and then the Celtic Studies summer school in Dublin, which was a lot - I don't remember the last time I had a full day of classes in anything, let alone Old Irish. But it was good, and fun, and I closed the whole thing out by turning up to a Kpop dance class - it's a thing I started doing during the pandemic when I couldn't go to the beach, and the teacher whose Youtube videos I was using is based in Dublin. So I thought as long as I was in the right city I'd go in person. It was great fun.

Then I met up with my sister to go travelling. We went to Helsinki and Stockholm, respectively, to visit some of my old Aber friends who now live in those places. Then she came back to Aber with me for a week, during which she was mostly sick and not up to doing much.

I came down with the same nasty cold just as she was leaving, and have mostly just been resting since. Not quite the productive resting week I'd hoped for, because I'm really supposed to be submitting a revised article this week and have just not had the brain power to finish it. Another conference next week (down to Bristol, where I'm not giving a paper but am on the society's committee so going anyway), and two more (where I am presenting) by mid-October. So I guess this is the rest I'm going to get.

Otherwise trying to enjoy being employed while it lasts, since the market for academics doing historical gender studies is frankly not at its best right now. One year to go.

Five Minutes in Orbit

Aug. 29th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Five Minutes in Orbit
An astronaut captured a moonrise—and much more—in a series of photos taken from the International Space Station.

Read More...

The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh

Aug. 28th, 2025 05:48 pm
[personal profile] swaldman
It wasn't until I finished this book that I realised that it's the same author as Some Desperate Glory. It's very different, but knowing that it was written by the same person I can start to see similarities.

It's a magical school. We've had lots of them already. It's an ancient(ish) magical school in England, in what appears to be a parallel world where magic is normal and acknoweldged and something that you can do a GCSE in. It's yet another magical school, but this time it is written from the perspective of the deputy head. The author is a teacher, writing what she knows, and this shows. She gets it. The best way I can think to describe the tone of the narrative is, paraphrasing slightly,

"No, your squad of demon hunters can't take these children to a place of safety. You don't have DBS checks! In fact you haven't even shown me ID".

There's a good plot, and it was a quick and intense read for me. Beyond that it's about identity. Specifically, identity for a middle-aged woman who has given her life to her job, has excelled, and isn't sure what else is left. It's about trauma, self-awareness, responsiblity, and hubris.

Highly recommended, and special thanks to [personal profile] sfred who recommended it to me.

Tesh has now done great MilSF (or possibly anti-MilSF?), and excellent fantasy. I'm excited to see what she'll turn her hand to next.

Hail Scars Alberta Farmland

Aug. 28th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Hail Scars Alberta Farmland
A powerful supercell storm left a trail of damage spanning hundreds of kilometers southeast of Calgary, Canada.

Read More...

[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

Faerie banner

Faerie, a Tolkien fanfiction archive, is being imported to the Archive of Our Own (AO3).

In this post:

Background explanation

Faerie: Tolkien fanfiction was an archive founded by Esteliel in 2011 and run with the help of mods Narya and Spiced_Wine. The site welcomed all sorts of stories, poetry and non-fiction writing, regardless of genre, rating or pairing. Due to unforeseen circumstances the site owner could no longer maintain it and the site was taken offline sometime in 2021. As a result and in order to keep the stories available to the fandom, the mods Narya and Spiced_Wine decided to move the archive to the AO3 as part of the Open Doors project.

The purpose of the Open Doors Committee’s Online Archive Rescue Project is to assist moderators of archives to incorporate the fanworks from those archives into the Archive of Our Own. Open Doors works with moderators to import their archives when the moderators lack the funds, time, or other resources to continue to maintain their archives independently. It is extremely important to Open Doors that we work in collaboration with moderators who want to import their archives and that we fully credit creators, giving them as much control as possible over their fanworks. Open Doors will be working with Narya and Spiced_Wine to import Faerie into a separate, searchable collection on the Archive of Our Own. As part of preserving the archive in its entirety, all fanfictions currently in Faerie will be hosted on the OTW's servers, and embedded in their own AO3 work pages.

We will begin importing works from Faerie to the AO3 after September 2025. However, the import may not take place for several months or even years, depending on the size and complexity of the archive. Creators are always welcome to import their own works and add them to the collection in the meantime.

What does this mean for creators who had work(s) on Faerie?

We will send an import notification to the email address we have for each creator. We'll do our best to check for an existing copy of any works before importing. If we find a copy already on the AO3, we will add it to the collection instead of importing it. All works archived on behalf of a creator will include their name in the byline or the summary of the work.

All imported works will be set to be viewable only by logged-in AO3 users. Once you claim your works, you can make them publicly-viewable if you choose. After 30 days, all unclaimed imported works will be made visible to all visitors. We will then permanently close down the site.

Please contact Open Doors with your Faerie pseud(s) and email address(es), if:

  1. You'd like us to import your works, but you need the notification sent to a different email address than you used on the original archive.
  2. You already have an AO3 account and have imported your works already yourself.
  3. You’d like to import your works yourself (including if you don’t have an AO3 account yet).
  4. You would NOT like your works moved to the AO3, or would NOT like your works added to the archive collection.
  5. You are happy for us to preserve your works on the AO3, but would like us to remove your name.
  6. You have any other questions we can help you with.

Please include the name of the archive in the subject heading of your email. If you no longer have access to the email account associated with your Faerie account, please contact Open Doors and we'll help you out. (If you've posted the works elsewhere, or have an easy way to verify that they're yours, that's great; if not, we will work with the Faerie mods to confirm your claims.)

Please see the Open Doors Website for instructions on:

If you still have questions...

If you have further questions, visit the Open Doors FAQ, or contact the Open Doors committee.

We'd also love it if fans could help us preserve the story of Faerie on Fanlore. If you're new to wiki editing, no worries! Check out the new visitor portal, or ask the Fanlore Gardeners for tips.

We're excited to be able to help preserve Faerie!

- The Open Doors team, Narya and Spiced_Wine

 

Commenting on this post will be disabled in 14 days. If you have any questions, concerns, or comments regarding this import after that date, please contact Open Doors.


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise 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.

Typhoon Kajiki Lashes Southeast Asia

Aug. 25th, 2025 05:34 pm
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Typhoon Kajiki Lashes Southeast Asia
Late summer in the Northwest Pacific Ocean often sees an increase in storminess, which in August 2025 included a typhoon that lashed both China and Vietnam.

Read More...

A Sea Aswirl With Chlorophyll

Aug. 22nd, 2025 10:26 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

A Sea Aswirl With Chlorophyll
One of NASA’s newest Earth-observing sensors extends and improves the continuous measurement of light-harvesting pigments in ocean surface waters.

Read More...

Onyx Storm by Rebecca Yaros

Aug. 24th, 2025 01:23 pm
[personal profile] swaldman

I enjoyed the first two books of this series. I didn't think they were especially good, in a sense, but they were gripping and enjoyable.

This one flipped over to "ugh, no". I forced myself to finish it, but will not be looking out for the next installment. This series, like many others, has handled the need for escalation between volumes by increasing the scale and raising the stakes. We started off with one young woman's survival, and now we're dealing with world politics. But this simply isn't handled well.

(spoilers follow)
 

 

Spoilers )

 

Bleh.


Kamchatka Peaks Pierce the Clouds

Aug. 24th, 2025 12:00 am
[syndicated profile] earthobservatory_iod_feed

Posted by NASA Earth Observatory

Kamchatka Peaks Pierce the Clouds
The peninsula in eastern Siberia features rugged terrain with towering, snow-covered peaks and cloud-filled valleys stretching between the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Okhotsk.

Read More...

[syndicated profile] ao3_news_feed

2.1 million AO3 works created and 1,298,541 AO3 accounts created.34 billion AO3 page views, averaging 93.2 million per day. Last year: 31 billion.5.4 million AO3 tags wrangled. Last year: 5.5 million.27,000 AO3 Support tickets received. Last year: 24,800.27,700 AO3 Policy & Abuse tickets received. Last year: 23,600.34 AO3 releases deployed. Last year: 23.9 archives imported to AO3 via Open Doors. Last year: 11.21,496 Fanlore accounts created.6,700 Fanlore pages created. Last year: 5,000.163,000 Fanlore edits made. Last year: 141,000.118 news posts published. Last year 118.17 Fanhackers posts published. Last year: 59.3 Issues of Transformative Works and Cultures released. Last year: 3.

We are pleased to publish the OTW's 2024 Annual Report, available in PDF and HTML formats. The report provides a letter from our Board of Directors, a summary of our activities during the past year, and our financial statements for 2024. Some highlights from 2024 include finishing the update to AO3's Terms of Service, creating a new committee (and 2 new subcommittees!), as well as starting work on the OTW Organizational Culture Roadmap.

You can access the 2024 report, and all earlier years, on the Reports and Governing Documents page of the OTW website. Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions.


The Organization for Transformative Works is the non-profit parent organization of multiple projects including Archive of Our Own, Fanlore, Open Doors, Transformative Works and Cultures, and OTW Legal Advocacy. We are a fan-run, entirely donor-supported organization staffed by volunteers. Find out more about us on our website.

Profile

huggeroftrees: (Default)
Treehugger

November 2023

S M T W T F S
   1234
5678 9 10 11
12131415161718
19202122232425
2627 282930  

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Sep. 1st, 2025 05:29 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios