New exciting 7-8PM bedtime

Sep. 5th, 2025 07:27 am
prixmium: (jackdaniel groovy background)
[personal profile] prixmium
Since I've been back at work, I keep getting sleepy between 7 and 8 PM and I guess it's better than not getting enough sleep, but it's a shame that there's such a thin line between too little and too much.

Last night, I had the thought to follow some links on [personal profile] svgurl's post and sign up for the [community profile] communal_creators thing as I keep complaining about the lack of community.

Then I immediately needed to go to bed.

Today, they let us leave from work a bit more than an hour early due to ongoing typhoon rain and general morale boost, I guess, since we all have to come in on Saturday tomorrow even if we aren't Saturday staff people.

I find that I don't mind the ebb and flow too much as long as they're not being assholes about making us sit in meetings that mean nothing to anyone.

I almost veered off to go to eat something at some restaurant, but I have been trying to manage both my time and my eating a bit differently since I got back. I will always be someone who thinks cheap eating out isn't any less responsible than cooking for oneself when the costs are relatively comparable when averaged out. However, I have noticed that when I am in a place where to go anywhere that isn't right around my work station costs two more hours plus the time I'm sitting there to eat that doing it on weekdays isn't as worth it as my anxiety would tend to tell me. It is less of a slog to cook at home and feel unrushed, which is sort of a new feeling for me.

While I was waiting for soup to finish simmering and then eating all the soup I couldn't put away in two containers, I watched a couple more episodes of Twin Peaks, which I started half-watching while I was at home, hanging out with little Charlie.

This time, I felt the inklings of thought about my own fannish projects while thinking about the show, which is at least promising, but by the time I was finished with watching eating, I think I'm too sleepy to actually do anything tonight. I keep waking up at some point before or after midnight, if only to relieve my bladder, and I wish I could get another hour or so of self-time in there and go back to bed on a sort of dual-sleep model, but I feel like to make that happen, I'm going to have to pull my stupid-early bedtime back even earlier to where it feels more like a nap and my reawakening time is slightly earlier. I used to do that all the time, but I haven't since moving to Japan, really.
prixmium: (vash arm)
[personal profile] prixmium
cw: animal death Update on little Charles: Apparently they administered morphine before the euthanasia medication and while that kicked in they let my parents pet him and feed him an ice cream sandwich. And after he was very high and half asleep, only then they gave him that, and my stepmom held him and Dad petted him until he stopped breathing.

In other news, I am thinking about the way being in fandom is just a lot less like being "in" anything and isn't really as fun anymore and how it is connected to the general state of the world.

When coming to this website to make this post, I noticed the site announcement about restrictions on Dreamwidth in Georgia and in my home state of Tennessee. I'm really proud to be on this website and paying a pittance a year to help them keep fighting good fights like this. I don't post here as much as I could, though, because years in the bigger ocean of tumblr and twitter have kind of made me wind down my sense of having anything to say.

I know it's a weird combination of the violence inherent to capitalism and just my brain getting older, but I remember having the ability to daydream all day long in school, writing fic snippets in my notebooks, while also continuing to keep good grades in my classes. I used to be creative and itching to share stuff. There was something about the internet being a place I had to manage to get access to that created a kind of goal at the end, but I still don't think it's "dopamine addiction" or whatever that's causing the main problem. I think it's just the sense that there are little campfires everywhere -- or one big bonfire here and there -- but around them, nobody is actually gathered to listen. People are just there to add fuel to the fire and be angry and hurt that no one is looking at the sparks they added. I'm to blame as is everyone else.

I do try to engage with other people's fanwork and stuff, but it seems like it rarely becomes a two-way street anymore.

You don't have to be friends with everyone you meet in fandom, but I know that back in the LJ and even early tumblr days, there was a sense of knowing who hung around in your neck of the woods. Maybe you didn't always, always engage in reciprocity of comments and reading, but there was enough overlap that there was an excitement to sharing stories and stuff. It was a form of conversation and positing ideas. Now, it's just part of an attention economy where everyone is broke and starving.

I don't know what exactly I did to direct the YouTube algorithm to feed me down this specific rabbit hole, but the other night I found this channel called [youtube.com profile] DarwinsLab. I can't speak for his past videos, but I watched the most recent tree about the nature of dreams, psychedelics, and the uncanny valley respectively. I really enjoyed them, and it felt a little bit like a slight reach backward into what the internet was like and "for" when I was in university and spending all that precious time I could've been forging IRL connections being on the internet (half-joking). It reminds me of Vsauce and watching everymanHYBRID and Marble Hornets and, strangely connected, YuGiOh The Abridged Series. There was a sense of creativity and conversation in those things that I often feel is not present even in the independent or self-made YouTube "content" I often fill my brain with.

When I was back in America for a few weeks, I rarely turned on YouTube, I noticed. Sometimes, I sat in total silence. Other times, I watched the actual TV my parents pay for, lying with little Charlie on the couch while parents were out. There was silence, and it was mostly bearable, though the first night of three that my parents went out of town while I was there (so I could dogsit our little buddy, them having no idea he'd be gone in a month), the house being so much larger than my little apartment kind of made me feel a little insecure like there might be something else hiding in the shadows or another room.

Here in Japan, I listen to YouTube and podcasts a ridiculous amount of the time. I enjoy them, most of the time. I enjoy learning, even when it's just on the level of following a story. Learning the trivia and beats of a true crime case that is common knowledge along with a little editorializing, etc. I have to have some kind of speech-sound to fall asleep here, and I don't know why. I would sometimes turn it on when I was back in the States, but I never actually comprehended more than five minutes of it before passing out.

I think it has something to do with the fact that all of my comprehensible conversations and interactions with human speech are at work here. There's a part of my brain that is just starved for something that feels both personal and novel. And yet, I'm noticing, that I have started to tune out toward the end of podcasts and videos that I normally wouldn't have lately. Then again, I've just suffered a loss, however distant and small compared to a human life. I know that what I'm experiencing at this very moment might not be some super representative aspect of my personhood.

When I try to listen to the part of me that's zoned out, to interrogate why, I find that it's that creative urge in the background begging me to be the one to make something. Only, I spent the whole time I was home trying to give myself space to create something, and the best I did was 15 seconds of simple video editing or so that is nowhere near finished that I may never go back and finish. I couldn't write anything, and I dunno why.

Except, I kinda do. It feels like there's no point to write anything lately. I feel a little bit less pessimistic about this than I did a week ago. I finally got one comment on the Trigun fic I posted recently. Only, I know that back in the past, I would have been able to find a space in which to talk about the aspect of the story that made me write that fic, even if the person didn't fully read my fic themselves, and if I got lucky they might, and that's what I'm missing.

Which brings me back to the YouTube algorithm.

Somehow, in connection with this and other stuff I watch sometimes, it brought me to this video:



It is an interesting take on a lot of things, and my petty connection to my own sense of being unmoored is much smaller than the bigger issues of white grievance replacing the personality and redirecting suburban white anger into fascism. However, one of the things she talks about up front is that Eminem was kind of one of the last release valves for a subculture of young white suburban people that held a space that allowed them to share experience, express anger, and be transgressive or rebellious in a way that was able to both acknowledge their legitimate grievances against those in power and the apparatuses in the mainstream that held them down while also being self-aware of their own privilege in the landscape of a genre of music that was pioneered by Black people. She talks about how she was once a big fan of Eminem, became very critical, and then came back around to the idea that while she doesn't want to absolve him of all the "problematic" elements of his writing and body of work that maybe the flaws and anger and transgression present within his work are representative of the functions of a lot of former subcultures that used to allow young (white otherwise, though the white people are most relevant to her concern in the video) people to help identify themselves in opposition to the mainstream.

I remember being in the fringes of Eminem-enjoying and the weird cathartic rush I got when I learned how to contextually use the "f-word" as an intensifier and was brave enough to do it in a venting rant to a friend over the phone in hushed tones as a tween. I grew up at the intersection of parents who were just really responsible given their means for the most part and "white trash," so there was a certain aspect of that that spoke to me when it was coming out and cool. And I remember that kind of word-of-mouth and slow-transmission of culture that was based on who you happened to have access to.

I also think about the fact that had it not been for my cousin giving me a copy of Shounen Jump he'd worn out as a mousepad after reading it a couple times then telling me about a person he met with a screenname based on YuYu Hakusho in an Unreal Tournament chatroom that I should try to message on a lark who then got freaked out like I might be lying about who I was and how I got their username that I would not, in any way, be who I am today.

Even the dial-up internet had the character of being a decentralized place but where you could, through others, eventually discover things.

The centralized, mainstream, social media internet actively bottlenecks all of that experience and most of it feeds it through an algorithm that serves to make the user and the people similar to and adjacent to the user's habits more like themselves instead of helping to change them in any way.

And while there's this narrative of wanting to embrace who you are, to not let others change you, the thing is that being able to "try lives on" used to be a more natural part of reality than it is now. The kids growing up with social media now are more terrified of being cringe than being anything else. ~Back in my day~, there was a sense that choosing how one wanted to be cringe and learning the rules and not being a "poser" but being fully sincere in your efforts to conform to this type of cringe was a feature of adolescence.

And I think that this connects to what is dying about fandom. Fandom was, at one point, a series of subcultures. Certain fandoms had certain rules, certain conventions (of both kinds), and certain online communities that had idiosyncratic rules and expectations.

Now, you have to cast your bait and line out into the murky depths of a tag or search term and hope that maybe someone who matches your weirdness might see it. There are all these arguments about "purity" versus being as weird and kinky as you want to be and everything in between, and I think this kind of thing is partly because there is no sub in the fandom subcultures anymore, so people keep trying to make the mainstream vibe into what they're most comfortable with. Whereas, in the past, people would just make their own little community about that thing that included 5-20 core members and others who came along to join and that was enough.

And, selfishly, it is SO hard to be creative in this environment where I know that everyone is too overstimulated to care or views me and my attention as competition rather than having a handful of people I can trust to at least care that I had something to say.

RIP Charlie

Sep. 2nd, 2025 06:59 am
prixmium: stonehenge in sunlight (stonehenge in sunlight)
[personal profile] prixmium
cw: animal death
cross-post from tumblr

I'm about to go to sleep, and likely before I wake up in the morning, on the other side of the world, my dad and stepmom will have to put down Charlie, the little dog who's been part of my family since 2011 when my mom saw him on a foster site and decided he needed her.

My mom passed on before he did, but he has continued to be a part of our lives, even when he temporarily moved in with a family friend.

I visited home for the first time in over a year for a few weeks in August. He waited all that time to see me. He played with me a few more times.

A couple nights ago, my dad messaged me to let me know that a couple days after I got back to Japan, Charlie collapsed and was having considerable breathing trouble. The vets said he was in late stage heart failure when they got him checked out.

Little guy is old and has had a great and pretty varied life for such a little creature. He's loved many people and been loved.

I'm thankful both to God and little Charlie that I got to see him again. If animals and people go to heaven and to the same one, I hope my mom is glad to see him soon.







Rest well, little cryptid.

September: Coffee Shops

Sep. 1st, 2025 09:07 pm
trope_mod: picture of a megaphone on top of a calendar (Default)
[personal profile] trope_mod posting in [community profile] trope_of_the_month
The theme for September is Coffee Shops. Whether that's in-universe coffee shops (or the closest equivalent), AU coffee shops, workers or customers or both, anything goes as long as it involves the characters interacting with some kind of hot-beverage serving establishment.

Posting guidelines are here, and if you have any recs or prompts you'd like to share, you can leave them in the comments using the templates below:

For recs:


For prompts:


This theme will last until 30th September.

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.

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.

prixmium: (skyeward - untidy)
[personal profile] prixmium
Headed back to Japan early in the morning. I'm not dreading it as much as I could, which tells me I do genuinely like this job, but there's some anxiety associated with any kind of change of routine. I have also been a bit more physically lazy here, so I will definitely feel it for a few weeks in 90 degree heat.

This evening, my stepmom put an episode of the revival of Matlock on TV, and I just... The main thing that stood out to me was the bizarre cohesion of colors.

It has a color palette that is just too well put together. Everything is some depth of teal or tan unless they want to point it out with purple or navy.

After that TV show went off, Medium came on, which I remember being very popular back when I was transitioning from LJ-->dreamwidth-->tumblr when it seemed like nobody really wanted to adopt dw. For a few days, I tried getting into watching Twin Peaks, but it felt slow as much as I find it interesting. I am mildly interested in watching more Medium if I can find it online without signing up for more streaming. Stepmom has Paramount+, but I kind of... don't want that for multiple reasons.

Japanese Citizenship/Passport Query

Aug. 25th, 2025 06:10 pm
glinda: I...have a cunning plan (cunning plan)
[personal profile] glinda posting in [community profile] little_details
A rather more contemporary citizenship question here. I’m looking for a resource for Japanese passport and citizenship rules - do they have birthright citizenship, if a citizen emigrates can they retain dual citizenship, is it different if they emigrated as a child etc.

The Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ website is very helpful on the subject of visas and emigration for citizens of other countries so I guess I’m looking for a similar kind of FAQ to this - https://www.mofa.go.jp/j_info/visit/visa/ - but for, I guess you’d call it re-emigration? Moving back to the country of your birth as an adult?

Any help, gratefully received!
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