This one will be [curr ev]

Aug. 30th, 2025 04:20 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Current rumors engulfing Bluesky have me recalling an old Communist-era Russian joke:

Every day, a man walks to a news stand and pays for a copy of Pravda, unfolds it, looks at the front page, and throws it in the trash. Every day he does this, for months, until finally the news seller asks the man, "So what is it you are looking for on the front page every day?"

"I'm checking for an obituary."

"Comrade, the obituaries aren't on the front page."

"Oh, this one will be."

(no subject)

Aug. 28th, 2025 04:55 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
It's my birthday! gosh wow!

Long time viewers may be familiar with Kat's birthday lore, which is this: Please join me in celebrating my birthday! The way you do so is by eating ice cream and ideally snapping a photo of it, or you, or both and sending it to me. This can happen literally anywhere in the world, and it can happen literally anytime (I've been getting photos for about two weeks now!)

The "ice cream" part is not literal --anything that feels to you like a treat, ideally frozen, counts!

If you are local, there are two bonus celebratory options:

1) COME DANCE WITH ME TONIGHT! I am running a "no-planning-just-vibes" Scottish Country Dance tonight, Thursday, 8/28, 7-9pm in the NESFA clubhouse (504 Medford St, Somerville). We're gonna do mostly Scottish by people requesting dances or figures, but I might throw in some ceilidh, a few waltzes, heck, maybe a bit of blues...we'll make it work!

2) COME EAT ICE CREAM WITH ME TOMORROW! I am gonna do my usual Davis Square Ice Cream Adventure tomorrow, Friday, 8/29. I plan to be in Davis from about 7:30pm-11pm, and get ice cream for myself at 8pm and 10pm. Join in for as little or as much of that as you fancy! Bring a friend I've never met if that friend wants to eat ice cream! Wave at me as you ride through the square on your way to something else! Come at the last possible minute and encourage a bad decision staying-up-to-late party! The possibilities are endless, it's Friday night woot woot!

(there may or may not wind up being a "well dang I also really like Gracie's, y'all wanna hang in Union instead" at some point this weekend. Watch this space. Planning is easier when it's not also the beginning of the school year)

~Sor
MOOP!
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.

(no subject)

Aug. 25th, 2025 11:36 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
First day of school!

Here are some patterns that I did today that I really like:

*Got out of bed at the first hit of my alarm.

*Got the dishes out of the dishwasher before eating breakfast

*Read book on the bus to and from work

*Zeroed my work email inbox for the day

*Dealt with any dishes hanging out (including the handwash stuff) when I got home from work

Here are some things that aren't patterns but also got done today:

*Hung out with Clayton, my work-bestie, for a goodly chunk of time

*Had very productive Geometry work-group, which is especially nice because it's basically the same people as last year, but was a WAY less contentious first meeting

*Spent over an hour chatting with my new mentee, who is _shiny_ new to teaching and I really hope continues to maintain their optimism and enthusiasm and stuff. I think they will, they're excitable but also in their late twenties so not quite as naïve as some.

*Did some of the HR paperwork which is especially fun because I ignored it all last year. This includes watching the entire Conflict of Interest training, which is an hour of unskillable, un-speedable modules which must be watched in order and if you leave one in the middle you have to restart it from the beginning. I also read the ten minute summary which I'm pretty sure sufficed to do the thing, but I have strong feelings about actually reading the shit work makes me sign.

*To be clear, I read the summary first and watched the video at home while playing Stardew Valley, I'm not paid enough to give _that_ my full attention.

*Attended a bunch of meetings and stuff, mostly fine-to-good. As I have previously observed, the fewer people in the meeting the more useful and interesting it gets.

So it's a pretty good first day! I am feeling cautiously optimistic about the fact that the school has not introduced dozens of all new structures that will definitely fix everything, and instead is working to improve and refine the existing structures. (Okay, there is one new structure, but it is to replace an old one that stopped existing, so it should be the same ideas within a slightly different workflow. And even that, the principal was like "yeah, I expect it to be good this year and awesome three years from now" so she at least claims to understand change takes time.)

Being temporarily disabled is a drag, but having the cane felt both good as a visual indicator, and genuinely useful for any of the standing around. My boss absolutely fished for details and got as much as "yep, it was something I needed and it will heal soon". (Clayton on the other hand got "my gyno wouldn't let me keep my uterus once it was out but he took pictures for me!" and this is part of the difference between Real Friend and Boss).

It was nice to see all my coworkers, including some unexpected heart-lifting delights. It turns out I do like the adults I work with and not just the kids!

First day with kids is Wednesday (one class for two hours of orientation) and then Thursday I see all five of my classes bang-in-a-row. I can live with the exhausting Thursdays because they mean I have a prep last block again, which is so deeply superior to having a prep penultimate block like I did last year (and therefore having a short time to rest before having to go back and teach more which is so hard to drag yourself to).

For now, I am going to get some ice cream with Austin, and then continue to take it easy for the rest of the evening. Maybe I'll even get to bed at early-bedtime instead of late.

I hope the things you do bring you joy as well.

~Sor
MOOP!

Untitled for Three Jigakkyu [music]

Aug. 24th, 2025 07:02 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Yall, the bowed musical instruments have finally made it to the electronica party. This is the coolest damn thing. Audio required, video also extremely worth it if accessible. 3 min 17 sec.

2025 Aug 11: Open Reel Ensemble: "Tape Bowing Ensemble - Open Reel Ensemble":
磁気テープを竹に張って演奏する民族楽器「磁楽弓(じがっきゅう)」三重奏による調べです

This is a trio performance on the “JIGAKKYU,” a traditional folk instrument made by stretching magnetic tape across bamboo.


ETA: I want to state for the record, contrary to what a lot of commenters on YT are saying, it is not that what is cool here is just how wackily innovative it is to use a reel-to-reel this way. The only reason this is going viral is because of how musically good it is; nobody would care about it otherwise, and I submit for evidence the half century plus of prior art of abusing reel-to-reel recorders in the name of music-making you have probably never heard of, because a lot of it wasn't very compelling as music so nobody ever brought it to your attention. What's most shocking here is how musical it is, and how they use the innovation to do something new in music recognizable as such. It isn't good because it's innovative; it's innovative because it's good.

As far as I am concerned, the great problem for electronic music has always been what I think of as the Piano Problem: the music is made by operating a machine, so there's a machine between the performer and the music. Great pianists master operating the machine so beautifully they make the machine disappear. But this is what makes piano playing hard. So much of what we love in music is its organicness, the aspects of it which are so beautifully expressive because of how intimately the performer's body interacts with the instrument.

Heretofore, the only ways to bring that kind of sound to electronic instruments were to use breath controlled midi controllers (electronic woodwinds), use an electromagnetic interface (e.g. theremin), or get really fantastic on keys. Or give up and embrace the mechanical nature of the instrument and use it for repertoire the excellence of which does not rest in expressiveness (q.v. Wendy Carlos' Bach recordings).

This instrument conclusively brings the organicness of bowing and all its delicate expressiveness to electronica. The result is simply gorgeous and I hope this creative vein is further mined.

Recovery and dance class

Aug. 21st, 2025 10:06 pm
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
I mean, it's clearly not that I'm _recovered_ and also if anyone from work asks, I am _absolutely_ going to take every contractual advantage I can vis-a-vis recovery, but I just taught a dance class, from a couch, which I think means my surgery recovery is going Very Well Actually.

Seriously, it turns out hysterectomies are surprisingly trivial for a surgery I have been describing as "got stabbed in the stomach a few times and had some of my organs stolen". Or at least, a laproscopic hysterectomy is surprisingly trivial for me, a person who is in generally good health and apparently had a smaller-than-usual uterus.

(I got to see pictures when I was visiting my doctor, and he was all "oh yeah, they should be available for you in mychart" but then I was looking today and could not find them, so I will have to include that in my follow up visit I do think.)

I'm very very happy that the recovery hasn't been worse. I have slowly been ramping up the amount of "stuff I do" which means today I walked to NESFA very slowly (it took me 2-3 times longer than it normally does and that is correct and good), did not do any of the room setting except the chairs (no moving tables! no moving carts of games!) and was very good and sat on the couch for all of my dance class. I had volunteers to show off the lovely footwork (thank you Rachel and Stephan!) and Stephan even took on a harder dance and it was a lovely time!

I love my dance class so so so fucking much, I love that the Cambridge Day advertises it sometimes and I get random total beginners out of nowhere, I love how lucky I am to be able to make the world work for me, like what the fuck, this is amazing.

And look, I was absolutely willing to last-minute cancel if I had to (although I'm so glad I didn't have to because like I said, I had at least one total beginner tonight and she was lovely!), I wasn't going to force myself to do stuff that was bad for me. This wasn't bad for me! Doing it from the couch was a neat challenge, and I think I did a mostly good job. People certainly seemed to have a nice time. We did five dances, which is one fewer than normal, but the one Stephan did was a bit of a challenge. It was all really lovely!

(regarding neat challenge, I knew I'm a super kinesthetic person, but it was still really startling to realize how hard it is to talk through the pas-de-basque footwork --a patter I've probably done dozens of times-- when I can't do the movements alongside the words. Even as simple as "do I start on the left or the right" took me a minute to grasp.)

So dance class was a delight. Healing is going along swimmingly --I can't twist at the waist, and I can't bend over. I walk much slower than usual. Sitting is real good, but I have to be more reclined than usual. Those are my limitations, but the pain is just...not a going concern. Seriously, my belly is full of stab wounds and I'm out here completely forgetting to grab more pain meds --and I'm just doing the ibuprofen/tylenol alternation, not like anything more intense. Hell yeah.

I'm gonna borrow a cane for the first couple days of school, certainly for the teacher-only days and maybe for the first student days as well. This is honestly a lot less because I think I'll need a cane, and a lot more because I think it would be useful to have a visual signal that you need to be gentle with me or I'll hit you with my stick.

Anyways, ten out of ten, do recommend. You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

~Sor
MOOP!

Phone, again [me, tech]

Aug. 21st, 2025 05:10 am
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

Hwaet! The saga continues... )
siderea: (Default)
[personal profile] siderea
Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:
I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?
I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:
From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.
So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:
Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.
I got this response:
Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]
Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Yeeeeet!

Aug. 18th, 2025 03:55 am
sorcyress: Drawing of me as a pirate, standing in front of the Boston Citgo sign (Default)
[personal profile] sorcyress
So, I've been alluding to this off and on in various spaces, but I don't _think_ I've made a public declaration. The end of my summer vacation has included one heck of an exciting event: I did a yeeterus on Thursday the 14th!

Yeeterus, noun, surgery to get rid of some unnecessary body parts -in my case, uterus, fallopian tubes, and cervix. More commonly known as a hysterectomy, and I suppose this means I can no longer be hysterical, a joke I am definitely going to workshop in the near future.

I've been coy about it mostly because I have been _terrified_ it would be outlawed before I could do it, fuck you very much the modern USA. Being at that sweet spot of "gender-affirming trans thing" and "sterilization and therefore anti-breeding thing" can make one nervous like that. It's weird that something so personal feels so acutely political. Like. I'm not ensuring I never have periods again *at* anyone, I just find menstruation incredibly personally dysphoric. The confirmation to never have children of my body isn't an attack on anyone else, it's just...something I've been aware was true since I was nineteen. I dunno man, why do you care so much?

Recovery has been very much in line with what I've hoped. The pain has been incredibly mild, and almost entirely kept at bay by careful cycling of tylenol and ibuprofen. The discomfort has been a lot higher --it turns out laparoscopic surgeries involve pumping one full of gas and then that gas has to dissipate somehow. I am treating myself gentle and not walking any further than around the house --but I am walking, and that's lovely.

I have kept an impressive log of feelings and thoughts and observations and stuff, which I am not *quite* willing to just open-share to everyone, but if you're thinking about doing the same, let me know and I'll pull the best tidbits for you.

I am so happy about it. Like, it's gonna make the start of the school year suck and I'm still so fucking happy.

Yay!

~Sor
MOOP!

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

February 2025

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