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Life in the boonies

So our old rooster went to the great barnyard in the sky few weeks ago. While the hens do not seem to miss him, roosters are useful for keeping unwanted critters out of the chicken run. The problem is, everybody has extra roosters. Most of our neighbors have chickens and treat them more like pets. Extra roosters are only good for using up feed, but nobody wants to kill them. If we let it be known that we are in search of a rooster, there could be any number of roosters dumped in our driveway in the middle of the night.

One neighbor around the bend has a much more visible chicken operation. They have a farm stand and a big covered run with 30 plus birds you can see from the road. The couple were out manning the farm stand today so we stopped by on the way home from the market.

"Do you have any extra roosters?"

"Sure! Somebody dumped a couple roosters just this morning. Take your pick."

We dropped off a cage, and will be picking up the new rooster later when they can catch him.

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TMNZ s6e5-6, Worldcon part 3: Friday Aug 15 panels

There are too many moving parts in RL to write up at the moment (I need to write about my post-Covid weekend, the new air fryer, L's car shopping in progress, and the Return to Office extravaganza), but I haven't had a chance to write up any of that yet. So instead you get Taskmaster NZ and the first of the Worldcon days that was getting too long for LJ so I ended up breaking it up into two.

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TMNZ s6e05 -- this was a less fun episode for me: I thought the tasks were not all that interesting, nobody did anything I really loved, and Jeremy's scoring continued to annoy me with nothing to distract me from it really. I mean, it was still a baseline level of fun, but was the episode this season I enjoyed the least so far. ( Spoilers from here )

TMNZ s6e06 -- I'm digging Pax's jacket, which is like the upholstery of your grandma's armchair, and also Bree's crossed swords necklace. And Jackie's wig du jour. ( Spoilers )

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Continuing on with the Worldcon account:

( Friday, Aug 15: panels )

By this point it was 8:30 p.m. and time to head over to the Terra Ignota fan fathering, but I'll leave that for the next post (right now I'm thinking that + the Saturday panels could be one post, and the Hugo Awards and my thoughts on the stats a different one, but we'll see; maybe Sunday will fit in there also...)

( A couple of photos -- mostly just Hugo bases this time )

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.