krpalmer: (anime)
[personal profile] krpalmer
Heading back to the big anime convention in my area this spring did seem to carry a certain weight of “I can’t take many more steps back towards the way I’d once taken things.” (So far as “crowded spaces are unhealthy!” goes, going on a cruise for two weeks did seem to have had more of even a temporary effect on me this year than being in a convention centre for several hours.) With that acknowledged, though, it got my attention when I happened to be in the right (online) space at the right time to see “Anime Lockdown” would be setting up a new streaming presentation, that much further on from the moment when crowded spaces had been very unhealthy and it had first been improvised. A lot of the panels scheduled did look interesting, so I decided to tune in. I’d be able to see quite a bit more of them than at the in-person convention, where I’d been unwilling to go to the extra expense of “staying in the area of over the weekend.” Too, panels interest me in a way that I have to admit “taking in the cosplay” or even “checking out the dealers (but not buying anything)” didn’t as compared to others. The follow-up announcement the person handling the stream had to be out on Sunday and would move the second day of panels to a second weekend did spread things out a bit and point out things had changed and changed again for everyone.
History in translation )

Snow-Written Images

Sep. 1st, 2025 03:16 pm
krpalmer: (apple)
[personal profile] krpalmer
Working around the (current?) output limitations of the Snow emulator to build up some sequences of dot matrix printer commands was, perhaps, just enough of a complication to result in a slight increase in satisfaction at seeing “dot-matrix output from a Macintosh.” After testing the different resolutions available in the Epson printer driver I’d used to feed my existing “printer-command-to-PDF” utilities and seeing confirmation of the old comments about how the early Macintosh would try to scale down larger sizes of its bitmap fonts to produce somewhat better output than you got on its screen (regardless of how this did or didn’t apply to “What You See Is What You Get”), though, I did get to thinking this hadn’t quite matched the earliest days of the computer. As important as Epson printers had been to computing as a whole, they were “a” printer hooked up to a Macintosh. “The” dot matrix printer for that computer, the Apple-branded model with a driver included in the standard system software installation, was the ImageWriter.
An antique solution )

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.

The Twilight Zone: The Lonely

Aug. 28th, 2025 06:06 pm
krpalmer: (Default)
[personal profile] krpalmer
Hearing “asteroid” in a next-episode preview had me thinking The Twilight Zone would be getting back to something I could point at and say “science fiction” for the first time since its first episode. I also have to admit I thought again of certain comments returned to not that long ago where faint praise for Rod Serling seemed directed more at his non-science fiction scripts, and of different comments over the years that Star Trek establishing the fixed setting of a roving spaceship was a way to avoid just how cheap everything would look should you have to create a strange new world from scratch week after week on a television budget...
Variation on a theme )

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