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[personal profile] jreynoldsward

When you commit to owning a horse for their whole life, you know that there's going to be That Day happening at some point.

Sometimes That Day is a day early, sometimes it's a day late.

And sometimes That Day just happens Right Now. Not when you want it, not when you've planned, but...it just slaps you hard, right in the face, that this has to be The Day.

That day was yesterday for the horse of my heart, Miss Olena Chic (Mocha), who I had owned for twenty years. I had already discussed the need to put her down this fall because she just wasn't going to do well in the coming winter. Held that discussion with the vet, the ranch owners, and my husband. We'd agreed that she would have one last good summer (hopefully), eating grass, hanging out in one of her favorite fields, having time with Her Gelding, getting lots of treats and being loved on. Which was happening.

I knew things were going downhill. The bone spurs on her problematic right knee were starting to make the cannon bone (big bone between the knee and hoof in a horse's foreleg) twist noticeably this last week. But she was still getting around, and was even managing to canter-hobble when I called her for grain, treats, and attention (oh, was she ever holding her head high and proud those days when she figured out how to canter with that bad knee). Then it became a trot, then a walk, and then...yesterday.

She had taken to standing under a big willow in the front of the pasture she was in, especially if I was coming later than usual. So I wasn't surprised by that, or by the nicker she gave me. But then...she didn't come to her usual feeding spot. My heart sank because at that point I knew. I called her again, offered her an apple slice with the painkiller she's been on for the last few months and...she could barely walk. Her legs quivered with the effort. I coaxed her over, gave her grain and treats, and called the husband because it was clear that something had happened over the last twenty-four hours. She had been walking fine the day before, hanging out with a whitetail doe and her fawns.

No signs of stress, like she had been running and strained something. Just a little sweaty under her heavy mane, which was normal for her on a hot summer's day. I checked her water trough and she had been drinking from it. She was eating normally, acting normally, except...there were signs of a possible neurological issue.

You don't call the vet for a last-ditch treatment for this. Not for an old mare that the vet has already shaken his head as he says "no more winters." If you call the vet, it's euthansia time.

I went to the ranch. Burst into tears when I told the ranch owner's daughter and asked her for another pair of eyes in case I was wrong (she's Miss Rodeo Oregon 2026 and is very experienced in her own right). Her parents were out of town but almost back. Dez eyed Mocha and agreed, calling her parents. Something bad had happened. Jeffrey dropped Vixen off when they got to town and...more consensus. We decided to try to get her on a trailer and back to the ranch. While Mocha's never been that friendly with Vixen, she's always loaded well for her and--no hesitation, no problems. Thankfully.

Then the discussion at the ranch. Today or tomorrow? Gunshot or vet visit tomorrow? Thankfully, I'd already had that discussion with Jeffrey because they've dealt with a lot of older horses who need to be put down. The recommendation was gunshot because sometimes the euthanasia meds don't work as well with older horses, and they'll fight them, making those last few minutes awful and fearful for the horse. Mocha was a tough old girl--and I feared that she would fight it. So no, no vet. Tonight, because it was cooler and we all feared given the rapid progress of her deteroration that she would go down and not be able to get up, making things more complicated. She was already in pain, why put her through more?

She was happily eating hay in the trailer. I gave her the last peppermints while Vixen quickly braided her tail and clipped the braids so I would have a keepsake. Then it was watching the trailer and backhoe go out to the back field, and stand with Marker, waiting for the end. All the horses on the ranch were fussing and anxious because they knew something was up. Marker called to Mocha when the trailer went out. Then he stood while I cried on his neck (I'd cried on Mocha's neck in the trailer), nuzzling me and licking me.

We waited while Jeffrey dug the hole with the backhoe. Then the trailer headed back. Marker screamed and called as the trailer went by, fussing when there wasn't an answer. Shortly after, the final shot.

She was a fine horse. I'll write a little bit more about the twenty-five years I knew her at another time, because I had been around her from a foal, even though I didn't buy her until she was five. I have a big collection of ribbons she won at various shows, and a belt buckle she won. I have one of her shoes, a portion of one tooth, and the braids. Plus tack--some of which has not been repurposed for Marker--and pictures. She had been bred to be a show horse and did pretty darn good at it.

But right now there are still tears and an empty spot in my heart.


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.

Making Money

Aug. 30th, 2025 07:20 pm
ksmith: (Default)
[personal profile] ksmith
I started my reread of Making Money only to realize after a chapter or two that I didn't recall any of it. At least one scene usually sticks in my mind*, and there are so many of Lord Vetinari being Lord Vetinari that I definitely should have remembered. Adora Belle Dearheart is one of my favorite minor characters, so I'd have at least recalled her.

And Mr. Fusspot. I would've remembered the dog, if only for one of the funniest scenes I have ever read in any Discworld book:

Watching a dog try to chew a large piece of toffee is a pastime fit for gods. Mr. Fusspot's mixed ancestry had given him a dexterity of jaw that was truly awesome. He somersaulted happily around the floor, making faces like a rubber gargoyle in a washing machine.

Maybe you have to have had a dog, idk.

Anyway, I think this is the first time I've read it. am enjoying it. Moist von Lipwig is such a conflicted, seat-of-the-pants sort of person.




*except for Night Watch, which failed to make an impression. I recalled that there was a rebellion at some point, but that was it.

Changing Covers

Aug. 30th, 2025 12:40 pm
jreynoldsward: (Default)
[personal profile] jreynoldsward

 

 (alas, no pictures because Dreamwidth insists that I link to something with a URL. SIGH.)

 

 

One of the reasons I like being self-published is the ability to look at things I’ve put out there and say “well, that didn’t work. The foundation of the story is good, but it’s not resonating with readers…let’s try something different!”

 

(note: this is often after sending this out to betas and having editing done. I don’t want lectures about the joys of critique groups, traditional publishing, etc etc ad nauseum.)

 

Sometimes that means ripping apart a story and rewriting it (which is happening right now with Klone’s Stronghold: Reeni) for various reasons.

 

More often it’s quick fixes of typos, updating the back matter and…creating a new cover. I started learning how to make semi-decent covers early on in my self-publishing days, when I got ripped off by a cover artist working through someone trying to set up their own hybrid publishing company. Not only did the artist not come anywhere near the concept, but the pricing was way out of line for the times (and given what the quality was, would still be way out of line. Though I suspect the current equivalent would be someone dashing it off using AI).

 

I started doing my own covers instead of working with a designer regularly because I was also putting out short stories and the cost was just too high. I didn’t like the results working with cover creation programs offered by several distributors, either. Plus I also tend to take pretty decent photographs. Making covers using my own pictures for background images seemed to be a pretty sweet notion.

 

As a result, I downloaded GIMP and started wrestling with it. GIMP is a perfectly good enough program, but…I started looking elsewhere after a while because it was always a fight to get everything done correctly. One friend does her covers in PowerPoint. I tried it and, well, it was still a wrestling job. Then I ended up with BookBrush and, for me, it’s well worth the expense. I don’t just do covers in it, I do promotional material.

 

Keep in mind that I’ve been told I have a decent eye for colorways, based on my quilting and my past history making beaded jewelry. Not everyone can do that. I also dedicate some amount of time looking at current covers, taking a few courses here and there, and studying what may or may not work.

 

The biggest challenge, however, is finding background images that work. I’ve learned the hard way that I have to modify my picture taking in order to create useable cover pictures (though I will use them in promo stuff). Then there’s the challenge of AI-generated images. I won’t use AI, so for a while last year I thought that meant no images on my covers unless they were pictures I’ve taken myself. I couldn’t find anything in my various photo sources that both fit and were uploaded before AI became a thing.

 

Then…something changed, as evidenced by those two covers above. The original Becoming Solo cover was kinda okay, but it was quickly outdated color-wise and font-wise. I stumbled across that image a week ago while doing something else in BookBrush, and looked up the licensing source data. Imagine my happy surprise when I discovered that this image was created in the twenty-teens, pre-AI. I added an updated font and…I like this cover so much better. To me, it hints of the darkness within that story, not just the choices that the main character Yesenia has to face but a secondary character with darkness within her, Shadow the Question, who has seen the destruction of a Magic Fair first-hand.

 

(yes, there will be a sequel, no, I don’t know when or what it will be about. Might be Shadow’s story. Might not be. Still brewing in the backbrain.)

 

The Crucible cover came about from the same sort of poking around—in fact, I discovered both images at the same time. When I was putting together the covers for The Cost of Power trilogy last year, I just couldn’t find anything that worked. I was fiddling with a promotional trailer for the trilogy’s omnibus edition and…this image came up. I took one look at it and realized that this picture of a man with a gun was Gabriel Martiniere throughout this series, but even more so for the second book, Crucible, where Gabe struggles with a LOT of issues and bad choices, in the face of increasing desperation because he can’t admit that he still wants a way out from the Martiniere Family. Which leads to…problems.

 

I looked up the upload date and, again…a twenty-teen upload. Perfect! The same held true for the other two books of the trilogy as well as the omnibus. Why I couldn’t find them a year ago I don’t know, but I was more than happy to replace the plain brown and gold covers in Cinzel Decorative font (which is in EVERYTHING right now, especially romantasy—I fear it is going to be the next Papyrus as far as people not wanting to see it). Add in the Black Ops One font and the tone…fit.

 

(the other two covers involve lightning striking two hills…which fits the ending of book one, and a cutout of two lovers looking at each other against a background of a heart made up of sparks, which fits what happens in book three. The omnibus cover is flame against darkness. All twenty-teen uploads, again.)

 

Sometimes my cover fiddling works and makes me happy, like these covers. Or the covers for my Netwalk Sequence series. Others…well, I’m still struggling with some of the main Martiniere Family Legacy covers. That may be an issue of the fonts. Same for the Goddess’s Honor fantasy series because I haven’t been happy with any of the covers. The original ones by a designer are outdated, alas. Fantasy covers are a big challenge because there is so much AI out there.

 

But…I’ll keep looking around. Sooner or later I’ll find what I need…as I just discovered.

 

When the time is right….


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.

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