eiffel_71 | Reading

Electromagnetic Field, a camping festival with a focus towards makers and hackers, was the highlight of my summer 2024, as previously described at length. I'm not sure how I found out about the Strange Games Festival in lateish April, but I know that when I did, I thought "that might be a bit like a cross between Electromagnetic Field and a games convention, that could be spectacular". Now crossing two things I like may not result in the best of both worlds - a notorious vegetable curry, heavy on cabbage, still gets referenced almost three decades after the fact as demonstration of this - but it's surely a good starting-point.

I am also famously not outdoors-y at all, but the fact that there was a pre-pitched glamping option made the event rather more appealing. Accordingly, I put the word around, found a couple of other friends (Weaver and David) who were interested in going, and we all went over the past long weekend. Very happily, the Strange Games Fesival is very likely to be the highlight of my summer 2025... and at least one of my friends considered it, and the thoughts it raised, to be their highlight of a longer time period still.

me, lying on my site, in front of a banner so that it says STRANGE GAMES

me, lying on my site, in front of a banner so that it says STRANGE GAMES

The festival has been running for approaching ten years. It started as an event for a group of Werewolf (aka Mafia, etc.) players to meet to play around a camp fire and camp overnight, but it has grown over time, gained its wonderful branding and moved around a little over the years as it has outgrown its roots. Crucial to its ethos is a clear statement that "We don’t tolerate any discrimination, and the Festival particularly aims to be a safe and welcoming space for members of the LGBTQIA+ and neurodivergent communities". This is a lofty and worthwhile ambition, and one that it appeared to me (from my point of privilege, so I note I'm not the best-placed to judge) to live up to its goal very successfully. If the combination of that ethos and "a camping festival themed around games" appeals, and if you can live with the realities of a camping festival, the event is very highly recommended indeed.

( And this is why... )

It's easy for me to find two big reasons to get very excited about the Strange Games Festival as a movement. One is the vibe, the other is the potential. The Strange Games Festival movement is taking off; in previous years it was a single annual event, this year it has grown to be one festival plus an additional campout which is a little smaller and without big organised events, next year will celebrate a tenth anniversary and there will probably be one festival plus two campouts, one away in Bristol. So if the movement is not rooted to the spot, how far might it go? Bushy Wood is a very happy home, but could there be an even bigger, better one somewhere else, now that discussions in terms of "as well as" rather than "instead of" are on the table?

Dreaming bigger still, what could a Strange Games Festival with not five hundred but, say, three thousand people look like? If it looks at all like Electromagnetic Field, from which I got so much, wouldn't that be a wonderful thing? (Some might dream yet bigger still, to the UK Games Expo, to Gen Con, to Glastonbury. That's an order of magnitude or two too big for even me... for now.) Maybe Strange Games Festival people might also like Electromagnetic Field; maybe Electromagnetic Field people might also like Strange Games Festival. I would feel comfortable saying that there are all sorts of cool camping festivals out there and you might like more of them than you knew about. I'm prepared to believe there could be others that I don't yet know about that I might like, in the same way.

Many, many thanks to everyone who worked with such dedication, expertise and talent to put on such a good event, whether running a game, volunteering or organising the whole show. How far you have already come, how late I am to the party, and how appealing it is to contribute in the future to something bigger and better still. If you can measure the effect that an event has by the number of smiles it raises, the Strange Games Festival scores a critical hit.

Current Mood: strange

hilarita

If you are a fountain pen person, what stupidly expensive pen (let's say, for the sake of this argument, one that costs more than about £250) would you want to buy?

cosmolinguist

I took yesterday off work, probably inadvisably so close to big deadlines but it gave me a chance to meet someone and do ridiculous things I'd need a filter that I don't have any more to describe here in more detail. The tl;dr is that my brain and body feel much better and I slept for eleven hours last night.

Now to get back to work and catch up quick...

cosmolinguist

There's a scene in The Thick of It where someone (I think it's either Glen or Alex Macqueen's character Julius Nicholson) is looking for a radio to put the test match on, and Ollie scofffs that they should just listen online, and Glen says listening to radio online is like making coffee in the microwave.

I immediately loved this.

I can't tell you how it's perfect but it feels perfect.

Anyway my radio stopped working so I'm listening on my phone now and I think about this line all the goddam time.

As with coffee in the microwave, I'd probably rather have none at all than deal with this. It's bad because with the radio I could flip an actual tactile switch, I didn't even have to take my eyes off my work, and now I have to pick up the distraction rectangle and tap tap a bunch on its unhelpful featureless glass carapace to get the music back on, and by the time I've done that I am probably playing games or answering messages.

D had already looked up dab radios when mine started dying, but today he just sent me a link to one and said "I can buy this from Argos, we can pick it up today."

I was torn between finding this very charming and worrying that I'd become so annoying he just bought me a radio to stop my whining about it, heh.

cmcmck

We've travelled through Plymouth many a time and changed trains at the station but we've never actually spent time taking a look at the city.

It was well worth the time to do so.

We explored the old seaport area, the Barbican and also the Hoe.

There is one heck of a lot of history to the place.

The Dolphin hotel is a pub with a very fine frontage:

( More pics: )

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: 'ome from the market

cosmolinguist

Hardly slept again last night.

Went for a bike ride and a couple of pints with D this evening so I am actually feeling tired now for the first time in many days.

Really hoping this means I'll sleep. Gotta actually go to work tomorrow, and I have obligations after work too so it'll be a long day if I'm as brainfoggy and exhausted as I was today or especially Saturday.

It was a lovely day: perfect weather. Really glad I got to be outside: we went to the garden center this afternoon too; spring bulbs are in and V wasn't able to get any last year so I'm glad they did this year. We also got tea and really tasty cake as they were having a pop-up cafe fundraiser.

denise posting in

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.

cmcmck

The River Lynher (pronounced liner) in north Cornwall runs through Stara woods.

It's an attractive spot.

As we set out we were amused by the new sign on Farmer Walters' farm next door to Kathy's cottage. Their grandchildren are now at the getting about stage and there are pastures on both sides of the road. Kathy thinks he should add 'cats'.

( See more: )

Current Mood: photographical
Current Location: ici

cosmolinguist

...not great but okay. I slept more (again: not great but okay which is a big improvement). The sun came out.

I didn't get to the gym but I did help D do his girlfriend's yard work -- putting vast quantities of a hedge into big bags and taking it to the tip[/dump]. Got home all sweaty and dirty, went right into the shower before helping make dinner, so all of that sounds typical for the gym. My right shoulder and my back are sore.

Before this we went to one of the local community gardens with V, who got to squee at all the native plants and bees and stuff being grown at the allotment.

D and I made pasta and sauce and he made gin and tonic to accompany the cooking of it, as is traditional.

Had a surprisingly painless conversation with my parents this evening. Mom had had good results at her yearly kidney check-up so she was happier than she has been lately. She also said that my fictive cousins couldn't say enough nice things about meeting up with me a week ago, which was nice. I enjoyed the time too and, as D said when I told him -- because the praise was as much for him as for me -- he's glad they didn't receive reports about men in dresses [because I'd worn a overall/dungaree skirt last Sunday] and us being weirdly affectionate for "housemates."

cosmolinguist

I slept ridiculously badly last night.

In one way this wasn't as bad as it might normally have been because today there was no lift club to get up for.

But in another way it was extra miserable because it meant that even when I did wake up I felt so awful that I wondered if I could join D's group of people going to the rugby (group stages of the Women's Rugby World Cup happening in Salford) this afternoon. After an hour lying down -- I didn't sleep but I tried to rest -- I felt enough better to go. I enjoyed the first half (except the score) but really flagged at halftime and was barely aware of the second half (beyond the howls of misery from the loud Scottish fans behind me, who screamed every minute or two about how awful the referring was even though they were winning the whole time).

When we got home I was so tired I tried again to sleep, couldn't do it. I'm now sick of my books and phone games and everything I use to pass the time when my insomnia is bad.

It feels like a real waste of a day, which makes the bank holiday weekend into just a regular weekend.

The weather has been cooler and the sun isn't shining; the light feels weird, it feels like the day never gets going properly. Day after day all week.

I hope very much that sleep is kinder to me tonight. But I don't feel tired now: I didn't do anything; I'm uncomfortably aware that I didn't manage to exercise more than the minimum this week when I'm trying to do more. And I'm not sure about the direction that circuits is taking under its new trainer; it's not working up a sweat in me in the same way.

So between that, a day on trains to and from London on Tuesday, not managing to go to the gym Thursday night when I really wanted to...it's been a whole week of blah (except Wednesday night it was fun to go see To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar which we'd never seen before and then have a lush meal afterwards, the first time in ages I actually felt like I ate too much but it was pleasant).

jbanana

We've got builders in doing a new kitchen after last year's leak, so we have many, many decisions to make, and we have to live with them all, good or bad, for many, many years.
EC was at a wedding today in St. Paul's cathedral - ok, only in a side chapel, but still!
YC is on his way to some remote location to produce sessions for a band for a week; no idea who they are.

My conclusion is that my kids have fancier lives than me, which is good.

Edit: there was one other thing today. On the way to the kitchen shop I had to drive through a demonstration against housing migrants in hotels. A man stood at the side of the road with a sign saying we should bring back Guy Fawkes and burn down parliament. I happened to have the window open because it was a hot day, and I had to pass him slowly, so I told him he was a fucking idiot.

I'm annoyed that the protesters draped themselves in flags. I'm as English as anyone could be, and nothing that they're saying represents me at all.

chris

You may recall that my late husband, Emerson Milford Dickson, was a judge for the first children's and YA prize at the Polari Prize awards, which are UK literary prizes for LGBTQ+ literature, in 2022; I mentioned that he took joy and pride in having been one in the memorial service speech I wrote about him at the time.

You may also be aware that the longlist for one of this year's Polari Prize awards included a nomination for a work by somebody overtly transphobic with a long history of hateful outbursts, among other things. As a result of this, many nominees for this year's awards, as well as some of the judges, have withdrawn, and it has widely been published that the awards this year have been cancelled.

I don't know if Emerson might have been asked to judge the counterpart children's and YA prize in 2024 or to remain involved onwards. I do know that, whether or not he had, Emerson would have been incensed by that inclusion in the longlist, and he would have been extremely vocal about it, absolutely lending his support to those judges who withdrew at the very least. As much as I and many others miss him, there have been many developments over the last couple of years that I am (and I know many others are) glad he has not had to live through. He would have felt particularly disappointed and betrayed by the Polari Prize, though.

The statement put out on behalf of the awards says that "Polari is not and has never been a trans exclusionary organisation. These are not our values and we condemn all forms of transphobia." This is difficult, at best, to reconcile with its longlisting decision, or with some of the actions of - and voices followed by - the Prize's founder. The slow and equivocal nature of the response by the Prize also does not offer reassurance. If the awards continue and if they continue to condemn all forms of transphobia, they cannot offer a platform to the repeatedly, openly and vocally transphobic.

I do not expect this to contribute to the public discussion; it can only be a drop in the wave. However, it would not be in keeping with my sacred memory of Emerson, and those who loved him, not to say anything at all.

Current Mood: disappointed

cosmolinguist

We're going to be on vacation from the 16th to the 25 of September.

The other day I blocked this time out in my calendar. The most accessible way to do this involves inputting the start and end dates.

Today I was asked about a meeting for a random Tuesday in October and when I went to see whether or not I was free, I saw that whole day I was showing as "on leave." And the Monday before it. I'm not aware of any reason I'd have time off then!

Zooming out and every day was showing as on leave. Every day that month.

I investigated and, instead of making the vacation last until the 26th of September, I'd somehow gotten it to be the 26th of December.

My burned-out brain just wants an extra three months off, heh.

cosmolinguist

5am and I'm awake from bad dreams. My brain is being a jerk...

Or, it's tired, I've been pushing it too hard for too long. It's trying to take care of me. It's trying to identify potential threats and think about what to do about them.

It's not its fault that the "what if there's a tiger after me" adrenaline and cortisol-based hardware is the only response available to the "complicated family and memories and bullshit email job" emotions that the software is currently running.

I got back to sleep, yay, but I very convincingly dreamed witnessing an accident and having to accompany family members (D and his sister and then somehow V as well) to A&E. I had every detail: bad phone signal when calling 999, not being able to get an ambulance, waiting all day, seeing excellent and nice clinical staff who are very busy)... I stayed with D and knew to look away when they did something that I know in real life would freak me out.

We were just getting to leave, both of them patched up, when my alarm went off.

If I didn't have such a busy day, and a deadline that depended on me doing something not just today but first thing this morning, I might well have called in sick. I never do that, but I honestly felt like I'd just spent a long eight hours looking after severely injured loved ones. It felt unfair to have to go to work too right after that.

But I did.

cosmolinguist

I'm sitting at a table on the train, and a family with little kids has joined me. I'm delighted to see that Thumb War ("one two three four I declare a...") is a game basically unchanged from when I learned it 35 years ago on another continent.

When the girl asked her mum about the wireless charging spot on the table, I showed her how it worked by sliding my work phone on to it (she grinned when the screen lit up).

Her little brother then held his toy car over the same spot and we all (him too) laughed at his joke about charging his car.

cosmolinguist

Counseling after work today was about how I'm doing well in some ways -- I said I'm finally getting that much-needed holiday, we'll be away for nine days; she asked me how long it's been since I had that long a vacation; I said I didn't know if I ever had. (Turns out I probably have, but the fact that I legitimately couldn't think of any of those occasions is indicative (and that's partly because they're trips back to Minnesota and visiting family isn't really time off).)

So I talked about how fortunate I feel that I have the stability to do that: this is the first time I've had the money and the ability to have time off; before I either had time or money but never both at the same time.

But I also talked about how badly I spiraled on Saturday when some gloomy news about the Twins of all things. (tl;dr: billionaires ruin everything. The hope that things would improve when the team sold to different billionaires has been snatched away; the current ones are keeping the team and it's very clear they're going to starve it of funds -- bad teams make more money than good teams and this family believes they need money right now. They don't share the view that beat writers and podcasters and fans of the team have which is that a sportsball team is a civic institution; for them it's just a way to make money. Like Gleeman started his article the other day, "It's hope that hurts the most." Or as I learned it from English pals: "I can take the despair. It's the hope I can't stand.") I was like I don't have a dog any more, awful things are happening in the country I'm from, I couldn't go back for my grandma's funeral or my family, work has been so stressful all year, I can't even manage to organize a hookup...and now I can't even have baseball as a little fun escapist thing??

So am I doing pretty good or pretty bad?? I feel bad about feeling bad, being aware that my bad-feelings are floating on a sea of basic-okayness and worrying that I'm being insufficiently grateful for it. But my counselor said that it's not like one is true and one is false; both can be valid.

I guess it's part of leveling up Maslow's hierarchy: once you get the basic shit sorted out you do start caring more about that higher-level shit. I didn't expect that to happen automatically; indeed against my will but it seems to have. I don't want to lose track of the fulfilment I do have. But also basic stuff isn't taking up all my time/mental capacity any more so I have to figure out what else to do with my adult life.

cosmolinguist

Despite the misery of getting there, the conference was worth attending. Thanks to D's help I got the bus I needed, I wandered in the direction I thought I was supposed to go from the bus stop and immediately was spotted by someone calling my name; it was one of two event organizers who'd recognize me. That felt very lucky.

My keynote speech was the second of three, which meant I didn't have to deal with all the technical failures of the first one and I wasn't the last thing in the day so I could decide after little sleep and long days in hot rooms and trains that I could leave early. My travel home was much smoother (if sweatier) and being home at dinnertime instead of bedtime did wonders for me.

The conference only had a couple dozen in-person attendees but apparently seven hundred online. I forgot the whole introductory section I had worked so hard on, but it went fine without it. There was still good discussion in the room during the Q&A bit, people are saying nice things on LinkedIn, and I was able to make friends with the first keynote speaker over lunch and she's a very useful work contact for me.

Yesterday at work was rough. I slept through my alarm -- something I never do -- and when I turned on my laptop an hour late I already had missed a call from my manager who'd had to route around me not being available when his manager tagged me to do something. So that was stressful but I was able to complete the task in a reasonably timely fashion, and while it is not my best work I think it ended up being one of those things that we didn't end up needing anyway. It was a slow day at work otherwise.

Unusually for a Thursday, there was no Doof so D and I decided to go to a queer social that we usually miss because it's every Thursday. He'd also invited a person new to the local discord and it was great to meet them too. We stayed out late (for us: he had to do his last-minute before-midnight duolingo lesson while we were waiting at the bus stop to go home!) and had a great time.

Today, the editing process my report has to go through was finished unexpectedly early, so I had to decide whether to accept or reject thousands of track changes. The editing was a weird process last time which we tried to streamline this time because we're up against a tight deadline. I tried to write to the style guide (now that I've laid eyes on it! I didn't know there was one before), but the style guide sucks and the editor I have to work with isn't good at using it. He also thinks all his own opinions and foibles are "just general grammar" and twice lately he mentioned "not using the passive voice" as if that was a) desirable or b) well understood by people who claim to care about it. I cannot cope with someone who doesn't know the difference between what's "correct" by even the widest interpretation of that word, what's a matter of register, and what's stylistics.

After work I had two startling and unsettling things happen in the space of about 15 minutes, the first of which I won't talk about here but the second of which is that I'd forgotten about my mom mentioning that some family friends were traveling to England on vacation and "are going to be somewhere near you." Of course I asked where and of course she didn't remember. She wanted to know if she should tell T to call me when they got here, "...if their phones even work there..." FFS. She should know their phones won't work here because hers and my dad's phones never work when they are here but of course she hadn't thought about it that deeply. She just is a boomer so would call. Well we're millennials so we can email!

I forgot immediately about this of course, in the sea of parental nonsense. T is an anglophile and a history teacher so tends to come to London and Canterbury and whatnot with school trips of teenagers. At least one other time, before covid, we vaguely arranged to meet up when she was here on a vacation but she was in London then and I think it was around Christmas so the trains were all fucked up and I was too poor to go to London on short notice anyway.

My mom might think they're "close to me" when they're in Ireland or something so I wasn't worried about it. But it turns out they are close to me! D and I now have plans to go see them on Sunday!

This does bring up the awkward point of how, if at all, I'll hide my life from them. My parents exhibit untold levels of oblivousness but surely other people might think my beard and voice and everything are surprising enough to be remarked upon when they get home!

I made the plan like normal but am not sure how to approach it now.

Profile

The Man Who Loves Laura Bassett

August 2025

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
					1	2
3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

Page Summary

Style Credit

Base style: Practicality by timeasmymeasure
Theme: Orange Sherbert by krja

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Page generated Aug. 28th, 2025 07:57 pm

Out there I feel sad not to see her no more

Reading

The Strange Games Festival 2025

so.. almost completely random question:

Day off

Making coffee in the microwave

Plymouth

Insomnia

Mississippi legal challenge: beginning 1 September, we will need to geoblock Mississippi IPs

Stara woods and the Lynher valley

Better today

Mulligan

Things

The Polari Prize 2025

You know you need a vacation when...

Trying to reframe things

Vignette

How am I doing, anyway?

Giving my brain a brush

Profile

August 2025

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags