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August Writing

August word count: 11786
Year to date: 86151

Though a lighter month than last month in raw word count, it's felt like a very productive one. (The current project is two companion longfics, Harsh Light and Gentle Dark, set during FFXIV's Heavensward expansion, one from my character Ariane's POV and one from from the POV of Urianger, my favorite NPC in the game, who will be shipped with Ariane but not until later!) I pushed onward through Gentle Dark, the Urianger fic, and got its final chapters written, which I'm very happy about! This does not mean that the first drafts are completely done, as there are some interlude bits I still need to write and which I deliberately saved for last. I'm working on those now, and on getting the chapter breaks finalized. I'm planning on posting these fics concurrently, alternating chapters by week, so matching chapter counts would be ideal.

As September approached, I was thinking it would be my first year doing FFXIV Write, a daily prompt-based fic writing challenge that's been going for many years. I struggle with even the idea of writing and posting in a single day with minimal editing, but I figured it'd be a good challenge for exactly that reason. However, it was recently announced that FFXIV Write will be taking a hiatus this year, as one of the organizers recently had a baby (a good reason!) and needs the time off. Some fans have decided to undertake the challenge anyway using prompts from previous years, and some have made and shared prompt lists of their own.

Personally, I've taken it as a reason to just keep going on the current project. My hope is to get the drafts into my beta's hands sometime this month; I think that's a reasonable goal, but we'll see how it goes! Either way, it's so exciting to see completion approaching. While I've posted a few one-shots for FFXIV, most of my fic-writing energy for the past couple years has gone into this, and it'll be my first longfic for this fandom. I'm really excited to get it out there!

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.