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Book2-94
Feb. 11th, 2026 09:00 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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The post Book2-94 appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
The Mark Of Donalds
Feb. 11th, 2026 07:17 pmpennyarcade_feedTime was, people would say that you had to read the newspost to know what the comic was about - like that was a bad thing! As the author of the newspost, I have a natural impetus to craft the kind of strip which requires an independent Stone of Hammurabi to help interpret it; a conceptual side order. The thing about today's strip is that you will find absolutely no succor in these words - no nourishment. It's inspiration is almost impossible to explain, it must be experienced viscerally. Brenna was only able to watch it for ten seconds. How far will you get?
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Shame is hard to carry
Feb. 11th, 2026 07:34 amkrissygibbsdotcom_feedWe had the worst family meeting ever yesterday. Most of the time when we have a family meeting, someone is struggling the most and we balance the load differently so that person has greater ease until life settles down a bit.
That’s not an option right now. I’m really struggling with the fact that everyone is at capacity.
I want to, but I won’t get into the laundry list of health issues my kids struggle with. I feel really guilty about the genetics they inherited. Noah and I had too much in common. He was freakishly hypermobile, but he had no pain from it. Just a bunch of the weird add on EDS stuff. He was like, the last Zebra standing in our house most days. He was more sturdy. The rest of us are not. Our joints melt like butter on a hot day. They simply don’t function as well as one might hope. I don’t want to get into all the rest of it in super great detail. Vertigo, passing out, immunocompromised… this is the vague overview.
I live in a house full of people who rarely have days when they feel 100%. The baseline entry for us leaving our house and going anywhere is a lot of exercise. Table stakes for entry into community is a high level of fitness that we hold on to with our fingernails.
I am not getting to my personal fitness building these days. I have too much to do and I’m exhausted. It is showing in my decreasing ability to socialise because my body can’t get there.
And yesterday our wonderful cleaning lady quit. I get why. She was so scared we were going to be mad at her. Of course not! You are moving on to do the job you would prefer to be doing. You have spent a long time in training and now you don’t need to supplement with cleaning. Yay!! Good for you!
Shit fuck. We are screwed.
Honestly she comes about once a month because she’s terrified of being exposed to any kind of illness so if anyone in my house is even vaguely contagious she won’t come so sometimes we go 9 weeks without seeing her. So, like, we probably could find more reliable help. Maybe.
Hiring help is incredibly hard and I am not good at it. I did not come from the class of people who got help. Either you do it for yourself or you do without. Those are the options.
I can make everyone in this house work more. It is technically an option. If I force them to do a lot more cleaning they will have less ability to access their social life because they are so tired. Do you know what is incredibly fucking mentally abusive to young adults? Locking them in the house to clean more instead of having a life.
I literally, physically can’t do it all. My hands stop. If I push too hard I can’t do things like hold forks. It gets bad.
So at the end of the meeting yesterday we were all crying and not sure what to do. We were really upset and then half an hour after we stopped trying because we were too activated to look for solutions, that’s when we found out our help is quitting.
I am struggling with feeling like I have not done enough to “deserve” help. I haven’t fought my way to the top of NHS waiting lists for myself and my kids. I don’t have the full diagnosis list explanation for why some of sometimes spend a day in bed with vertigo so bad that we will fall and cause a head injury if we push our luck with walking. I am not so rich that I won’t notice the money being gone–I will have to make choices at this point to not pay for other things, but it seems like a good trade in many ways.
I have tried many times over the years to hire babysitters/cleaning help. I have had one really great babysitter and one really great cleaner out of more than a dozen attempts to hire people. This is harder than finding people to date like whoa.
In the past Noah and I fought about cleaners. I don’t want to have the kinds of kids who are incapable of cleaning up after themselves. Fuck that bullshit. My kids need to fucking know how to be a competent adult, thank you very much. Thing is, they know how. It just uses a lot of their sparse energy. On days when we catch up and do a lot of cleaning I can watch the fog of exhaustion settle over their faces and I know they won’t be doing any kind of intellectual work for the rest of the day. They can’t focus.
What are my real priorities? Making sure they know how to clean no matter how terribly they feel? Or do I want them making progress towards work that might be more fulfilling down the line that will allow them to pay for the help they need. I think my kids will always need some help with the physically rough parts if they want to be capable of doing fun parts.
This is all hard to sit with. I don’t feel like I do enough work to justify an assistant. I only have 3 full time jobs, what a weak, whiny, ball sack of a human.
I had been feeling like things were going pretty well. Turns out me trying to cover for the folks who weren’t doing enough was failing to conceal how much was falling off the “done” list and the other people are getting upset about balance. Oh, well.
What we all want is for Noah to pick up his share. We would be fine.
We will never be fine again.
We need help and getting it is a high stress, time consuming activity. I am overwhelmed as fuck. I don’t know where in my schedule I am going to manufacture the time and energy to find help. It usually doesn’t go so great.
The last not quite fit was someone who was hard to schedule with every week and he’d show up and do about 40% of what I asked him to do and he did such a poor job I had to redo that 40%. I’m sorry when my kids clean more effectively than an adult by the time they are 10, I don’t want to pay the adult.
I don’t feel disabled enough to “deserve” the amount of help it would take for me to have a life where I got to actually relax at times. I don’t work for pay so spending family money to be even more useless feels like the kind of thing I want to eat the rich for.
I feel caught between a rock and a hard place.
The funny thing is, if the NHS was able to say, “Optimally for your disability it would be good if you had x hours of help because you need more rest” I would pay for it. It’s not that I need the help to magically arrive and be free. I just don’t know how to A) feel like I deserve it and B) find it.
I would be a better mother if I didn’t turn into an anxious mess at the thought of hiring help.
Sometimes, if I am feeling flippant, I think about the Scots who have told me how much they hate Trump and his mother. His mother was a Scot. She played a lottery game with the folks in her village. When she won big, she didn’t share the winnings as she was supposed to, instead she skipped town and went to the US.
I don’t want to steal a job from a local. I bought a house no one local was stupid enough to buy because it needs so much work. I am employing local crafts people. I would like to send even more money dubiously earned in the US over generations back into the Scottish economy.
Maybe there is some acceptable symmetry here?
Girl Genius for Wednesday, February 11, 2026
Feb. 11th, 2026 05:00 amgirlgenius_main_feedWednesday Action Log 02-11-26
Feb. 11th, 2026 05:01 amtwentysidedtale_feedMore Balders Gate 3.
Finally after a few weeks of trying to get past act two, we’ve finally made it to act three. I’ve been way to busy to get into act three, but there are some highlights from this current run so far. Right after the last post, we were going through the Crèche, and apparently neither of us knew that if you mock Vlaakith too much she will kill everyone on the spot. So, we technically lost our run, but due to the fact that neither of us wanted to restart again, we force closed the game. If you close it normally or through the task manager, the game will save first regardless of what you do. But if you turn the power off on your computer, the game can’t save. It’s not ideal, but it seemed fair enough due to the circumstances.
We also had to restart the game another time, but not because of a party wipe out. Halsin died during the same big side quest as last week. Not that he got killed by any story choices or anything like that. We finished part of the quest where you fight off a bunch of enemies while protecting a portal, and to make it a bit easier on ourselves, we cast Spike Growth around the area. After the fight he apparently he decided the best path to leave the area was directly through the spikes, I don’t know if we could’ve continued the quest without him, but it felt bad that he died like that. So we’ve loaded twice in honor mode, where you can’t load. I’m fine with it, but I’d like it if we don’t have to again.
How’s everyone else doing?
Update on legal cases: one new victory! :) One new restriction :(
Feb. 10th, 2026 03:03 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
denise posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_newsWe're very sorry to have to do this, and especially on such short notice. The reason for it: on Friday, South Carolina governor Henry McMaster signed the South Carolina Age-Appropriate Design Code Act into law, with an effective date of immediately. The law is so incredibly poorly written it took us several days to even figure out what the hell South Carolina wants us to do and whether or not we're covered by it. We're still not entirely 100% sure about the former, but in regards to the latter, we're pretty sure the fact we use Google Analytics on some site pages (for OS/platform/browser capability analysis) means we will be covered by the law. Thankfully, the law does not mandate a specific form of age verification, unlike many of the other state laws we're fighting, so we're likewise pretty sure that just stopping people under 18 from creating an account will be enough to comply without performing intrusive and privacy-invasive third-party age verification. We think. Maybe. (It's a really, really badly written law. I don't know whether they intended to write it in a way that means officers of the company can potentially be sentenced to jail time for violating it, but that's certainly one possible way to read it.)
Netchoice filed their lawsuit against SC over the law as I was working on making this change and writing this news post -- so recently it's not even showing up in RECAP yet for me to link y'all to! -- but here's the complaint as filed in the lawsuit, Netchoice v Wilson. Please note that I didn't even have to write the declaration yet (although I will be): we are cited in the complaint itself with a link to our August news post as evidence of why these laws burden small websites and create legal uncertainty that causes a chilling effect on speech. \o/
In fact, that's the victory: in December, the judge ruled in favor of Netchoice in Netchoice v Murrill, the lawsuit over Louisiana's age-verification law Act 456, finding (once again) that requiring age verification to access social media is unconstitutional. Judge deGravelles' ruling was not simply a preliminary injunction: this was a final, dispositive ruling stating clearly and unambiguously "Louisiana Revised Statutes §§51:1751–1754 violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution", as well as awarding Netchoice their costs and attorney's fees for bringing the lawsuit. We didn't provide a declaration in that one, because Act 456, may it rot in hell, had a total registered user threshold we don't meet. That didn't stop Netchoice's lawyers from pointing out that we were forced to block service to Mississippi and restrict registration in Tennessee (pointing, again, to that news post), and Judge deGravelles found our example so compelling that we are cited twice in his ruling, thus marking the first time we've helped to get one of these laws enjoined or overturned just by existing. I think that's a new career high point for me.
I need to find an afternoon to sit down and write an update for
dw_advocacy highlighting everything that's going on (and what stage the lawsuits are in), because folks who know there's Some Shenanigans afoot in their state keep asking us whether we're going to have to put any restrictions on their states. I'll repeat my promise to you all: we will fight every state attempt to impose mandatory age verification and deanonymization on our users as hard as we possibly can, and we will keep actions like this to the clear cases where there's no doubt that we have to take action in order to prevent liability. In cases like SC, where the law takes immediate effect, or like TN and MS, where the district court declines to issue a temporary injunction or the district court issues a temporary injunction and the appellate court overturns it, we may need to take some steps to limit our potential liability: when that happens, we'll tell you what we're doing as fast as we possibly can. (Sometimes it takes a little while for us to figure out the exact implications of a newly passed law or run the risk assessment on a law that the courts declined to enjoin. Netchoice's lawyers are excellent, but they're Netchoice's lawyers, not ours: we have to figure out our obligations ourselves. I am so very thankful that even though we are poor in money, we are very rich in friends, and we have a wide range of people we can go to for help.)
In cases where Netchoice filed the lawsuit before the law's effective date, there's a pending motion for a preliminary injunction, the court hasn't ruled on the motion yet, and we're specifically named in the motion for preliminary injunction as a Netchoice member the law would apply to, we generally evaluate that the risk is low enough we can wait and see what the judge decides. (Right now, for instance, that's Netchoice v Jones, formerly Netchoice v Miyares, mentioned in our December news post: the judge has not yet ruled on the motion for preliminary injunction.) If the judge grants the injunction, we won't need to do anything, because the state will be prevented from enforcing the law. If the judge doesn't grant the injunction, we'll figure out what we need to do then, and we'll let you know as soon as we know.
I know it's frustrating for people to not know what's going to happen! Believe me, it's just as frustrating for us: you would not believe how much of my time is taken up by tracking all of this. I keep trying to find time to update
dw_advocacy so people know the status of all the various lawsuits (and what actions we've taken in response), but every time I think I might have a second, something else happens like this SC law and I have to scramble to figure out what we need to do. We will continue to update dw_news whenever we do have to take an action that restricts any of our users, though, as soon as something happens that may make us have to take an action, and we will give you as much warning as we possibly can. It is absolutely ridiculous that we still have to have this fight, but we're going to keep fighting it for as long as we have to and as hard as we need to. I look forward to the day we can lift the restrictions on Mississippi, Tennessee, and now South Carolina, and I apologize again to our users (and to the people who temporarily aren't able to become our users) from those states.
Home Azone
Feb. 10th, 2026 01:45 ampennyarcade_feedIn the Time Before - no relation to The Land Before Time - it was very important to have a "Halo Killer." There were many attempts, wrought at a profundity of expense and labor. They would have been very surprised to learn, years after this conflict had passed into history, that the storied franchise and its laconic green action figure would die to suicide.
Get the MH Stories 3 Demo!
Feb. 9th, 2026 08:19 pmpennyarcade_feedCapcom just released a demo for Monster Hunter Stories 3: Twisted Reflection and I love it. The demo seems to have come out for pretty much everything but I grabbed it for the PS5 Pro and it’s gorgeous. Plenty of people love the Monster Hunter series but I feel like the “Stories” side games get overlooked. That sort of makes sense as the Stories games are very different. These are turn-based RPG’s with an anime art style and a focus on younger characters with monster collecting/ battling. Think of them like Pokemon + Monster Hunter and it’s just as cool as it sounds.
Book2-93
Feb. 9th, 2026 09:00 pmsidequested_feed
The post Book2-93 appeared first on Side Quested Webcomic.
