Victory Road Application 2025

Sep. 6th, 2025 08:08 pm
quickattackjack: (skelesmile)
[personal profile] quickattackjack
Player
Name: Wolfy
Preferred Contact: quesadillawizard on plurk
Timezone: CST
Current Characters in Victory Road: Beetlejuice, Henry Townshend, JW

Character
Name: Jack Skellington
Series: The Nightmare Before Christmas (Film + Tokyopop Comics)
Timeline: Post Battle for the Pumpkin King (that book is a flashback, technically i THINK the latest in the timeline is Mirror Moon)
Canon Resource Links:
Film: https://the-nightmare-before-christmas.fandom.com/wiki/Tim_Burton%27s_The_Nightmare_Before_Christmas
Zero's Journey: https://the-nightmare-before-christmas.fandom.com/wiki/Zero%27s_Journey
Mirror Moon: https://the-nightmare-before-christmas.fandom.com/wiki/Mirror_Moon
The Battle for the Pumpkin King: https://the-nightmare-before-christmas.fandom.com/wiki/The_Battle_for_Pumpkin_King

the wiki is not great

Personality:

He's a man of big emotions. When he's excited about something, he wants to get the whole town involved, complete with power point presentation on why. When he's sad, he is utterly lost in his melancholy and allows himself to fall into trouble like the time he got so sad he just walked out of town into the woods in a random direction until the sun came up. When he's focused on something, forgets to eat and sleep until he's puzzled out what he's trying to discover. Others often have to step in to bring Jack down to earth. He loves to play as much as anyone and loves a spectacle.

If something catches Jack's curiosity, he will pursue it until he feels he fully understands it. This can manifest in many ways: exploration, book study, the scientific method. He's only got a limited scope of understanding though. Jack knows ghosts and ghouls and graveyards and screams. Horrible is wonderful! Scary is spectacular! He was hand-trained by the previous Pumpkin King, Edgar, and taught all he knows about making sure Halloween goes the way it ought to. While he is not part of the governing body of the town, he is still a leader. The townspeople look at him for inspiration. It's a lot to carry on your shoulders, but it's something Jack does with dignity and pride.

Although he delights in scaring the masses, as being scary is very important in Halloween Town, Jack is above all a polite and decent fellow. He treats every citizen of Halloween Town as his equal and appreciates all their talents and gifts. His friends are his whole world. When Zero went missing due to his careless placement of one of his inventions, he did not rest until his dog was back in his arms. He enlisted the strongest and bravest monsters to be part of the rescue team. When he saw that his dear friend Sally, who had supported him even in his wildest antics, was being held against her will and tortured, he saw red. His loyalty threw him into action and he did battle with Oogie Boogie until not a bug was left. This is important because Oogie and Jack have a history. He must have already fallen pretty darn far in Jack's eyes. Sometimes you have to kill your childhood best friend. :(

Jack is very hands-on when talking to people, patting shoulders and tugging people in the direction of whatever he's talking about. If he thinks your tongue is important to the conversation, he just might pull it out of your mouth. He's a bit scattered though and does have a tendency to talk over people without meaning to, often missing things that are right in front of him, such as Sally's affection for him or Santa not into being sent on "vacation" via kidnapping in a plastic garbage bag. His intentions really are for the best, he just gets lost in his own whimsy. He can talk himself into anything. This thoughtlessness almost ruined Christmas entirely and since then, he's tried to be more thoughtful when it comes to other realms' customs. His friends won't let him forget, that's for sure.

Jack is very creative. For example, in the contest to become the new Pumpkin King in Training, Oogie sabotages him and makes him drop all his pumpkins. Thinking quickly, Jack pieces the smashed shells together into one big jack-o-lantern and wins points for his efforts. He's known to tinker and invent things on whims as flimsy as a dream (creating the magic mirror) or even pouring months of hard work into furthering the technology of the holiday realms (the portal in zero's journey). He admires Dr. Finklestein and often goes to him for advice on scientific matters.




Pokémon Information
Affiliation: Trainer
Starter: Edgar the Murkrow

Samples
RP Sample: TDM Thread

Victory Road Sample: This sample must take place in Victory Road's setting and can be EITHER a written post OR another thread if you would prefer not to write a post. The minimum is 300 words for a prose sample, eight sentences for a network post/actionspam sample, or ten comments total (five from you) in an RP sample. What we are looking for here is how the character responds to the Pokéworld's setting. You can also use a Victory Road test drive thread for this sample, but you cannot use the same top-level for the first sample above.


TBA

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.

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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