Search maintenance

Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:19 am
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

Happy Wednesday!

I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!

Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!

Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.

watervole: (Default)
[personal profile] watervole

 Recent research has shown that some fatal diseases in garden birds are spread by bird feeders.  The RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) stopped selling bird tables several years ago, and have now issued guidelines on what times of our one should not feed at all, and how often seed and suet feeders should be disinfected.

After thinking about it, I've taken down my feeders.  They were getting very little use in recent years, and when I'm unwell, I can't clean them regularly enough.

I still have plenty of plants that attract insects, and a tree with rough bark where I often see small birds looking for food.

Advice from the RSPB 

snowgrouse: General Gan (The Longest Day in Chang'an) being a handsome motherfucker (Gan hulking)
[personal profile] snowgrouse
Title: The Kiss of the Beast: Sweet Dreams
Author: Snowgrouse
Fandom: The Longest Day in Chang'an (2019)
Pairing: Gan Shoucheng/Jiao (Original Male Character)
Rating: NC-17
Genre: PWP, Slash
Warnings: None, really. This is pretty mellow, as far as Gan pr0n goes. He doesn't even slap Jiao once!
Length: ~2300 words
Summary: Jiao falls asleep in Gan's bed and has a steamy, filthy wet dream of him. He comes so hard he wakes up--only to find Gan himself standing at the foot of the bed, bemused and amused...

A/N: What it says on the tin. Despite being straight, Gan allows Jiao to... well, find out. Wonders never cease. Jiao, of course, is over the moon.



(Gan runs his hand lightly across the thick bulge of his erection, his breathing heavier as he pleasures himself with the soft, smooth texture of the silk; he sweeps his fingertips in a feathery caress across his balls, then his shaft, finishing with a little drum of his fingers upon the tip. To Jiao's torment, Gan repeats these caresses until the silk clings to his cock so tightly Jiao can tell he's drawn back his foreskin; the next rub of his fingers across the tip leaves a wet stain upon the silk, the scent of his sap so strong now that Jiao can smell it from where he's standing beside the bed.

Gan sighs in pleasure and gives Jiao a languid look through his heavy-lidded eyes; his kohl having smudged from the day's toil makes his eyes look even more devilish and debauched than usual.

"What's the matter, faggot?" Gan asks playfully. "Aren't you going to offer me--" and he squeezes his prick with a hiss, "a goodnight kiss?"

"I wouldn't dare!" Jiao cries, bowing his head in a salute.

Gan tilts his head lazily, letting it loll on the pillow. "Shame," he says with a playful raise of his eyebrow.

Jiao hates being trapped like this; as Gan flashes him a sharp white grin through his curly whiskers, Jiao feels like a half-dead mouse must when a cat refuses to kill it, still keen to torture it for its sport. Yet, at the same time, in a perverse way, it arouses Jiao tremendously to be Gan's plaything like this, an object for him to whet his sadism upon.

"Would you like to kiss me, faggot?" Gan asks bluntly. "And don't give me any of that 'my will is your will, sir' bullshit. Just be honest."

"Y-yes, sir," Jiao says quietly, his eyes cast down. "But only if you want it, too, sir."

Gan is surprised by that last addition, not knowing what to say at first. Jiao knows very well that Gan must have developed if not homosexual desires, then a curiosity about them at least, in the course of all the years he's been the unwilling object of Jiao's unrequited lust. But now, Gan is the one feeling trapped: if he commands Jiao to kiss him, he will have admitted to desiring him.

"Why should a man care if his desires are reciprocated or not?" Gan replies brusquely, overcompensating for his nervousness with masculine bluster. "If I want a bitch, I will fuck a bitch, whether she likes it or not. If she doesn't like it, that's her problem."

Jiao stays silent and remains bowed, glancing at Gan warily from underneath his brows.

"At ease, faggot," Gan finally says and waves his hand. "Come and sit here," he says and pats the bed beside him.
)

The case of the missing notifications

Apr. 11th, 2026 11:58 pm
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_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

snowgrouse: General Gan (The Longest Day in Chang'an) being a handsome motherfucker (Gan hulking)
[personal profile] snowgrouse
Title: Ring of Evil
Author: Snowgrouse
Fandom: The Longest Day in Chang'an (2019)
Pairing: Gan Shoucheng/Original Female Character/Right Cavalry Soldiers
Rating: NC-17 for sex and graphic violence, sexual and otherwise
Genre: Darkfic, PWP, Hard BDSM, Non-Con, Horror, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat
Warnings: YE OLDE FUCKEDE UPPE SHITTE. Big, big warnings for brutal non-con in this one--dark even by my standards. While she does enjoy it a couple of times (and gets to come at least twice), this is definitely more rapey than ravishey and quite violent. There are several extreme kinks featured herein, so heed the Ao3 tags.
Length: ~5700 words
Summary: On Lin Jiu Lang's orders, Gan and his men burn and pillage a gentry lord's estate, and brutally rape the only woman left in the village: the lord's beautiful, beloved concubine.

A/N: The title comes from the Chinese term for gang rape, if that's any indication. This is really dark and horrific--exploring the horror of the "medieval village in flames and soldiers raping and pillaging" trope, so I'm not sure if "ravishment" is even applicable. IDK if the lady agreed to be left behind in the village to hold back the Cavalry's advance (in which case, she consented, even if she knew what was coming), or if the lord sacrificed her for that purpose because he was as big a monster as the Cavalrymen. So I decided to leave it ambiguous, to add to the horror. Please heed the warnings. See further notes (including endnotes) on Ao3.



("They all want it," a particularly vicious-looking young officer says; Hui is even nastier with women than Gan himself is, his narrowed eyes glittering with menace. "They all dream of being raped. Every one." He caresses her cheek in a mockery of tenderness. "Don't you, sweetheart?" he says and turns his caress into a slap. "Hmm?"

"Well, now your fantasy's come true," Gan says and begins to slide his cock inside her pussy. The scream she lets out is heart-rending, horrific, ugly but beautiful to the men's ears; Gan almost comes as he feels its vibrations echoing inside her body, the tight squeeze as her muscles try to eject him in vain.

"Hui, put your hand over her mouth."

There's no one to hear them, and Gan loves to make women scream, so it's for different reasons that he wants Hui's hand on her mouth: he wants to terrorise her, so a soldier's dirty, sweaty hand is perfect for the purpose. Hui leers and clamps his hand over her lips, the men loving the way this makes her scream even harder; Gan rewards her with longer, deeper thrusts, the slickness of her pussy betraying her pleasure, allowing even Gan's hefty prick to slide in and out of her with ease.

Yet, she keeps on screaming, so Gan tilts his head and pouts. "Oh, poor you," he coos in mock-pity. "Poor, poor you. Are you scared?" he taunts and spreads her pussy, pulling open her folds. "We just want to play with your pretty little cunny, that's all," he says softly as he inspects her, watching his monstrously thick cock brutally splitting the white and pink lips again and again. "We don't often get to play with pale girls like yourself, you see; pink cunnies like yours are a rare treat. Don't you think it's pretty, boys?"

"Very pretty," they say.

"Yeah, nice and fat," another agrees, licking his lips like contemplating a delicious dish.

"Nice and meaty," Hui says and slaps her clitoris, making her shriek into his hand. "Yeah... You're going to take all our cocks in this fat little cunt," he says and slaps it again, making Gan groan in pleasure as she jerks around him in pain.

"Are you going to give her your special treatment, General?" one of the men says, leering maliciously.
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