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Phone, again [me, tech]

Whelp, it looks like I'm in the market for a cell phone again.

On Saturday night, I noticed something dangling from the corner of my cell phone, which immediately struck me as odd, as there's no aperture in the protective gel case there for something to get stuck. Well, there's not supposed to be. On further inspection, I discovered the corner of the gel case no longer fit over the corner of the phone, and some random shmutzig had gotten wedged... between the back plate of the phone and the rest of the phone, to which it was no longer attached along the bottom. Pressing it back down didn't work: something in the middle of the phone was causing resistance to closing the phone.

Lo, verily, my phone's battery was pregnant.

Some of you who follow me on the fediverse might be thinking, "Wait, didn't you just replace a phone, the battery of which swelled up?" Lol, yes: late April. That was my work phone. This is my personal phone. Lolsob.

So, being a proper nerd, I went right to iFixit to order myself a battery. Whereupon I was stopped by something that did not bode well. I entered my phone's model information and iFixit, instead of telling me what battery to buy, alerted me that it is not possible to determine what kind of battery my phone took from the outside.

It turns out that the OnePlus 9 G5 can take one of two batteries, and which one a given OnePlus 9 G5 takes can only be determined by putting eyes on the battery which is in it.

Well, okay then: I clicked through the helpful link to read instructions on how to pull the battery on a OnePlus 9 G5. I read along with slow dawning horror at exactly how involved it was and how many tools I would have to buy, and made it to step twelve – "Use a Phillips screwdriver to remove the ten 3.8 mm-long screws securing the motherboard cover. One of the motherboard cover screws is covered by a white water ingress sticker. To unfasten the screw you can puncture the sticker with your screwdriver." – of thirty and decided: fuck this, I will hire a professional.

(I think maybe it was a fortunate thing that I went through the prior fiasco with trying to change the battery on the Nuu B20 5G, first, because it softened me to the idea of maybe I don't have to service all my electronics personally myself.)

Alas, it was late on a Saturday night and all the cell phone repair places around me were closed until Monday.

Fortunately, I had a short day Monday and would be getting out of work around 5:30pm. I called ahead to a place that is open to 7pm to ask if I needed an appointment and whether they did OnePlus phones. There was a bit of a language barrier with the guy who answered the phone, but he said no appointment was necessary and whether they could fix my phone would entail putting eyes on it, and please try to come before 6pm to give them time to fix it before they close.

So after work, Mr B took me there, and we presented the phone. Dude got the back of the phone the rest of the way off the phone with rather more dispatch that I would be have been able to, and pretty quickly discovered that he was in over his head. Credit where it's due – "A man's got to know his limitations" – he promptly backed off, and told me to bring it back tomorrow when the more-expert boss was in.

I'm slightly irritated that we made the unnecessary trip instead of him saying, "Oh, a OnePlus, come tomorrow when our OnePlus expert is in", but it did give me the extra time to do more thorough backing-up. I have never managed to get Android File Transfer to work, nor any a number of alternatives; snapdrop.io would only do single files at a time, not whole directories, and, weirdly, Proton Drive, both app and website, doesn't allow uploading whole directories from Android either.

Finally, I saw a mention that the Android app Solid Explorer "does FTP". I wanted to make a local backup to my Mac, but, fuck it, I have servers, I can run FTP somewhere just to get my files backed up off my phone. Imagine my surprise on opening up the "FTP" option on Solid Explorer and discovering it wasn't an FTP client it was an FTP server. Yes, the easiest way I found to exchange files between my Android phone and my MacBook Pro was to put an FTP server on my phone.

Worked fine. My FTP client on my Mac sucks, but I'll solve that another day. (Does Fetch still exist?)

Mr B and I discussed it and decided he'd bring the phone in the next day, Tuesday, to spare me the hike. He returned with the phone, still with the back off, and the news that they had discovered, as I had, you have to get at the battery to even figure out which battery to order. And that he was told that the battery would be in by 3pm the next day (Wednesday). The only surprising thing here is that they could get the battery that fast.

So, today (Wednesday), after 3pm, Mr B took my phone back for a third visit, and they attempted to install my new battery.

It was the wrong battery.

( Hwaet! The saga continues... )

Entry tags:

admin,
patreon

Admin: Patreon: What fresh hell #728, #729 [Patreon]

Yall. I am so tired.

Last thing first. Investigating the other thing, I discovered this. I'll just cut and paste what I submitted as a ticket to Patreon:

I took a break of a few months, and when I came back my fees spiked. What gives?

I just did a month (July 2025) that extremely similar to last January (2025): similar revenues (466.19 vs 458.50), similar patrons (160 vs 162). According to my "Insights > Earnings" page, my total fees went up from 11.4% to the astounding 14.6%. Drilling down, most of that is an eye-watering 3% increase of the payment fees (5.8% to 8.8%). There was also a minor increase of Patreon's platform fee from 5.6% to 5.8%.

That represents a FIFTY-TWO PERCENT INCREASE in processing fees, and a 28% increase in fees over all.

Care to explain? Was there some announced change in payment structure or payment processor fees I missed?

I have received no response.

But the other thing is this: Patreon has dropped my business model.

Apparently by accident.

When I went to Patreon to create the Patreon post for my latest Siderea Post at the end of July, I was confronted with a recent UI update. In and of itself it wouldn't have been a problem, but, as usual, they screwed something up.

They removed the affordance for a post to Patreon to both be public and paid. The new UI conflated access and payment, such that it was no longer possible to post something world-accessible and still charge patrons for it.

I found a kludge to get around it so I could get paid at all, and I fired off a support ticket asking if it was possible but unobvious, or just not possible, and if it was not possible, whether that was a policy or a mistake. I have received very apologetic reply back from Patreon support which seemed to suggest (but not actually affirm) it was an unintentional:

From what we've seen so far, the option to make a post publicly accessible while still charging members for it isn't possible in the new editor. Content within a paid post will only be available to those with paid access, and it won't show up for the public.

Other creators have reported this same issue, and I want to reassure you that I've already shared this feedback with our team. If anything changes or if this feature is brought back, I'll be sure to keep you in mind and let you know right away.

So it's not like the reply was, "Oh, yes, it was announced that we wouldn't be supporting that feature any more," suggesting, contrarily, they didn't realize they were removing a feature at all.

The support person I was corresponding with encouraged me to write back with any further questions or issues, so I did:

Hi, [REDACTED], thanks for getting back to me. I have both some more questions and feedback.

1) Question: Am I understanding correctly, that the new UI's failure to support having publicly accessible paid posts was an oversight, and not a policy decision to no longer support that business model? Like, there's not an announcement this was going away that I missed? As a blogger who often writes about Patreon itself, I'd like to be able to clarify the situation for my readers.

2) Question: Do you have any news to share whether Patreon intends to restore this functionality? Is fixing this being put on a development roadmap, or should those of us who relied on this functionality just start making other plans? Again: my readers want to know, too.

3) Suggestion: If Patreon intends to restore this functionality, given the way the new UI is organized, the way to add the functionality back in is under "Free Access > More options" there should also be a "charge for this post" button, which then ungrays more options for charging a subset of patrons, defaulting to "charge all patrons".

4) Feedback: The affordance that was removed, of being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content, was my whole business model. I'm not the only one, as I gather you already have discovered. In case Patreon were corporately unaware, this is the business model of creators using Patreon to fund public goods, such as journalism, activism, and open source software. My patrons aren't paying me to give them something; my patrons are paying me to give something to the world. Please pass this along to whomever it's news.

5) Feedback: This is the sort of gaffe which suggests to creators that Patreon is out of touch with its users and doesn't appreciate the full breadth of how creators use Patreon. It is the latest in a long line of incidents that suggests to creators that Patreon is not a platform for creators, Patreon is a platform for music video creators, and everybody else is a red-headed stepchild whom Patreon corporately feels should be grateful they are allowed to use the platform at all. It makes those of us who are not music video creators feel unwelcome on Patreon.

6) Feedback: Being able to charge patrons for world-accessible content is one of a small and dwindling list of features that differentiated Patreon from cheaper competitors. Just sayin'.

7) Feedback: I thought you should know: my user experience has become that when I open Patreon to make a post, I have no idea whether I will be able to. I have to schedule an hour to engage with the Patreon new post workflow because I won't know what will be changed, what will be broken, etc. It would be nice if Patreon worked reliably. My experience as a creator-user of your site is NOT, "Oh, I don't like the choices available to me", it's that the site is unstable, flaky, unpredictable, unreliable.

I got this response:

Hi Siderea,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful follow-up and for sharing your questions and feedback in such detail.

To address your first question, I can’t speak to whether this change was an oversight or a deliberate policy decision, but I can confirm there hasn’t been any official announcement about removing the ability to charge members for world-accessible posts. If anything changes or if we receive more clarity from our product team, I’ll be sure to keep you updated.

At this time, I also don’t have any news to share about whether this functionality will be restored or if it’s on the development roadmap.

I know that’s not the most satisfying answer, but I want to reassure you that your feedback and suggestions are being shared directly with the relevant teams. The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better.

Thank you as well for your suggestion about how this could be reintroduced in the UI—I’ll make sure to pass that along, along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods. Your perspective is incredibly valuable, and I just want to truly thank you for taking the time to lay it all out so clearly.

If you have any more thoughts, questions, or ideas, please let me know, and I’ll be happy to take a further look. I appreciate your patience and your willingness to advocate for the creator community.

All the best,
[REDACTED]

Several observations:

0) Whoa.

1) That is the best customer service response letter I've ever gotten, for reasons I will perhaps break down at some other junction. But it both does and does not read like it was written by an AI. I didn't quite know what to make of it, until someone mentioned to me the phenomenon of customer service agents at another org using AI to generate letters, and then I was like, oooooooh, maybe that's what this is. Or maybe not. Hard to say.

2) Though [REDACTED] could not confirm or deny, it sure sounds like an accident, but one that impacts such an uninteresting-to-Patreon set of creators that they can't be arsed to fix it, either in a timely way or at all.

3) "The more we can highlight how important this feature is for creators like you, the better." is a hell of a sentence. Especially in conjunction with "...along with your broader feedback about the impact on creators who fund public goods.". Reading between the lines, it sure sounds like the support people have been inundated by a little wave of outraged/anguished public-good posters, and the support people, or at least this support person, is entirely on the creators' side against higher ups brushing them off. Could be a pose, of course, but, dayum.

So that's what I know from Patreon's side.

The kludge I came up with for the post I made at the end of July is that I used another new feature – the ability to drop a cut line across a Patreon post where above it is world readable and below it is paid access only – to make a paid-access only post where 100% of the post contents are above the cut line.

Please let me know if it's not working as intended. This unfortunately has the gross effect of putting a button on my new post saying "Join to unlock".

So.

In any event, I strongly encourage those of you following me as unpaid subscribers over on Patreon to make sure you're following me, instead, here on Dreamwidth, because Patreon is flaky.

I will make a separate post with instructions as to all the ways to do that. You can get email notifications of my posts (either all or just the Siderea Posts), follow RSS and Atom feeds, get DM inbox notifications, and, of course, just follow me on your DW reading page, all on/through Dreamwidth, anonymously and completely free.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Entry tags:

Traveller: Sword Worlders Amuck! Session Two - 2025 08 17

Characters:

Inara, an entertainer and artist, secretly psychic, played by Sarah
Stefon, a retired Imperial Scout, played by Steve
Skuld, a noblewoman, played by Ian
Ingrid, a retired Army Captain and former Sword World Patrol member, played by me.

( Session notes under the cut. )

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Entry tags:

links

Interesting things - 2025 08 17

Bite Club: The Fraternity That Awaits You After a Shark Attack. A club I'd never want to belong to but I'd be glad it was there if I needed it.
How to not build the Torment Nexus. Yeah this is what it's like working in tech.
I gained 20 pounds of muscle. Here’s what I learned. I wish I could do what the author of this piece (a woman) has done.
This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men And she’s never been happier. If I were 20-30 years younger, I'd probably do the same. Maybe I wouldn't marry a woman but I'd sure think about it if I wanted to be married!
Everyone is listening to secular praise music. Yes, even you. I like a lot of these artists but I get where this article is coming from. Though I think Hozier and Florence + the Machine are edge cases since they want to focus on country. I also think they're missing the boat by not linking these artists with Goth music, which has been addressing similar themes since I was a teenager.
The Entitlement to Mankeeping Pipeline. Subhead: "The problem isn’t that men are isolated, so they rely on women; it’s that men rely on women, so they end up isolated."
What’s It Like to Date While Disabled? My disabilities aren't visible but I relate a lot to this. It's another reason why if anything happens to my husband, I'm moving to Crone Island.
The most important British character in US comics. It's John Constantine. I remember the yuppie demon issue well; it was formative for me.
What it means to be 'culturally' Irish in 2025 is complicated - as Ed Sheeran has shown.
What Bama Rush Means in 2025. As a woman who picked her university to avoid Greek life (literally; there were no Greeks at Rice and that was a factor), I find all of this fascinating and alien.
The Cozy/Grimdark/Heroic Fantasy Sine Wave and a bunch of stuff about villains. Elizabeth Bear on some current trends in fantasy.
Meet the Fans Who Saved the Original ‘Star Trek’ From Cancelation, Not Once, But Twice. Respect your fandom elders.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Entry tags:

travel: oklahoma city

More about our OKC vacation (backdated)

This is our museum and purchase related activities during our OKC trip.

OKC Museum of Art: Discovering Ansel Adams. I knew very little about Adams other than having seen his photos in various exhibits over the years, so it was interesting to read about his background and history as part of this exhibit. I kept asking "but what about his relationship with ..." and finding photos of him with that person (Georgia O'Keefe, for one), in the next room. Sadly they did not have the photo of the saguaro I wanted to buy for Char in the gift shop afterwards.

Commonplace Books. This is a nice bookstore on the order of Bookpeople in Austin. It's not as big but it also has room for a small venue for meeting writers and having music (they had a singer-songwriter in there while we were in purchasing books.) I really like this store and spent way too much money there.

Game HQ. A nice big gaming store south of the river in OKC. We had intended to check it out last year but didn't make it. It was nice but I didn't feel it offered a lot that our FLGS doesn't have.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

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Indie bookstore crawl part one - 2025 08 12 (backdated)

I went with a friend to do part of the Indie Bookstore crawl that's happening this month here in Dallas. We got the following shops stamped:

Half Price Books flagship: I've been here many times. I picked up several books including the new Lev Grossman Arthurian story.

Interabang Books. My favorite local new bookstore. I bought Michael a book about the making of Born to Run and a lovely boxed set of Murderbot.

Bibliobar is in downtown Plano right down the drag from the park where we do Pokemon on the way back from Kura on Legacy Drive. It's tiny but I did find a book I liked there. Lots of sex positive/queer stuff and a strong emphasis on romance.

Neighbor Books is just off the square in Downtown McKinney, in sight of the old courthouse where we saw the Hot Club of Cowtown a few years ago. It's bigger than most of the indie stores I've seen and has a better selection of books, but the arrangement choices are pretty different: all the fiction is one one long set of shelves mixed in but the nonfiction is divided up. I liked this better than Bibliobar but not better than Interabang.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

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ANCW blurb for The Free Republic of Ygg - The Rites of Spring

Spring has sprung across the multiverse, aided by the actions of your colleagues, the agents of the Free Republic of Ygg. Unfortunately for you, the seat of Order likes it when it's Always Winter and Never Christmas. Amber has sent someone to bring seasons to a halt, and it's up to you to make sure the seasons keep rolling merrily along.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

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Weekly media report - week ending 2025 08 13

Books
The Undercutting of Adam and Rosie, by Megan Bannen. Third and last in this trilogy of romantic fantasies. They're not romantasies, they're romance x fantasy crossovers: both parts weigh in equally. This one is about gods, demigods, and immortality, and brings the changing world to its logical conclusion. I've enjoyed these stories and I'm going to miss this extended clan now that they're over.
The Queens of Crime, by Marie Benedict. The "Queens of Crime" aka five famous vintage mystery writers, solve a real-life crime in 1930 England (and Bolougne). I liked the twists at the end and the parallels between things that had happened to the narrator and the victim.

Music
Brass Queens, Hot Tub Sessions Volume 1. Short 30-minute album by a group of women brass players recommended to me by the algorithm. Fun stuff; I need to find out if they're touring.
Jess Murph, Sex Hysteria. Another "recommended by the algorithm" try but this one wasn't as successful. Autotune and rap, featuring Gucci Mane. Not awful or anything, just nothing that made me want to listen to it again.
Rose Betts, There Is No Ship. Still another algorithm recommendation but this one is right up my alley. Folk inflected piano and a great voice! I see more of her music in my future.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Entry tags:

We ate at: a bunch of places in OKC on vacation

(more about other activities later)

HunnyBunny Biscuit Co.. A little chain of biscuit brunch foods shops that includes Oklahoma City. We liked it so much we ate there twice. They have biscuit benedicts that are delicious and also a fantastic biscuit cinnamon roll. I hope they open up in Dallas because they'd make a mint.

Fogo de Chao. Spouse was into carnapalooza. It was nice and the service was overall pretty good. I wish I'd come in completely starved because I always feel like I didn't get enough to eat. What we did get was really well done meat and sides. I always wince at the money we spend on these things but it's less than we spend on omokase or a Tasting Collective meal. I also tried a Brazilian soda that was really nice but the amount of sugar in it was scary.

Musashi's. Japanese hibachi place that we like. We went there last year and since we still don't have a regular place in Dallas, we decided it was a good vacation meal. They have some of the nice Wagyu and American Wagyu on the menu. I had the American Wagyu and it was expensive but delicious. The chef was very experienced and put on a good show. I feel like one-off places are much better than Benihana is nowadays and this was no exception.

The Jones Assembly. Warehouse restaurant and concert space in an old auto plant. Slightly upscale gastropub menu and vibe. If this place were in Dallas, we'd be all over it.

Current Music: Silence is golden.

Entry tags:

links

Interesting things - 2025 08 10

Jenna Ortega and the Fashion of Fear. An analysis of her promotional fashion in light of her position as the face of female Gen Z horror.
Pa. State Museum closes Native American exhibit, returns 1000s of artifacts under federal law. Good.
The Disney+ Curse: How the Streaming Service Hurt Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar Brands. I sent this to two friends because it's relevant to ongoing conversations about how these entertainment brands are just less interesting now than they used to be.
‘Cat-sized’ rat found in Teesside town puts focus on pest control cuts. Yikes. That's near where I went to school when we lived in England.
How to Kill a God. An analysis from the fansite for the Craft Sequence, a series that seriously changed how I think about magic.
Premium Quality Entertainment: The Joys of Murderbot and Sanctuary Moon. An analysis of the Murderbot show and some of the book details using the cheesy TV show Murderbot loves.
David Geffen’s Divorce Gives New Meaning to an Old Term. It's "hypergamy" or marrying up, or having a sugar daddy. Apparently this particular term has also been coopted by incels.
The Hidden Case of Sir Ewan Forbes, the Transgender Baronet. He was born in 1912, but lived as a boy from early on, and people accepted him for the most part. Sometimes I really think that enforced mid-century conformity was the worst thing for marginalized people in the Anglosphere.
Springsteen Isn’t Who I Thought He Was. A thoughtful critical appreciation of his poetry from someone who wasn't a fan. This is a discussion related to the ones spouse and I have had about Springsteen in comparison to other artists.
The original game of thrones — Mary and Elizabeth’s dance duel. There's a new ballet opening this summer at Edinburgh about Mary and Elizabeth and the Virgin Queen is played by a GNC man!