Code deploy happening shortly
Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenancePer 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
Aug. 31st, 2025 12:28 pmdenise posting in dw_newsA 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.
The Flower Road #003 - Rollin' by Brave Girls (March 2017)
Aug. 31st, 2025 08:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spinthedrift
K-pop’s history is full of short-lived miracles, but few burned as brightly—or as improbably—as Brave Girls’ Rollin’. Released in 2017 to little notice, the track seemed destined to join the long graveyard of mid-tier girl group singles: catchy, contemporary, but swallowed by a market in perpetual motion. Four years later, it became the centerpiece of one of K-pop’s most astonishing comeback stories, a viral resurrection sparked not by trendsetters on TikTok but by the South Korean military.
My own introduction to Brave Girls came not with Rollin’ but through The Unit, a second-chance survival show for struggling idols that aired the same year. Members Yujeong, Eunji, and Yuna appeared, with Yujeong placing 37th. The show was meant to manufacture redemption, but for most contestants it only deepened the sense of futility. Brave Girls did not find their second chance there. Instead, they drifted further into obscurity, teetering on the edge of disbandment.
Rollin’ itself was not entirely overlooked though—critics praised its tight construction and Brave Brothers’ knack for melody. A year later, it even received a remix and new choreography, a second attempt to give the track the spotlight it deserved. But despite these efforts, the song barely registered with the general public, tucked away as a cult favorite rather than a hit.
It wasn’t until early 2021, in a cultural twist no one could have predicted, that Rollin’ surfaced again. A fan-compiled stage mix of the group’s countless military base performances went viral on YouTube. The video’s comment section read like a collective diary of South Korean men recalling how this song soundtracked their time in service: “I still remember my senior danced that dance on the table in the barracks.” “This song made me survive through my military service.” “There is something in this song that makes you strong.” The words were a powerful testimony, turning Rollin’ into more than a sleeper track—it was an artifact of survival.
From there, the story unfolded like a fairy tale: Brave Girls won their first music show trophy after a decade in the industry. Endorsements rolled in. They dominated variety programs, daytime radio, and summer charts. Suddenly, four women who had nearly walked away from it all were the faces of a viral miracle. Their follow-up single “Chi Mat Ba Ram” proved they could translate lightning into a second spark, but nothing matched the sheer force of Rollin’’s belated ascent.
Part of what makes the song endure is that musically, it’s better than it had any right to be for a “forgotten” release. Produced by Brave Brothers, the track leans into the then-ubiquitous tropical house trend. But instead of a generic EDM beat, Rollin’ builds its entire chassis out of sun-dappled synths. The instrumental shimmers with warmth; its tropical DNA isn’t just garnish but a scaffold for greater things.
The chorus is where the song takes flight, bouncing forward on a melody that combines urgent drive with sheer buoyancy. Brave Girls’ vocals cut cleanly here, giving the refrain a desperate edge. The climax vaults from breathy lower tones into rave-like intensity, the members straining against the production in a way that feels earned and insistent. This is tropical house done right—glossy in all the right places, yes—but charged with real urgency.
It’s tempting to frame the group’s viral revival as pure accident, the result of quirky algorithm. But to reduce it to coincidence undersells Rollin’ itself. The song had always been there, quietly brilliant, waiting for its moment. When it resurfaced, it didn’t feel like nostalgia bait but revelation: a reminder that great pop can sit dormant until someone—or in this case, an entire generation of soldiers—testifies to its impact.
The irony, of course, is that the group’s second chance came not through industry design but despite it. K-pop rarely allows its artists time to grow old; groups past their third year without hits are often written off. Brave Girls, with their patchwork lineup changes and dwindling promotions, should have been no exception. That Rollin’ became their savior shows both the cruelty of the system and the unpredictability of fandom. K-pop history isn’t always written by executives or tastemakers. Sometimes it’s written in YouTube comment sections, resurrected by memory and affection.
Today, Brave Girls as a unit no longer exist. Three of the four members—Minyoung, Eunji, and Yuna—rebranded as BBGirls under new management, with Yujeong departing. The fever pitch of Rollin’ has passed, and the group has returned to relative quiet. But that doesn’t erase the moment when everything aligned. For a few months in 2021, Brave Girls embodied the impossible dream: veterans on the brink of disbandment suddenly handed the stage they’d always deserved.
To call Rollin’ simply a “miracle” is to risk sentimentalizing it. The more accurate word might be reprieve. The song pushed back the deadline on four women’s careers, allowing them to stand in their own spotlight before the curtain threatened to fall again. That light was brief, but not insubstantial.
When its tropical synths kick in now, years later, Rollin’ doesn’t just sound like a summer jam. It sounds like survival—like something almost lost, then seized and cherished. Watching Brave Girls become BBGirls, I can’t help but feel a bittersweet pull: the frenzy has faded, the spotlight shifted, but the fact that they’re still here at all feels meaningful. Their persistence carries a quiet hope, not just for themselves but for every group consigned to the margins, waiting for a chance that may never come. Rollin’ reminds me that K-pop’s underdogs often hold its deepest treasures, and that sometimes, against all odds, the music refuses to stay buried.
---
The Flower Road is an ongoing attempt at a mostly weekly series of music profiles, each one revisiting a song from a different month of my K-pop journey since January 2017. Together, these profiles trace the shifting sounds, aesthetics, and emotions of being a K-pop stan across the years—one track at a time.
on being plagirised
Aug. 30th, 2025 01:24 amhwariumI had two of my fics plagiarised last year, which I found out through a kind reader who DM’d me. Reading the stories, it was clear that they had re-written my fic scene for scene. In the comments, I can see them claim credit for the idea and the story. I submitted the report to ao3 in November 2024 with this gdoc side-by-side, and ao3 got back to me this month saying that there was nothing they can do because text was not copied. It appears that the current AO3 policy allows fanfiction to be re-written and paraphrased, and that counts as “transformative” (try repeating this to any university marker).
...
Since AO3 wouldn't take the fics down, I wanted to comment on the plagirised fics and ask for my work to credited.
Only to realise I have been blocked.
...
A moment of silence please while we all think up nasty adjectives. Thank you, I’m obliged by your sympathy, thank you deeply.
If you’re reading this, it’s very likely that you’re also a writer and a creator. I’m very lucky to be friends with many of you, and I know you can imagine how I am feeling. I'm not going to air that laundry, but I want to talk about my philosophy on the integrity of the process. This is not my public stance on plagiarism or AI, or any kind of moral, political, or value judgment what what people can or can't, should or should not do. This is a personal reflection on how I want to live this life.
I noticed that one of the plagiarised fics was marked as incomplete. It's because my original fic was marked as the first of a series and I just never wrote more of it. I had the thought, if I ever continued this story, will they immediately plagiarise it too?
It scared me. But as with most heavy emotions, I thought it through. I thought about the logical extremes. I thought about my reaction, because my reaction is what matters, because that is how I will live this life.
I ran this thought experiment:
If every work that I write from now on, will be immediately stolen and claimed by someone else as theirs, will I continue writing?
And my answer is, I must.
It's terrifying, to know you have been exploited for cheap clout, to know that it may happen again, and with the rise of AI in every-day hands, to know it may happen more often.
But I don't want to stop writing because of a possible negative outcome, no matter how likely it may be. I don't write for the comments or the kudos, no matter how much dopamine that exposure creates.
I write because of the process. That process where I go through my own memories of this life, my unique feelings on a particular story I read, my reaction to a piece of news that touched or broke me. It’s the journey of reflection where I wring myself dry while being both the straining muscle and the wet towel. I alone know the five discarded sentences that lived before the one that survived on the page. The parallel worlds that the characters walked and the infinite forks in their forest is something only I can see.
The act of writing is an act of meditation with the soul. I alone, will reap the true value of the story, because I have sat down with my mind and my memories and worked for it. I have the power to turn a series of facts into a story, and then transform that story, into a narrative. A person who steals a story does not understand how or why it works. In the plagiarised work, that user paraphrases sentences and swaps words for their synonyms, but in doing so destroys the rhythm of the phrase that was designed to ebb with the emotions of the characters. One word swapped for another loses the precious intangible connotations that aligned with the atmosphere of a moment, chosen for a sound that must be whispered rather than talked.
On the level of the narrative, I wonder if they understood how each character embodied the faces of predestination and free will. How their choices and dialogue piece together a portrait of contrasts, of cause-and-effort, of callbacks to motifs and theses. When they rewrote each interaction, did they think about how it served the theme?
Understanding how a sentence becomes a brick in the cornerstone in the house of a story, is a skill that requires a lifetime to learn. And then learning to build that house is an entirely different mountain a writer can only learn by climbing. To write is to climb up that mountain.
Someone who steals a story, a piece of art, or even just a turn of phrase, will never improve as a thinker, and will only cripple themselves because they are unwilling to even try. Eventually, they cannot think at all.
In ten years we will both read the same words, but the story in my mind will be far richer than anything they can imagine because they have not learnt to think. Not just for the plagiarised story, but for any story. When I discuss a common novel between friends, we each have different opinions because of our different lives and reading diets. A story is never quite the words on the page, each reader brings their soul to meet the author halfway, and the union births a new story, existing only in the mind of the reader. Learning to think as a writer has transformed the way I read, and this is but one reason I must keep writing.
But even if my story was stolen and improved. Even if the stories I want to write have already been written and nothing that I can even try to do will ever be original.
And even if there was a parallel world where a better version of myself exists, a healthier hwa, a better (and faster) writer, a wider reader, a kinder daughter, more successful in all the ways of the world and of the heart, even if that hwa exists, will I continue writing?
Should I continue living?
And my answer is, I must.
Because it's not about the outcome. For me, it's about living a good life that I look back and think, I made the most of it. To look at my hands and experience the pride that comes with knowing the hours and days that I have worked.
It’s not just about putting a story out into the world to be read. If I had a clone who could clean my house and reply my emails and listen to my mum yap for 2 hours every Sunday, I would not use the clone. Why watch a volleyball match, instead of googling the score? Why climb Kilimanjaro, if you can find a picture of the summit? Why read when one can ask ChatGPT to summarise 100 books?
A person who relies on the effort of others to simplify their life, does not end up living at all.
This is my personal philosophy. When I revere the process, my soul is nourished and my experience of the world deepens. Even if there a shortcut that will take me to the same outcome, cherishing the slow route can grow me in a way I might not fully apprehend for decades. This is not just about writing, or the modern anxieties around AI, late-stage capitalism and the dopamine apocalypse. For me, it extends to small choices about cooking a meal or buying a hard copy of a book that I’ve already read electronically. I reflect on my own choices when I observe friends hiring house cleaners, ask ChatGPT to write a birthday message or scroll Tik Tok while walking between destinations. The easiest way to reach a destination is to catch a taxi, but if I use public transport, I can enjoy the architecture of the new station, notice the new bakery at the entrance, and learn about the new exhibition at the art gallery. If I cycle, I’ll see the seasons change in the colour of the trees, and maybe I’ll stop at a cafe on a whim and chat to another customer about her perfume.
Life is hard and sometimes we must all make choices for convenience, but I want to be aware of what I am losing by choosing the easy path. Sometimes life is thankless and grim and your hard work gets exploited, but even in times like this I reflect about the choices I’ve made, the memories of a quiet evening, writing at 4am in Berlin in the winter of 2020, and I can feel tenderly proud of that past labour, which no one can ever take away from me.
Note 1: thank you to jess who reached out after ao3's determination and to all moots voiced their support. This started in jess' DMs about my philosophy about the integrity of the process, and got migrated to the notes app.
Note 2: I didn't lock my fics after ao3 got scraped in April 2025 to train generative AI. There's a potluck of reasons, partly because I've already had my work plagirised in 2024 and had the chance to reflect philosophically on why I write. I also read a lot of sci fi and I've reflected on ideas of this kind after reading Peter F Hamilton's A Second Chance at Eden — perhaps to be scraped is a form of immortality, there's a romantic victory in minutely influencing the order of words in the distant future, to be another data point in favour of the em dash. Again, personal philosophy is separate to my opinion about the morality of AI, and I've always been a little nihilistic. I live knowing that I can lose everything I have and I am prepared to be forgotten. I've thought about a post-human world, the heat death of the universe, and I know that the meaning of my life is mine to decide. If the future is an inevitable wave, I am choosing how I want to swim even if I drown.