withinyourheartsotrue

mark in

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.

urheartsotrue

Amelia (21) used to be a freelance dancer for New York State Ballet, but she couldn't get a permanent contract, so she ended up leaving for Europe to apply to a smaller company.

She first tried several companies in Italy, hoping her fluent Italian could get her in, but no such luck. Eventually she got a contract with the National Ballet of Denmark in Copenhagen. She has been a corps member there for two years now and she is already beginning to get soloist work. She plans to stay in Denmark until she can make principal. Only when she gets to dance the leads does she feel like she can make up for leaving her sister to care for her hospitalized mom. Only then will it have been worth leaving.

In January 2025, she finds out she has been cast as Madge in La Sylphide and since it's her biggest opportunity yet, she celebrates with her best friend and roomie, Margaux Gauthier, whose bed she ends up sleeping in. They are in a romantic kind of situationship and with her, Amelia finds most of her intimacy after leaving the US, but since she still misses her ex-girlfriend and Margaux considers herself exclusively heterosexual, Amelia refuses to commit herself fully.

At the end-of-the-run party for the whole company, Amelia ends up spending the evening with Emma Gregersen (18), the prodigy of the Danish group at the NBD, and they hook up in a bathroom.

Although Amelia likes Emma, she still refuses to commit herself to anyone, so she ignores the other girl completely afterwards. However, the two keep gravitating towards each other and eventually kiss again, Amelia inviting Emma along to a foreign-group-only party that Margaux is hosting at their shared apartment. While the party continues into the night, Amelia and Emma spend the night together in Amelia's bedroom. Like this, Margaux finds out about them, Emma deciding to tell her boyfriend and break up with him.

Her boyfriend supports her and for a while the four keep Amelia's and Emma's secret from the rest of the company, while Emma finds the courage to come out to her parents and Amelia arranges for her mom and sister to come watch her final performance as Madge before the show is going on tour for the summer.

Amelia wants Emma to meet her family and the day before the performance, they fly in, Amelia and Emma spending the day with them. At the end of the day, the two girls decide to move in together next season.

madscenes

CONCEPT

Ever wanted some aesthetic writing to quote in your profile title, info sheet, etc.? Look no further! For DW points, I'll use an RP thread of your choice, character info/visuals or similar character insights to write a poem specifically for your personal use.

SPECIFICS

- Link me to a thread (always with the other player's knowledge), your character's info page (not a wiki or official page, your own write-up) or to a moodboard/visuals/aesthetics post, and I will write a poem that matches the vibes/feeling these give me.
- I am never going to name your character(s) in the poem, at most I will refer to them as he/she/they in accordance with how you refer to them in your written source material, and while I can refer to specific words/terms/things that are present in the thread or info posts, for the sake of *poetry*, the piece of writing you receive is more moods/impressions than exact replication.
- Poetry style references can be found here, though I can do many different other styles, too: WINGS FOR ARMS | POEMS OF THE CAMELIAS | PEARL-EMBROIDERED, GOLD-COVERED | ODILISK. You can request a specfic style among these and I will take inspiration from that, or you can let me wildcard.
- Poems can be between 10 lines and two Word-pages in length, depending on style.
- You get one revision round where you can make comments or request changes and I'll make smaller adjustmenst to meet those. I have no editor and the piece isn't beta read. It's my work, raw.
- A poem costs 30 DW points, sent to this journal,

madscenes. This is the only type of payment I accept and you pay upon commissioning.
- Turnover time is between three days and a week long.
- Poem will be sent in PDF-format to either a given e-mail address or via Google Drive.
- If you don't like the resultant poem, I do not transfer DW points back, but in rare cases I might write a second version.

ABOUT ME

My name is Simone, I'm a Danish author and poet (self-published) who has published poetry, short stories and a novella in Danish as well as a historical novel in English. I have been writing what you'd call seriously for about ten years now, but written more leisuredly since I was a kid. I'm 100% ESL. My inspirations are all kind of ballet, literature, my own RP and poets such as Sylvia Plath, Machi Tawara, Mette Moestrup, Anise Koltz, Fani Papageorgiou and Mary Oliver, to name a few.

If you have any questions, please ask them below. Commissions can be made in the comments, too, or by PM to this journal.

code

denise in

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.