Author: michael raven

  • Minor Comment Moderation Woes [tentatively resolved]

    The site is going through some growing pains that I am attempting to troubleshoot. My current issue is with comment moderation.

    Only first-time comments should be held for moderation. However, all comments are currently being sent for moderation. Clearly, this feature is not acting as expected. I am looking into solutions, including considering something other than Akismet (should that be the root cause) or Jetpack for comments — undesirable choices either way. While overly aggressive at times, Akismet works reasonably well. Similarly, Jetpack for comments has to positive feature that you can use the app for comment notifications if you have a WordPress.com account. Otherwise, readers will have to subscribe to “all comments” via RSS feeds or stop by for responses.

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  • Towards the Within — A Musical Odyssey

    One of many plans I have with migrating from my previous site to this new site, one was to begin a musical odyssey of sorts that I would call Towards the Within. The focus of this series is introduce myself to entirely new musical experiences. I hope to encounter new sounds and bands during my experiment. As I do so, I will share the more interesting discoveries with you in a series of posts.

    Establishing the trailhead

    I deciding that I wanted to avoid having too heavy of a hand in determining the direction of my musical exploration. Instead, I would only determine the trailhead at which I would enter a new wilderness. After which, I would let the algorithms of the internet guide me. Part of those initial guardrails would be set based on my mood of the month.

    This month, my mood happens to be international music mixed with non-english darkwave. I added a dash of some traditional influences as well to drive the music in a folksy direction. YouTube’s has a “Create a Radio Station” feature where you can set up some basic parameters, then seed it with an artist list. Doing just that, I set the radio to high artist variety with a high discovery ratio.

    And now I’ll wait to see what there is to see as I wander into the wilds…

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  • hunger

    shallow focus photography of blue dragonfly
    Photo by Marian Florinel Condruz on Pexels.com
    cattail & cagey
    our home along
    lily & rush
    waiting at water
    wind-lapped & sun
    to drone summerlong
    waiting on
    a hunger gnawing
    a hunger clawing
    on the edge of day

  • rewilding spirit at the edge of ravensweald

    Campfire

    background

    For a while I have been feeling my writing has started to stagnate at the other site the I have been doing the bulk of my writing these past five years, sceadugenga.com. During those years, I’d been a fairly prolific writer on sceadugenga on a day-to-day basis: posting anywhere from one to ten posts nearly every day since 2020, and quite a few days through 2019 on top of that.

    Prior to 2019, I’ve been writing a number of different blogs since around 2001 — using everything from static HTML pages to Blogger. Largely I’ve been writing on WordPress.com or a self-hosted site based on their software since 2005.

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