Category: junk drawer

  • manure

    The older I get, the less I feel I have something to say in a world that increasingly has a counterpoint, even when there is no need to counter anything. Why bother when it just opens the door for someone who feels they might need to school you on whatever you write or say?

    Not that I’m opposed to hearing different takes on something. It it their need to be right that makes me scratch my head and want to throw both hands in their direction and say, “Oh! Bother!”.

    Work. Play. Here. There. Family. Everyone needs to have an opinion and their opinion cannot be swayed. It is vital that it is not swayed. And, if you don’t try to sway theirs, you have people poking at you to get you to sway your opinion, even if you would rather not have an opinion at all some of the times.

    Even this post is an opinion I’d rather not have.

    So, perhaps, I’ll dig a hole under the oak tree and bury this post with a handful of other opinions I carry around inside, tied up in a burlap bag to give the tree some manure to break down into useful nutrients for growth and find a use for the more toxic of the thoughts I carry within.

  • Aftermath

    The capstone of a not-great week last week was — you guessed it — having to deal with a family gathering brought down by the adult equivalent to schoolyard bullying.

    It started when I mentioned my really my really cool Wren fountain pen to the family. My mother was impressed with how well it wrote and the ingenious design. My father was intrigued by how it worked. One aunt in attendance agreed that there is nothing like having a nice pen for writing with. The other aunt…

    (more…)

  • Kissing the tortoise shell

    This is not a review of the Echo and the Bunnymen concert from their last show on their 2026 US tour in Minneapolis. I enjoyed myself. They played enough of their old songs to satisfy me, although I would have liked a few deeper tracks from Ocean Rain. It is no secret at all that was my favorite of their albums and the last one that I enjoyed 100%. Crocodiles was excellent, as was Porcupine, but I merely liked those albums “a lot”, whereas Ocean Rain was a near spiritual experience for me the first time I listened.

    The performance aside (old guys playing old music well enough to justify the cost of admission), it was the people watching that intrigued me while waiting for the lads to come onstage.

    (more…)

  • U and I, eww

    Thank you, whomever at WordPress rolled back the new Reader UI for browsers that debuted yesterday.

    While I can see some of the benefits, I don’t think that UI was tested ahead of time. The fonts were far too small, the whitespace far too big and it made readability a bit of an eyestrain. And dropping (without warning) likes and comments to the bottom of the tab made me have to hunt too hard for those features. Again, far too much whitespace, forcing the user to hunt for the standard features we grew accustomed to using.

    Other elements were welcome additions — if you could find them (read time is helpful, for instance). And it did not work on mobile browsers. At all. Panels overlapped, preventing any useability whatsoever.

    But this fixation across all tech with UI that uses ever-decreasing font sizes and is otherwise either too spacious or to crowded… Eww.

    So thank you WP team for rolling that back. There are good ideas in that, but it was poorly implemented. My eyes are much happier.

  • Half-penny dreadful, erm… thoughts — 16jun26

    I’m being abandoned with the cats like I am every summer — this is but the first family trip of two planned events. I get to scoop cat litter while kids scoop up more stuff they don’t really need. But the same could be said for the new kittens, although I am being made to say they are everybody’s kittens.

    Who gets to stay home with them while everyone vacays? Right. My kittens.

    Anyway, on Sunday next week, I get to put on my little witchy-dress and dance out under a solstice moon (although, sadly, not a Strawberry Solstice Moon) all by my lonesome. Not skyclad. There’s been restraining orders issued against that.

    If you had a day and evenings completely to yourself (and the resident clowder), what might you do if weather was not being cooperative for dancing in a little witchy-dress? Or the neighbors call the police on you? AGAIN!?!

    Unwitchy-dress dancing is welcome too. Dancing can be omitted if the idea is that I watch some witchy romcom instead. Oh! We can have a streaming party!

    Or, maybe — I should not wake up at 2.30 in the morning from nightmares and, if I do, go back to sleep even if my brain is “noping” that idea.

    It’s getting punchy over here.

  • Well, that was unexpected

    I’m not quite sure how one goes back to sleep after having a dream of an old classmate throat slash himself in the kitchen, prompting a mad dialing of emergency services you know will arrive too late to do anything for him.

    It was a far more graphic and visceral experience than most of my dreams. And I admit, I can have some real doozies. Usually, the gore is suggested. This dream was “in full Technicolor” and detailed.

    I’m half-expecting to read something about him in the local news, it was so vivid. The other part is “don’t be absurd, J would never do anything like that.”

    Except, my brain reminds me, that’s exactly the kind of thing he’d do if he wanted a ticket out of here.

    As I said, I’m not sure how one goes back to sleep after a dream like that.

  • Burnout

    I will be taking a wee break from creative writing — primarily fiction, but I may step away from poetry for a spell as well.

    As Mr. Gumby said, “My brain hurts.“

    In all fairness, my brain hurts most of the time, especially when I examine most current events.

    That doesn’t mean I am done writing other things (sorry!) or abandoning my longer tale, but I think the creative end of my cranium needs a small rest. Rather than power through or deny it, I think it is better to just accept that I am “not feeling it” for the past few weeks, which is a strong signal to step back.

    It’s been a busy couple of weeks. Work and housework have exponentially increased the load on my mental capacity; the extreme levels of cat care (hours trying to get her to eat something, anything) followed by death of a beloved cat; the excitement of adding a new cat to our family, followed by the decision to add two new cats; the end of school chaos (choir concert, band concert, honor roll celebrations, school farewell because of a school board wanting to eliminate STEM and Fine Arts programs and the subsequent tears from the kids); planning weekly D&D sessions for the tweens so they can stay connected to their classmates during the diaspora following the school closure… Is it any wonder my brain is tapped?

    Besides. Aside from a day or two about this time last year, I haven’t taken a day off from writing something (occasionally multiple somethings) every day for about five or six years. Ahh, if only practice translated to perfection — although the perfection I strive for quite likely has got an audience of one. Lord knows I’ve scared most folks away with my efforts. I might as well give their eyeballs a rest from the Clockwork Orange levels of torture.

    And let me droogs enjoy a glass or six of their Moloko Plus without my interferences for a spell.

  • Widget huckster sideshows

    There’s on thing that you quickly discover whenever you decide to do “research” online for “a widget”. The intended use for the widget in question is largely irrelevant. There is a truism that holds, especially in the age of the internet: “Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.”

    And that’s largely an okay thing, I suppose, if it is a casual interest that drives the research. But most of those opinions are bought and paid for by the people who want to you buy their widget instead of someone else’s widget. Free widgets abound in exchange for opinions — usually “positive” is the unsaid, and occasionally explicitly stated, requirement — which makes me look at most of these widget opinions with more than a hint of narrowed side-eye.

    Negative reviews often have nothing to do with the widget itself. The box coming crushed in shipping is hardly the widget maker’s fault. Or buyer’s inattention to detail and buying the wrong widget for the intended purpose.

    (more…)

  • Remember the webring?

    Depending on when you showed up on the internet, you may or may not recall a little something called the webring. For the uninitiated:

    A webring (or web ring) is a collection of websites linked together in a circular structure, usually organized around a specific theme, and often educational or social. They were popular in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly among amateur websites.

    Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring

    I was just thinking about how to bring that back interconnectivity and make discovery less reliant on algorithm. Digging into it, it looks like a fairly simple thing to add on as code and host in a subdomain (basically for the php “guts” to make it work) and, unlike the old-school webring, can be designed to be randomized with a cookie that gives preference to sites that having been visited that are part of the ring, rather than a next/previous circular arrangement. Yes, it puts the thumb on scale of sites you haven’t visited yet, but that is the only algorithm I would employ. Nothing directed.

    The nice thing, I can design it to be purely HTML, which would work on most sites, including WordPress and other blogging services.

    I was thinking of maybe doing a curated fiction writer’s ring, but I don’t want to do it if I end up being the only one participating (it kind of ruins the point). Are there any fiction writers who follow me interested in something like that?

    All you would have to do is add a simple bit of HTML code in your footer or sidebar to call the style sheet and the curated list.

    Let me know if you are writing fiction and are interested. Maybe I could cobble something together on the quick if enough hands are raised (meaning five participants, minimum).

  • Tree inspection

    I went to check on my new little trees — mere saplings — in the backyard this weekend. Will they thrive? Will they die? I don’t know. But they sit on the back hilltop and on the front-yard flats in accordance with their sun needs and drought resistance. Perhaps there will be berries and flowers soon (next year or a few more down the line). I can only hope.

    I am probably the only person planting trees who would laugh at what I found at the top of the hill when I checked on one that was more afterthought than intentional, seeing as I really had no good place to plant all ten saplings I received as a “gift” from the Arbor Day Foundation and a new young plum tree.

    Up there, lonely and away from the powerlines running up the right-of-way between my yard and the back row, the sapling stood tall, with an unexpected gift at the base.

    Some critter, probably one of the three foxes that like to hunt the neighborhood, left a solitary turd at the base of the tree.

    Was it commentary? Was it fertilizer? Was it even one of the foxes?

    I’m no expert in fox turds, but it looked too big to be the possum’s. Too small for even a small dog fed on commercial food. Not the right shape for the deer or the rabbits. Raccoons? Maybe feral cats (not fed on commercial food, I know that shape and size well)?

    But I laughed and the crows laughed with me there at the hilltop.

    Poor little tree.