Category: junk drawer

  • 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.

  • Looks around, sees things

    I’ve been doing lots of navel gazing when I haven’t been writing Vengeance, My Heart, which is why my activity has diminished somewhat on the site.

    Some of it is getting around to coming up with a useful term and framework that I can hand people who ask me about my spiritual practice. I know, most folks are not clamoring for information here, so that isn’t the issue. But it does come up in conversations at times. And I’ve discovered that people prefer a tidy couple of words when it comes to answers of that sort rather than my rambling, ambling version of it (which is almost as much about what I am not as it is about what I am). Plus, it is time to settle down with it without sounding so darned intellectual about it.

    (more…)

  • Sunshine Blogger Award

    The Sunshine Blogger Award is making the round again this year. Generally, I don’t participate as it is intended you participate when it has come my way (posting commented answers to the posed questions but not posting as a participant). However, Veselin, Natalie, and Sandy have all kindly nominated me to be a recipient in this round and I feel like I should act as part of the community rather than stand outside of it.

    Thank you, all three of you for the nominations. If I forgot someone who recently nominated me, please let me know so I can correct that.

    So, for the first time since these awards started circulating…

    Let’s do this thing.

    (more…)

  • [Retracted] Potentially bad idea

    I decided to remove this post because I’m less interested in the conversation that I originally imagined.

    Please disregard if it shows up in your feed as the original post.

  • Suchness and Winter Words

    Maybe it’s the day.

    Or maybe I’m just done.

    Watched an old All About Eve video. It doesn’t matter which.

    We’ll use Wild Hearted Woman/Every Angel. Why not? It’s even got annoying credits running through the second song. And it’s cut off. Brilliant.

    “Michael, what am I supposed to take away from this?” you may ask yourself.

    Is it their best video? No. Is it something about All About Eve? Not really (I still adore Julianne, but that’s a personal problem — even therapy has given up on me there).

    It’s something intangible that I have no words for today. Lost little words Saturday, we’ll call it.

    Maybe… It is the suchness of those things… I’m tired of not feeling a suchness. In madness, there isn’t a suchness to grasp onto.

    Smile for me, roll your eyes. “Oh Michael,” you’ll say with exasperation, thinking you understand what I mean by this all. Except you probably don’t. Because the words were lost and we can’t find them in the snowdrifts and in the winter words of December. Shine bright, Lady Moonlight.

    Can you tell me: Are you lonely?

  • Page Added — Serialized Fiction

    While I know most readers view this site through the lens of WordPress/Jetpack Reader, I like to tweak with the site as I go along to make it more user-friendly for those who swing by to see things up front, close and personal.

    In preparation for having an anticipated longer-running bit of serialized fiction, I have created a landing page for those folks who don’t want to scroll though my posts to find individual episodes for a given series.

    Swing by and let me know what you think, if you are so inclined. It just so happens that I also added a navigation element linking to this page as well, in case, you know, you want to catch up with one of these stories.

    (more…)

  • Me no likey the block likey

    Some days, you can’t win for the losing.

    In trying something out for WordPress on a test site, I saw a new block that I thought would solve a frustration of mine about the .org version of WordPress, where you have to force folks to click on the post title to “like” a post when they visit outside of Reader. I finally had a block to add to my front page for likes (on those short poems).

    Which is fantastic. Except… It doesn’t appear to be registering likes in the notifications on either of the versions of Reader (web or Jetpack App), which is where I keep track of such things. Which means the functionality is broken and I need to rework the site design to get back that functionality to where it should be.

    TARNATION!

    This is a consistent problem with the Jetpack plugin for WordPress. They push out a feature without really testing it prior to launch and it breaks things. Last year, it was the commenting system until an update. Other times, features don’t do what they are functionally designed to do. Reader regularly gets web updates that are headscratchers at best, and breaks Reader until someone can hotpatch it at worst.

    I love the folks at WordPress, but they really need to do a better job of testing their incremental updates before something goes live.

    Back to your regularly scheduled programming. I just needed a quick vent.