I know, yawn, blow-by-blow accounts are so dull and so very much not droll (let us not confuse the two “d” words, please), but I’m going to natter on a bit about it anyway. It would possibly be wise to skip this post unless you are somewhat interested in the process.
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I just got to the stage where my fiction subdomain is getting becoming functional. The keyword is “functional”, but it is far from finished/polished and the content quality there is. erm, lacking at the moment. Of course, it is purely for testing ideas and functionality, so it will eventually be wiped.
It is not currently behind a “maintenance mode” wall, so if you want to see how the Fictioneer WordPress template demos on my site, you can check it out at fiction.ravensweald.com.
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I feel a need to throw a myriad of miscellanea out there to anyone willing to give it a read. This is your classic dumper dive post, where you might find something interesting, maybe even valuable, but what you find might have an equal chance of just being junk. Read at your own risk. No refunds.
(more…)I’ve never made it any secret that I am not one for small talk. I’m perfectly fine with silence, either the comfortable or uncomfortable varieties — in preference over small talk anyway. It might be that it seems like an insurmountable task to engage in small talk now that I don’t have a drink or cigarette in one hand, the other, or both. It’s really a thing for me; I lost my ability to natter on about stuff when I went both sober and smober. The smokes and the glass/bottle gave me a prop to fidget with, to play a persona, a mask to slip inside when social situations called for loathsome small talk.
So, picture my dread this morning when I showed up early to a local passport office and limited DMV service center to renew my passport for some expected upcoming Canadian travel (recall those days when we could just use our driver’s license to slip over to Canada? Oh, those were the days!) and encountered not one, not two, but three individuals who thrived off of small talk. Engaging in such small talk. Loudly.
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UPDATE: The problem seems to have finally resolved itself. Keeping this post live so you can see the things that you may encounter with going off the “approved platform”.
Just so you are aware, mobile variants of Firefox seem to dislike the SLL certificate for this site and are throwing errors over the place since about 9pm central time when you try to load the site. It may also appear in desktop variations of the site, which seems to have been fixed by clearing the browser cache for the site. That solution does not appear to work with the mobile version, however.
Chrome and Edge seem to work just fine. I have not checked Safari.
From what I have been able to discover, there was a hotfix update to all versions of Firefox to address a “zero-day exploit” around the same time as this problem came up for me. My security certificate is independently confirmed to be valid, but Firefox appears to think otherwise.
It might be a matter of another update, or that Firefox needs to update the SSL certificate definitions that are valid, something I have zero control over. If you are experiencing difficulties viewing the site with Firefox, I recommend using another browser for the time being; on desktop, go to the padlock in the site address and clear cache and cookies for the site when prompted, which seems to force a refresh of the SSL certificates.
Owning a domain is just fun, innit?
the outside rain me
the inside coal black
listlessness & spleen
why bother waking?
I sometimes ask myself not if I should write, but if I should share what I write.
Writing is my lifeblood. I have occasionally “given up the bad habit of writing” only to find myself slinking back with a scrawled bit of doggerel like a junky needing his morning fix. If I go more than about a day without writing something, somewhere — I get that janky tremor that we used to call “jonesing” back in the day.
I cannot stop. That much has been decided. And, for the most part, I like to think of it as a victimless habit. Mostly harmless… Besides, like decent person with any filthy habit, I wash my hands afterwards.
But should I share what I write? That gets trickier.
I still believe it is “mostly harmless”. But I know, regardless of the perception of “quality” (in quotes for my buddy, Ted), what I write often seems to not be (for whatever reason, perhaps due to “quality”) the kind of stuff that people particularly “get” or maybe even like. And I am not entirely blind to the qualities of the writings that are well-received, but the well-received style of writing is plainly not me.
So I often find myself asking, when I write, should I share it? Or should I hermit myself off in the woods and eventually be found as a dead and desiccated body, with stacks of scrawled within notebooks scattered around my cave that some cold hiker will burn for fuel against the cold autumn air?
Wait… don’t answer those… those were rhetorical questions. Allow me at least the illusion that someone reads and maybe slightly likes what I write, please.
Channeling non-oblique, non-obtuse writer to see if I can make something of something…
I recently received a message from a distant relative that I had contacted back in December. She seemed to be my best way to link up to my maternal ancestors via DNA because not only did she share the genetic origin that was distinct to my mother (unrepresented in my father’s DNA), but she had access to a huge family tree of 2500+ members.
She only now got back to me about the research I had asked her to perform using her access to the extensive family tree, having given her my grandfather’s name (assumed or otherwise), his approximate age (from court records), and possible residence or port of entry.
(more…)Time permitting, which is not as often as you might think, I’ve been settling down and started playing a recently released game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
In a day and age where games either seem just, in general, overpriced at $70 for some AAA titles which are often bug-filled things with uninspired gameplay, I do tend to sit up and pay attention when the rumors go around that an AA title comes out from an up-and-coming studio that tries to do something different from the the copy-pasted games out there for less than $50.
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