Tag: half-penny thoughts

  • 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.

  • Half-penny thoughts — 13jun26

    I was joking around with my twin daughters last night about music and starting up a band (one more than a passable singer, the other plays flute and piano). They are toying around with starting up a cover band that does 80s songs in their own style and with their own instrumentation and in the middle of the discussion I smacked my forehead and cussed.

    “Total missed opportunity,” I said. “I wish I would have thought about it when I was playing with various bands when I was younger.”

    “What?” they asked, in unison.

    (more…)

  • Half-penny thoughts — 12jun26

    You know how it is when you are looking for something and you cannot seem to find it no matter how hard you try and then you stop looking for it and it suddenly appears?

    Maybe it is an object you lost.

    Maybe it is a social thing, like a new beau.

    Maybe it is a word on the tip of your tongue.

    Or a song you are trying to recall.

    You turn around and see it, whatever it is. You are in the shower and suddenly the fragment becomes whole. You sit in a cafe and a stranger asks if you have a piece of paper to spare.

    When we are no longer looking, it seems we find what we are looking for.

    Or maybe it is just me.

    Oh! Butterflies!

  • Half-Penny Thoughts — 05jun26

    For better or worse, the age of the internet has resulted in a homogenization of our lives. It has blurred boundaries in ways never before possible. Counter-culture is now the performative norm. Punk is dead; long live punk.

    It is tempting to put a sandal on one’s head in the way of Jōshū and then just leave the courtyard. Better yet would be if we could put the courtyard on our head and leave the walking to the sandal while we talk a bit about mū with a dog.

    If the normal position is resistance to authority to the point of mediocrity, there is little left to rebel against.

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  • Half-Penny Thoughts — 10apr26

    This morning, I asked Claude to provide a general evaluation of the poetry on this site, mostly for shits and giggles. Sometimes I feel I am too close to my own poetry to critically evaluate what I write, so I felt it would be helpful to get the opinion from “someone” without a stake in providing me feedback — not cog greasing or a sense of friendly obligation to make me happy. [Note: Claude was not informed that I am the author of this site, so it has no reason to lean into saying nice things to me about my poetry.]

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 06apr26

    Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

    A little bit of venting this Monday morning. If you are not into health-related posts or venting in general, you probably can skip this post.

    About twenty years ago, I went to a general practitioner with an earnest complaint about some generalized pain I was experiencing that I couldn’t explain. It was sometimes in my joints, and sometimes muscular. Sometimes both. I asked what it might be, acknowledging that it might have some of the source being in arthritis. I also suggested that because my mother had been diagnosed with fibromyalgia, that it might be a factor in my increasing frequency of inexplicable pain.

    She laughed out loud at my suggestion. And I mean, nothing held back at all.

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  • Half-Penny Thoughts — 23mar26

    I’ll have to admit that I am mighty surprised by the lack of discoverable serialized fiction via WordPress Reader. That isn’t to say that it doesn’t exist, but either WordPress Reader doesn’t recognize the term, people don’t use “serialized fiction” (or variations of it) for tags or categories, or there are just not that many folks publishing such things that are connected to WordPress.

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  • Half-penny Thoughts — 09mar25

    Photo by Bharath Kumar on Unsplash

    As I delving back into the habit of writing prose versus my habit in recent years of writing almost exclusively poetry, I’m tossing around several ideas to bounce around my largely empty cranium.

    Okay, it’s more like dumping a large bucket of superballs at this time.

    Or, if I’m more upfront and honest about what I’m doing, throwing the whole bunch of superballs all at once as hard as I can and see what comes out of the bouncy mess.

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  • Half-penny thoughts — follow-up to 05mar26

    For those who are interested, I discovered the problem with my scheduled tasks (but not the weird refusal of Google’s search engines to crawl the site for indexing).

    I’m probably going to make a hash of the explanation. That said…

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  • Half-penny thoughts — 05mar26

    There are days where I ask myself if I’m going about everything all wrong when it comes to having a web presence for my writing.

    The wonder spans from formatting to content to design to SEO to paid vs free vs subscriptions vs donations… So it goes.

    Even something as simple as a domain name has implications. I just discovered that a published author uses “Ravensweald” as his fantasy series collection’s series name, the series published almost at the same time that I double, triple, quadruple checked to make sure there were no apparent conflicts for the site name before acquiring the domain. So it goes.

    And, I should have known that updating a plugin should have been deferred — it broke it’s own cron jobs, so I see errors and I cannot revert because they removed the old version from the plugin repository. The errors are minor and non-critical, but irritating all the same. And I guess Google decided this winter to stop indexing the site for search and yet the console tells me everything’s just ducky. No errors. Just… not indexing. So it goes.

    I’m tempted to wipe everything and reload the content with a fresh install of WordPress in case there are lingering ghosts in the machine. So it goes.

    Are y’all contemplating any overhauls on your sites? What are some critical key things that you wish you had done differently? Or could do? Do you think you are underpaid for your content? Or do you think there must be a non-traditional approach to deriving/providing benefit to content.

    So it goes.