Category Archives: Meta

Meta

Linkity says goodbye to Leonard

9 Comments

I find I have little enthusiasm for linkity tonight. It’s been a rough week. First the US election, which… I really hoped for better from us. And then learning of Leonard Cohen’s death…

Here’s a blurry (it was windy) rose blooming by my building. In November. In Minneapolis, Minnesota. Where Thursday’s high temperature of 68F was the average temperature for the 10th of September, not November.

Some post-election thoughts from local bloggers mlegan, kmkat, 366thingsilove, and pkatkins. Eloquent tirade from an NBA coach. Gracious and inspiring words from Hillary Clinton.

Both of the cats have been very clingy this evening. Here’s a shot of my lap a few minutes ago:

“…zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…” -Chaos

And that’s all I got this evening, folks. Stay safe. To quote the National, “Be brave and be kind.”

Meta, Personal history

How am I now 48?!

26 Comments

It’s kind of amazing how fast time seems to pass as you get older – there’s an economic phrase (the only thing I remember from economics, actually) that describes it perfectly: increasing at an increasing rate. Indeed.

“Wow. You are old, Mom!” -Chaos and Mayhem

Sometimes. And sometimes I’m not. 🙂

Meta, Reading

Where have all the contests gone?

17 Comments

Congrats to Dianna, who won The Silence of the Stars (Stars #2) by Kate McMurray!

Congrats to bheds, who won Sharp Love (Gambling on Love #2) by Ava March! Sharp Love is being released today by Carina Press.

 

At this point, I have no upcoming contests on the schedule at all. *waits for everyone to recover* I definitely will still do contests for authors who email me or send me a PM on Goodreads, but I’m not actively drumming up contest business these days – after five years of doing so, I’ve grown a bit weary of the whole process, which my introverted self has always found exhausting. When I started hosting m/m book giveaways lo! those many years ago, there weren’t a whole lot of options (beyond Jessewave and Elisa Rolle) for m/m authors to let readers know about new work. The Goodreads m/m group was maybe a year old and didn’t have many members. There were a few m/m review blogs such as Jenre, Kassa, DIK (Desert Island Keepers), and Kris’n’Good Books, but they were a fraction of the number of m/m review blogs available now. And m/m books were being released at a slow enough rate that we could read nearly everything as it came out.

So yeah, both authors and readers have a lot more options these days. I’ll still be among those options, but at a more sedate pace/level than previously. I’ll still be doing the Misadventures in Stock Photography most Mondays and Linkity most Fridays. And you can always keep an eye on things via my RSS feed.

Many, many thanks to all the authors and readers who’ve supported Stumbling Over Chaos (and whom I’ve had the opportunity to support) over the years!

 

“Whatever. I need a nap.” -Chaos

Meta

Blog permalink structure changed!

As part of trying to reduce the number of internal server errors y’all get when trying to access my site, I’ve been doing some optimization. Part of that has required that I change the post permalink structure.

Previously, the structure looked like this: http://www.stumblingoverchaos.com/?p=5978

Now it will look like this: http://www.stumblingoverchaos.com/archives/5978

Any links you have to specific posts are now broken. Sorry about that! This, sadly, is a result of getting spam cannoned several times each day recently.

Also, this broke the crap out of my internal linking. I ran a script to clean that up, but there may be a few strays. Let me know if you hit any, ok? Thanks!

Meta, Randonymity, Tales of the Neighborhood

Shhhh… Sleeping Princess Alert!

31 Comments
  • My poor brother – he celebrated his birthday Friday with stomach flu… exactly how he celebrated his birthday last year.
  • I’m trying to work up support for celebrating his birthday in July instead.
  • Yup, we picked those stores because they’re within walking distance.
  • We each got catnip slugs at Twin City Green (hmm, they’re $1.50 cheaper in the store and don’t have packaging).
  • The catnip slug has easily the most potent catnip ever in it.
  • The kitties love it with much bunny kicking and rubbing over their heads.
  • It was a day of strange conversations, with random strangers oversharing in Kowalski’s.
  • CJ and I also took a short walk through the neighborhood, but we got chilled pretty fast.
  • Before we wimped out (it was +19F/-7.2C) and walked to Spyhouse for hot cider, we saw this very interesting bus:

  • Here’s a closer look at the front:

  • Goth band? Punk rock band? Parking in a sedate residential neighborhood near Lake of the Isles? Huh.
  • Last Saturday I went over to Jeanne’s for dinner and took a really crappy picture (with my phone) of the Christmas spectacle next to her house.

  • Please note that this picture missed at least a half dozen glowing inflated snowpeople off to the left, plus the display that wrapped around the house, plus the loud Christmas music.
  • It’s much easier for Jeanne to give directions to her place in December: “Head toward the unearthly glow on the horizon…”
  • Recently, I was asked how to get avatars to show up in the comments. My blog uses gravatars (globally recognized avatars). You can register at Gravatar to create or upload your own gravatar and associate it with your email address(es). That’s it. After that, blogs that have gravatar support, such as many WordPress blogs, will display your gravatar next to your comments.
  • Wish me luck finishing my Christmas shopping over lunch today…
  • And try not to get too rowdy while you’re reading, ok? Mayhem’s catching up on her sleep.

“…..zzzzzzz…..” -Mayhem

Contests, Meta

In which I inexplicably mention Plato

31 Comments

Leave Liz (Athena Dreams) a comment about sweater shoulder construction and you could be selected to win a copy of Knitted Jackets. Leave your comment before February 21.

Facebook responds to concerns about their new terms of service.

Shockingly, I was actually able to use knowledge gained as part of my MS program while I was at work today. (To give you some context, I work as a codegeek sort of person for a telecommunications company and my MS program was for Rhetoric.) Some coworkers and I were looking at note-taking programs, Evernote in particular. One of my coworkers started to speculate that technologies such as Evernote were helping to make our memories even worse.

At that point, I had a complete flashback to Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Long, long ago, back at the advent of that radical technology, writing, the written word was seen as leading to the decline of the art of memory, which was very important in an oral culture. Plato spent some time in Phaedrus discussing the failings of writing: “Therefore every man of worth, when dealing with matters of worth, will be far from exposing them to ill feeling and misunderstanding among men by committing them to writing.” (Which actually sounds like a quote that we should all read before we send inflammatory emails or leave ranting comments on blogs!) Newsweek even had a short article (in 2005) comparing the clash of orality and literacy to the current clash between literacy and an increasingly visual culture.

Whew! Shall we celebrate visual culture and look at a picture of a cat now? 😉

“I thought she’d never finish, so I hit the ‘nip to make it through all of that rhetoric babble stuff.” -Chaos

Meta

The unexpected side effects of blogging

122 Comments

Frarochvia noticed an important detail in one of yesterday’s pictures – an ASL book. Last night I started taking ASL classes through Minneapolis Community Education.

“Hey, big kitty, what does this mean in Kitty Sign Language (KSL)?” -Mayhem

“It means you’re smooshing my ear and cruising for a bruising, May!” -Chaos

ASL is one of those unexpected side effects of blogging. (Not making the connection yet? Read on!) Like many of you, I’ve developed a number of friendships through blogging and have met bloggers from the Twin Cities, from across the US, and from overseas. Spoken English has been the common language; however, it isn’t the common language of some deaf bloggers I very much hope to meet and spend time with: my dear friend Fraro, local Limedragon, and Tiphanie. I don’t want our meetings to consist of us typing frantically and staring at our computer screens – we already have that down without leaving our own living rooms.

So I’ve been inspired to go forth and learn ASL. And I find myself thinking about blogging and the direct benefits (connection! community! friendship! laughter and tears!) and some indirect benefits, such as this ASL class. What have the expected and unexpected benefits of blogging been for you? The direct and indirect benefits? I’m curious. This seems a great topic for discussion.

Speaking of discussion, recently, Deb aka Chappysmom wrote about a post she’d read on getting more blog comments by replying to comments via comments instead of via email. She was curious what we thought about it; a very interesting discussion subsequently developed in her comments as the author of the aforementioned post and others participated.

Now, I personally really like replying to comments via email because some great conversations and friendships get started that way. You know who you are! 😉 But since I’m curious to see what sort of discussion develops in the comments if I reply there and maybe some of you return a time or two to contribute additional thoughts to the discussion, I’m not going to reply to the emailed comments for this post. Nor am I going to reply to every single comment with a comment of my own. I’m just going to participate in the discussion, and I hope you will, too!

“Gee, I guess he wasn’t kidding about that one… Hey, what do you think this is the sign for in KSL? Maybe ‘Help?!!’ Or ‘Unpaw me, you wretch?!!'” -Mayhem

(Nope, they aren’t dusty or dirty – they are simply covered in catnip…)