Tag Archives: blogging

Friday Links!

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SomeFun.Com
Yay!
It’s Friday again! Here’s a collection of news and other things that struck me as worthy of being shared:

Something Weird Happens When Three Master Fencers Battle Fifty Novices.

Drone Whale Watching Hawaii. Footage of whales taken from a drone.

271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book. A handmade instruction book on how to much watercolors. It’s amazing! Thanks to my husband for the link.

Apple’s iPad business isn’t collapsing, but the rest of the tablet industry sure is.

Spilled Milk: Scouting for My Son’s America.

Retired Colonel Offers His Burial Plot To Lesbian Vet Denied Burial In Idaho.

55,000 Christians: We’re ‘Appalled By Sarah Palin’s Twisted Misrepresentation Of Our Faith’.

Polls don’t identify the real science education problem.

A Marine Biologist Explains Godzilla’s Exponential Growth.

Meet Carl DeMaio: Anti-gay gay, newest victim of the war on intolerance.

Porn Websites or Religious Websites—Where Are You Likelier to Pick Up a Computer Virus?.

It’s Different for Girls. “The PC manufacturer’s senior vice president who had been instrumental in crafting the deal suggested he and I sign over dinner in San Francisco to celebrate. When I arrived at the restaurant, I found it a bit awkward to be seated at a table for four yet to be in two seats right next to each other, but it was a French restaurant and that seemed to be the style, so down I sat…”

Nearest bright “hypervelocity star” found.

New model, spanning 13 billion years of cosmic evolution, makes important advances.

CEO Of Biggest Fast Food Chain Comes Out In Favor Of A Minimum Wage Increase.

Murray bill would force Social Security to pay same-sex spouses survivor benefits.

Ted Cruz Champions Nuremberg-Style Laws for Gays and Lesbians.

DAILY SHOW: Jon Stewart’s Gaywatch – Lesbian Life Cycle Edition.

Hercules & Love Affair ft. John Grant — I Try To Talk To You (Official Video):

(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)

Oops! All thumbs!

blogging, ,

Cat looking at a Macbook.
This may or may not be an accurate representation of me writing.
I was trying to edit a draft post this morning, and I clicked the Publish button when I was reaching for the Update Draft button.

Which sends out notification e-mails to everyone who follows the block, cross-posts, and so on, and so on.

D’oh!

Anyway, please enjoy this video of the teen-ager who decided to give his Great-grandmother the Prom experience she never got as a kid:

(You may need some kleenex while you watch.)

Confessions of a re-blogger

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shutterstock.com
Always check the dictionary.
I’ve been beginning my blog posts for a while now with an image. Sometimes, such as the two recent posts about the “white homo demons” preacher, they have been images used to illustrate the news article to which I was linking. Others have been editorial cartoons, memes, photos I’ve taken myself, or images from other sources on the internet. Whenever possible, I include the copyright holder or source of the image in the ALT tag of the image.

Occasionally the place I got the image from is a tweet or other re-blog that doesn’t have the original source. When that happens, I try to track down the source with Google Image Search, but some images have been re-blogged so many times, the original source doesn’t come up in the search. Then I try to the read the EXIF data from the image, but often there’s nothing useful there, either because it’s been stripped out along the way, or in the case of web comic images and the like, it was never there.

My lynx plushy seated at my laptop.
I know the source of this one. I took the picture myself, in my living room. That’s my laptop. The cute lynx plushie was a gift from my husband.
If I were being really scrupulous, I oughtn’t to use the image at all at that point. After all, I have more than one artist friend who has found their work being used, without their permission, on t-shirts or other items for sale somewhere, and heard their rant about their failed attempts to get the people who stole their work to, at the very least, acknowledge who made it.

But, often I go ahead and use the image. I rationalize that I’m not profiting from it and that I’ve done due diligence trying to locate the source to give credit. But it’s a rationalization. Should I feel guilty about that?

Probably. And maybe I should start going the ultra-scrupulous route: don’t post it if I can’t find the source and link back to it. I’ve certainly ranted enough about people using the excuse the “everyone else is doing it” in the past. There’s such a rant about a recent news story sitting in my draft queue right now. I had been looking for a good “hypocrite” image, and had found a great one (much more interesting that the Shutterstock image above), but couldn’t find the original source to give credit.

Then I got an email from someone wanting permission to use an image I’d used in a post months ago. I had to explain that I’d found the image on iLounge, and so didn’t have the right to give permission, because it wasn’t my image.

Even though that image did have the URL for the source of the image, the URL is in the ALT tag, and most people don’t even know how to view that. So, even when I am pointing to the source, most people don’t realize it.

What to do… what to do?

Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with?

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Creepy stalker face
That smile…
One night last week I was doing my thing—reading news online, occassionally checking my twitter feed—when a message pops up on IM. Honestly, I’d forgotten that my instant messaging client was up. I’d run it earlier in the day because it was a work-from-home day, and just forgot to log out of all the accounts. Anyway, the message that pops up says, “I liked what you wrote.” I didn’t recognize the name, but sometimes that’s just because I forget all the handles some of my friends use (and let’s not even get into the friends who have a habit of changing the name and user picture on their accounts all the frikkin’ time…).

So I type back, “Thanks. Which thing, specifically, did you like?”

I write a lot of things, and have them posted/published lots of places, so this seemed like a reasonable question… Continue reading Which part of ‘no’ are you having trouble with? →

Grandmas who kick butt

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Danielle Henderson has recently begun writing for Seattle’s The Stranger, and I really like her stuff. But on Valentine’s Day, thanks to a posting from Danielle to the Stranger’s newsblog, I became a total fanboy of Danielle’s 81-year-old grandmother, who is quoted twice in Danielle’s post in reaction to an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal written by Susan Patton. (Patton is the “Princeton Mom” who wrote the open-letter to women at the college advising them to be concerned about their “shelf life” as a desirable wife. Patton has since landed a book deal and gets asked to write for the Wall Street Journal, bless her heart.)

First, Danielle tells us the best advice she ever got from her grandmother:

“Don’t marry the first guy you have sex with, always make your own money, and for god’s sake get a f—ing education!”

Then, after reading an excerpt from Patton’s editorial, Dannielle’s grandmother’s reaction is:

“Who the hell wants to end up with a man that doesn’t want you because you’re smart? Don’t date dummies and you won’t have a problem.”

Someone needs to offer Danielle’s grandmother a book deal. I’d much rather read her advice than Patton’s.

You can read Danielle’s entire post about Patton’s latest drivel here.

Bad at herding myself

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Kitten falling asleep on an Apply keyboard.
I haven’t had a lot of energy lately.
Coming down with the bad cold that’s been going around a bit over a week ago really messed up my schedule. Besides having to cancel several planned events with friends, taking some sick time and working from home a few extra days, I haven’t had a lot of energy. Some nights I’ve had trouble sleeping. Even when I don’t, I just haven’t had much energy. On those nights that I don’t conk out shortly after dinner, I wind up staring at the computer attempting to write and not getting a lot done.

So, for instance, when I wrote and scheduled the post called, “I don’t mean to be a jerk, part 1,” I had the opening sentences of a related part 2 post sitting in the draft queue. Continue reading Bad at herding myself →

Diverted intentions

writing,

Cat with a manual typewriter.
“Where’s the delete key?”
I’ve been trying to wrap up the end of my novel, the one I worked on finishing during NaNoWriMo. I got 58,000 words added to the novel during November, and was well into the epic battle at the end, but I didn’t quite reach the denouement by the end of the month. And then, of course, I had to change gears and work on a Christmas ghost story before the party.

So, I’ve been struggling with the ending, and it occurred to me it was fitting that I was doing so as the last days of the year were ticking down. So when I hit another snag last night, I started writing a blog post about writing endings in fiction, and how difficult that can be.

When I got up this morning for my morning writing time, I figured I could finish the blog post and schedule it to publish later today. A blog post on composing the final scenes on stories to post on the final day of the year. Perfect, right?

Well, I instead spent my hour of morning writing time re-reading the last three completed chapters and correcting the rather prodigious number of typos and writing a bit more of that stalled denouement.

And now I spent five minutes writing a post about why I haven’t finished the post about writing endings.

And maybe a post about writing something different than I planned is a better way to cap the year.

Happy New Year!

The Law of Fumble Fingers

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Cat looking at a Macbook.
This may or may not be an accurate representation of me writing.
One of the problems with the way I run this blog (and it’s a subset of the way I write), is that from time to time, I accidentally publish something that isn’t ready.

I have a certain number of posts in draft form at any time. Continue reading The Law of Fumble Fingers →

Deciding how much to tell

writing,

An otter holding a bottle of beer.
Now how is he going to carry the hot dogs back from the concession stand?
A few days ago my second blog post about the meaning of persecution included an anecdote about a figure of speech. The explanation I gave for the figure of speech, “caught in a suicide squeeze,” was intentionally truncated and simplified. I didn’t explain that a suicide squeeze specifically begins with having a runner on third base with less than two outs and the runner leaving the base at the same time (or milliseconds before) the pitcher releases the ball…

Continue reading Deciding how much to tell →

Friday Links!

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The Octopus That Almost Ate Seattle.

What year is it? KKK Battles With Town Over Renaming School Named For Klan Founder (Our local alt-weekly paper headlined it’s covered of this story, “If the KKK Doesn’t Want You to Change the Name of Your School, You Should Probably Change the Name of Your School” my thought is, if someone thinks refering to people uncomfortable with the name as “many bestial blacks and other criminal elements out for revenge” should seal the deal)

The creator of Calvin & Hobbes: Mental Floss Exclusive Interview with Bill Watterson.

This, Right Here, Is The Problem. “…this is why women are routinely mocked by sexist, skeezy shits who think that finding us attractive must necessarily invalidate whatever point we’re making…”

The Marriage Equality Movement Could Change Dramatically In The Next Two Weeks.

What we Teach Men.

Houston Chronicle Expresses Regrets For Endorsing Cruz.

Morning Radio Host Interviews Psychic and Puts Him to Shame.

The religious right is a fraud: Nothing Christian about Michele Bachmann’s values.

Rachel Maddow sums up the government shut down fight’s accomplishments (click here if the video isn’t embedding properly):
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And sometimes you need a band and a bus to propose marriage:
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