Silly Site o' the Day

I definitely spoke too soon. The power steering belt assembly went kaput today. The car started up with weird flappy noises, so I canceled my haircut appointment and belayed the food shopping in favor of taking it back to the auto shop, and the belt came off mere yards from our destination so it was a very tricky final right turn but we made it. Unfortunately the parts won't be in until midday Monday so we had to cancel the trip to Mom; fortunately she got a local friend to help her out with her medical appointment. This is always one of my great fears, not only being without a needed vehicle but being unable to help out Mom logistically when she doesn't have a locally reliable support network and she has to rely on luck (which was on her side today if not mine). We didn't have a huge shopping list so we can get by until the car's fixed (as soon as I pick it up, presumably, Monday afternoon, we head straight for the supermarket) but it's still frustrating as heck, and I can't stop thinking that I should have left it there yesterday and had them do the needed repairs... but there's no guarantee anyway that the parts would have arrived today! And so my brain ping-pongs back and forth, and I can't get it to stop. It's a weird downward spiral, which is very different than turtles all the way down:

Via Laughing Squid. Time for The Ten Commandments now, at least...

Silly Site o' the Day

Four more days! Although I don't think I'm going to be doing anything that special for my blogiversary, I have an inkling of what I want to say. In the meantime I have a 3-day weekend and have spent the day catching up on homebound chores. It was such a lovely day I did a bit of food shopping in the morning just to get out and about (locally, I have no desire to get on the highways just yet given the cleanup still going on), mailed out a few cards, caught up on finances, even did a nice stir fry, and most importantly did about five miles on the exercise bike which I find I can do on the weekends if I split it up half morning and half evening. Still have to psych myself up to do that during a workday! Maybe some of these AI-created inspirational posters will help. Maybe not.

Silly Site o' the Day

It's Friday, so it must be time for a new Simon's Cat!



Just a note, as we're leaving for England in less than two weeks, and I won't be taking my laptop with me to blog with embedded Silly Sites and such, I'm in the process of pre-scheduling daily posts to hit at noontime each day so this blog will still have daily content. If I have the time and the wifi I may still do real-time posts, they just won't have any links on them.

Lucky 13

I look at the floor and I see it needs sweeping... - George Harrison

Thirteen years ago today I decided to start this blog. As any Pen-Elayne readers still here may remember, I've always enjoyed one-to-many written conversations. In the late '60s and '70s, when postage stamps were like 6 cents, I had like 150+ penpals, and wrote stories and passed them around the classroom (I was on page 4 while pages 1-3 were making the rounds); in the '80s, when computers were just coming into vogue, I self-published a printed zine called INSIDE JOKE and contributed to a lot of apas; in the '90s, when web 1.0 was just getting off the ground, I joined CompuServe fora and Usenet newsgroups and message boards; and in the 21st century it's mostly been this blog and Facebook. I also have accounts on Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and a half dozen other places, but there are only so many hours in the day, and so much energy to muster.

And that's always been the thing with me. I go into something with great enthusiasm, almost immerse myself in the hobby, and after awhile a new time-sucker rears its interesting head and I'm off in that direction. So I no longer do comics reviews, or write for other websites, or even maintain this blog on a regular basis aside from posting daily content. It's not from lack of interest or desire, it's usually just that some shiny bauble elsewhere in my universe of interests has caught my sight, and there are only so many hours in a day, a year, a life to pursue all the available interests and media out there. At some point, something has to give.

I love checking off "things done" in my head (and, to Robin's consternation, often verbally). But mental checklists are kind of exhausting, and bear many seeds of possible disappointment (not the least of which is, "doing stuff" should be fun, and checklists have a tendency to make that more like a chore). So I'm gradually learning how not to make plans, because I'm never so crestfallen - on a deep, lizard-brain level - than when the plans I create in my head don't come to fruition or somehow go awry. These days, when financial circumstances and personal preferences have dictated that Robin and I spend most of our leisure time at home, I try more for vague ideas of what I want to do with my time. This weekend, for instances, the idea was to catch up on TV shows DVR'ed but unwatched since last spring (we've made a dent in that but haven't cleared it yet), finish my ironing (checked off!), catch up on reading the comics I just bought as well as the local newspaper which I hadn't perused in a month and a half (still working on that but should be done by day's end), perhaps fit in a bit of dusting and vacuuming (alas, not this weekend), and write this post and perhaps a blogaround (check, and we'll see).

It could be that I still have too many ideas and not enough wherewithal to organize them where they belong. Maybe it's because I'm so good at organizing during my daytime career that I don't have the acuity to keep doing it once I'm home. Maybe it's all too overwhelming and paralyzing, and the path of least resistance, littered with King online games, is more relaxing and fulfilling. Perhaps I need to have more of a think on it.

I'm not going to make any concrete promises on what this blog will become, or how much I'm going to keep writing in it, other than to speculate that I'll probably keep posting daily Silly Sites. Again, the desire is there, but other things occupy me. I don't care if blogs are going out of fashion, I'm always going to want an outlet for long-form writing, and as long as Blogger is free and avaialble I want to make use of it. How much I do so is another thing. Why don't y'all stick around and we'll find out together?

Belated Blogiversary

Reading Lance's remembrance of his 10th blogiversary, I was suddenly struck by the realization that Pen-Elayne on the Web was 12 years young as of a week ago Sunday, September 7, and I completely spaced out on it. On the plus side, the blog is still going and I'm actually writing more now than I've been in some time. On the minus side, darn it, I missed our blogiversary. So, yay us?

Going All the Way to Eleven

On 7 September 2012 I started this here blog. I was hoping to post more in the past year than I had in previous years, but for the most part this has become a holding pattern for Silly Sites (not that there's anything wrong with that) and a pointer to Facebook photo albums, rather than the writing outlet it had been for me when I started. I still love writing, but have come to believe more and more that it's something I'll do full-time after retiring from my paying job, which I also love. Some people, like Robin, were born to follow their creative muses and enter the freelance world, and some people, like me, were born with less courage but perhaps more organizational ability and desire for financial security. Still, it's nice to have a place to which I can retreat when I do want to write about things, and even as the world moves on to social networks and insta-tumblr-vining, I'm going to hang on to this relic of the early 21st century as long as Google retains Blogger as a platform. Who knows how long that'll be; none of us were prepared for the demise of Google Reader, although I can at least keep up with Feedly on my phone and my home desktop (alas, it still doesn't work with Internet Explorer, the only browser I have at the office). Time and tech marches on, and more than ever it's evolve or die. While we were in the UK we witnessed the last gasps of dial-up and had our American credit card refused because it didn't have a chip. Who knows what's around the bend tomorrow. So I'm going to enjoy this bloggy ride while it lasts, and thank you all again for continuing to read.

This is how sick I am...

I just deleted all my saved Silly Sites from NetNewsWire. Yeah, it's been that kind of cold. I'm sure I'll build them up again eventually, but until then I've nothing to link to. Still, there you are, new content.

Cleanup Time

I took the day off work to do some housekeeping, both online and off. Inspired in part by Skippy's 8th blogiversary and his tireless support of Blogroll Amnesty Day and the concept of mutual linkage, I decided to clean my sidebar of all the News + Views Guys, Duos and Groups whose blogs are inactive or who don't have me on their blogrolls. (Having already swept through the Liberal Coalition and News+Views Gals sections a few months back, this now leaves the Kultcha section, Op-Ed and Roundups, the last of which will probably go bye-byes.) If Bill Wolfrum, Dave Johnson, Mark Kleiman, PZ Myers, Tom and Dori at Backup Brain, David and Sara at Ornicus, the folks at After School Snack, Corrente, Crooked Timber, Feministe, Feministing, First Draft, the Group News Blog, Lawyers Guns and Money, Left Coaster, Pandagon (wow Amanda, no blogroll?), Preemptive Karma or anyone else actively blogging who's now been removed from my sidebar can point me to where on their blogs a link to me appears, they will of course be immediately reinstated. (I continue to read a number of blogs which ignore my existence entirely because I enjoy them - as evidenced by my Bloglines subscriptions - but I no longer feel a need to give them free sidebar PR if there's no reciprocity.)

This housecleaning has freed up my sidebar considerably, so it might be a good time to mention to any "new" bloggers I read (like Amanda Hess at The Sexist, the gals at Tiger Beatdown, etc.) who would like a mutual link exchange, I'd be more than delighted. And,to remind other folks who seek a link exchange for the primary purpose of selling something that Pen-Elayne is a NO-ADS blog.

Oh, and also? I've moved my friend Jill, who does Brilliant at Breakfast, up to my Top Seven. Given that I conceived that section to honor friends and bloggers who've had a profound influence on my writing and my life and my decision to blog in the first place, she totally belongs there. (Now if only Anni Ackner would return to blogging, I could expand that section to a Top Eight...)

Administrivia

Hi, Laura Gjovaag here. I'm Elayne's techie friend. I'm about to start making changes to this blog's template, so it may look very odd for the next couple of hours. Or rather, the sidebar will look odd. The rest of the blog should be up and running fairly quickly. I'll update this post when I'm done so you can tell me what I messed up.

Update: 8:43pm New York Time - I'm done with the main changes. There are a number of tweaks still to make, and I'm aware of a spacing bug on the sidebar on item pages that I need to fix. Otherwise, I think it looks ok. If you see anything truly amiss, let me know so I can figure it out.

Comment Moderation On

I've had to turn on comment moderation because I can't figure out how to delete unwanted ad comments. Hope that doesn't inconvenience actual non-ad commenters too much. Thanks for understanding.

Silly Site o' the Day

Probably not "silly" so much as "cool." I need to add new blogs to my sidebar like I need a hole in the head, but I couldn't resist Danielle Nierenberg's request to add Border Jumpers, the blog she and Bernard Pollack are keeping of their travels in Africa. Do check it out. Seems right up your alley, Marie!

Comments Changing

I found out via another blog that Haloscan, the commenting service I've used since like forever, is "upgrading" to a pay-only format and the free service will go away in a week. As I've never spent a single cent to blog and don't intend to start now, I've just enabled Blogger's own comment feature. It breaks my heart that I may no longer have access to old comments from folks who are no longer with us like Leah and my Dad, but that's the 'net for you, we knew it was ephemeral when we signed on. So excuse me whilst I test things out... Okay, it seems that Blogger comments don't work as long as Haloscan is still around, so we'll see what happens a week from today. Update: Thanks to Laura we're ported over now from Haloscan to Blogger's own comment mechanism, and even, though you'll no longer see any old Haloscan-based comments on the blog, I have them saved into a personal archive so I don't lose the memories.

Out with the Old...

Today I purged the two individual News+Views sections of my sidebar blogroll, removing inactive bloggers as well as most of the bloggers who no longer link to me. I was just getting too overwhelmed by the liberal blogger echo-chamber, and if someone has decided they have no desire to be my cyber-friend who am I to stand in their way? I know it sounds mean, but chances are these folks (some of whom I've spent lots of time socializing with in person) won't even see this post if they're no longer "speaking" to me. And it's not just a way of making my sidebar and daily reading more manageable (i.e., now I can spend more time reading and absorbing Digby's posts and Susie's volume!). It's a prelude to adding more new liberal bloggers on Blogroll Amnesty Day, which will be Sunday, February 3. So here's what I'd like Pen-Elayne readers (specifically liberal bloggers) to do -- if you already link to me and you don't see your name on my sidebar, please email me or leave a comment below so I can rectify the error. (I did a search on everyone's site for my first name, but it's possible some of you have blogrolls off your main sites.) And if you want to add me to your blogroll, please alert me so I can reciprocate. I'll announce all new blogroll additions on Blogroll Amnesty Day. Thanks!

Silly Site o' the Day

A couple brief maintenance notes before I choose a Silly Site and saunter off to bed. Jon Swift has been added to the blogroll, and about damn time too; and Ezra Klein's merged his blog with his day job and can now be found here at the American Prospect. (Fans of his former co-bloggers can find them here at Cogitamus.) Robin and I had a great time at today's party until he got a migraine, but he tried HeadOn for the first time and that mitigated it somewhat so I may actually buy their migraine relief product despite the potassium dichromate. Hey, as a pro-level photographer Robin must have enough potassium dichromate in his system already. :) See, here's his brainscan (brainscannr via Gerard). Anyway, photos tomorrow or the next day or whenever I actually feel rested and have finished my ComicMix column. No more NYC for me for at least a few days, except if I get another interview...

Maintenance Notes

TBogg has created a new blog under the auspices of Firedoglake; although FDL's past racist missteps resulted in my delinking them until such time (if ever) that they actually acknowledge and seek to correct their actions, I'm still linking to TBogg because you can access his blog completely separately from the main group blog (looks like they're starting to do what Daily Kos does, have people create blogs via their server). Also, I found out via Avedon that Eli Stephens is a gal ("Eli" being short for "Elisha") so I've moved her from the News+Views Guys section up to the equivalent Gals section; my apologies for not ascertaining your gender sooner, Eli! I should probably make a number of changes to my sidebar other than these two, but I haven't yet had the time to really go through my blogroll to see who's still active...

Reflective Blogaround

A pretty quiet week, except if you're taking a stand or remembering the grim anniversary of the definitive proof that the current government cannot keep its citizens safe. Digby has a timeline. Over at skippy's place, cookie jill has a handy list of Gulf Region bloggers, including Blogging New Orleans' 24-hour Katrina anniversary blogathon. Me, I'm flying a couple flags in solidarity.





Elsewhere in my corner of the blogosphere:

• Stuart Pivar has withdrawn his libel lawsuit against PZ Myers for Paul calling him a crackpot.

• Bully asks, Would you like to swing on a star? Sure you would.

• Photos from Asia! Chengdu Province over at Neil's blog (yes, it includes yummy food pics!), and Tokyo over at Cat's place, including a food post. Speaking of food posts, Marie hypes a burger in Egypt, and David Byrne reports from Red Hook.

• Cheryl reminds us there's nothing wrong with sexy, as long as it's part of a three-dimensional characterization.

• Kevin Moore has found the perfect term for my ex-husband.

• PJ wants to know why more feminists aren't up in arms over something he found in a letters column of a comic I don't read.

• BoingBoing has enabled its comments again, and they're bound to be well run because Teresa Nielsen-Hayden is moderating them!

• Melissa has one of the best takes I've read on the weird new Heineken keg ad.

• Barbara follows up on her Darmok post, which I loved (that's actually the TNG episode that sticks with me the most over the years), by talking a bit more about the myth-based Bush presidency. To me, what the Darmok thing symbolizes is the public's willingness to accept superficial catchphrases and buzzwords and references without asking that they be defined. You cannot communicate with people unless both ends of the conversation are using the same reference points. This is why I stress over and over again to make politicians on all ends of the spectrum define their terms.

And here's a few maintenance notes:

• It's going to be weird not having Max Sawicky on my blogroll any more, but my fellow Rutgers alum and economics expert is moving on. One of his co-bloggers, Barkley, explains why MaxSpeak will be so missed.

• Kate Harding has expanded Shapely Prose to include co-bloggers Sweet Machine and Fillyjonk (I swear, many of us do actually use real names when we blog!), so that blog gets moved to Da Groups.

• And Kathy Kattenberg welcomes co-blogger Chief onto Liberty Street. I'd move that blog into my Dynamic Duos section, but KK's a Liberal Coalition member so it's going to stay listed under LC for now.

Well, best get to updating that template...

Burning the Feed

Since Feedburner has a site tracker, I decided to make myself a Feedburner feed and put the tracker on my sidebar. I only tested it on one post, but so far my Feedburner feed is a little faster than Blogger's built-in Atom feed, although today the LJ alternate Atom feed beats both of them by a half hour. Go figure. Anyway, if those of you who subscribe to Pen-Elayne via my site feed could perhaps subscribe to the Feedburner one, as that'll tell me how many folks subscribe to Pen-Elayne via services like Bloglines and suchnot and how many feed reads I actually get. (Or, you know, not. I'm just curious.)

Maintenance Note

Apparently LiveJournal has now changed its default site feed to Atom, and of course Bloglines doesn't automatically redirect stuff like that. So I've been spending the last hour or so searching all the LiveJournal blogs to which I subscribe and changing the feed addresses. New feeds should read as follows:

http://USERNAME.livejournal.com/data/atom

So therefore my alternate site feed, in case the Blogger one isn't working, is

http://penelayne.livejournal.com/data/atom

Please adjust your newsreaders accordingly. There's a hitch, as four LiveJournal blogs on my must-read list -- Budgie, Julia, Kaja Foglio and Kevin Moore -- don't seem to have working feeds at all, which breaks my heart particularly in the case of Budgie and Julia who are personal as well as online friends, but at least I'm glad I can read all the others again.

Maintenance Notes

It's been awhile since I've done any appreciable maintenence here, and that's mostly because it's been awhile since I've caught up in blog reading and seen what's out there that's needed updating. Also, most blogs on my sidebar seem pretty stable and active, and I have no desire nor time to add any more.

I do have a straight substitution, though, as CE Petro has decided to close her blog Thoughts of An Average Woman and go into a joint venture instead. She's writing as the "Archcrone" in a so-far-two-person-blog called The Crone Speaks (the other contributor being Ms. Jared from Sinister Girl). So CE is now removed from my individual News+Views Gals section and Crone Speaks has been slotted into Dynamic Duos.

I'm also trying out two group blogs via my Bloglines subs which won't yet make the sidebar (which is already too long, particularly with me not blogging a lot here lately, and keeps tumbling past the bottom of the Blogger design) but which I wanted to mention anyway: the new PZ Myers-inspired blog for the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party and NTodd Pritsky's new group blog Pax Americana.

Considering NTodd's new responsibility and the complete lack of activity on the Liberal Coalition mailing list for the last three months, it appears to all intents and purposes that the LC is no more (NTodd was nominal "leader" of the LC). I'm considering reassigning LC members elsewhere in the blogroll and dropping references to the coalition altogether, but for now I'm keeping things as is until some actual decision is made, or through the end of the summer, whichever comes first.

Blogroll Easter Amnesty

I don't like the term "blogroll amnesty." It implies the people on one's blogroll (that list of names usually found at a blog's sidebar, denoting other bloggers to which that blog links in a spirit of community and recommendation) have committed some sort of crime for which that magnanimous blog has chosen to forgive them. Which of course is not the case; what this expression has actually come to signify among A-listers in the liberal blogosphere is more like blogroll immunity, but for themselves rather than their blogrolls -- the A-listers make public announcements absolving themselves of much of their responsibility (and with great power comes yadda yadda) to encourage community and visibility by conducting consequence-free purges of their blogrolls, instead of just quietly and regularly maintaining and updating them like the rest of us.

And this in turn upsets most of the folks who aren't A-listers and suddenly find their readership and visibility dropping like a stone through no fault of their writing or activism. Some, like skippy, have responded with "since when have blogrolls stopped being recommend reading for your readers, and a personal tool for making surfing the net easier?" (I always thought newsreaders like Bloglines were for the latter.) and promptly began offering reciprocal blogroll links to pretty much everyone.

As I've said in the past, I don't go that far because my blogroll then becomes too unwieldy for my template. Unless I write longwinded daily posts the sidebar content just drops off the bottom. Neither do I want new visitors to be intimidated. But blogs come and go all the time, and I like keeping up with things and adding reasonably to my blogroll as time and maintenance warrant; I try to do it every March during Estrogen Month, for instance.

So when Jim Johnson asked me a second time, I decided to add him as well. Jim wrote, "I have contacted you in the past about linking to my blog because I felt we shared some common ground and could both benefit from hooking up. I’m following up because I still feel that way, and I want to share my message of equality and acceptance with as many people as possible. I hope to help the GLBT community by demonstrating that they have straight advocates within the church, and I also hope to reach straight people who are not as accepting and give them something to think about. The right wing still has politics and Christianity very much intertwined and I feel the other side needs to have a voice to counter that."

I think you can see why I didn't link to Jim previously -- as I'm not a Christian I rejected (and objected to) his "common ground" assumption which was the basis for his request. However, while I am not "within the church" I am most certainly a straight advocate of gay rights. And it's Easter, which is something of a big day for Christians, so I thought it appropriate to add Jim to my blogroll now, with the understanding that my blogroll does not necessarily match my Bloglines subscription list or even my actual reading list (which is considerably shorter than those 770 feeds or I'd never get anything else done). Welcome to the blogroll, Jim!

Oh, and in case you haven't seen it, do check out Terrance's post What You Link Is What You Get on Pam's House Blend and Melissa McEwan's On Mentoring and Patronage at Shakesville.