I’ve Been Tagged …

I’ve been tagged by Violet Ravette in her The Gothic aspiring Writer mode. When I read the questions, I felt bound to try and answer them, as they are quite to the point and “about blogging”, aspects of which I often talk about. However, I’m going to be skipping up and down these questions, several need more thought than I’m prepared to give them right now.

Q1 … How did you come up with your blog name? I could laugh, or I could cry from tooth-gnashing frustration about the URL up there in the address bar. Probably laughing is the better response. For me, my blog name was to be a temporary placeholder thingie while I learned the ropes of setting up a blog in privacy.

I fully expected to be able to change it to something much more appropriate but it was not to be. When I started blogging I did not know the differences between an URL, a domain, a website and website host, and a blog. To my mind, all of them were parts of the same thing and that idea has caused me untold stress.

WordPress terminology/jargon and its concepts are NOT and NEVER clear or translucent, not crystal clear, crystalline, glassy, or unclouded. Concepts are nearly always opaque and cloudy and nearly always need six or ten readings with a glossary at hand before understanding glimmers in the distance. Then I need to try and nail it down before it escapes. Like, rewrite it in my own words.

And I say this from the point of view of a person who learned HTLM (I started with its fourth iteration, back in 2003) and could get a blank screened monitor with a C/- prompt in the top left hand corner to do as it was told.

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As I was with WordPress for a short time when it first began–so that it already knew me or still knew me when I returned after a long stint with Blogger and then G+. My name and number were still in the system. And by hook or by crook WordPress did not make it possible for me to change my new prospective blog name.

They offered me a whole new URL, meaning a second blog, to be paid for as well. Don’t ask me to explain, it became an immovable barrier, I decided to leave it in the road and walk around it. Mind you, I don’t mind the name so much, it is after all the handle I mostly go by. It’s the number. — 385131918. I mean, what can you do with that? Don’t try, I’ve already looked at it in 55 different ways.

That left me the tag-line to do glorious things with. 3 realities. The everyday consensual. The Eleven Islands. The future. I don’t now recommend specifying a place in a tag-line. The blog will change in flavor and suddenly the tag-line is dated. But … Lodestar is primarily set in the Eleven Islands and therefore the tag-line is still current. Still, expect to say a change up there one day soon.

Q5 … Is there anything more you wish you had, or would like to learn as a blogger? I must confess I laughed when I read this question. Who invented this tag? This looks so much like market research. There are always more ways I would like to learn to make my blog more interesting. But I figure that since I am mainly talking to other bloggers, anything new I learn other people might be interested in learning too. Or they might be interested to read that the way they did it, was better.

And then there is the concept of learning by doing. So I’m in the process of learning the intricacies of making and embedding video clips which efforts can be seen in the Cat Diary, as well as the ongoing process of turning an image-rich document into a pdf, as will one day soon be seen in the Bosley’s Builders series.

Every so often I go through the WordPress Blocks Catalogue, and see if anything tickles my fancy. I’ve been thinking I should learn how to do a quote block soon. Should be pretty easy, but in my experience as soon as you say that, something hard will trip me up. In my family, I’m famous for making easy things hard, and seeing problems that no one else has even noticed.

Q6 … Do you have a specific style of blogging? Mmm, a specific style? Well, I usually try to have at least one image, and that is usually centered. Off-set images are easy to do, I know, but lol don’t suit my style somehow. I’ve noticed I’ve started to use a few colloquialisms and Australian and American slang. That’s a style thing. and I try to write in a conversation manner.

Back in the days of a ‘young’ internet, slang and colloquial expressions were frowned upon, due to the fact that many internet users didn’t/don’t speak English as their first language and would misunderstand. Back in the day there were websites where you could learn all the best ways to get your message across. Useage.net doesn’t appear to exist anymore. It was good, very plain spoken, but very useful. Learnt a lot there.

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Interestingly, the three questions I have answered today are about form while the three to come are about content. I often compare ‘form’ to a fishing net and ‘content’ to the fish I’m trying to catch. So whenever I write ‘About Blogging’ I’m knotting the net–or repairing it–to go out fishing with it.

Pretty good image. My prompt was “Woman throwing out a fishing net”. Asking the resident AI to generate this image was a decision by me designed to escape copyright problems on the one hand, and paying iStock on the other.

Apparently, this pic is one of 18 chances I have at generating an AI image. 18 chances for the year? For ever? Thank the Universe that the color scheme still has the AI signature and it can’t be mistaken for an actual someone. Hopefully.

Cat Diary 11

Me training the old woman is an ongoing project. My main drive is to get more food more often. The day after she went out for dinner was excellent. We had a new to me meat at lunchtime … when she fed me a couple of chunks … and at dinner time when I got some of the gravy as well as a few more scraps. Yum!

This is me the day before, cleaning the bag that the barbecued chook came in. Forgot to mention that delicacy. Seems to me she tries me on new things at lunchtimes.

So it’s very disappointing when there is nothing much in the middle of the day. Makes the day long and boring.

To my surprise the day she went shopping she brought home a thing she probably thought I’d love. Nothing is further from that feeling about the alien thing she expects me to interact with.

The Build, Days 8-10

This first part of the week was entirely taken up with further demolishing of the structures on the site and trucking them away …

Here the final duplex has been taken down .

In the foreground a pile of metals, another to the right. Seeing the fine-grained sorting of metal from rubble by the excavator arm with a two part scoop on the end serving as a hand, was totally impressive.

A computer gamer said the excavator operator was using it as a ‘skin’ and I suppose operating an actual excavator is probably not very different from operating a digital excavator, except that the ‘real’ operator has the rest of his crew to keep alive, make sure he stays on task, doesn’t break through the sewage pipes if any, etc etc. Meaning that there are real-world consequences.

This operator’s skill, though, makes me think that this job at least will be safe from being automated for a good while … the adult human brain is still very capable of out-thinking the AIs we’re all so worried about.

A reddit dot com/r/singularity discussion nine months ago considered that AIs didn’t yet have the capabilities of most mammals in that though AIs can be very smart on isolated tasks, they have no sustained intelligence the way most animals have.

All work stopped early on Wednesday afternoon as rain was forecast and we indeed had a good downpour.

Lego …

Bag 1 is done.

After balcony gardening for an hour this afternoon, playing with Moggy in between ten or twenty moves, thought I’d start on my Lego new project.

It’s my first set aimed at adult fans and promises to show me some new building techniques among other good things.

Now to try and fit it into Bosley & Co’s world. I bet there’ll be some disbelief, and even resistance. Because this thing looks bigger than any place they have up to this point.

Still, who could resist a …?

Cat Diary 10

We have embarked on another training program, which is me learning not to ‘scrapple’ the carpet, is what the old woman calls it. Good luck with that, I say. It feels entirely too satisfying to give that up in a snap. I spread my front paw toes out wide and extend my front claws. Grab hold of a good swag of the stuff, and P-U-LL!

“NO!” the old woman said in a big voice.

The first time I got such a fright I had to go spend time under the couch to recover. But I had to make sure it was the clawing she was talking about, you know?

So I waltzed out in front of her working on the kitchen bench. Did it all again.

“NO!” she said.

So, yeah. OK. She doesn’t want me to shred the carpet. I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem, I already made short work of two rows of carpet weave that were sticking out into my domain from under the shed door.

Well no, maybe not short work. It might’ve taken me all one night, niggling at it. But would you believe, when the old woman went out for a walk, she came back with a huge slab of flood-worn five-ply she picked up from a place on the creek bank.

I said it’s big! But totally not something I’ve ever seen. Why wouldn’t I cringe away from it?

So first there was training me to trust it. Using kibbles of course.

Does she think I’ll trust anything just because it has kibbles on it?

OK, I didn’t last very long not trusting it. Soon gobbled them up and the thing didn’t leap up and bite me.

So next is teaching me to use it for my scratching instead of the carpet. Huh! I so can’t see that a piece of wood will be as satisfying as carpet!

Cat Diary 9

I’ve been learning tricks, would you believe? I have no idea what they are all leading to. For the last couple of days it was all about finding kibbles IN cardboard boxes.

Today the old woman put kibbles ON a box …

Here’s me finding them and taking one off. It’s a pretty wonky operation so I’m gonna wait till I’m really hungry before I have another go. In the meantime, I might think of a better way to get them down.

Other than that today has been a boring day as the old woman went out twice in one day, first time in the morning with all her painting gear and second time in the afternoon with the wheeled thing.

She came back hours later with it laden with stuff. New kibbles too, I hope. We were getting quite short on them.

The Build, Day 7

The demolitions began with a weeks worth of fencing the whole site as is the normal procedure. So counting working days from then, it’s day 7. My son kindly let me know that the whole construction industry in this country (Australia) uses the same calendar where 9 day working weeks and flexi-days are concerned.

So when I said on Monday nothing is happening, where are they? He said, they’ll be doing something on another site.

Well, they’re back today. At 8.30 AM a huge semi dump truck backed into Carinya’s main street, looking bigger than normal due to the littleness of the houses. That starting time, by the way, is due to the work being in a residential area. Normal construction industry starting times are 6.30 AM, or even 6 AM. An early start makes sense in spring summer and autumn, when temperatures may be over 30 Celsius.

Yesterday, at 35 degrees C (95 Fahrenheit) from about 11 AM here, would’ve been unbearable, with the humidity quite high too. Today temperatures are back in the mid twenties.

A couple of men in orange hi vis shirts unloaded maybe two dozen tires. And it’s only because I saw a clip about an archeological site in the Orkneys being covered with black plastic, with ‘retired’ tires to weight it down, that I realized the tires in the present scene must be to prevent a load of dust and rubble being blown all over the highway.

Sometimes it boggles my mind that old tires are being used for that purpose all over the world. One of the joys of the internet: good ideas spread as fast as bad ones.

They dumped a pile of concrete rubble at the end of the street, next to the mysterious hedge that is still there. All the other vegetation were massacred except the hedge? I need a site informant.

A large front end loader is at work at the lower (eastern) edge of the site, In the elbow on the map, filling that same truck with rubble and broken cement it’s scraping up from–I suspect–the forecourt. I’m going by what I can hear, in this instance.

I need to try and retrieve the map of the area we were all sent a couple of weeks ago … got it!

Well, it’d be better upside down, because that’s the way I’m looking at it and taking photos. I shall endeavor to do magic with various software. I’d like to put on treasure-island-style crosses to indicate where the work is being done. Watch this space.