Tagging My Fish aka Content

in this, part two of yesterday’s topic, I’ve been Tagged … I’ll be discussing the Questions to do with blog content.

On a totally different topic for a minute, Moggy and I have had a rough beginning to our morning, along with every other resident on Levels Two and Three of our building. No power from 7 a/m to 9.15 a/m. Though we were told beforehand and had prepared–with a thermos of hot water for example–nobody knew that the alarm units in every apartment would be telling us that … “mains supply is interrupted” … every ninety seconds for the duration. This to happen again on Friday. Not much of an imposition, I know. Especially when we were forewarned.

Moggy was so weirded out by this strange un-embodied voice spouting its refrain that she retired to the far corner under the bed and re-appeared only when the lights went back on and the voice was silenced.

What surprised me about this event was how ‘in the moment’ I had to be just because I couldn’t engage some of my early morning routines. At one point I realized that the ‘net’ metaphor I used in the previous post can definitely be applied to routines. Making in this case the routines the net, and the-new-and-interesting-things-to-do the fish. Something like that.

I’m chortling at this point. After last night’s success at ‘prompting’ (explaining to the resident AI to what pic I needed) I wanted to see what the AI (I’ll need to find out its name) made of this … “Smoky furred cat with white underside and white paws, black nose and black lower jaw.” Nothing is the answer. The message was the image could not be found due to network problems. Ri-i-ight. The AI is stumped?

Q2 If your blog was a person, fictional or real, who would it be? I’d have to say my blog would be a fictional person because she’s a digital entity, existing only in bits and bytes and only online. She’s a ghost in the works. One of millions. It’s as crowded in her world as it is in the consensual ‘real’ world.

It does actually surprise me sometimes that we–me and my digital identity–can connect pretty reliably. Part of the reason is probably that WordPress keeps her safe. She doesn’t have to wheel and deal out in the hot hard world of the world wide web.

Although, not too many entities are out there on their own anymore. I’ve certainly noticed a change in my online experiences from when I first got online in approx 1998, in that nearly everybody I want to talk to, is now in some kind of gated community. It’s difficult now to ‘surf the web’ in the free-wheeling and easy way we used to. All the gated communities still provide that for their members but anybody else first has to sign up and often pay down real money.

Q3 What helps you create new content when you need inspiration? This question follows naturally from the previous one. ‘Creating new content’ is writing or photographing, painting, sketching etc about new ideas I happen to trip over. New ideas provide the ‘inspirations’.

Having to pay everywhere makes it harder to find and produce new content. It’s not only $$$ that stop me finding good stuff. Substack, for example, has this full page thing that they flash at me every time I go to read some of my favorite commentators, where I’m supposed to mark three things that I like to read about, and they’ll be able to steer more of the same my way. I’ve been skipping out every time I see it. It’s such a creativity killer to be shunted into the same byways every time I get online.

WordPress, in contrast, has introduced a ‘discovery’ application that I’m happy with, as I’m able to range further into the domain, and have already got a few topics of interest in my stash. Eg, last week I stumbled across an article on ‘hypovolemia’ which is now sitting there brewing. When I find more info about it, I’ll copy and paste that in there too. With four or five points I’ll have plenty to write about.

My Drafts is where I keep my stash of topics I might post about some day. Usually I’ll copy a link and open a new post, and save it in there. I usually have five or six drafts on the go–waiting for more info, energy, and or time. Any that get too old and stale, I’ll delete. Recently, an Apple mobile phone update provided me with a ‘Journal’ app where I’ve also been noting interesting topics.

In my actual life I keep a bunch of journals. Health diary. Art Journal. Dream School. Bosley and Co’s stories. They also all provide me with grist for the inspiration mill. The picture following is from my art journal, it’s a sketch for a larger painting. A sketch is where I try out techniques, perspectives, colors, even the framing is an experiment. Washi tape. I’m showing it unedited.

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.

— — — —

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.

— — — —

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!