August '22 Roundup & Rambling

Raw Data:

Novels – 15 ↑

Graphic Novels – 6 ⭤

Average Rating – 3.33 ↑

Pages – 4125 ↓

Words – 1162K ↓

The Bad:

One Piece #28 – The only under 3star rating this whole month!

The Good:

A Season in Carcosa – 4.5stars of Almost Perfect cosmic horror

Movie:

The 2015 tv revival of The Muppets made them rude and crude instead of laughable and lovable.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• Animate Wall MTG
• Binstagramm
• The 80’s Movie Book Tag
• WordPress Woes
• Ankh of Mishra MTG
• Apprentice Wizard MTG
• Currently Reading
• Armageddon MTG
• Armageddon Clock MTG

Personal:

Batched the first week of the month as Mrs B was still out in California visiting family. Got sick in the middle of the month for a couple of days and then worked and read, worked and read. I just felt super busy the whole month even when things were going fine.

Had a baptism at church, which was really nice, went to a company lunch one friday (which was great because we still got paid but didn’t have to work those 3hrs), visited the SDA church one Saturday and tried to get a game of boardgame Doom going with my brother.

WordPress “updated” in the background at some point this month and they broke the ability to copy/paste multiple items into the Title bar of a post. Since I c/p the title, series and rating, I had to figure out an alternate way. I emailed WP and they confirmed it was the update doing the breaking and they also confirmed it wouldn’t be fixed at least until the next update. So I had to start using blogger as my primary blog and then WP as the backup. Blogging is just becoming a hassle and WordPress seems fixed on their course of driving away the casual blogger. I am really stressed about it. It is cumulative stress too, so it doesn’t go away. The block editor, which I am used to, still makes me angry to use, WP’s various shenanigans with their plans and addons and crap and now something “basic” isn’t working. It feels like I am dragging a ball and chain behind me every time I go to blog and I am starting to really, really, really hate it.

My Librarything usage has also been dropping and since the few people I interacted with on a social level had dwindled as well, I began cutting back at LT soon after the month began. Starting this week I’ve cut the cord completely. One less place I have to copy/paste and keep track of information. I feel like I’m re-trenching on multiple fronts. That’s not good, because you only retrench when you’re in a war, and usually only when you are losing that war. Reviewing has become a war that I’m losing. While I know my moods affect how I feel about blogging, the fact that I am feeling this way at all about it is a big fat warning sign to me. I’ll be giving it all some serious consideration over the coming months.

Plans for Next Month:

September is going to be a very full blogging month. So much so that I’ll be double posting on Mondays. One will be the typical Magic the Gathering post and the next one will be a book review, hopefully at noon. Might be some timing issues due to WP being idiotic but it will at least go up on my site at noon.

I’ve got to write about September 11 and do the next Muppets thing and everything else will be book reviews, book reviews, book reviews. I have GOT to get caught up, so September gets to be the month I pack them all in. I know book review posts aren’t as fun to read, but my backlog has almost doubled between the reading time I had while in California and the sick time I had this month. So prepare yourselves to be socked between the eyes. If I feel the need to write some other non-book review stuff, well, then that’ll be another double posting day as well.