If you wonder why there is no support at WordPress.com now, it’s because the owner just kicked out almost 10% of the workers. He paid anyone who disagreed with him to leave. Awesome.
Where can I get some of that moulah? I’d leave wordpress for 30K in a heartbeat.
Oh, this was supposed to be a celebratory post? My bad. Let me switch the flip and go into happy mode.
Oh frabjous day, oh hurray, hurray. Everything is just perfect and wonderfully and happy. Yippee ki-yay, miserable frackers!
That’s what happens when I stay awake for 40hrs. It has taken me all week to get over that little episode.
Sadly, work was absolutely bonkers this week. Several of the project managers had big jobs coming due and they were panicking like chickens with their heads cutoff. On Tuesday we started out scheduled to stay at one job for the whole day. By the end of the day, we had gone to 4 different jobs, and because we’re so fething awesome, we finished them all! Of course, on Wednesday we got jerked around again, but accomplished almost nothing. That day I went home, ate a bowl of cold cereal and went to bed.
Thursday I had a “writer” encounter with a solicitation to review a book. Nobody gets to tell me how to review their book, period. Doesn’t matter if it’s as simple as “You have to be completely honest”. That is a “condition”, a boundary, a limiting of MY FREEDOM as a reader and reviewer. They weren’t necessarily bad conditions or even onerous, but NOBODY tells me how I review a book. I left devilreads (that wretched hive of scum and villainy) over that very issue. Thankfully, it ended up being ok, as I simply declined after the conditions were revealed and we each went our separate ways. No harm, no foul. But I really could have done without that bit of straw on this camel’s back.
This whole week I have wanted to go to bed and not bother getting up. Just 9 more hours to go…
The other week I, along with various other people on wordpress.com, experienced a very strange issue wherein you couldn’t type the letter “i” on wordpress.com sites. It lasted between 24-48hrs and then inexplicably cleared up. I wrote about it HERE.
I had contacted “support” and this week got back the following response:
Hi there!
WordPress.com is a web application and does not have control over how individual letters or characters behave on your keyboard or browser. The problem you’re experiencing with the letter “I” seems to be an issue outside of WordPress.com’s functionality.
Here are a few troubleshooting steps you can try:
1. Clear Browser Cache and Cookies: Sometimes, cached data can cause unexpected behavior. Clear your browser’s cache and cookies and see if the issue persists. 2. Try a Different Browser: Check if the problem occurs on a different web browser. This can help determine if it’s a browser-specific issue. 3. Disable Browser Extensions: Certain browser extensions can interfere with web applications. Disable any extensions one by one to see if any of them are causing the problem. 4. Update Your Browser: Ensure that your browser is up to date. Sometimes, outdated versions can cause issues with web applications. 5. Check Keyboard Settings: Make sure your keyboard settings are correct and there are no issues with the physical keyboard itself.
This problem ONLY happened on wordpress.com managed sites and no where else. But that is what WP Support does these days. First it denies, then it blames, then it ignores. And if you keep on persisting, you get banned, first from the forums and then I suspect you get your site taken down for alleged TOS violations.
Wednesday I woke up at 3am with some pressure on my lower left abdomen. Got through work and then went to Urgent Care at 4pm. The dr there poked me, told me I needed a CT scan and sent me off to the ER. I got there at 5pm. I didn’t get out until 2am. It was a horrible experience of waiting and doing nothing. I got the CT scan, had blood work done and was told there it was just a general inflammation and to eat the BRAT diet and take acetaminophen (tylenol) until it went away. And if it didn’t go away, to contact my primary care doctor and get an appointment with a GI specialist. When you’ve been waiting for 8hrs, being told there is nothing they will do feels pretty crushing. Got home and slept until past noon. So now I’m on the BRAT diet through the weekend in an attempt to help my guts get uninflamed. The BRAT stands for Bananas, Rice, Applesauce and Toast(dry).
That’s all on top of the busy’ness of the end of last week and the beginning of this. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing control of events in my personal life and letting it get too busy. Most of that feeling is because I’m still tired from my ER time. Give me a week or two or normalcy and I’ll be feeling just fine.
Some of you might have noticed that you can’t use the letter “I” here on this site, or at other sites across the wordpress.com system. It does appear to be completely random and comes and goes. Feel free to use the letter “Y” or even “Eye” in the comments if it affects you here.
I highly recommend you contact WordPress. Not because I think they will actually do anything, but simply so that other people know that they are not alone with this problem. If you are a freeplan user, wordpress can be reached through the Forums. click on the blue button that says “Add New Topic”. Make sure you list out what sites you’re having the problems on, what specific posts (if you can remember), what browser you are using and be sure to tell them that Bookstooge sent you, because I hate them and have been banned from the forums but I want them to know that I’m still here knowing how utterly useless they are. https://wordpress.com/forums/forum/support/
If you have a paid plan, you can contact them through email, supposedly. I tried that and had the problem of using the letter “i” within their system. It’s totally bs and at the moment, I hate wordpress.com more than I have in a very long time.
In case you hadn’t noticed, WordPress.com decided to shove the block editor down our throats in our comments section. I know, I know. Huge swathes of the community were calling for this. The majority of users needed this. In fact, the world as we know it would end in a fiery cataclysmic fireball if WordPress.com hadn’t instituted this life saving change.
If you would like to turn this option off and make your comment section be the same as it has been for years, if not decades, you will need to go to: https://wordpress.com/settings/discussion/ and turn off the “Enable Blocks in comments” item. I have put up a picture and highlighted everything in angry red to help you.
If you are fine with the block editor in your comments then you don’t need to do anything.
You think I’m kidding? Your data now goes directly to AI programs that pay Automattic. WordPress admitted this on their blog (but closed the comments section).
Under the “Privacy Section”, you’ll need to checkmark the “Prevent Third Party Sharing”. Make you sure hit “Save Settings” AFTER you have selected to opt out.
I know you all “know” this, but it is good to be reminded that “your” data is not yours on WordPress.com or on any site run by Automattic. Pay attention and take control where and when you can or you will permanently lose it at some point.
Pages read – 49,779 (↓3K) Words read – 15564K (↓900K) Average Rating – 3.29 (↑ 0.06)
GENERAL THOUGHTS:
General Life Thoughts
What a year this has been. We started 2023 with Mrs B being incapacitated pretty much until late March and a little in April. That led to her moving to a new doctor and whole new medical system, which has worked out well. Then our fight with the insurance company for her medication continued at year’s end (they hid some of her options from her and we thought we were going to have to shell out over $1500 in one go) and she broke her wrist. Her courage is ok thankfully. Mine, well, that’s iffy.
My biggest physical thing was dealing with my eyes and my diabetes. My left eye continues to be the problem child and I have a bad feeling things are going to be bumpy in 2024.
Emotionally, I was all over the place. I rode the crests of the waves in the good times and man, did I crash and burn in the troughs too. I was discussing “time” with someone and realizing how much quicker things are moving for me now. October of ’22 I took off from reviewing and yet I can remember it like it was THIS October. Then I have those moments where I can’t even remember what I had for breakfast and it’s only 2hours later. Someone needs to write a book on getting older so I can read it and get prepared for what’s coming! There was a lot of other stuff too, but as it is ongoing, I’m still riding the wave of it and don’t know if it’ll end up being a crest or a trough, or even both.
While I don’t have to deal with the turmoil of hormones, my emotions are as volatile as ever they were in my 20’s and I’m coming to realize that’s just how I am, they aren’t going to suddenly change and I just have to accept that. I’m going to continue to say stupid things to people, fly off the handle at the drop of a hat, get my feelings hurt and butt heads with most everyone I meet. I just need to work on mitigating all of those things. Easy peasy, right? 😀
General Bookish Thoughts
Overall, I was happy with my reading this year. My total number only dipped 4, and that was with taking days off from blogging throughout the year. I deliberately tried to read less near the end of the year and it appears to have worked.
I did start subdividing that general number up into the various categories I assign a book, so gives a better view of what I read than just ONE BIG NUMBER. My manga and comic reading steadily dropped at about the midyear mark and I suspect they won’t be picking up any time soon. That comes and goes like a sine wave function and right now I’m in the trough.
My rating was up a tiny bit, which is good because I’m trying to get better at not picking up books that I’ll rate low. Of course, what usually happens is moral content and bam, auto 1star, which just kills my rating. Oh well, I keep on plugging along.
General Blogging Thoughts
What do I say about WordPress without going into a blue streak? Well, I have no plans on leaving in 2024. I’ve put too much work here to start all over somewhere else. So set your minds at ease on that point. At the same time, I am the unhappiest I have ever been with this company since I started really blogging here at the end of ’16. Things being broken on a weekly or monthly basis, constantly fighting to figure what they just did, and why, and most importantly for me, the absolute onslaught of their *&^%$#@! code monkeys against the comment sections. What they have works and it works perfectly. So of course they have to mess with it. And break it and absolutely destroy its basic functionality for the normal user. While they walked back that particular decision, given their history, it just means they will have a go at it again later in ’24 and in smaller increments. I guess I would say I have nothing good to say about WP at the moment. I am angry and upset and it feels like my only option is to go start elsewhere (too much work) or just leave (which isn’t a real choice as I need to interact verbally online with people).
My followers went up but that is because I’m not clearing away spam, business and dead wood accounts any more. It’s too much work and it depresses me. Turn over continues and people come but mainly people seem to go. I have to admit, it is a continual thorn in my side, but that is one of the down sides of blogging (it’s not all fame and fortune after all, no matter what some people may think).
All my other blogging metrics were also up except for number of posts written. Of course, when you’re talking 377 posts a year, 3 less posts isn’t even a 1% drop, so it’s negligible. I did write more in the posts themselves, as they were generally longer by about 100 words. I also got a lot more random views from search engines. That I put down to starting the process of getting my site completely indexed with google. That’s going to take a long time however and with so many of my early “reviews” just being the info block about the book, I doubt those will get indexed at all. As of this post, I have 4895 posts on this blog. So you could read one post a day and you would have enough reading material for the next 13.5 years. Which will give me time to churn out another couple of thousand posts. Get cracking! Those old posts aren’t going to read themselves after all.
Commenting went up too. By a thousand. That’s three extra comments a day! Of course, it’s really only up by 500, because half of that 1000 is me replying, but 1.6 new comments a day for me to reply to is bliss to my soul. Keep it up folks, you’re doing great! 😉
The Author Index is almost finished and that is a bright spot for blogging. I’ve been dragging my feet though, as I don’t want it to really be finished, because then I have to find another blog project and I’m afraid I’ll open a can of worms with some project that will be 100X bigger than anticipated. I like small blog projects, not ginormous blog projects.
The Art for my blog has also been a bright spot. Whether it is seeing the Magic cards that I played with as a teenager or putting up drawings from Miss Ross, I have enjoyed being able to do something different. I know other bloggers do that kind of stuff routinely (hence the creation of sites like Instagram, etc) but with being a book reviewer and mainly dealing with words, the weekly and monthly foray into “picture” refreshes me. Plus, it gives you something different to see than just a small wall of text.
Blogging stayed pretty much the same this year as it did last. That’s why I like doing the stats, because my feelings can skew the reality. The reality is that I wrote just as much as in ’23 as I did in ’22. I can tell how my blogging is going by how much I write. So the numbers staying the same means stability and that’s a good thing. While I’m riding the emotional waves, it’s good to know that I’m still plugging away at my posts.
I guess my blogging experience depends on the mood I’m in. So bear with me as I ride up to those heights and then crash down to those lows.
My blogger account continues to be my backup, that “just in case” place. Bookstooge.blogspot.com exists right now only for my book reviews. I don’t crosspost my non-book stuff, not even my monthly roundups. I check the comments once a week or so for spam and random people just leaving a driveby comment. It’s like that ramshackle shed in the backyard where I store all my crap and always tell myself that “one day I’ll clean that place up”. Hahahaha.
Calibre continues to be the resource I use the most whenever I have questions about the books I’ve read in the past. While I always link to a wordpress review, my initial query is always in calibre. Nothing has changed from last year and I’m just glad it is continually being updated.
THE BOOKS:
Best Book of the Year
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen. I had an unprecedented EIGHTEEN 5star books this year, so it was really hard to narrow it down to just this one. But S&S hit me right in the Feelz, really hard, and when a book can accomplish that, it deserves to be recognized.
Worst Book of the Year
Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh. While I had SEVEN 1star books this year, I only had one 1/2star book and Lapvona was it. Made me sick to my stomach.
PLANS FOR 2024:
Personal
Survive. Seriously. A lot of stuff has been swirling around in my head in ’23 and in ’24 I need to deal with it all. Either catch that ball and run with it for a championship touchdown or drop it like a hot potato and just cancel the game. Or figure out a way to secretly kill the ref and then call the game in my own favor.
Expand my hobby list. I’ve been reading a book called “Making Love Last Forever” by Gary Smalley about strengthening relationships and one of the points he makes is that a stable relationship has multiple hobbies to fall back on when things get rough in one area. It seemed odd to me at first to think that having multiple hobbies could help a relationship, but after an incident earlier this year when something happened that was real life book related and I just went off the deep end about it, I realize that if I had had other hobbies, the book thing wouldn’t have meant as much to me and thus I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did. Thankfully, this is an easy one, as Mark has been singing the praises of the card game Marvel Champions for the last 18+ months. In fact, you can expect a post this month on it. I know you’re already anticipating it!
In relation to that, I am hoping to do some multi-player magic over whatsapp with Dave and Mark. I’ve really not pushed for it because I’m afraid of being “That pushy guy” but the reality is that I want to play some commander, so I suspect I will have to be a bit pushy. Going to have to find the right balance. All three of us also have the Marvel Champion game so maybe we’ll explore that too. Who knows, I can dream though, right?
Get my butt in gear about being serious for dealing with the Certified Survey Technician program. I am not a self-starter but nobody else is going to make this happen except me, so I have to start. I’ll start at the bottom and work my way up the ladder. It will be good for my resume, good for my work wellbeing and make me more marketable should I need to make any moves for family reasons. But I said pretty much the same exact thing in last years annual review, so I’m remaining skeptical of myself.
Cut down on caffeine. Sorry rockstar, you’re just not My Hero any more.
Blog
For the time being, I’m going to block out Wednesday’s and Friday’s as “free days”. Wednesday will probably get filled anyway, but this way I won’t feel like I have to. Friday’s are going to be the day I really try to leave open. I need a day I can either ignore or just vent in Maximum Drivel Drive.
I’ll go back to reviewing one movie or series a month. After November and December and trying to review some sort of movie every Sunday, I realized I just can’t do that. I am not a movie person and it doesn’t work for me at all. Writing movie posts makes me feel like Sisyphus. A gimpy Sisyphus at that.
Going to be sticking to mainly novels this year. Groo is the only comic I plan on reading in ’24. No manga, no other comics, no graphic novels. If something catches my eye I’ll read it, but I’m not going to search anything out. I read two non-fiction books in ’23, thus I’ll need to scare one up for ’24 as well. I’m pretty laid back about that though. Me and non-fiction have a gentleman’s agreement; I leave it alone and it leaves me alone and we’re both happier for it.
I have a couple of buddy reads scheduled already. Dave and I will be reading and reviewing Equal Rites at the end of this month. Lashaan and I will be reading Pride & Prejudice in February, as Lashaan hasn’t broken his teeth on Austen yet. If you would like to do a buddy read later in the year, let me know in the comments and we can discuss what book and timing potentials.
Magic cards once a week will continue. So will once a month art posts. I don’t have any new ideas for either (beyond what I proposed in the Experiment Post in December) and thus I will continue doing the same thing.
Nonsense posts as the mood strikes. Which is the usual, so no change there either, hahahahaa.
If you use the Reader, you may have noticed that the “visit” button is no longer visible under the post in the reader. You can’t even click on the title to get to the post, that just takes you to the full post but still in the reader. I have found that you have to click on the ellipses in the upper right of the box and under there is an option to “visit post”.
Of course, it is RIGHT ABOVE the option to “block site”. Can’t see any problems with that setup, can you? Yeah, me neither.
This is one more incremental change that goes against good usage and good design. Hiding options behind other options seems to be how WP is operating these days however and I suspect we’ll be seeing more “simplification” while they cater to whoever they think they are catering to.
While I’m not about to leave WP, or to abandon my Bookstooge.blog address, I am currently looking around at other options to host the site. Not very optimistic though.
In yet another totally incomprehensible and bone headed move, WordPress.com, in all its wisdom, decided that we needed “writing prompts” whenever we started a new post. As far as I know, nobody asked for this. No blogger needs this. If they do, they should go to some other social media where being completely brain dead is the norm. I was so angry (surprise, surprise) that I immediately fired off a patent pending “Angry Bookstooge” email to support to find out just what in hecker freckers was going on. They replied with their usual pablum and non-reasoning and so I figured I was stuck with this abomination of stupidity.
Patent Pending “Angry Bookstooge” Email
I received an email follow up from WP.com late last week informing me of an “update” where I could opt out of this filthy, disgusting and utterly vile practice. Here’s the steps so you can opt out too if you so choose:
My Sites
Settings
Writing
Then you can toggle off the “show writing prompts”. Just make sure to save after doing that so your choice is saved.
I hope this has been helpful. As WP.com changes things, randomly, for no reason and against all good sense, expect more little posts like this as I navigate the minefields of trying to stay here while simultaneously wishing every person at WP.com was being worked over, and good, by Pinhead.
Two years ago I wrote a post (Part I) detailing how to utilize Dropbox as a picture hosting site so you didn’t have to eat into your free space here at WordPress. I’ve been using it on any picture over 100KB and it seems to work well for me. But just because something is working well doesn’t mean I am content to sit on my lees and let WordPress continue to work against me behind my back. It would be just like them at some point to disallow outside hosted pictures on free sites, so I decided to investigate what I could do for picture compression. Just in case you can’t tell, I have an extremely adversarial relationship with WP.com.
What I found was the Caesium Image Compressor. Here is the website and the download for various OS’s is part way down the page: Caesium Website.
I have been very pleased so far. Once I installed it, it took a while of playing around to get all the various options set up how I wanted. What I didn’t realize, and was very pleasantly surprised with, is that Caesium can also resize your photos along with compressing them. This is wonderful for me as I use the high quality pictures from my Calibre Library for my book reviews. Instead of having to use a separate resizer tool and then Caesium to compress that, I can do it all in one step. I even have it save the picture where I want so everything is conveniently stored for upload.
I use it on the little pictures for the book reviews (which are 194px wide) and I regularly get 30-60% compression. Going from 30KB down to 18KB isn’t a world breaking but if I want to continue blogging for years and years, every little bit adds up. I also use Caesium on any files I upload to Dropbox as well. Saving space any way I can means I don’t have to worry about hitting that 3gb limit (or 1gb if you’re a poor new user to WordPress. You newbs really have my sympathies in that regards!) It is another step in the blogging process however. So you have to decide if that is worth it to you or not. For me, it totally is. It is free, it is small and once you set it up to your taste, it is almost just 3 clicks of the mouse and you’re done.
I hope this post has been helpful even if just to inform you of options that you have. Because knowing is half the battle!
GI Bookstooge is the REAL American Hero, but we all knew that anyway
After my post celebrating my Unbanning from the WordPress Forums (Out of WordPress Jail!) I wondered when I would get banned again and what would set it off. I figured WordPress would do something ultra-boneheaded and I’d say something in response and get ye olde ban hammer.
Well, it happened but I’m not sure exactly why. I have an idea and I’ll walk you through it. But first, Evidence of me being banned yet again from the forums:
When the WP Reader Changed on Me! last week and I posted about it, I went first to the forums to see if anyone else had noticed this change or complained about it. Nobody had and so I asked all of you in the post to confirm that my eyes hadn’t gone crazy. Enough of you confirmed the sudden change so I knew I was on firm ground. I have one of the paid plans (to get rid of the atrocious ads wordpress puts on the free sites) and that entitles me to email support. But I didn’t want email support. I wanted to post in the forum to get a public reaction. But I couldn’t find any way to start a new post. I could reply to other posts but I could not start one. So I caved and sent an email to the Great and Powerful Oz, or those shysters known ironically as “Happiness Engineers”.
I stated that the reader had become very narrow like the app and why had they changed it and why hadn’t they announced it. The Happiness Engineer replied back along the lines of “I understand you have a question about the reader, what can I help you with?”. Oh man, it was like they hadn’t read the email and were replying to some random keyword. I wrote back telling that person to read the initial email. They then asked me to take a screen shot to show the problem. At no point so far had this person acknowledged in ANY WAY that they were aware the Reader had been changed. I took a screen capture and gave it to them but told them since they didn’t seem to be aware of the issue that I figured they (wordpress) were lying to me and obfuscating the issue hoping I’d give up.
THAT is what I think got me banned from the forums. But what I don’t understand is why. How did what I wrote in the email translate over to the forums? And I made sure in the email NOT to claim the jerk engineer was lying or obfuscating, but WordPress as a whole. That way I was not attacking or “disrespecting” staff * epic eye roll *
So another Jerk Engineer replies back that he took a look at the screen shot and couldn’t see a problem. I replied calmly and outlined exactly what was different and that all I was looking for was the WHY of the changes, which were detrimental to all viewers who used a computer instead of a phone. I am so incredibly frustrated with WordPress right now.
I am looking into other RSS feeder options and come the New Year will be abandoning the WP Reader. I’ll still be using wordpress but I’ll access all the notifications via my own website instead of going to the reader. I’ll visit all of your sites via whatever rss feed reader I end up with. The problem is, one person’s site I regularly regurgitate upon (Aye laddie, your trossachs are totally pants’d! Begorrah!) has a problem where I can ONLY comment through the reader. As I am an avid commenter (not just on his site but most everywhere), this presents a problem to be solved. It just can’t be simple can it?
So the incredible Saga of The Bookstooge versus the Evil WordPress continues.
Just a little rant post to get things out of my system. WordPress has been misbehaving in little areas and it’s really annoying me. I don’t know if it is WP updating in the background (every time something goes wrong it seems like it is because they updated something without fully testing it and so they screw over hundreds of thousands of people all at once) or if it is my browser being updated or some of my plugins.
I use Chrome with adblockplus and Ublock Origin. So far they have played very nicely with WP. Every month or so I do have to clear my chrome cache or wp starts acting funny, but since I prefer to do that anyway as a security precaution, it’s never been an issue.
Recently, nothing I change in the editor has been sticking. When I select the “top tool” option to keep the tools stuck on the top of the post, the next time I enter the editor the toolbar is right back to being on each block. When I open the “category” option on the right, it doesn’t stay open like it used to nor does the “tag” option.
When I write a review, I write everything in OpenOffice and then copy/paste over here. I’ll copy the title and series into the title bar and then copy/paste the star rating after that. Today I am finding that I cannot do multiple copy/pastes into the title bar. If there is something written there and I go to copy/paste, it overwrites what is written there with what I am trying to copy/paste. So I had to copy/paste the title and series into notepad, THEN c/p the star rating into notepad and create one line and THEN c/p that into the title block of WP. That is total BS.
I tried using MS Edge with no addons to see if it was chrome, but the exact same thing happened. Couldn’t copy/paste multiple items. So I shot off an email to WP describing it and telling them to fix it.
I just want WP to work. Instead, they tinker and break things and lie about it to our faces and generally act like nothing is the matter. Little things like this DO matter. It adds up. I shouldn’t be stressing out over a damned hobby. Personally, I hope these issues are because of chrome and the plugins. I can fix those easily enough. But if it is WP, there’s nothing I can do but wait and hope they fix what they broke.
