Blog Archives
A New Project on this Blog…
In the nearly five years I’ve been posting on this site and others, it’s become a bit apparent that my thinking and writing style have evolved quite a lot. To get a good handle on just how it’s evolved and to gauge whether it’s gone in a direction that I’d like, I’m engaged in a little project on the side…
…filing my old blog posts, saving them to Word or Pages, formating and correcting for spelling errors, and finally, exporting the whole unseemly mess as a PDF to post on this blog for free consumption by the sites readership.
I’ve already posted, and again here, the 2009, 2010, and the first 2011 anthology of my selected blog posts from those years, what I perhaps delusionally think of as my least totally heinous ventures into blogging, with a few other volumes currently in the works: the second 2011 collection, and like 2011, possibly two separate anthologies for 2012.
I need to read over these myself, since I am very much aware of the danger of just posting on the same stuff year after year, post after post, and reading my old posts is a good way to refresh my memory and prevent repetition of old and tired topics already better written on before.
Or not.
Whether my style, voice and tone are suited for going in whatever direction I’m going in, if and in what way they’ve gotten better, plus getting a better handle on what new topics to write on, and what’s already been done, will be determined once this project’s completed.
I’m not putting a definite deadline on the posting of the new volumes, but I shall announce and publish them here when they are complete and ready.
Again, these will be free, after all, they will be practically verbatim (minus the spelling errors and such) from material freely accessible on this site by navigating the archives.
You pay nothing.
I’ll also in the meantime be working on a set of volumes collecting the best of the fractal posts on this site, and other work of mine, also in PDF or whatever I find works better with images. This volume won’t be free, but it will be cheap, and will be posted online when complete and formatted.
Thanks, you people are sooo cool. In the words of my alien humans, the Kai’Siri,
Talotaa Frang. (Be strong, be well.)
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 27,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 6 Film Festivals
The Weekly Gnuz and Lynx Roundup for November 30, 2012
This has been a pretty harrowing week for the family, when our young adult cat, Eccleston had become seriously ill from getting into spicy food Monday evening, leading to internal bleeding that may well have killed him overnight and causing him to spit up blood before we took him in for vets treatment.
He’s doing much better now, and starting to do normal kitty digestion things again, but we’re keeping an eye on him to make sure he heals up well and fully recovers. Taking care of him is part of the reason I’m announcing this:
I’ve needed to go on a blogging hiatus for some time now, and I may be back to blogging in a few days, or a few weeks, I cannot say which right now. But this applies to all four of my blogs; my two WordPress sites, my Blogspot site, and lastly my Tumblr page, for that last the only further entries until I return being those that are already auto-queued for posting in four-hour increments.
Posting on other venues will be limited to four hours weekly in total, for keeping in contact with friends and fellows on Facebook and Twitter.
While I’m on hiatus, I’ll be generating new material for posting, including new installments for each site, possibly new regular or semi-regular installments, and improvements in the solidity of current content. There will be various research projects, some involving bloggable material that I’ve not posted on before or subject matter only barely treated in prior entries. I’ll be watching my lectures, online and by videodisk, taking notes from textbooks and generally furthering my academic skills and knowledge base through improved study and research techniques. In short, I’ll be doing all the things that need to get done before I can return to blogging and make visiting this and my other sites worth your while as visitors, readers and viewers — and listeners for audio-based posts once I get around to that.
I may well even redesign or modify the site layouts to something a little more presentable. I’m going to try something with the links this week, color coding according to type of entry…red for entries on this site, green for external blogs, blue for news items or news aggregators, grey (or white on black text backgrounds) for miscellaneous webpages and offsite video links.
This week was posted “Hate the Belief, not the Believer…” ; a new release by Melodysheep, Charlie Chaplin — Let us all Unite! ; 10 Amazing Illusions via Quirkology
The week’s stats on the Call are:
- 118,145 pageviews
- 1920 posts, including this one,
- 180 WordPress & email subscribers
- 1838 Twitter fellows,
- 193 Tumblr fellows,
- 1633 comments…
Thanks to you, this site’s fantastic readership!
On Books, Crafts & Pretty Things; Cat Thursday — Miss Kitty Fantastico
On Left Hemispheres, a religious studies instructor at the University of Oregon discusses “Gospel Truth(s) A Critical Interrogation of the Good News”
Martin Pribble has posted on The Hyper-Belief Problem
on Astronasty; Ecstasy used in treating PTSD proven effective
on Token Skeptic; New Token Skeptic Podcast – On Savita Halappanavar – Interview With The Skeprechaun Podcast
The US military and NASA may soon be hitching rides into space on commercial craft
Things do not look promising for Supersymmetry theory…
And now for the strange, the unusual, the interesting, and the downright silly…courtesy of Doubtful News
Christian group says demon sex makes you gay – Salon.com.
The facts about 2012 Doomsday rumors — NPR.
Yasser Arafat’s remains exhumed in murder mystery — BBC.
MMR vaccination rates reach a 14 year high in UK — BBC.
Hello, Fox 31 Denver? It’s bugs, not UFOs. — Bad Astronomy
Announcement of $400 million Google acquisition found to be a hoax – San Jose Mercury News.
Mark Cuban rips NBA over worthless bracelets
Facebook privacy notice and Target gift card hoaxes — Doubtful News.
WordPress stands up for anonymous blogger — Doubtful News.
Neuroscience – Under Attack – NYTimes.com.
7 Bizarre Prehistoric Versions of Modern-Day Animals
BBC News – Japan’s ninjas heading for extinction.
Northumberlandia, the Lady of the North: A supine land goddess makes her debut – The Washington Post.
BBC News – WWII pigeon message stumps GCHQ decoders.
Commissioners side with extremists and lose bid for reelection.
A Most Unusual Blog Award – Thank You!
I’ve been looking for an opportunity to post this, and have been playing around for weeks with several ideas on what to say. This, of course, will be the version that survived the grueling selection process.
This site been nominated for the unofficial One Lovely Blog award, which is most unusual for a skeptical blog.
Since beginning the artwork for the Call, I’ve always thought of the fractals as dark and creepy — Well, okay, maybe just a wee bit nice to look at according to some, hence the coining of the phrase “horrific elegance” that is also used for this sites companion Tumblr page (big changes are due there BTW, including a repurposing of the page for more fractals, more sciencey stuff, reblogs of friends’ posts, and fewer Bollywood actresses.
But there are teh roolz for this award, whether this blog is creepy or lovely, or somewhere just… odd looking… in between:
[1] Thank the blogger who nominated you:
Appreciation for this award goes out to Brenda Fraser, and for her thinking of this blog as being something other than just weird in content. I recommend her site for those with a bent for more spiritual fare and much better poetry than mine.
[2] Give 7 random facts about yourself:
- I’m a night-owl where my sleep-cycles are concerned.
- I have fun reading textbooks casually, and still learn something from it.
- I’m working to improve my study and reading skills, to fulfill my plans to make it to complete college and study at a fully accredited Uni.
- I’m a huge indophile, interested in South Asian and South East Asian cultures, history, diversity, mythology, the ladies, and the South Asian movie industry.
- I’m not always comfortable with changes in life, but I see them as vitally important and not to be railed against — change is part of the real world, and you can’t stop reality.
- I think that prehistoric giant mammals are cool.
- I stayed up almost all night following online the landing of the Curiosity rover on Mars last month.
[3] Nominate 15 blogs:
