Time for Some Changes

A mixed personal and blog update here.

Real Life:

has kept me fairly busy the last couple of weeks. We’ve got a new place in a different town lined up and NOW I have to contend with packing everything within a month to get us out of here. No problem. It only took us 15 months to pack for the move out here. *headdesk* So yeah, I’m expecting to not have much free time to blog as I’d like. I’m going to try my best though. I’m really fed up with drama messing with my work here.

The Blog:

I recently wrote about my frustrations in the NSFW Blog, as part of discussing my writers block. It’s similar to the grumbling I’ve done here in the past. After a week or so of pondering the big picture, I’ve decided I need to make some changes:

FIRST; I’m going to start a separate blog for political and social issues. I’m tired of readers dropping here over political stuff, and I want to be able to be a little more open with my feelings and opinions also.

Personally, I’d prefer to just stay in my own little corner of the world and ignore the rest of it, BUT this election has shown me that (Un)real life is just going to keep forcing it’s way in. I have NO illusions that I’m going to make a difference, BUT at least when this life is over I’ll be able to say I made the effort instead of deciding it was too awkward or inconvenient to stand up for what’s right.

Next; I’m going to start writing in my spiritual blog again also, in the hopes it will keep me grounded and remind me of lessons already learned. Being an Empath (or HSP if you’re a complete skeptic in anything beyond the material world) is a PITA when you forget said lessons.

Followers and Following: This has been my massive frustration lately. That’s because I’m putting HUGE amounts of time into networking with other bloggers and it’s NOT paying off the way it (theoretically) should. I’m literally spending a couple hours a day following blogs and responding to notification emails about others’ posts. Here’s just under a month’s email totals for me:

This was Oct 28th, and I’m already back up to over 2000 after the Deleted Items were cleared on the 29th.

That is with me being less active lately also. I had it go as high as over 7000 once or twice before. It would all be awesome if it was somewhat balanced, but 85% of it is notifications about others’ posts or a like to my reply. Another 10% is “hit and run” likes from people I know never read anything I wrote.

So, I’m going to be slowly and deliberately separating the wheat from the chaff; eliminating followed blogs that have never visited here after initial contact, don’t respond to my comments, never like or comment here, etc… The goal being to focus time on the people and blogs who ARE genuine. I want to spend more time commenting on their stuff and exchanging ideas. The heck with the users.

I’m also really hoping that trimming the fat will also fix the (lack of) notifications problem I have with a few followed accounts that I really like. We shall see.

Working towards a niche: This is one of those things I’ve had to be honest about being a shortcoming in my blogging. I’ve been all over the place with topics and information. Gaming, politics, cooking, etc… Cristian Mihai is right; people like consistency. They don’t want to go to a cooking blog and read about auto repair (to pull two examples out of the air).

To be real, I don’t know if I’ll ever fully get this down to a single specific topic. More likely it’ll end up a broad generalized topic that encompasses some of my more frequently blogged about topics, and lumped together under something like “Modern Living”.

I do know politics is gone. Social issues I may touch on lightly. I’m going to cut WAY back on personal posts also. There’s an adage that nobody wants to hear (or read) your drama day after day. I’ve seen a few people build quite a following that way however. Granted most of them were cute girls that complained about their sex life while flashing cleavage in pics… That’s another rant though.

The bottom line is we’ve all done it. It’s perfectly understandable in small doses also, but too many personal rants start to become psychic vampirism level pleas for attention. I don’t want to be *that* person. It’s also better to do something about problems than complain about them.

As a final note, I’m also going to do my best to work towards getting a daily topics schedule restored for the blog, so people know my food posts are on Monday (as an example from my former schedule).

Sex Really Does Sell

After posting my min-rant / update about my NSFW erotica blog, the thing got more traffic in a day than I’d seen in months. 😮

Maybe I need to link here to more stories / posts there. 😀

Since I have a bigger audience here… I wanted to see if I could get some opinions on one character’s looks, her hair style specifically:

Her hair is just as long in either pic, and comes down to her butt. The only real difference is that the left hand pic has wavy hair and the right hand side is straight, as I was thinking a more natural look might be better.

I can’t make up my mind and at this point I’m thinking the best option might be to keep the fancy hair style for when she’s operating as a hero, and the straight for when she’s her normal everyday self.

COVID-19 Burnout

Keeping up with all the news facts and figures related to the Coronavirus is exhausting. There’s no way I could even keep up with debunking all the manipulative and false news stories out there. Same with all the political bite biting as well. The anti-Trumpers have gone from demanding he seize absolute power to screaming that he has n right to dictate a re-opening timetable. AND, just to be fair, Trump also acting like his old jackass self trashing Anthony Fauci via Twitter. There are legit reasons to criticize him, but that’s not the way to do it or the tone to use.

In short, I’m tired of it. Everything is COVID nowadays, and it’s all drama and infighting. Between all of this nonsense and moving related work, I’m physically and mentally exhausted. A 2300 mile drive will be heavenly by comparison, LOL.

Here’s the deal with the blog for the next week or so:

I’ve got to shift more to finishing up moving responsibilities. We’re rapidly running out of time. I’ll try to do what I can but I’m going to be much more scarce for the immediate future.

HOWEVER… I *do* have a handful of posts ready to go. First is the next part of my Solutions Saturday category. Scheduled to auto-post on Saturday just after midnight local time.

I also have some posts set up and ready to go that I’ll manually post as I pass various checkpoints on our route Eastward. Think of it as Oregon Trail in reverse, or maybe the Cannonball Run, LOL

For now, I leave you with the ULTIMATE cat meme:

Yes, forget ancient aliens, Atlantis and all those other conspiracy theories… The truth is that the world is a Cat playing with Australia. O_O

410 + 721

No, not an addition problem. When are my headlines ever that straight forward? LOL.

410 + 721 is actually my current WordPress situation. I hit and surpassed the 400 follower mark (yay!!). With no notification from WP either. >(

I’m also sitting on a backlog of 721 unread wordpress related emails in my inbox. All it took was a few days “off” to try to work on the house to get to that point also. I’m still not sure how much of that I’m going to try to catch up on and how much will just have to sadly go by the wayside.

Networking is an important part of blogging and I try to return the support I’m given. I’m only human though. That despite my best efforts, LOL.

On the bright side, we have one lowball offer on the house. IF we can negotiate them up, we might be done with that phase of the insanity. Ironically, with the virus hysteria destroying the economy, we’re now wondering if a mostly blind move across country is such a great idea at this moment. There’s a stable employment situation here after all.

Well, we will negotiate, wait, watch and:

Yep, more comic book geekery. Sometimes there’s strong, simple truths in fantastic stories though.

This message brought to you courtesy of the Blue Lantern Corps, reminding all of the importance of Hope. 😀 😛

Oh and yes, for those wondering; Barry Allen was a Blue Lantern during the Darkest Night.

OH, and I didn’t forget my revised blog format either. The chaos has simply thrown a wrench into that briefly. We’ll get back to it soon. For the moment though, the world MIGHT be able to do without Tuesday Trash. 🙂

Personal Update: Regrouping (again)

I’m finally catching my breath after the war to get the house ready and the couple of open houses we’ve had. I have a few minor concerns about our realtor, but overall we seem to be off to a strong start with getting the house sold.

I *do* know that I’m sleeping better and handling the decreased stress much better. That’s a huge improvement that I’ll take regardless of minor concerns.

Needless to say, I’ve been behind on the blog. I had to just delete almost 200 email notifications because there’s no way I’ll ever catch up on that much material. I feel bad about it as I value what those I follow have to say… err write about. 🙂 It’s just being realistic about my current schedule though.

While dealing with real life, I’ve done some reflecting on the blog here.

First, I still want to get organized to where I deal with specific subjects on specific days. I’ll probably take Sundays off and leave one day as a wildcard day as well. I haven’t had the time to figure out categories yet, but I still believe this will be better for my planning and my followers.

Possible (probable) categories include: Cooking, Writing, Politics & Social Issues, Photography & Martial Arts.

Second is something I talked about several months ago the last time I got fed up with some of the discourse here and elsewhere. I let myself get wrapped up in the drama again instead of sticking to what I planned back then; focusing on solutions.

The trouble with getting drawn into the current political debate as it’s framed by the elites, is that it’s all crap. Both sides are deeply flawed, and there’s NO way you’re going to convince the utterly mindless sycophants on either side that Trump or Obama are not the antichrist.

I more fully realized the folly of even trying when I saw an article online. It was all about how it’s impossible to change people’s minds when they’ve made an emotional decision. I actually wanted to do a separate blog post on it. I probably will still do so, once time allows.

150 Years Ago, a Philosopher Showed Why It’s Pointless to Start Arguments on the Internet

It’s pretty scary reading in a way. We’re becoming a society where truth and logic no longer matter, only blind emotion.

In terms of my own writing though, it convinced me that it’s better to focus on proposed solutions that (hopefully) benefit everyone instead of worrying about the puppets out there. If we get enough people willing to talk common sense, compassionate ideas, we may just eventually turn things around.

People that want to snipe, judge and spit in my eye for my saying that compassion has to be balanced with accountability and common sense (per my recent rant)… The hell with them. They’re wrong. They’re taking out their feelings of inadequacy on the world. Most importantly, they’re not worth the rise in blood pressure.

Announcement: Blog Changes

First, a quick announcement regarding the blog here: I’m going to take a cue from a few of the blogs I follow and devote each day to a general topic. I’m still pondering the specifics and logistics (ie what day gets what topic). For those who want to avoid politics and social issues though, they’ll each be confined to a specific day of the week. This will probably start next week.

I’m also going to start putting subjects in front of the title, like I did here. That way, readers will have an idea going in if it’s a subject they’re interested in.

I won’t lie. I have REAL mixed feelings here. On one hand, I respect that some people come to the Blogisphere to escape the real world. On the other hand, I feel like I’m being bullied into putting up trigger warnings to cater to children who think they have a right to never have their thinking challenged.