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A post triggered by an ongoing problem with WordPress comments

I’m writing this on Monday morning, on my smartphone, on the heels of an issue relating to WordPress*.  Apparently, there are people trying to leave comments on this blog on WordPress, and many of those comments are not actually appearing, which I know from experience can be very frustrating‒especially if it was a comment behind which there was any care and thought‒and which can lead commenters to wonder if they are being blocked.

Just to address that last point, I want to assure all you readers that I am not blocking comments.  I don’t know if I have ever blocked any comment on this blog.  If I have, it was quite a long time ago, and I don’t remember it.

The problem seems to be some manner of ongoing glitch in WordPress, one of which I think I too have been a victim on other sites.  You’d think they’d try to do a bit better for long-term, paying customers, but they appear to be too busy trying to add flashy, unwanted new things to keep up with the various brain-dead social media out there, but not paying enough attention just to keeping their basic functions running as smoothly as possible.

They call their workers “happiness engineers”, which is a cheesy enough title, but at least they could take that job title seriously and try to do what they can to engineer, effectively, the happiness of their customers.

If a bridge over a gorge had been built by civil engineers as reliable as these happiness engineers (to be fair, perhaps it’s really more of a management problem), I think I would be inclined to rappel down, then swim across, and then climb up to get to the other side, rather than driving or walking.  The Tay Bridge itself, subject of one of the worst disasters (and reputedly one of the worst poems) in early rail history, was not much more poorly engineered.

Or perhaps I should say “poorly executed”; again, I cannot be sure that it’s actually a problem with the happiness engineers so much as with the people making decisions at “higher” levels.  All the engineers I’ve known‒and all but one of my roommates at college and many of my other friends at the time were engineers or were at least in the engineering school at Cornell‒have been people who did not like solving a problem poorly if it could be avoided.

Of course, I don’t know how many of the people at WordPress have actual engineering degrees.  Presumably, there are at least some people with degrees in computer science and engineering at the company.  Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t so presume.  After all, “when you presume, you make a pres out of u and me”.

Anyway, I will at least put an inquiry in to WordPress about what might be happening, and it would be good if any of you who are account holders might inquire as well.

I hope you all had a decent (or better than decent) weekend.  Mine was not great; I’m still not feeling too well physically, and mentally I almost never feel very well for very long at a time.  I had a rather minor but personally large disappointment brought about by circumstance that I won’t get into specifically, but it reinforces the notion, which I make in my story “I for one welcome our new computer overlords”, that hope is dangerous, particularly to a person who has tried to become used to and to embrace despair.

I am trying to do otherwise.  I dwell on the negative a lot, here, but I do try to do otherwise.  I’m damned if I know why I try; it’s probably just those stupid, mindless, biological drives and nothing more.  I wish I could rewrite my base code to blunt or eliminate those urges.

But then again, if I could rewrite my base code that way, I might as well rewrite myself to be happy and healthy, right?  Also, I could rewrite myself to be motivated and ambitious and charismatic, so I could become rich and powerful and immortal and eventually take over the world and even the universe!  I would make everything better than it is now, I can say that with little fear of contradiction.  Also, I want a unicorn pony with dragon wings that gets its sustenance by absorbing all the excess calories that I eat, so I never become overweight.

Anyway, my train will be coming soon, and I want to keep this relatively short.  I just want to apologize to the people who have tried to comment but have had difficulty doing so.  I hope you didn’t think I was ignoring you or that I had blocked you; I was not and had not.  I couldn’t honestly say that discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me**, but it is unpleasant, and I try to avoid it.  I don’t know if I’ll be writing or doing audio the rest of this week, but I will probably make my latest audio into a “video” at least.  In the meantime, try to keep your spirits up.

*Isn’t it interesting how the same preposition‒“on”‒can be used with reference to time, to things being used, and to metaphorical situations?  It’s interesting to me anyway.  Also, of course, it can literally be used to refer to placement, as in “I’m sitting on a bench.”  It could also be used for metaphorical placement, as in “I’m on top of the world”, but I have only rarely been in that state, and it’s been a very long time since the last occurrence‒the last time was 22 years ago, I think, though there were other good times somewhat more recently, at least up until about eleven years ago.  After that, pretty much everything has been shit.

**For one thing, that very phrase contradicts itself, since it’s speaking about how ugly one finds discourtesy.

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Time and the hour blog through the roughest day

Hello and good morning. Welcome to another Thursday, a reminder that you’ve survived for yet another week.  Congratulations!  You’ve earned the chance to read yet another edition of my weekly blog.

I’ve been thinking about the recurrent and ongoing desire I have to reinvigorate Iterations of Zero, my “other” blog, in which I range over a wider…well, range of topics, many of them darker than what I address here.  I tend to keep this blog, the one you’re reading, focused on my creative writing (books and short stories) and on music when that comes up (though that also appears on IoZ).

One of the biggest obstacles to IoZ is that I imagine that I should write about planned and specific topics there.  When I write this weekly blog, I don’t plan it in advance.  I just write whatever comes out, rather in the way that people have conversations*, and it seems to work nicely.  So, what I intend to try is not to plan what I’m going to write in Iterations of Zero, but simply start writing as I do here, and see what comes out.  Hopefully, I won’t start channeling ancient Lemurians or some similar such nonsense.  I can think of it almost as a kind of free-association psychotherapy…except that I can’t really do it while lying on a leather “couch”.

This won’t clear away every barrier to posting in IoZ.  One of its other main obstacles is time.  I don’t want to sacrifice another weekday morning that could be spent working on my books, since I already miss one of the those a week doing what you’re reading now.  And, despite my exhortations for all of you to send me lots of money so I can become independently wealthy and write full-time, I still have to work for a living, and to commute (yes, I’m back in the office full-time now), so my free time is woefully limited.

I’ve tried various means to get around that problem, including buying a Bluetooth keyboard for my cell phone so I can write blog posts there.  It’s a nifty little gizmo, and it does its job nicely, but it hasn’t seemed to make me any more likely to use my spare moments to write.  I’m much more prone to use them to read blog posts and to check various news and science sites.  I guess I’m going to have to bite the bullet and just tell myself to write something—anything—every Sunday, which is the one day I never use to work on my books**.  We’ll see how it works out, but it can be soooo hard to kick myself into gear on Sundays.

Now, to abruptly shift gears and address another potential time sink: I’ve been considering restarting audio recordings of some of my work.  I have a few published short stories for which I haven’t recorded audio (and thus haven’t posted to YouTube), and of course I only reached Chapter 9 of The Chasm and the Collision before deciding that not enough people were following it to make it worthwhile***.

However, there is real, personal, ego-syntonic joy in reading my stories aloud and posting them for people to listen if they want.  Doing so in the past also helped me learn how to use Audacity, which led to me being able to record and produce my original songs, which is double-plus-good.  So, what I think I may do is put out a few posts here with links/embedding of my short stories’ audio “videos” (one post) and chapters of CatC (another post) to give you all an easy place to link to them, to see if I get any new listens, and to elicit any comments in favor of or against me doing further recordings.

It might also be nice to do a post embedding my song “videos” as well, since I have little bits and pieces of the beginnings of various others bouncing about on paper and in my head and might be pushed toward or away from further efforts by reader/listener response.  But that’s mainly orthogonal to the preceding point.

As for much more important matters, Unanimity continues to draw nearer to its final form.  I’m within a few hundred pages of the end of the penultimate edit!  That might not sound like much, but in a half-a-million-word novel, believe me, it’s getting close to the end.  Of course, the final run-through will be the hardest work since the original writing of the book, but the excitement of being near completion should easily keep me going.  Hopefully, I’ll be able to spread a little of that excitement to all of you.  There are worse contagions to catch, as we all know.

With that, I’ll call this week’s blog installment good and move on to other things.  I hope you’re all well, and that you stay well and become even better over time for as long as you are able.

TTFN

*Some of you may say that this fact is obvious based on the quality of this weekly blog.  You really know how to hurt a guy.

**There’s nothing religious about this; Sunday is just the one day of every week that I never go to official work.  For that reason, it’s also the day I do my laundry, and I can guarantee that there is nothing religious about that process.

***I honestly don’t understand this.  I know I’m biased, but I really love that story—and others have told me they love it also and have thanked me for writing it—and I think that I narrate it well.  Oh, well.