I’ve been using this theme for a couple of years now and it’s getting kind of stale but I suspect if I change it I’m going to be swearing and angry for the rest of the day. What say you, blogizens? Should I do it anyway?
#Weekendcoffeeshare: Everything is Awful edition
If we were having coffee, I would kind of feel sorry for you, because man, am I not fit for human company at the moment. I was snarling at my son before I even managed to get out of bed this morning, the news makes me want to cut people, and this new WordPress editor continues to be annoying. I’ve figured out (with help from Steve D) how to do inline graphics like I want to, but the procedure for it is so ridiculous compared to the last editor that I almost wish I didn’t know.
Also gone in this new editor: the ability to copy a post, again, which is something I use all the time. So, yeah, I’m still not onboard with this nonsense. Not at all.
Oh, and the image appears to be moving down on the screen the more I type, which isn’t how inline images are supposed to work. I don’t know what the deal is with that. Maybe just wrap the text, WordPress? It’s been something HTML has been able to handle for literally as long as there has been HTML.
Yep, still slowly moving down the screen. So maybe the “Media & Text” block isn’t what I want here.
(Tries to fiddle with settings in this block, somehow all the sudden the entire block is in what looks like 30-point text, swears, gives up, copies what I’ve written, starts over.)
Okay. There’s a “classic” block that seems to work? And when I looked in Preview, not only did the “Media and Text” block look stupid in general, but it resized the image to super-small and awful. So literally none of this shit works at all anymore and this cannot possibly be how they want this to be. I am tired of everything being bullshit, coffee person, and you really shouldn’t be sitting with me right now, because I’m not fit for human company.
Amazon update: I got a notification from them on Friday that they had shipped me … wait for it … one book out of the 28 or 29 that I ordered. It is supposed to arrive today. The cover will be on upside-down, inside-out, and no doubt on the wrong book altogether. I got an email this morning that the rest of them have shipped and will be here tomorrow. I fully expect them to be completely destroyed or otherwise unsalable when they arrive. I also expect to have to spend most of my winter break reformatting everything so that I can use Ingram Spark for my printing needs now rather than Amazon. I’m in too deep with them to even pretend that “Oh, I won’t buy books from there anymore” is a viable option, but I can sure as hell move my POD business elsewhere.
Later today– in about half an hour, actually– my son is having a friend over for a few hours, so there will be twice as many seven-year-old boys in the house as I’m used to. This, for once, is not me complaining; one of the disadvantages to only having one kid (and my wife and I both being temperamentally disinclined to socialize if we don’t have to) is that my son doesn’t have as many opportunities to play with other kids as I want him to. Yesterday he tried to get me to play a game with him that he was making up as we were going along, and it became increasingly clear the harder he tried that I am a terrible father, because I don’t have the patience for the seven level-ups and eighteen unlockable weapons and two thousand interminable fucking rules that he wants to have for what boils down to “we are surrounded by invisible enemies that we must kill.” There is no actual play, only endless iterations on the rules of the game.
A topic for later: how my kid’s conception of play has been irreversibly altered by role-playing video games. Because whenever I was making games up with my friends as a kid, they sure as hell never involved lining up every toy sword and Nerf gun in the house so that we could “unlock” them as we played.
My solution to this, by the way, is that I want him to have friends over more often. I always felt that my house was where all my friends always ended up when I was a kid. I want him to feel the same way. The problem is I don’t think my parents did it that way because playing with me gave them headaches. Maybe it did, though; I dunno. Dad will no doubt chime in and let me know. 🙂
I like the drop caps, coffee person. They will no doubt get annoying eventually, but for now I enjoy them.
Later today I’m making cornbread and chili. With luck, it will improve my mood. In the meantime, I’m off to the shower; one of the other fun things about the boy having a friend over is that it’s one of the kids from Hogwarts whose parents have way, way, way more money than we do so everything must be looking nice when they get here to drop the boy off and I cannot allow myself to be lazing around in my sweatpants like I am now. My pointless and, it should be made clear, utterly unnecessary status anxieties can be something we investigate later, I suspect.
ETA: I found a typo and jumped back in to edit it and this is what I was greeted with. Also, I’m done with drop caps already because I don’t like how they look. But, yeah, WordPress, you really think this editor is ready for the public?:
(can’t figure out how to add an image this far down in the post)
(Oh God FUCK THIS)
(Okay, there’s a button in the top-left to add a new “block.” Sure, THAT’S TOTALLY INTUITIVE, WORDPRESS.)
You have no idea how much swearing I’m doing over here right now. I hate this SO MUCH.
Okay, enough of that
Those are the cards, and I’m done screwing around with it. I lost my mind for a bit last night when I realized that the font I was using was the font from The Office, and several hours of searching for and downloading different fonts didn’t produce anything that I was 1) equally happy with and 2) equally legible and readable, so I just went with bolding everything to remove the Office-ness of it and now I’m moving on with my life. The point of these cards is to give them to people at cons who might be useful at some point in the future, and by the time I hand them a card, the way things have been going at these cons, I’ve already been talking to these people for several minutes and I’m fairly certain they’re going to remember me. If not, hey! There’s my face. So they need to be legible, say “word-dude” somehow, if they don’t say it literally, and have my contact information. A bit of a science fiction flare won’t hurt either. So, there. Done.
(Luther@prostetnic.com is my new real email address now, by the way. The old gmail account isn’t dead; I’ll leave it open for quite a bit longer to make sure I catch anything that people are still sending to it, but if you’ve ever emailed me for any reason, do me a favor and change your contacts, and if you email me at the old address my response will come from the new one.)
The funny thing is I’m still happier with how my dad’s cards turned out than mine, but whatever.
The next project: I’m probably not going to work on this today, but my Bruce Banner side is getting a digital resume. One of the annoying things about sending paper resumes to people is that, even with a cover letter, it’s difficult to get the hey I’m actually pretty decent at a whole lot of damn stuff idea across, and if I put together a little WordPress site for myself at myrealname.com it’ll give me a lot more breathing room for what I actually want to let people know about me. That’s not today’s project, I don’t think, because I need to put some thought into exactly how I want it built and what I want on there, but it’s coming. Then drop it into the paper resume and onto LinkedIn see if it gets any traffic.
Oh, and there’s that book to worry about, too.
Busy day coming. What are you working on today?
CHAOS!
So, I thought switching to a certain theme was a temporary thing, only then THERE IT WAS, and now I can’t find the old theme again, so I guess I’ll fuck around until I find one I like.
And to think, I was about to put up a post about how I needed to find better uses of my insane amount of free time!
Blog nattery
Been thinking about ways to fiddle with the blog, and one thing that keeps persistently coming up is a static (ish) front page that’s more book-focused and authory, with a link from there to the actual blog itself, which would basically look just like it does now. You might remember I did a survey a few weeks ago about how people read the site. I got a decent number of responses to that and discovered that way more people than I would have thought— just over half– of my readers are using WordPress’ reader software to look at the blog. I’ve hardly ever touched the thing and had the idea that most folks thought it was useless, but apparently either I was wrong about that or people think it’s useless and use it anyway due to some deep-seated cultural disgust with bookmarks that I wasn’t aware was out there.
The good news, though, is that those people wouldn’t be inconvenienced by infinitefreetime.com suddenly being pointed somewhere static, because they’re not visiting the site that way anyway. In fact, it looks like if I pointed the domain name at a static site instead of the blog, only about 5% of my readers would need to change their bookmarks.
Anybody wanna suggest a theme that would play nicely with that sort of thing?
Welcome to infinitefreetime dot com 