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 |   A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Memory Upgrade? More from Elle Cordova: https://youtube.com/shorts/G9kyYrM4_tE?si=RwKrtgXXpr5O7HbT |
| Question When Google needs to know something, does it google it? |
| Thinking of the Bard It’s well known that males spend a lot of time thinking about the Roman Empire. And I admit quite freely that it’s true of me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think of other things too. Only this morning, for instance, I caught myself thinking about William Shakespeare. I do this quite often because he’s interesting, mainly in considering how he worked. His day job was as an actor and, somehow, he found the time in between prancing about on stage, to write a serious number of plays and poetry too. So his copious production would lead us to wonder just how much planning went into his writing. We know, as well, that he sometimes had to dash off a new play to keep the coffers of The Globe Theatre filled in the lean years. Which, in my book, means that he was probably a pantser. Obviously, the likelihood is that I think that because I’m a pantser myself but, when you remember that he handicapped himself by writing most of his plays in iambic pentameter, I really can’t see how he had the time to do a lot of planning with all that already on his plate. But this brings me to the conclusion I’m really driving at. Shakespeare was far less conscious in his writing than you would think we are, judging by the amount of rules and advice that float around in places like WdC. He didn’t have time to consider all the methods and essentials that we love to burden ourselves with. At any rate, none of these rules and regulations had been invented in his day so, if he used any of them, it would have been entirely unconscious and natural to the way he worked. I bet you the one book he’d never have written would be an instruction manual on how to write. He just sat down and wrote. At incredible speed and with amazing insight into humanity. Which leaves me with this thought: If it was good enough for Shakespeare, it ought to be good enough for us. Word count: 346 |
| Messages in the Night I have fallen into the habit, when I wake up for my nightly pee, of taking the opportunity to fire up ye olde computer and checking to see that folks on WdC are behaving themselves. Part of this ritual is to open Messenger and hoover up any spare gift points lying around in the little word games it offers. And that is how I’ve noticed a curious anomaly. The rewards for these games are much smaller at night than they are during the daytime. At a guess and not having been interested enough to calculate the thing over stats recorded during a lengthy period of time, I would estimate the rewards as 50% of the day rate. And that’s not even considering the fact that far fewer games are offered at night. It’s not that I’m overly concerned about the matter, living in the blessed time zone known as WdC Eastern Standard Time as I do, but I wonder at the mind that did the extra programming to ensure that the (presumably random) operation of the games should have a built in prejudice against the antipodes and Asia. What can be the reason for this apparently deliberate isolation of the eastern hemisphere of the planet into a state of gift point poverty? Thinking about it, I have decided that what governs the frequency of the games and value of the prizes is the number of people in Messenger at the time. So the value goes up when there are lots to compete and drops when numbers are low. Therefore, my benighted and unhappy upside down friends and denizens of the far east, the solution lies in your own hands. Recruit others in your region to WdC and Messenger and the payment is, at least partially, in the form of gift points. Word count: 301 |
| Being Useful It's not a conversation if everyone agrees; it's a fan club. You guys need me - I'll disagree with anything. |
| More on the Stats I thought for a while that I was beginning to understand the strange logic of the stats. Having been through a period of record-breaking numbers, I narrowed the cause down to a poem I had written entitled Jordan Peterson. It must be the use of a currently important name, I thought. All the bots see it and bring in the searches on the name. Which seemed a reasonable explanation for a while. Then the stats began to wither away and I figured that the unintended trick had played itself out. So I tried an experiment to test the theory. I wrote something including the word “trump” as a verb. Nothing happened. So, either I should have capitalised the word to mislead, or it’s not the cause of the wild fluctuations of the stats at all. And, of the two possibilities, I’m inclined to believe the second. It just seems to me to be more natural that stats should be inexplicable and disobedient to all logic. Which is not to say that I will give up trying to understand them. Word count: 180 |
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