564th Friday Blog Roundup

Judging for the 2015 IF Comp, a big interactive fiction competition, opened yesterday.  I said that I wasn’t going to vote this year, and then changed my mind when the games went up because I’m weak-willed like that.  Oh, and there was a horror game I heard about that I wanted to play.  So now I’m going to try to play all 55 games.

BUT.

There is a point to this.

As I was scrolling through this year’s games, I saw one called Switcheroo, and it’s about foster care and adoption.  It made my two IF worlds — infertility and interactive fiction — collide.  I was so glad to see that subject matter represented on the list.

I haven’t clicked on it yet so I don’t know how it will go, but you can play it online.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “The Focus of Tears” (Stirrup Queens) — thank you, Northern Star!
• “Not Just Another Mommy Blogger” (Mine to Command)
• “Transitions” (When Why How Baby)
• “On the Night of My 37th Birthday” (Mrs. Spit)
• “What I’ve Learned About Grief…” (Chicago Tribune)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Trisomy 18 Loss – Music and Musings has a post about not knowing how to get started with adoption.  She explains, “I feel like looking into adoption is like trying to untangle a string of Christmas lights (one not put on one of the handy-dandy light rollers, of course). I am just looking at the lump of wires and bulbs, still haven’t even found the plug on one end.”  It’s about looking for answers and finding more questions.

No Kidding in NZ has a hard post about mothering her mother.  She so eloquently says, “But it is not lost on me that this will be my only experience of mothering anyone, when things happen in reverse, and there is no great joy (and even the little joys are disappearing daily), and there is in its place only sadness.”  I wanted to envelop her in a hug, virtually holding her as she holds her mother.

Dear Noah has a post about people assuming that she is done grieving the loss of her son because a certain amount of time has passed.  She writes, “What do you mean ‘when I was grieving?’  I am grieving.  No past tense here.”  It’s really a post about meeting people in the space they’re in rather than tugging them to the place you want them to be.

Lastly, Inconceivable has a complementary post about stating she’s okay because people need her to be when she’s not really okay.  But this post blew my mind with this thought: “It perplexes me, the cultural demand for openness, the popularity of memoirs or the expectation of ‘authenticity’ in so many contexts, but while the People magazine article clawing open a celebrity sells or the confessional blog post goes viral, seeing that same exposure live so often produces the almost reflexive but you’re okay now, right?”  We ask for all the nosy details in the lives of celebrities, but we shy away from hearing the gritty details from the people around us.  I thought about this for days after reading it.

The roundup to the Roundup: Foster care/adoption interactive fiction.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between September 25th and October 2nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.