1088th Friday Blog Roundup

Even though I love blogs because I love personal stories, I don’t read a lot of nonfiction. And I especially don’t read true crime. I love fictional mysteries, but not real-life mysteries. I felt uncomfortable when I listened to the first season of Serial. That was a real girl who was killed. That is a real boy (now man) in prison.

But I got sucked into London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a true story about a British boy who pretended to be the son of an oligarch, fell in with the London underworld, and fell to his death into the Thames. The story intersects with the Brink’s-Mat theft, which Josh and I learned about from watching The Gold on PBS, and the string of Russian deaths, such as Litvinenko. I’ve been alternating between the audiobook and the e-book. Both are amazing pieces of storytelling.

But there is a part of me that feels uncomfortable enjoying the experience of listening/reading this story. It is this family’s worst moments, captured in words, and I’m gutted for them because there are so many “what if” moments where their story could have continued differently. I don’t know. I feel like I’m processing the story on two levels: the story itself and then the act of consuming the story.

We need a word for the feeling of discomfort that comes from the enjoyment of reading nonfiction that depicts a terrible moment.

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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 to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

And now the blogs…

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

• None… sniff.

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pics and Posts has a great reminder (through flowers) that your history is not your destiny. That just because something is one way now does not mean it will be that way forever. That something not working out in the moment doesn’t mean that it will never work out. There’s always next year for her lilies.

Lastly, every once in a while Grumpy Rumblings releases an old blog draft. This week, there were ideas from 2015. They’re little time capsules for what was occupying their brain at that time, and I snickered at a post about things they don’t understand because I also don’t understand the point of “3 course ‘quick weeknight meals’ that take more than 30 min to prepare.”

The roundup to the Roundup: Processing how I feel about nonfiction. 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 May 22 – 29) 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.