Category — Microblog Mondays

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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A person recorded a monologue in English, moving from about 450 AD to the modern day. A timeline appears on the screen, and you note the date when you start to understand the monologue. Is this video accurate? Who knows! But let’s try it anyway.

I started being able to follow along in 900 AD, missing about half the words, but could mostly catch everything by 1300 AD. How did you do?

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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All last week, the news would report that we maybe-likely-possibly-definitely have a weather event. The weather event would be zero inches of snow or 3,000 inches of snow.

I do not envy meteorologists because people get so angry when their predictions are wrong. But they can’t really predict accurately until we’re close to the event. I still think it’s pretty cool that we live in a world where we get some advance warning that something is about to happen.

I prepped by putting batteries in the flashlights, locating extra blankets and thermal layers, and making sure we had ingredients for meals.

I always think that I want snow until I get snow. And then I realize that I don’t really want snow. At all.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I blame Dear John for adding another game to my daily game sessions. Wordiply is from The Guardian. You get a few letters in a row, and you need to make the longest word possible that uses those letters in a row.

For instance, if the letters were CHIC, you could make CHICken. But you could also make hierarCHICally, which is 14 letters vs 7 letters. “Hierarchically” would win over “chicken.” The point is to make the longest word possible and when you think you have, reveal how close you are to the actual answer.

I am terrible at this game and usually settle too early. But it’s also pretty clever and not timed, so I like that I can think about it while I go about the rest of my day.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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It is very difficult to not react to negative headlines. Back in the olden days, the newspaper was the newspaper. It was designed to provoke a reaction, but it wasn’t designed specifically to provoke a reaction in you. Everyone on your street who received the newspaper saw the same stories on Monday, and they didn’t see new stories until Tuesday.

But now, the stories you see are sometimes not the same stories other people see. News sites create so much content, and the algorithm can decide what to put in front of you based on what it believes you want to see (or provoke a reaction). The top of my news site is exclusively headline news, followed by opinion pieces on how AI is going to take everyone’s job, followed by articles about retirement. I never see sports, even though I know that section exists in the newspaper. I never see entertainment. Clearly, they showed those articles to me at some point, I didn’t click, and now they don’t show them to me at all.

My point: We have begun reminding each other in this house when we’re being distracted by headlines designed to distract us from real news, or believing a possibility just because the algorithm has delivered 12 opinion pieces over 12 days about the same topic. Instead of reacting, I remind myself that I am being manipulated by what amounts to advertising. It’s just advertising to get me to click or distract me from focusing on something else.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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I was not going to play Shuffalo, even though I loved the little drawing and the concept of the game: You keep creating anagrams, receiving one new letter each level. I was not going to play Shuffalo because I assumed it was like the new Slate games, similar to the New York Times games. They hook you with a few free rounds and then close it off behind a paywall.

But so far (knock on wood), the Shuffalo drops into my inbox around 11 am every week day. I am so happy to see it that I’ve actually been reading the New Yorker more often because of these warm feelings. So well done, New Yorker.

My recommendation: sign up for the daily reminder.

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts connected to businesses or sponsored posts.