The Paris Olympics begins this Friday. It snuck up on me this time. I don’t think we’ll watch in real time because I’ve never grown accustomed to watching events in the middle of the day. I’ve always been a recap-in-the-evening sort of person.

We will definitely watch women’s gymnastics to see the team, especially Simone Biles. And I’m deeply interested in women’s swimming this year because 15% of the team comes from the same school near me. (Classes of 2015, 2020, and 2023, so not there at the same time.) And, of course, we’ll prioritize the opening ceremony on July 26.

What are you watching? What is your favourite sport? What can you not miss, and what are you okay if you never see?

Wikipedia has a list of the bestselling books according to the New York Times, broken down by year, reaching back to 1931. This means you can look up the bestselling book from your birth week.

Mine was Watership Down by Richard Adams, and… I haven’t read it. I cringe because it seems like the sort of thing I should have read by this point (isn’t it often assigned at school?). I also haven’t read the books from Josh or the twins’ birthdays. Or my parents’ birthdays. Or my sister’s or brother’s birthdays.

Have you read the book that was the number one bestseller from your birthday?

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

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A gelati place near us has the most brilliant marketing plan. Every day, they declare two names as the “names of the day.” People with those names can get a free small gelati or X% off a larger size.

Of course, most people do not go for gelati alone, so everyone who accompanies them pays full price, and the store gets one or more people who may not have bought dessert that day. We end up buying 3 extra gelatis any time one of our names gets chosen.

Maybe Mikes or Jennifers wouldn’t fall for this trick, but they don’t usually choose Mikes or Jennifers. Sometimes those names pop up, but they more often choose names that are unusual but popular in our area, so people who never get to see their name on a pencil or other souvenir flock to the store to get their picture under the name sign. Everyone in our family has been called up at least once, and a few of us have gotten to be the name twice since they started it years ago.

Well played.

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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.

I thought this was a profoundly moving post about grieving miscarriages. If this app had existed years ago, I likely would have tried it out to make AI-generated versions of my children. She writes:

AI baby generators have since become regular fixtures in online pregnancy forums … They also crop up, albeit less often, in the darker, quieter communities where people grieve prenatal and perinatal losses. Such mourners have traditionally lacked the rituals and templates that come with other forms of loss. But their early adoption of these tools gestures at the not-so-distant possibility that AI will one day guide many people through the grieving process.

It’s a story of using “grief tech” to mourn a loss often overlooked by the rest of society. Go over and read the whole thing.

Sunday (in two days) is the actual 18th anniversary of the Friday Blog Roundup, though this is the closest Roundup to the anniversary. 18 years ago, I wrote a post to share a few things I read that week that stuck with me. And over the years, I’ve written 896 of these (they were misnumbered at some point), which comes out to 49.7 Roundups per year, accounting for the times when I skipped a week.

I used to read hundreds of bloggers, spending an enormous chunk of my day reading blogs, but now it’s down to a handful of people who post. Many old bloggers post on social media, but I can’t share what they write because you need to be friends with them to see it.

I’ve been debating what to do with the Roundup. For now, it continues, hopefully toward its 20th birthday.

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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.

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And now the blogs…

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.

As a fellow non-Uber user, I liked The Road Less Travelled’s post about the service. “Also, as many people in the story comments pointed out, if you don’t rate your driver five stars AND give a good tip, you may be more likely to find yourself without a ride in the future. Sounds vaguely blackmail-ish to me.” There’s also the point that you usually aren’t tracked in cabs — when I enter a cab, the cab driver doesn’t know anything about my other cab rides, but that’s not the case with Uber. Just not a fan of the concept, though I know other people love it and use it daily.

Lastly, Finding a Different Path has a post about pronatalism and schools. A conversation about declining enrollment led to offensive discussion, and she writes: “It makes sense that schools are family-centric. We need children and families, because no students = no schools. But we also need to acknowledge that not everyone who works in schools is a parent, and the community members who are not currently rearing the next generation have value.” Go read the whole post.

The roundup to the Roundup: 18 years of the Roundup. 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 July 12 – 19) 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.