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

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REI promised me three kinds of fun, and they delivered maybe one-and-a-half kinds of fun instead. The first is fun that is fun. The second is fun that is only fun in retrospect. I would classify this as not fun. You may be happy that you’ve done something and enjoy the memories, but that isn’t really fun.

For instance, I don’t enjoy the process of writing. I do enjoy having the completed manuscript. Having the completed manuscript does not, in retrospect, make the work fun.

The third type of fun is something that is not fun, even in retrospect. Or something, I assume, other people say is fun but you do not enjoy. Which leaves us with… one (or being generous, one-and-a-half) kind of fun.

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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 that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

In the same vein as what your favourite book says about you, is the flipside: The books you read shape who you are.

The implication, of course, is to fill your head with good stories that will lead you to good thoughts and good actions. “I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives.”

It’s a long opinion piece, but the main message in it is lovely: “The children we were, the children who are still within us, the children who understand wonderland, who know the truth about stories, save the adults, who have forgotten those truths.” So arm yourself well with books to save the adults around you.

I ruined a show for myself. We started watching Mare of Easttown, and I loved the first episode. Josh commented that the SNL sketch he had seen suddenly made a lot more sense, and he showed it to me. But the sketch contained at least one spoiler, so I assumed it contained other spoilers. Like the murderer.

I was upset and decided to Google to see if the sketch contained the ending, and one of the first hits was a post that said it didn’t but the murderer was… And listed the ending. In the Google preview. So I now definitely do know the ending, one episode in.

I’m not sure what I’ll do now. I definitely wasn’t in the mood to watch it anymore that night. But maybe it’s worth watching just to see how the story unfolds?

I hate when people post or say spoilers. Especially mysteries.

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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 Odds” (March Is for Daffodils)
• “Pronatalism and Those ‘as a Parent’ Comments” (No Kidding in NZ)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Finding a Different Path has done what we all wish we had done: Tell solicitors to take her off the “get a student loan for your child” list. Seriously. I cannot tell you how many baby product offers or formula coupons I got in the mail that were salt in the wound. Cheering her on and wishing I had thought to do the same thing.

I remember the television show The Road Less Travelled writes about. I think I saw one episode before I turned it off. I had a fertility clinic in my real life; I didn’t need a fictional one in my relaxation time. But I like the heads up because I will probably also avoid Virgin River.

Lastly, No Kidding in NZ has a post about the upcoming World Childless Week and provides links to old posts that touch on some of the topics that will be discussed during that week. So I link to one post, but you get dozens of extra links, too. Lots to read.

The roundup to the Roundup: Spoilers suck. 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 August 27 – September 3) 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.

We saved the final Schitt’s Creek for Sunday night. I know! We waited almost 18 months to watch it. We were on the final season at the beginning of the pandemic, and it broke my heart to think that there weren’t more episodes. So we kept putting off watching those final scenes.

But Sunday seemed like the right night because it was the end of Part 1 of the pandemic. I think of the last 18 months as a single chunk of time, beginning with the twins coming home from school (just for two weeks!) and ending with the twins returning to school. In between, there was also the vaccine milestone. But… I don’t know. I feel like Part 1 ended on Sunday night, and Part 2 began on Monday morning.

We watched it at the perfect time because there’s something Alexis says in the episode— that she’s glad they lost the money because they got to have all of this time together. And Moira states the other side—that’s the silver lining but the cloud has been all of the financial stress.

That is sort of how I felt about Part 1 of the pandemic. It was awful, stressful, upsetting, and I was ridiculously happy to have that extra time with the twins. To have them close and to see them throughout the day. I want the pandemic to end, but I will always look back at that silver lining and remember it was there amongst all the many many many clouds.

I hate back to school on a good year. That day is my hardest day, and I usually avoid social media because I feel very alone in feeling sad. I was happy they were with their friends and happy they got to return to some semblance of normal. I hoped that they will have a good year. I hoped that they will get to experience some of the fun parts of high school and not just all of the work.

But I was so sad for myself. Because I miss them a lot.

Every day, I am faced with an obstacle course to get to content: I need to enter a password or click on a link, and I feel nothing about it until I get to a CAPTCHA image to prove that I’m not a robot. All I need to do is look at a picture and click on the squares that fit the requested information (all squares showing cars or traffic lights or crosswalks). Once again, I am doing the EXACT SAME THING that I do when I click other links to enter a site; it’s just a lock on a door to content that I want (like a password), and it’s a pretty simple lock to open (click on the pictures).

But you feel something when you encounter CAPTCHA pictures. And now someone has explained why.

I’m not sure any of this is true, but this article sent me down a deep rabbit hole Googling session. I never noticed that CAPTCHA images usually do not contain people. “Each CAPTCHA depicts a world blasted by a neutron bomb, where the objects survive but none of the people do.”

And the images are at weird angles, almost as if the picture taker is hovering in mid-air.

He writes, “They weren’t taken by humans, and they weren’t taken for humans. They are by AI, for AI. They thus lack any sense of human composition or human audience. They are creations of utterly bloodless industrial logic. Google’s CAPTCHA images demand you to look at the world the way an AI does.”

Such an interesting thing to finally notice.