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

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Modern Love published a list of 36 questions people should use to increase love. (Though we liked The New Yorker’s version of 36 questions to fall out of love. We still like to say to each other: “Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you like to punch in the face?”)

Greater Good Science Center came out with a version for kids to use to find friends. My favourites:

• Describe your worst haircut ever.
• If you could be famous for something, what would it be?
• If you had a lot of money and could do anything you wanted with it, what is one thing you would do?

I’m not sure it would work to tell someone to stare deeply into the other person’s eyes for two minutes (I think that was the kickoff instruction in the original questions?) or to ask these questions in such a stilted manner. But teaching a person how to tell a story and then end with asking the other person to give their answer is kind of brilliant. Or, as GGSC points out, teachers could use this in the classroom for kids to get to know one another.

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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.

I started reading Bellweather Rhapsody by Kate Racculia, and it starts off with a quote by David Foster Wallace: “Every love story is a ghost story.”

I paused on it because we are all pre-ghosts—we just don’t look like one yet—so our love stories WILL become ghost stories. Death is woven into the fabric of life.

David apparently wrote that sentence in a letter to a former teacher. It appears without context:

Wallace skips a few lines and adds the quotation, “Every love story is a ghost story.” The phrase appears as if suspended in the white space surrounding it. After a few more lines is Wallace’s attribution: “Virginia Woolf to Merv Griffin, on the The Merv Griffin Show, 1971.” … My guess is that Wallace made the whole thing up as a joke, I told Max.

The wife of the letter recipient and the author of a DFW biography both try to trace the phrase: who said it first, and what does it mean. In the end, it’s left as a mystery.

Which means you can imagine it means anything that speaks to you.

We celebrated Beorn’s first birthday last weekend. We gave him the whole weekend because it’s not every day that your best friend turns one. We kicked off the festivities with a croissants and coffee breakfast in his honour on Saturday morning, and ended the two-day party with a watermelon “cake” (chocolate chip cookies for the humans) and blowing out the candle. We made the wish on his behalf.

I think he had a good time. He definitely enjoyed the extra treats. He always gets all of the attention anyway, so it was hard for him to distinguish what was normal excessive attention and cooing and what was birthday excessive attention and cooing.

Look at that face!

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It’s Friday the 13th. I don’t know why I have a compulsion to always type that whenever the Roundup coincides with Friday the 13th. As you were.

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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:

• None… sniff…

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pocobrat has a short poem that I love. Time running away, indeed. Maybe I also connected with the meme embedded with it.

A Blank New Page has started a blog. She begins: “When we got married, my husband and I talked about the possibility of not being able to become a parent. What a weird and hypothetical thought.” And I love this phrasing: “facing a blank new page in my life … It scares me because I have to decide myself which way to go, what role I want to take in life, I have to define for myself what it means to be a woman.” Scary but also amazing. And I can’t wait to read this blog and see the page fill up.

Bereaved and Blessed writes about a family tradition of giving a painting to mark a moment. I think this is brilliant, especially as someone who does not like to receive actual flowers. She writes, “The Monet, along with two other fine art prints that my parents gave us, to celebrate Molly and Abby’s births, also have been a wonderful reminder of my Mom and Dad’s love and generosity.” But the best surprise is what happens when she shows up at her new job. Love this post.

Lastly, Infertile Phoenix has a hard day around a lot of children at a work event, but she locates the source for the pain. She explains, “It’s not the kids. It’s never the kids. … It’s the moms. It’s my sadness that I never got to be a mom and never got to have mom friends. It’s the camaraderie that I will never share.” The post is deep insights from a hard day.

The roundup to the Roundup: Beorn’s birthday. Friday the 13th. 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 6 – August 13) 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.

Once upon a time, I had a passionate love affair with Google Reader.

After my feedreader was snatched from my trembling hands (do I sound dramatic? Because it was really really really unnerving to change feedreaders), I moved to Feedly, which I now love. But it was a rocky start. I mean, I came to Feedly so raw, so upset from having lost Google Reader. Could I ever love a feedreader again?

Um, yes, yes I could.

But that is the mindset with which I read this post about that change in the Internet from the Google Reader days to the algorithms that now rule our lives.

I don’t think it’s just looking back with rose-coloured glasses. I think the Internet really was better back in 2008. When content was delivered to you chronologically vs. controlled by an algorithm that doesn’t truly know you but is trying really hard to deliver what it thinks you want to see based on all the data it has collected on you. Or how we once subscribed to the things we wanted to read rather than leave content consumption to chance by following links from social media.

The author writes,

When Google Reader disappeared in 2013, it wasn’t just a tale of dwindling user numbers or of what one engineer later described as a rotted codebase. It was a sign of the crumbling of the very foundation upon which it had been built: the era of the Good Internet.

I miss that Good Internet.

There is a museum of broken relationships online. There are also several versions in cities around the world, curating artifacts as tangible reminders of a human connection, and a traveling exhibit. But I liked the idea of an online exhibit. Physical objects drive the point home, but sometimes all you need is the story.

The stories are sometimes bitter, but the ones I find hardest to read are the wistful ones. Where something wasn’t working out or it really was a case of bad timing. And then there are the tiny snippets, like the one about the claddagh rings or the Snoopy—what was the trigger or was it always built into the relationship?

It feels like a good collection space for all of the relationships and friendships that have drifted apart or ended during the pandemic.