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.

*******

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…

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.

As I say every month, I’m shamelessly stealing this idea from Jessica Lahey. She has a recurring monthly date where she reviews all the books she reads that month. Book reviews are important for authors, and I want to get better at doing this.

So. I’m going to review them here and also online, but I’m going to do it a little differently. I’m only going to review the stuff I really liked. I don’t see a reason to spend my time writing about something I didn’t love; it’s just using up more of my energy. So only positive reviews.

These are the books I liked (or mostly liked) from June.

The Last Murder at the End of the World (Stuart Turton): This is a book with A LOT of plot holes (as in, if x is true then y cannot be true, but the author asks us to also believe y is true – you know, science fiction math) but if you can get past those plot holes, there is an interesting story in there. And if nothing else, it was fun to imagine the world.

Lies and Weddings (Kevin Kwan): Kevin Kwan books are like a paper version of good champagne — festive, fun, bubbly. It’s not going to quench your thirst, but you’re going to have a lot of fun consuming it. It is the perfect beach read, except you need to be connected to wi-fi so you can look up all the real places and designers he names.

The Queen of Poisons (Robert Thorogood): I felt like the first Marlow Murders book was Thursday Murder Club-esque like a lite version of Richard Osman. This one felt lighter than that. It was still enjoyable. Still liked the main characters. Maybe it felt a little rushed? In any case, very solid cozy mystery.

Very Bad Company (Emma Rosenblum): Points off for choosing adtech as the topic but not understanding digital ads (I think we all cringe when we see someone get our job so wrong in a book), but extra points for every Churchill quote. That was such a brilliant character quirk. Every character was unique. It was White Lotus-level enjoyment of some truly terrible people. Cannot wait for her next book.

What did you read last month?

Along with needing a new planner, the company also discontinued the notebooks I use for my bullet journal and work notebook. The work notebook was harder to replace — there isn’t a lot out there exactly like it — so I drove around buying up all of the stock I could find in-store. This amounted to 14 notebooks. I go through one every 1.5 – 2 years. Would I work another 21 to 28 years? Totally possible that I will retire within that window. And if I work beyond that, I could always suck it up and deal with a different kind of notebook for my final years.

The bullet journal was easier to replace — a Moleskine is a similar notebook — but the truth was that replacing it was filling me with anxiety. I didn’t want something different. I wanted my paper strength and stay.

The company was selling the final stock online, and if I ordered 18 notebooks, I would get free shipping. I could have my exact notebook and never have to switch brands. I go through a bullet journal every 1.75 years. That’s 31.5 more years of bullet journaling. And I could probably stretch them out about 2 years at this point because I’m mostly balancing just my schedule vs. also remembering everything for the kids.

It was a lot of money to invest in paper notebooks, but it was also like buying a forever stamp. Yes, it was more money now, but over time, as notebook prices increase, I will likely save money by making this one-time big purchase instead of finding (and paying for) new notebooks one at a time.

But it was also strange to think about my life in notebooks. My work life in notebooks — as I see the stack dwindle down, it’s also my work years dwindling down. My personal life in notebooks — how much longer do I have to live when I’m down to a handful of notebooks? It was a little sobering.

But at least I only have to worry about the planner now.

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

*******

Along with the goose in the bottle, another mind-shifting thought is to take a step back whenever you’re upset and ask yourself, “Does this really matter?”

Some things matter. But we’re conditioned to react as if everything matters. And when you can take a step back and say, “Wait, does it really matter if I do X or get Y or feel Z?” you sometimes find that the answer is actually no. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change your world in any way beyond a tiny, temporary blip.

It was an interesting thought exercise when I felt myself panicking last week to ask myself: “Does this really matter?”

*******

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.