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

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This weekend we went to a second Harry Potter festival.  This time the weather cooperated, so we got to wear our Ravenclaw robes.  This festival was a lot more crowded.  You’ve never seen so many wizards in one place.

We lucked out that our visit to Philadelphia coincided with the Rosenbach Museum in Center City displaying the original copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for the 150th anniversary of the book.  It’s the handwritten copy that Dodgson presented Alice Liddell when she asked him to write down the story, complete with the original, pre-Tenniel illustrations.

You could only take a non-flash photo from 2 meters away

It was very special that we got to see the book the day before St. Frideswide’s Day, who is the patron saint of Oxford and her story (and the church in Oxford connected to her) are entwined in the story of the book.  We celebrate St. Frideswide’s Day every year with scones and tea, which we’ll have after the kids come home from school.

What is the most amazing thing you’ve seen this week?

P.S. I wrote about St. Frideswide before this with the Alice tour of Oxford.

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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 posts.

Thank you to everyone who weighed in with stories or sympathy about losing my Saturday morning routine.  It felt really weird to wake up yesterday and… not play.

But that’s okay because I am replacing the game with a bunch of games.  Instead of putting all of my eggs in a one-game basket, I’m spreading out my gaming energy in a few different places while I drink my coffee.

First and foremost, I’m playing Loot and Legends.  I love Loot and Legends.  I am particularly attached to my wizard, Bathilda.  Sometimes the kids watch me play, and the ChickieNob will shriek, “protect Bathilda!” when her hit points drop.

In the same vein, when Land Fit for Heroes launches in a few days, I’m checking out that gamebook because it has a multi-player mode.  I don’t totally get how multiple people will share a game, but I’m all for finding out.

Next, I am working my way through the IF Comp games.  I plan to vote this year, so I want to play as many games as possible before the November 15th deadline.  I’m also playing Scroll Thief.  I have a huge backlog of interactive fiction to get through.

I am playing the Sherlock game (though I wish I could reset it because I botched the first round), Solitaire, and all of the old Activision and Atari games in the app.

So I have stuff to play.  It’s different, but it’s good.

What games are you playing these days, online or off?

Side note: tomorrow is #MicroblogMonday.  Get writing!

A few weeks ago, I won the crown on Battlefish’s blog, which is fitting since… you know… Stirrup Queens.  Queens.  Crown.  Get it?

Anyway, we hatched a plan for the crown.

I love this plan.

Somewhere over in Finland, there is a woman who is finishing her last round of chemo.  And she is going to get the crown.  But she’s not getting it from me and JustHeather.  She’s getting it from Thomas, as a very early (like 5 months early?) Random Act of Kindness.

Every year, there is a Random Act of Kindness Day in the spring:

March 9th Random Act of Kindness Day for Thomas was an AMAZING success in 2015! In honour of Thomas’ 10th birthday, more than 11,000 people pledged to change the world one act of kindness at a time on March 9th in his memory – and they did! We hope just as many people will join us again on March 9, 2016.

Kindness is something that should practiced every day, of course, but we’re asking people to be a little extra kind on March 9th. You don’t have to be anywhere specific or do anything specific – just look for ways to be kind wherever you are in whatever way you can.

So… in a small way… it’s sort of from all of us.  To this random woman.  Who has no clue that she’s going to get this big wallop of love.  I love our community.

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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:

• “She Wants You” (Heart Cries)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Pages, Stages, and Rages has a rallying cry, comparing gun violence in America to our very own Hunger Games.  She talks about the comparative passivity and points out, “Since the horrific massacre at Sandy Hook elementary school there has been 142 school shootings.  That’s one per week.”  Not about infertility, but it is about sustaining life.

Lavender Luz has a post from the perspective of a birth mother speaking about open adoption and things she wished she had done differently in her own situation.  It’s an interesting read; obviously personal to her own life, but there is advice to discover, too.  It sort of makes you look back on all difficult relationships and wonder what you would have done differently with the knowledge you have now.

Lastly, PALS has a post called “Permission to Parent” about parenting after loss.  She writes, “I do see the irony in the fact that I gave myself permission to grieve, but I’m not so forgiving in allowing for imperfect parenting on my part. Or even the idea that these challenges and struggles are simply a part of the parenting process, regardless of what it took to get to that point.”  It’s about being grateful and realistic.

The roundup to the Roundup: The surprise crown.  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 October 9th and October 16th) 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.

UPDATE AT BOTTOM!

I have a song that is driving me crazy.  So far my Facebook feed is stumped.  I am going to give you about a dozen clues, and you are going to help me figure this out.

I heard it on a top 40 station, though it probably wasn’t a top 40 song.  Meaning, I’ve been perusing hit song lists, and nothing feels familiar.  But I get the feeling the song is from this summer, or maybe last spring.

It is a female artist.  She sort of has a scratchy voice.  It sounds like she is singing the song lying down; like she doesn’t have enough energy to sit up.

It is a veeeeeery slow song.  What kicked it off tonight was hearing the song “Say Something” and at first I thought it was MY song, but then a man started singing.  My singer sounds like Alessia Cara crossed with Ellie Goulding singing with complete ennui.  Sort of like a Lana Del Rey.  Sort of… dirge-y.  Or a Florence and the Machine.  Or even an Adele.  Except probably none of those people because I’ve been clicking on their songs all night and haven’t found it.

I can only remember one line from it, and I’m not even remembering it correctly, except that I know it has something where the person is saying “the first” and then rephrases “the second” (or the third…).  Sort of like a vocal strikethrough.  So she’s singing about how she doesn’t get something right the first time, the second or the third time…

Help?

Update:

THE SONG HAS BEEN FOUND!  This is it: Love is Real Try Again by Miranda Dodson.  Christina found it, and she is my favourite favourite favourite person in the world because I had just about given up.  And it has the line I remember: “Why can’t I get it right on the first second time or the third wasted life.”  I can’t even explain the relief I am feeling right now.  Off to buy the song.

Oh my G-d, and it’s about infertility and pregnancy loss.  Yes?  Or am I reading too much into the lyrics?

National Stop Bullying Day is held on the second Wednesday of October, but it kinda sorta could use an awareness day every month.  Every week?  Um… a daily reminder?

A few weeks ago, I read Jon Ronson’s new book, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed*, and I’ve been digesting it ever since.  Every time I see a person being skewered on social media, I think about how they would have been a chapter in his book if this moment had occurred earlier.

Isn’t that terrible?

There was a wonderful quote in the book that summed up social media.  For me, it occurred on page 88 out of 336 (because I was reading the e-book):

I once asked a car-crash victim what it had felt like to be in a smashup.  She said her eeriest memory was how one second the car was her friend, working for her … and then a blink of an eye later it had become a jagged weapon of torture — like she was inside an iron maiden.  Her friend had become her worst enemy.

Has social media, which has been a very good friend of mine for many years, become my worst enemy?  No, not quite.  It’s still a community-building space, for me.  But I have a lot of fears about social media, most of them contained in truly scary ideas like Peeple.  And the fact that the people who made Peeple didn’t think there was anything wrong with it as they made it.

Where am I going with all of this?  I have no clue.  Only that sometimes social media feels like an out-of-control train, and I have to hop off it and roll through the grass and observe it from afar until I sense that it is slowing down and I can hop on again.

*A side note: I loved this book.  I devoured it in two or three sittings.  I couldn’t take it in fast enough.  But I often feel that way about Ronson’s books.