The Monday Peeve 62

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Okay, so today’s peeve is another techy one. Saturday night, I began to play games over Zoom, as you do, and my camera wasn’t working. WTF? This is a brand-new laptop! My last laptop had a non-working camera, among other issues, so I was really upset. I tried everything, reset the privacy buttons, restarted the computer, googled the issue, asked Zoom for help, asked Lenovo for help, etc. My roommate, who is much more technical than I am, was also stumped. I couldn’t focus on the games because I was so upset. I texted my daughters to bitch and complain, as I do.

My eldest asked me if I switched on the privacy screen. What? I don’t have one. So silly. Then she explained that there is an eensy weensy teeny tiny button at the center top edge of the screen. I couldn’t see it at first, but I felt it. HOLY CRAP THERE’S A SWITCH. I must have turned it on when I wiped my screen with an eyeglass cloth (the best way to safely clean finger smudges)… I switched it off and VOILA the camera began working. Yay! I went back to my games.

But the peeve is… why when both my roommate and I googled this problem did the easy, obvious solution not pop up first (or at all)? God, that was maddening!

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ94: Trainwreck

Fandango provocatively asks…

What do you think about what happened in the United States yesterday? Are you shocked or surprised at the outcome, if it’s even known as you read this? Or are the results of the election what you expected? And finally, are you happy or unhappy?

You probably can tell from my title what I think. I’ve been anxious for weeks, not trusting the polls, because they were wrong last time. I don’t know anything about the “science” of polling, but it seems on par with the “science” of astrology. As of this writing, there still is no clear winner of our 2020 US presidential election, but whoever wins, my opinion is that we all lost. If Trump wins, we can expect more of the same shitshow we’ve had all along and especially this past year. If Biden wins, we’ll have the right screaming that he cheated and we’re now doomed to communism. If the Senate doesn’t flip, which it doesn’t appear to have done, he won’t be able to pass anything anyway.

I am not surprised that red states stayed red. I mean duh. I am shocked however at the percentages Trump received. I mean, even here in the land of fruits and nuts, he took like 30+% of the votes. People want more of 2020? The mismanaged pandemic response is cool with them? His alienation of friendly countries is a good thing? His brutal stance toward immigration is something we want to continue? His absurd tweeting? His views on women’s rights and appointments that reflect the same? Ugh. So, maybe Biden will eke out a win after all the votes are counted in WI/MI/PA, but it won’t be a decisive one. And… we’re still left with tens of millions of people who approve of Trump’s policies.

All that said, Biden was not my choice in the primary and I think the Democrats could have done much better than steamrolling him through. He doesn’t have a great record on most of the issues we care about, plus he’s just so damn old (so is Trump). We had vibrant primary candidates, but they were given no support and then were forced to drop out. The whole process just sucks. So, do you think the Dems will learn from this? 🤣

I’m not happy, obviously. I’m just resigned. Last night, I decided to abandon my “epic retirement road trip” I’ve semi-planned for a while because I simply don’t want to travel through those red states. Yes, they were red before this, but now I’m just so turned off from all this Trump support that I can’t even imagine it would be any fun.

Okay, so I assume that everyone reading this has their own blog or some other venue for expressing their thoughts. While normally I don’t mind a bit of disagreement, I’m not in the mood for it today and will not be hosting comments in support of Trump. If you want to praise him, please do it somewhere else. Thanks.

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

The Monday Peeve 59

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Today’s peeve is about WP itself… more specifically, the app. It has nothing to do with the block editor. 🤣 It’s about missing things on my reader (old issue with a new wrinkle), which has me super stressed out. I’m talking about my own stuff! I follow myself, as you do, and I’ve noticed lately that my images are randomly not appearing in my posts even though they exist. I use an image (sometimes more than one) in every post now, so no post of mine should ever appear with text only. Yet, these “missing” images actually exist on the post; I know this because when I “visit” a post at my main site, the image appears. Why is it missing from the app feed? Sometimes it’s an image I’ve had around a while, such as a Bitmoji, and sometimes it’s a new image I’ve downloaded from someone else’s prompt post. And I’m not talking about that dreaded X in a box you get when an image has been deleted. No. I’m talking about a post appearing as if no image was ever uploaded with it, when it was. 🤯

I like using the app on my phone ~ it’s super convenient for reading posts and saving the prompts I might want to do later. But this missing image issue has me SUPER MEGA ANNOYED! Naturally, I’m not going to bother asking for help from WP because (1) I doubt they will even understand what I mean; and (2) they never help. Plus, sometimes the image appears, so with my luck, they’d look and see one and think I’m just crazy. I may be crazy, but it is a FACT that WP is glitchy and irritating regardless.

Look at this evidence…

Recently published posts in my app tab on Saturday morning.

The same freaking posts as they appear sans images when I look up my blog on the app!

Happy Halloween week! 🎃 Don’t forget to remember your peeves for next Monday! 👻

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

FPQ90: Eyes on the Prize

Fandango provocatively asks today how we feel about blog “awards” and why.

PCGuyIV’s post on the subject reflects my thoughts ~ don’t much care for “awards” these days. This in no way denigrates my blogging buddies who have previously nominated me for an “award.” I appreciate when someone thinks of me! 😍

The reason I put “award” in quotes is because it’s not actually an award, as we all know. As PC observes, it’s a chain letter, and chain letters, like all MLM schemes, have one point: to accumulate goodies at the top of the chain. In this case, the goodies are links back to the “award” originator to boost his or her views. This is why early on I quit linking back to the original. I linked only to the blogger who nominated me.

That’s one issue. The other is that in general “awards” contain too many questions and they’re boring. How many times am I gonna jabber on about why I started blogging or do I prefer tea or coffee or whatever silly thing that no one actually cares about? Bleh. Rory with his Friday Four and Melanie with her Share Your World have the right idea: four interesting questions. That’s enough! 👍🏻

I have noticed that many bloggers dislike “awards” and/or won’t respond, so at a certain point I quit nominating people even if I was okay with answering the questions. Then I started skipping more and more of the noms myself. (No offense, as I said.) I was thinking the other day that I haven’t seen one in my feed for a while, and I’d like to take this opportunity to pat myself on the back for contributing to their absence. 🤩

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Images from Fandango and Bitmoji

The Monday Peeve 56

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

My peeve today is about masks and safety. What the hell is wrong with people that they REFUSE TO WEAR A MASK?!?!! I’m not talking about the idiots in the Rose Garden because they apparently believed that God was watching out for them or something. I’m talking about ordinary people going about their public biz. Where I live, stores and offices REQUIRE masks to walk in the door. The management team in our office building has sent repeated memos about the necessity of face coverings and there are signs all over the place. Yet there are still people walking around without masks. It’s maddening! 😱

Maybe things will change this week after the Rose Garden fiasco. Anyone can get infected. ANYONE. Protect yourself, your loved ones, your friends and coworkers, and your community by wearing a mask in public… why is this controversial? I don’t understand why people have to be such jerks. 🙁

Oh, any comments about conspiracies, breathing in your own air, or other wackadoodlery will be DELETED. 😡

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Image altered from the original at Pixabay

The Monday Peeve 55

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Random tech issues drive me bonkers! That’s today’s peeve, btw. If anything should be consistent in this world, it’s a computer, amirite? Computers aren’t whimsical beings, subject to mood swings and irrational decisions. They are meant to react the same way to the same thing every time. And yet… and yet… they don’t! Yesterday, I was literally in tears over the bizarre way my laptop behaved while I tried to do a smidge of work. It was so slow and so weird. And just when I thought, okay, this is it, I am totally buying a new one… it quit doing all the annoys, sped up, and was fine for the rest of the day. ARGH!!!

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Image altered from the original on Pixabay.

The Monday Peeve 54

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Doesn’t it annoy you when someone says something like “you can do a thing because that person did the thing?” Whatever it is — quitting smoking, getting rid of migraines, exercising more, publishing a book, finding true love, etc. — the premise is that someone else did it so I can too. Huh. So we’re all the same, a giant mass of cookies cut from the same dough the same way, and if one of us survives being stomped on by an elephant, then the rest of us can too. Did you know that some woman somewhere wrote a novel in the middle of the night after taking care of kids, job, house, hubby, found an agent after querying 500,000 of them, and is now on the bestseller list, negotiating movie rights, and buying a mansion? Ergo, I should have been able to do this as well.

There are variations to this theme. A particular irksome one is that X group of people are successful, so Y group has no excuse for not being successful also. This not only assumes that all people are the same and started out in the same circumstances, BUT ALSO have been treated the same by others. Another variation is the person who got lucky with an investment, is now all smug about his “brilliance,” and drones on that other people should be smarter about money, when it was JUST LUCK that he hit it big. We don’t hear about his other thousand investments that tanked, just the one fabulous pick.

Blah. This year sucks!

RIP RBG 😢

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Image altered from the original on Pixabay.

The Monday Peeve 53

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Let’s get right to it, shall we? LITTERBUGS. Oh my god, they make me so annoyed! It’s like… this is YOUR earth also, so why do you want to crap it up? You live here too, doh. But more specifically, when the garbage bin is literally RIGHT THERE, why are people throwing stuff on the ground? I just don’t get it. At every apartment complex I’ve lived, there has been trash on the ground right next to the bin. Sometimes it’s from people who must put out their trash while the truck is dumping the bin because they can’t wait a minute until it’s put back. Other times it’s just from lazy people who can’t be bothered to expend that extra calorie of energy to toss their bag in. Finally, we have the garbage pickers who sneak in to find their “treasures” in our trash and make a mess while doing so. IT’S ALL DISGUSTING.

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

My Turn [rant]

Soooo, I have tried to avoid bitching too much about WordPress, as imperfect as it is. Not to mention that I don’t hate the block editor (heresy!), though of course I have empathy for anyone experiencing difficulties getting their writing to publish. The thing is, blogging is my favorite form of social media by far, and I’m super grateful it’s surviving when almost everyone else just twitters and faceplops. I blame a short attention span… I remember when some of my writer friends kept interesting blogs, but now they just quote boring political crap on FB, or repost dumb memes. I guess it’s easier. 🙄

H O W E V E R!

I had the damndest time getting my last post to publish properly. And this has nothing to do with the cursed BE because I was using the app in classic mode. Ooh, maybe they’re screwing with the CE to get us to switch over entirely (I use the BE on my laptop). I had to keep fixing it and republishing it to get all the links to “take.” They would disappear in the process and I’d view the post only to find them poofed. So maddening!

I understand that the outcome of writing to WP for help is zippo, nada, crickets. So why bother? Instead I’m venting here, especially because this wasn’t a one-off. I’ve had to repost other pieces of writing due to formatting glitches. Sometimes my video links don’t show up with previews, and it looks stupid when the html link sits there alone instead of a nice music image. Btw, I’m in the process of labeling all my saved images, since the WP search function is crap. Not talking about their library, but trying to find something I’ve used before and saved in mine. Yes, that’s a different issue, but why not throw everything into the Big Casserole of Doom?

Must chillax somehow…

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Images from Bitmoji

The Monday Peeve 52

Smiles and positive posts are all well and good, but sometimes I need to vent a bit. How about you? That’s what The Monday Peeve is all about, a chance to blow off a little steam at the beginning of the week, so then we can go merrily on our way once again (hah). I’ll pick a topic that’s on my mind, but you can vent about whatever you please, here in comments or on your own blog. Grab the photo, use the TMP tag, link back to me (or not), and Bob’s yer uncle. I do reserve the right to delete any links that offend my delicate sensibilities. So far, none have, but it could happen. I have feelings!

Today’s peeve is about those annoying website warnings. I understand that it’s the law to tell us about privacy and yada when we go to a site. Got it. But I go to the SAME SITES and the warning repeatedly pops up, sometimes EVERY TIME I visit, even multiple times per day! It’s so irritating, especially for news type sites because not only do you have to (yet again) agree to their privacy policy, but then you get the pop-ups asking you to please subscribe or get updates in your email, etc. etc.

JUST LEAVE ME ALONE AND LET ME READ THE THING!

Take WordPress, one of the worst offenders imo… I am constantly getting the privacy/cookie message on my laptop when I have stayed logged in for months. WHY? It doesn’t happen on the phone app (though it does on the phone browser), which is another great reason (#758) why the app is better than the website.

I hugely resent giving up these precious two seconds a hundred times a day because that adds up to um well 200 seconds that I didn’t spend “working on my novel.” I could have been finished by now if it weren’t for these horrible time-wasting clicks. RAWR!

~*~

©️2020 Paula Light and Light Motifs II. No unauthorized use permitted. Please check out Paula’s books for sale on Amazon.

Image altered from the original on Pixabay