I have gone past 1500 posts.

Now, that is not in itself a cause for celebration, it’s simply a testament to the fact I can’t seem to shut the hell up. I’ve got an opinion on EVERYTHING. I ain’t bashful about sharing it, either.

On a side note, did you know Lewis Black is on Twitter @thelewisblack ? Not sure why that suddenly occured to me.

I’ve gone past 1500 posts.

That may seem cool, until you try to find something buried in that mess.

I tried to find one particular post in my archives the other day, and I came to a stunning realization.

I can’t find SHIT.

I even have a search function on my blog. Nope, really can’t find shit.

Now, you can’t help me find what I was looking for, I forgot what the heck it was already.

There is something you COULD do that I would be truly grateful for. Please?

You could let me know in the comments to this post what posts I may have written over the years that stand out to you as ones that would be worth having links to on the sidebar.

If the answer is none, then that’s fine with me. :)

I’m not looking to fulfill any particular criteria. It’s enough to me that, if I wrote something that for whatever reason stuck with you and you think would be a good one to have linked on the sidebar, that you let me know.

If I actually get some suggestions, I’m going to add a section on the sidebar for reader recommendations, and it will bring some stuff back to life from a dead and gone archive.

I’m not joking, by the way. If you think nothing I’ve written deserves to be on the sidebar of the blog, that’s cool. Hey, if you think it’s all fishwrap… there is absolutely NOTHING wrong in my mind with aspiring to write words that last for a single day before fading away into the past.

There are a few things driving this today, besides my not being able to find shit in my archives, that is.

The first thing is, every once in a while I get the thought that maybe I should have links to some of the stuff in my archives on the sidebar for new readers to check out. I do not, in any way, expect anyone to read through 1500 freaking posts. With the size of my bearwalls? Really?

Not a chance.

But buried in that mess there might be posts people enjoyed, and think new readers would enjoy too. Or at least would give people fair warning over the kind of crap I’m known for spewing.

I do have some posts on the sidebar. I’ve tried to keep the Storytime posts I like doing and the Tales from the Truckstop, and Druid Tanking posts from back when what I thought was, for a brief millisecond, relevant. A wonderful reader also recently asked me to add the Alex the Bunnyslayer posts there, and if someone asks you to do that, how the hell can you resist?

Those posts on the sidebar already, some of those are very old, and yet they still seem recent and fresh to me. I think part of that is because they are on the sidebar, where I am reminded of them and the good times we had writing and talking about them. If you think I don’t like to remember good times I’ve shared with you, you’re nucking futs.

The thing is, I’m not capable of judging what someone might think was worth linking to or not. For this kind of thing, it doesn’t matter what I thought about it, what matters is your opinion.

There is yet another reason for this, too.

If my pagehit post caused some people to wince in irritation at my bragging and to liken me to being the kind of person that would tell a crowd of people how many conquests I’ve had, then the whole concept of my pandering to my massive ego by begging readers for suggestions on what posts of mine were most awesome ought to cause ‘em to blow a fucking gasket.

Cherish that visual with me for a moment. The beginning of reading the post, the dawning realization of just what it was I was asking for, the gradual darkening of the cheeks as blood pressure soars, the sudden pop…

Nirvana.

I kid, I kid. I do that. It’s all in good fun.

There is an even further point to all this.

If you are a blog writer, or any kind of writer at all, and you sometimes feel discouraged at not finding an audience or recognition, take a good, long look at me for a moment.

I’m not a great writer, I’m probably not even a good writer. But I do put myself into my writing, and I keep writing. I’m the energizer bear of blogging, I keep writing and writing and writing. It may suck, people may want me to shut the hell up, but here I am.

If I’m not actively writing, I’m thinking about writing, thinking about story structure, thinking about characters and concepts and shit, and I want to write it all down.

It’s not about pagehits. It’s not about recognition. It’s about writing for the love of writing. If you’re doing it for a reward other than doing what you love, then it’s a means to get you something else you want, and you’re not likely to keep going unless you get that thing that is your true goal.

I was writing long before there was an internet, and I sucked then, too. I’ve got notebooks full of story ideas, role playing game scenarios, poetry, character backgrounds, you name it. I’ll be the first to say, none of it is any good.

Every few years I come across one of those notebooks, flip through one, and think, “Holy shit, I was a complete IDIOT. This is crap! Oh my god, I can’t believe how immature my worldview was, how lacking my understanding of history, the inter-connectedness of events, how shit works together, geopolitical views and just wow what a bloody idiot I was.”

Then a few years pass, I pick something up, and read what I’d written just a few years prior, and think the same damn thing.

Every year I look back on the person I was a year before and think, “Wow, what an ignorant idiot.”

The lesson here is… I know, based on past experience, not think but KNOW, that I am an idiot NOW. In five years, I will look back on the person I am today and truthfully think, “Wow, what an idiot I was.”

That doesn’t stop me from writing. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. I keep writing. I wrote in notebooks, I write here, and who knows where I’ll be a decade from now. Dead in a ditch, victim of the zombie apocalypse everyone tried to warn me of, or writing something completely different on a new venue I can’t imagine? No idea.

If you love writing, sharing your ideas, playing with words and cleansing yourself of the ideas in your skull that threaten to drive you nuts unless you get them out where you can twist them around to get a better look at them… DO IT.

1500 posts don’t all happen at once. They happen because you wrote something today, and tomorrow, and every other time you were fired with enthusiasm to get the shit out of your head someplace where you could see it, and you did it by typing or scribbling or scrawling.

Honestly. Look at this place. Look at it, and be sure of one thing.

You can do better.

So do it. Be yourself, let your love for writing explode on the screen, and if you are honest with yourself and what you’re saying, it may take time, but people WILL find you, they WILL link to you, and you WILL be part of the community whether you want to be or not.

For every writer pouring their heart out, there are people who will find those words resonate within them. It may take time, but it will happen.

But start with the writing.

I joke around that nobody comes by to read this stuff, Gnomer just sits there in between slaughtering Horde in BGs hitting ‘refresh’ on every post that mentions him 1,000 times a day. 

The truth is, though, while I am the one that keeps on writing, it’s not all me. Not even slightly. When you comment, even just when I see you’ve come around, it is part of the conversation here. You teach me, encourage me and give me the inspiration to continue to feel that we are all having fun together, and I guess that means, in a very large, real way, the continued existence of this blog is your fault.

Bears may not be able to parry, but clearly we can deflect. :) 

As much as I thank you all, I also want to give a huge thank you to my wife Cassie, who has been with me every step of the way as we danced this waltz of blogging craziness together, even as she thought I was a blithering idiot, and I did my best every day to prove her right.

As I mentioned to Lier the other day, my blogging goal every time I sit down is to write a post that will amuse and distract someone for 5 minutes during a lunch break.

I like to think I achieve that goal at least a few times a week, and if that’s so, then world peace and a united earth government can’t be far behind. Right?

In conclusion…

You will believe that a Bear and his love can dance!

I’m not the one that has done any of the real work so far. Cassie has.

She’s using the track changes function, of course, and inserting notes, so I see and evaluate all her changes. Which, when it comes to grammar and spelling, are always dead on. The notes are more to point out to me things that seem long, wierdly placed, could use more information, that kind of thing.

She’s been working very hard on it, and it’s been great for me in one key respect; Cassie does NOT read fantasy or sci-fi fiction.

So, all the time I’ve been writing these, she’s never read them before.

She’s reading them now. And for the most part, she likes it. I’m not going to speak for her, but she seems to have really been engaged by and enjoyed Jessies story, and Terins story has been… well, I knew there were issues with it at the beginning. I had played with Manny plenty of times before, I knew I could throw him in the deep end and know he’d swim. I hadn’t really had James as a player before, so I really started out slow and established the groundwork, something that’s fine for a PBeM role playing game, and not so entertaining for a story to read.

I’m so happy with the progress, I can’t really tell you. They were just SO rough, so ‘not ready to read’, but I’ve been very happy with them as turns in a PBeM story.

Now, as the balance I always envisioned is being introduced, I’m getting to be very happy with how this is all working out. 

None of this is probably of any interest to you, but it’s what we’ve been doing lately. It’s why there isn’t blog postage. Who has time to think about WoW when I’m thinking of the Converging Forces story? I’ve been writing the next chapters in my head so I can get cranking.

The drawback to having your wife hooked on your writing? She wants you to KEEP WRITING. Specifically, to get it back to Jessie.

The conversations we’re having over the writing mistakes she’s corrected so far really make me feel bad. She’s the one finding and correcting them, and if I was a skilled writer, they wouldn’t have been there in the first place.

The single biggest thing that has come out, however, is truly, I do not use apostrophes right. I need to go back in time and slap the shit out of my english teacher, because she taught specific rules on the use of the apostrophe that turn out to be, well, bullshit. Flat out lies. I didn’t make those damn rules up, either. I was in class that day!

I truly need to make a shirt that says,

“What I do to the apostrophe is an offence against God and nature.”

I’ve been trying to continue with Terin’s story in Converging Forces for, no lie, two weeks now. I’ve written reams of pages, none of which I thought, even at the time, was right.

How can it not be right? Because my voice was all wrong.

Get that? When I looked at what I wrote afterwards, it didn’t sound like me, let alone like the characters who were supposed to be talking or acting.

People talk about voices in your head, but that’s just funny. What, you get sick and you become a different person?

I’ve been writing on the blog during this time, and even then, it didn’t feel like I was hitting resistance… reaching for a coherent thought felt more like trying to catch a cloud. Nothing much there to grab a hold of, just some arms flailingly wildly.

Anyway, I can tell I’m finally start to feel better, because I sat down to begin writing the Converging Forces chapter all over again, and for the first time… it looks clear to me.

Hallelujah! I’m back, baby! I’m 100% solidly in the game!

(BBB would like to take this opportunity to thank his readers posthumously, knowing as he writes this that a meteor will be striking his house and hitting him in the head about 30 seconds after publishing the post. It was nice knowing you.)

The idea someone would send ME that kind of question makes me want to laugh my ass off.

But hey, look… 1300+ posts and counting. How the heck did that happen? Oh yeah… one day at a time, that’s how.

It’s the kind of question that doesn’t apply to you… until it does, if you know what I mean.

Here, revealed at last, is the grand secret of how I keep consistently writing blog posts here without fading away into the obscurity I so richly deserve.

I sit my ass down and write.

Now, I’m not being sarcastic. I know it seems that way, but that IS the grand secret. It’s the trick, the one thing that lets everything else happen. I sit my ass down and write something.

I don’t put it off, I don’t put other things before it, I don’t say to myself “I want to write a post but I don’t have time right now, I’ll do it later”, and then later say “Oh, I was going to write a post but it’s too late now, I’ll do it tomorrow”, and then tomorrow say ‘Oh, man, I’ve got a crazy day today, I’ll sit down and write something when I get home.”

I sit my ass down and write. I try to do it every single day.

I may not have a finished post at the end of it to hit ‘publish’ on, although I often do. Sometimes I write the PBeM story chapters, and sure, those now go up on the blog too, so you see ‘em eventually. I also do other writing that you don’t see, background and research and fundamentals of civic structure and magical systems and military structures and all sorts of other stuff that may not ever see the phosphor-laden screen (or the iridiscent shine of LEDs) but help provide the foundation that my other creative writing is built from.

But I write.

I damn well sit down and write. Even if I have no idea what to say, no thought in my head, nothing going on… or too much going on, all of it seeming petty and meaningless and unworthy of dumping on your feeds.

Here’s the miracle of writing; once you start typing, words start laying themselves out, one after another. Pretty soon, sentences are formed. Whole chapters can develop, and before you know it… you have either dredged up some actual cohesive topic to write about and can keep going, and just go back and clean up that mess in the beginning later… or you can just keep going with inane crap until you kick start your brain.

For god’s sake, don’t tear it up and start over! Push on through, see what comes out. You can always go back and delete stuff later.

A second little secret? Sometimes, that wierd shit you plop down that comes from the back of your head, rambling and disjointed and all over the place, that can be some of the funnest stuff to read later. Save that post as a draft, come back to it sometime, and somewhere in that crazy will be something you will just tee off of, and say, “Oh wow, what was I on that day? Hey, that gives me an idea…”

Sit down and write. Make a point of it. Every day, in some way, do some writing that is for you, that is your own creative ‘kick out the jams’, blow the dust off your head, get the thoughts out of YOU and somewhere else where you can look at them, and give them the sound thrashing they deserve. It makes you feel good to get stuff out of where it’s crammed down in your gut, get it out there and just away. Put it in a blog post, put it into someone else’s words in a story, put it into an angst laden missive in your black leather bound diary with the red rose on the cover, but get some writing done.

How do you know it’s good?

Third secret. You never, ever, think that what you wrote was actually good. The best you can hope for is to look at what you’ve written, and say ’Those are my thoughts, written my way, and I own them. That’s me on a page. Right, wrong or batshit crazy, hit publish and put it behind me. On to the next post!”

You can be writing theorycrafting articles, screenshots of a summer day, or a short story poem in iambic pentameter (whatever the hell THAT is), and if you are emotionally invested in what you wrote, you’ll think it sucks. Well, maybe not suck, but you sure won’t think it’s really good enough for OTHER people to read. If it’s REALLY good, you’ll be secretly proud of it… and then you’ll really not want to share it, because once you’re that emotionally invested in it, if other people don’t like it, damn that can HURT like a mo’fo.

Publish it anyway. Yes, you are risking some serious pain, but who said writing was for cowards and chickenshits? This is the real deal, this is your heart and soul out there for reals… you don’t do this if you’re a coward. DO IT. PUBLISH. And hell take the hindmost.

Fourth secret. When you write something and have those thoughts that it’s not worth posting, it’s not good enough for other people to read, it sucks, why did you waste your time… post it. Check for spelling and punctuation if you must, give it a last reading for sentence structure and grammar if it makes you feel better, but above all else… read it to yourself as though you were speaking it aloud, and if it sounds like how you’d talk to your most trusted and loved bestest friend, if it comes out smooth and clean and sounding like your conversational voice (or your ranting shouty voice screaming at the idiot that pulled the whole room and then ragequit after cursing at you for 5 minutes in that run last night)… POST IT!

We are not copywriters. Copywriters have very specific rules for professional writing, and they are there, and work the way they do, for a reason.

If you want to write, write. Strive to infuse your personality into your writing. Don’t worry about the rules, those are usually there to try and keep from alienating the short attention span reader. I say, screw that. Don’t focus on tailoring your message to the reader, focus on nailing your message presented YOUR WAY.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again one time; if a hundred people read what you wrote, you will never keep all one hundred reader’s interest. The best you can hope for is to keep the interest of the people who will LIKE THE WAY YOU WRITE.

That said, when starting out, it can be reassuring to have some tips and guidelines to follow. Follow rules if they really help you feel more confidant, if they provide a sort of safety net when you’re out there on the high wire and the spotlight is shining on you and only you. Just don’t let them be the crutch you use to tell you when you’ve written a ‘good’ post.

The best set of copywriting rules I’ve seen anywhere can be found here. Just thought I’d share.

Do I follow those rules?

Nope.

Not because I’m smarter than them, or better, or any other pretentious crap. I don’t worry about the smart tips, because I’m already writing how I love to write. I’m not writing to please an imagined reader, and I’m not trying to take somebody else’s idea and spin it out into an article for a magazine for a steady paycheck. I’m not here to clear the personality from my writing and follow a set pattern; I’m here to blow off some steam, and along the way to use the words I write as I was once told you were supposed to use the words of a poem; to get my thoughts and feelings out there clear and clean for others to see.

If it takes me a bearwall to do it, I do it, not because I think you’re stupid and need shit spelled out for you, but because I’m having fun writing! I don’t want it to stop, sometimes.

Look, here’s the thing. If you’ve always wanted to write, but just don’t know how, you sit down, today, and you write something. I don’t give a shit what it is, take your grocery list from the weekend and turn it into a short story of how you had to escape from ninja pirates that had your house surrounded, and you only had THOSE few items to work with. Plus a kitchen, hey, I’m crazy, not stupid. How would you do it?

Or take some topic, I don’t care what, reach out and grab something from the air. Spelunking. Gravestone rubbings. Whether or not mallard ducks fart while they fly. I don’t care, just pick something. Then write about it. Just start typing it the way you’d say it, and go from there. See where you can take it. Tell yourself a story.

Write anything. But do it.

Put the writing in front of other things, instead of putting other things in front of writing. You can start off the day going to work, promising yourself “When I take my break I’m going to spend 10 minutes writing about x.” Maybe you won’t actually be ABLE to write during your break… but you’ll have been thinking in the back of your head about what you wanted to write all morning. It will be going around back in the ol’ noggin, and that’s some great stuff that comes out of there when you let it simmer long enough.

I take a USB memory stick with me to work most days, and over lunch I’ll do some writing, and save whatever I’ve got on there to bring back home. I may not have much, but just thinking about what to write during the day gets the typing process all smoothed out later.

Of course, there are those horrible moments when you just nail that internal dialogue. You come up with just the most awesome plot twist that sells your entire story to you, you know JUST the right tone to take, you get the words nailed down, ohh it gives you shivers it’s so awesome!… and then later you forgot what it was when you sit down to write it. Oh man, that’s got to be writer hell, right there.

Even with that, I think it’s worth it.

Anyway, for the budding writer, I’m as serious as I can be. You want to be a writer, then sit your ass down and make time to write. When you’re not writing, take time to THINK about what you’re GOING to write. Make it something you do.

And even though you think it sucks, if it sounds like you when you read it out loud to yourself… publish it, and then MOVE ON TO THE NEXT WRITING.

If you happen to have your own tips for consistent writing, by all means share them below. After all, I ain’t kidding when I say that you never really publish something and think that it’s freaking brilliantly awesome… and if you do, trust me. You were wrong. :)

I hope you all have a great week, and I truly hope that this trend of ever-growing numbers of blog writers continues. I love seeing so many new voices rising out of the wilderness. Send your posts like an arrow into the heart of mediocrity, for you cheer me up immensely when you do.

Oh, and that blog post title up there? I sat down today to write a post, with absolutely nothing on my mind but inane crap. The words ‘Supersonic’ and ‘Lightspeed’ popped into my head, so I wrote them for a blog title. And then I started writing a post that had nothing to do with those words at all, because that’s where my fingers and the back of my head took me. I didn’t try to force myself to write something related to those words when it wasn’t coming.

I could go back and change the title now… but I think that constitutes a last little secret all on it’s own.

Tomorrow morning, my family and I are taking a trip to visit Chicago. We’re going to be gone all week on a nice adventure, taking the train into the city, seeing all the sights, living large.

During this time, I won’t be on WoW at all, but I’ll still have my email and such.

There should still be post activity,  but I intend to spend what free time I have writing for the PBeM story, and putting WoW stuffs behind me for a while.

Have a safe week, my friends.

I used to enjoy;

• Playing end game instances/raids with others
• Leveling/questing/exploring in the world
• Playing cooperatively while leveling with my wife

I’m not going to write some massive bearwall. It would be too long, and undoubtedly boring.

What I will say is, I didn’t enjoy the way Wrath made every 10 person guild a potential progression raiding guild, with that inevitable awareness in the back of everyone’s head that you could possibly see everything in the game… if you started raiding more often. And started taking it a little more seriously. I did enjoy the tempo and design of instances in Wrath, though. Say what you will about them, I enjoyed being able to get a group and burn through an instance at a fast pace. It was pretty cool. I’m not talking about the difficulty level or lack thereof, I’m talking about how long the bloody things took. With Cataclysm, we have the same 10 and 25 person raid progression go go go, but with Burning Crusade style instances requiring teamwork, coordination and cooperation.

I love the new heroic instances as a concept, and I applaud Blizzard for combining the carrot of leveled guild rewards with the stick of heroic instances that are hell on pugs. I think Blizzard sat down and did some serious thinking on how to deal with the endless bitching and complaining about asshats in PUGs. From out of these meetings came the realization that if they could just get the players to form larger guilds, and make them WANT to play in runs as guilds instead of PUGs, then the asshats they end up hating will be in their own guild… and all that bile and hatred would be turned on guild leaders and officers to deal with the asshats rather than on Blizzard.

A guild you can level with great in-game rewards, mounts, pets, Heirlooms and stuffs? Where having more people doing things levels you faster? And to level the guild you have to do things together that you used to PUG? Well played, Blizzard. Well played. I hope that your customer service complaints have been reduced in the percentages expected.

I’m not enjoying exploring the world, because all of Azeroth has changed, and the instancing means that my max level characters can’t just go out there and check things out 100%, learn it. Oh no, if I want to see the zone the way it’s supposed to be… I have to do all the quests in the zone, damn near. On everyone.

And hey, it sure would be nice to go hang out with a lower level friend, maybe help out… oh wait, I’m in the wrong phase. Oh well, guess you’re on your own. Sorry!

And I’m mostly not enjoying playing cooperatively with  the love of my life and best friend, whom I happen to be married to. You see, even if you’re grouped together, and playing together, and leveling together and staying in perfect sync XP to XP… a lot of this phasing takes you out of the game world into your own little custom zone, for you to address the serious stuff.

Boy, that’s just great when you were doing the quests together, and one of you is the Tank while the other is DPS/Healing. “Where the hell were you when I had to kill the bad guy? Sucker tried to eat me?” “Sorry, I think I slipped into an alternate universe there for a second. My bad.”

Blech.

On a side note, a digression, a sidebar if you will…. Blizzard, it takes a special kind of genius to design a game that has as its sole end game focus GROUPING… to work hard to emphasize grouping, to drive people to bigger guilds, and to design content requiring teamwork and cooperation and coordination, just as I said before… but to make sure that while leveling up while questing, that you CAN’T COMPLETE THE LEVELING QUESTS AS A COOPERATIVE GROUP.

Boy, with all of that, you might think that I’m a whisker’s breadth away from quitting, right?

Damn near, my friends. Damn near.

What is keeping me from that is one main thing.

I CAN play cooperatively while questing with the woman I love. I just have to do it in Outlands or Northrend, that’s all. And then, once we finish in Northrend… well, I guess we’re done, because the new content is another clusterfu&^ for leveling while grouped.

So I’m playing my Frost Mage while Cassie tanks as a Bear. She dinged 68 last night while I’m still at 67, in Shadowmoon Valley.

It’s so much fun… sad to say, my biggest hope now is that Blizzard doesn’t “improve” the old content, it’s the only stuff we can still play together as a team.

I am also contemplating trying something wacky with folks on some other server somewhere, doing Elune only knows what. There’s a really fun-sounding concept guild called “Twits and Giggles” that the Disciplinary Priest started over on Fizzcrank-US, Alliance side. It’s Death Knights only, and as the title implies, it’s just for fun. I could try that. I’ve been leveling a DK on my server, but wtf, I could do another one, right?

It’s either that, or see if I can find someone somewhere that can use a Bear tank once in a while, but who can’t commit to playing that often. Yeah, put THAT in your application and see how far you get, huh?

Personally, I’d have used some dice, but then again… I’ve got a lot of dice. Hmmm. Actually, remembering some of the gamers I’ve known, I don’t have a lot of dice. I only have one large tackle box full. I’ve known gamers with far more than that. Perhaps I should simply say that I have a wide variety of potential high rollers to choose from and leave it at that.

However they did it, your comments were counted, the names were entered, and the winner has been chosen.

Congratulations goes to the lucky winner, Ken R!

Ken R left the following winning comment on the original post;

Ken, I’m emailing you as we speak to get you all set up with Maxim.

For those of you that had commented on the post to enter the drawing, Maxim would like to offer you a a special two (2) MONTHS of free premium hosting on Enjin’ Advanced plan, which comes with a 10 man mumble server.

To take advantage of that offer, all you need to do is create a website on Enjin.com, and then send Maxim an email at info@enjin.com with the Subject “Big Bear butt commenter – your commenter name”.

In the body of your email, let Maxim know the details of the guild website account you created, and he’s told me that he’ll take it from there.

With that, I’m calling this drawing completed, and hopefully a success.

Good luck to everyone that entered, and especially a great good fortune to Ken, who I hope will enjoy the website and server with his friends for the entire year to come.

Good night!

It was very funny.

I hit publish, checked it out, and the video wasn’t there. No video! I checked a few times, and the embed code simply didn’t work. I had to race out the door that second, so I had no recourse to fix it any other way, like by just adding a link. I had to do something, so I deleted the post and bailed.

Over the course of the day, the case of the mysterious vanishing post has caused all sorts of confusion for readers, for, with the genius of feedburner and feed readers everywhere, you are not allowed to have ever made a mistake when you hit publish. It goes out exactly as it was at that moment, even if you delete it 2 seconds later.

Isn’t that nice.

Now, a smart feed solution would be to also send out updates to posts, so if things, like life itself, ever happened to change, maybe people would have the chance to see that.

Ah well, I’m sure someone will make such an original innovation someday in the future, and we will all look back on today’s feeds with scorn, wondering how we ever accepted such a static situation.

In the meantime, I’ve had several very helpful folks email me to ask why my blog has been hijacked, or to let me know that my feed is infected with a virus, or etc etc, because the feed has a post on it, but lo and behold clicking on the link results in the post not being found, and various and sundry errors occuring.

Gotta love hindsight. Wish I woulda just let it be and fixed it later.

The latest email I received was a very nice one from Elynea, which came in as I was fighting with idiots in a Stonecore pug.

I know I got the email, because my new phone chirped at me, and it is but a moment’s swype to open and peruse the message.

I read Elynea’s message while fighting, and wanted to reply to her right away so she wouldn’t worry.

BUT… I didn’t want to stop fighting in the pug. They may have been idiots and acting like tools, but that’s no excuse for me to be rude.

My new phone offered me a solution! I can haz multitasking!

I selected reply, and then tapped the microphone on the keypad, activating voice chat.

I spoke my message into the phone, and it processed my words, then converted my speech into the actual email message!

What I said was, “I know, I deleted the post because it was broken. Sorry about that.”

The phone took that message, chomped on it and produced a typed version. I shall now share with you what my phone wanted to send Elynea;

“I know I deleted the post it was broken. Suck on it.”

Ummm…. hold on JUST a second before hitting send there, pardner. Run that one by me again?

Perhaps… just perhaps… this new technology ain’t exactly perfect yet.

You’ll be glad to know that no Elyneas were told to suck on anything in the course of this process.

My wife DID get a good laugh out of the look on my face, though.

You have my most sincere apology for the heck I put you through on a regular basis.

Yes, I installed a smartphone-friendly plugin for the blog that was supposed to improve the appearance of the blog when viewed from a smartphone.

That doesn’t mean I’d ever actually visited the blog that way.

Tonight, we went ahead and both bought LG Optimus-V phones on the Virgin Mobile network. These are Android 2.2 phones, and our monthly plan has unlimited internet and text.

Obviously, the second thing I did was visit the blog. (First was to check my email).

The blog loaded up looking… interesting. No banner picture, just post titles.

I made the mistake of visiting my most recent Bearwall diatribe.

The page opened easily enough, and I scrolled down the text.

And scrolled. And scrolled.

And scrolled.

I’m serious. I’m really sorry. When I check my Bearwalls on a widescreen monitor at my desk, they seem annoyingly long but reasonable.

Trying to read them on a smartphone, they are an offense committed against both nature and God, and should be struck down with heavenly fire.

I promise, I will try… TRY to rein myself in henceforth, and drive myself to greater heights of brevity.

Good lord, after reading that massive textbomb, I’m lucky nobody ever visited one of my “Greet the Bear” events and just walked right up and punched me square in the mouth without saying a word.