Feminist Friday Reminder, and a Nice Photo

Another tiny wildflower. I took this one yesterday, in bright mid-afternoon sunlight. The shadows are cast by other flowers and a chain-link fence.

Don’t forget about the Feminist Friday discussion at Comparative Geeks tomorrow.

Wherever you are in the world, and whatever time of day it is, thank you for making this such a happy week. It’s been one of our best ever.

We have one more day of multiple posting before our carriage turns back into a pumpkin, so do stop in tomorrow if you have a minute.

Twitter for Bloggers VI: Management

You can find links to parts 1-5 of this series on our Twitter for Beginners page. I’ll wrap up today by explaining how I manage my accounts. If you’re able to get your account growing, you’ll have to figure out a system for keeping up with all your Tweeps and dealing with unfollowers. That’s just part of the game. This is how I’m doing it at the moment.

I maintain two accounts. @Sourcererblog is the one I’m actively growing. @justgeneo is a personal account. It has about 250 followers. I’m not actively growing it, and I only check it once or twice a day, but I’m diligent about giving followbacks. Having a smaller account with a personal profile is useful for several reasons, and I only need one big account.

Since I started working for growth, @Sourcererblog has gained, on average, 25 followers per day. I get between 3 and 10 unfollows a day. Some of these are accounts I’ve chosen not to follow. I’ve also been blocking as many accounts as I’ve been following every day for the last couple of weeks. I’ve seen a large uptick in spam followers since my following reached the high 1400s. I can’t figure out whether that’s a benchmark they use to target accounts, or whether it’s just a coincidence.

I follow and unfollow in 10-day cycles, because I’m leery of Twitter’s spam policies. I was suspended once early on, and I don’t want that to happen again, so I’m conservative with follows and unfollows, even though I could probably follow/unfollow 200 people per day at this point.

Here’s how I follow, starting with my following/follower ratio near even.

Gaming Stories: Morrowind

by Garrett Ashley

In celebration of the apparent flop of Elder Scrolls Online, I decided to crank up 2011’s Skyrim for the first time in months. In case you didn’t already know, The Elder Scrolls V is a hugely successful game both critically and commercially—I won’t bother providing any references because it’s old news and all the reviews are pretty much the same. People seem to love The Elder Scrolls. And I don’t blame them. The games are great. So in light of all this, I wanted to talk about 2002’s Morrowind, one of my favorite games of all time.

I don’t have much to say about the mechanics of the game. There are a lot of flaws (if you’ve ever experienced the battle system, you know what I mean) but all of that can be overlooked in place of what the game actually offers. There’s a map that actually feels huge. There’s no guidance system like a compass to lead you in the right direction, and the only way you can keep up with quests is through a journal system that updates when events are triggered.

There’s a sense of reward around every corner, making exploration a general necessity for the hardcore fantasy gamer. And exploration somehow seems better in Morrowind despite its limited graphical quality—Skyrim offers impressive vistas, sure, but Morrowind offers more environmental storytelling, which is a better sort of fuel for the imagination.

Vocal Duos in Music

Recently we went to see The Manhattan Transfer in concert. Not a band I had known, but we took the opportunity to go see some live music! It was a great concert, and they definitely still have their skills.

Early on in the concert, they introduced harmony, and how it works, demonstrating as they added one each to the combination. It made me think about harmony, and groups with multiple singers, and how maybe that was something that there used to be a lot more of – but for a while there wasn’t as much. And I feel like it’s coming back.

I really like bands that have multiple people singing, and am really enjoying some of the groups doing more of this. Not like the boy bands or girl bands, where maybe they each do some singing, just to highlight each of them and show them as a personality – to try to spin off solo careers. No, no. The bands where the point is that there’s more than one singer. And the best, in my opinion, is when a man and a woman are both singing, back and forth.

The Raconteurs

I think the band where I really picked up on this and noticed it, and noticed that I really liked it, was with The Raconteurs. This band was made up of a number of artists pulling together to make a band that only lasted two albums. Most notable were the two lead singers, Jack White – formerly of the White Stripes – and Brendan Benson. These two, before and since, have done quite a bit of music, and I like their solo work. But this was my introduction to both of them.