It's nice to be noticed!

The email said, in part:

Dear Member,

Congrats! You have been chosen as a spotlighted member within the Music Community. Your screen name is being featured on a music community page!

Please stop by to view the spotlighted feature at AOL Keyword: Music Talk.

***

Cool! Thanks! (And yes, to follow up on the featured journal entry, the monsoon has started here. No gullywasher, yet, but yesterday I did have to "run and hide [my] head" coming out of the bank.)

The top featured journal on the music page, by the way, is Mrs. Linklater's Guide to the Universe. Her entry on summer music is more succinct than mine. I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. Her other entries tend to be longer and funnier. I recommend them heartily.

And while I'm recommending things, here's a shout out to Shelly's Cyber Chocolate, which has had several interesting posts lately. The creator of Wonder Librarian has a number of other blogs, including a couple about writing and one about Mars. You may want to follow some links.

I've already plugged Mumsy's Interactive Haiku (repeatedly!) and The Peach Pages, so I'll move on to Becky Yanagi's Where Life Takes You. She's written some really interesting, moving, and fun entries since I've been reading her journal. Check it out!

There are a bunch more, non-AOL journals I could mention, but for now I'll just direct you to the Other Journals list on the right. John wants to go to lunch.

Karen

Another Blogger for Kerry - A Defense of General Purpose Journals

Photo courtesy of JohnKerry.com. (Hotlinked - now long gone.)

I was a caller on NPR's All Things Considered again this week, this time putting in a word in favor of literary and general purpose blogs and journals. Neal Conan's guest, a journalist and fan of political blogging, dismissed essentially all non-political ones as "I got up this morning and I brushed my teeth," in other words, dull and pointless.

He's mistaken.

One has only to look at the lively discussions on Making Light and Electrolite to see a blog community in which politics is only part of the equation. Aspiring writers swap ideas, techniques and news of their progress on Within the Qelenhn, Presto Speaks! and many other individual journals. The friends function of LiveJournal enables journalers to keep up with several blogs at once, and add their own comments to each. And over on AOL, John M Scalzi's By the Way helps to keep journalers motivated to write on a wide variety of topics. True, a few of his posts run a little toward the tooth-brushing end of things, but even that has value, as we peek into the life of a writer who works out of his rural home, far from any AOL HQ.

Such goings-on do little to get John Kerry elected, but frankly I doubt that political blogging will tip the scales in the upcoming election. I'm much more interested in the results of Neil Gaiman's and Harlan Ellison's respective lawsuits, the dubious merits of POD, and how Sara Geer's tv production is coming along.

But okay: yes. You should vote for John Kerry this fall. Satisfied? You shouldn't need me to tell you that. This truth becomes clearer with every news report. Anyone who isn't thoroughly disgusted with George W Bush by now probably has been getting his or her news, if any, exclusively from Fox and other conservative media.

If you actually like what Bush and his cronies are doing, I'm not going to change your mind by blogging. All I can do is suggest that you pay more attention to NPR and other news sources that do more than skim the surface of stories.

Next subject, please.

For more cool not-necessarily-political blogs, follow some of the "Other Journals" links at the right, or visit the ones mentioned in the comments below.

Karen

This is the last one, I swear

For convenience in posting to LiveJournal blogs by Sara, Sarah and Shelly, I've started one of my own. The journal you're looking at right now, Musings from Mavarin, will continue to be the main one. The blogspot one (Otherworlds) will be an archive of fictional entries by Mavarin characters, and the LiveJournal one will be mostly about writing, plus postings of misc. short pieces of mine that don't fit elsewhere. It's called Lost in Mavarin.

First up: an abandoned song of mine called Real Life (the melody didn't work out well enough), three Bulwar-Lytton sentences from a couple of years ago, and thoughts on dogs' thoughts.

Karen

Checking in by Mac

I just looked at this journal on my iMac (AOL for OS X) for the first time in a while, possibly ever. Loath as I am to admit it, this diehard MacUser has been using her Compaq almost exclusively lately, because the Mac isn't portable, or compatible with the UoP web site. So anyway, I went online on the Mac to let Norton update, and checked this journal. What a mess! The font size problems on the entry below this one, which I worked so hard to fix in Windows, are decidedly not fixed in the Mac version of the page. Furthermore, the Mac version of "edit entry" has no text controls at all.

Phooey. The world seems determined to part me from my Mac, simply by refusing to let software work properly on it.

Well, I'll experiment. If I can fix it in Word or Netscape and then paste it back in, maybe it will look okay.

Or maybe the Windows version will end up in 64 point reversed Comic Sans. Who knows?

Karen

Testing...

This is to test the IM/Buddy List feature of this journal. Here goes nothin'!

I've looked over the team homework, eaten dinner, updated the Mavarin home page, and listened to two Dick Van Dyke episodes while doing the other stuff (same ones I watched last night). Now to do some actual homework!

(The answer is: it's not a full-featured entry, but can be edited after the fact. Big deal.)

Hi there!

See what you started, Shelly? This is just a quick hello and placeholder. Tonight I have to look over some team homework, do individual homework and start on a take-home final, all in Intermediate Accounting. I'd much rather be reading a Buffy/Angel novel, watching Season 3 of Dick Van Dyke and eating the turkey roll that's got another hour to cook. Chances are I'll do all of those things before the night is over.

Karen