Last night, my ol’ WMUR and Marquette friend Stephen D posted three comments on the Picayune. It’s always great to see any kind of feedback! As always, my count for the upcoming contest to award whoever lands the coveted 600th post got thrown off because my little bro’ Jeremy is also the Tech Admin, so anytime he comments, it’s automatically approved. Therefore, I am always unaware of it until later. It’s not like I’m going to reject whatever he writes. Hell, I’ve even approved people who disagreed with me (a lazy Libertarian) and someone who is probably bitter that The Economist didn’t hire him (an ex-friend/St. Reagan worshipper). I only need to double check Jeremy’s entries for style, maybe some grammar (this would be my friend Cindy’s expertise!) and then I want to put it toward the count.
Now I found a plug-in to tally up all the contributors! Well, I had to since I thought WordPress already did this. Thankfully it’s based upon the contributor’s e-mail address which my site doesn’t disclose, you can also leave it blank if you wish, I made up something for those who passed away and if I couldn’t deduce it.
I spent last night going down the rabbit hole checking all 542 and correcting more than half as many were my fault when WP didn’t migrate Blojsom entirely. Sadly, comments really dropped when Jeremy and I had to cut off Picayune to anonymous postings. It was pretty cool to get nice comments from strangers who stumbled upon here to say nice things about my cat Molly, how they also met Crowded House or getting a plug from Astronomer Dr. Phil Plait for reviewing his second book. But we can all thank the dregs of the Internet: Chinese, Russian, Brazilian and American trolls/dipshits flooding the world with their noisy crap to boost Google analytics, moronic attempts at theft and selling Ugg Boots, I thought that fad was over. Security then destroyed convenience for the majority of my friends who find signing on a pain in the ass, preventing them from bothering to even write a few words as they usually do in just SMS communications.
Today, I’m promoting some incentives! If you engage by leaving 50 quality comments, you get a $20 prize. Many have a head start and one long-time friend earned it while I was concoct this. Plus I will repeat this at 100, 150, so on. You know what I mean by “quality.” No one-word responses or emojis or acronyms, etc. In this world of instant gratification, we can reflect for 5-10 minutes and leave a complete sentence. Good luck to you all. If you don’t have an account, tell me. If you forgot your password, tell me. You know where to find me and should Picayune be it, I say, wow, I’m impressed, honestly. Should the latter be oddly true, then write to giftsofthemaggi AT G mail dot com.
I have to say while I could use the 20 bucks, it was more of an honor just to be mentioned. I use to have a blog like this. I think I made about 15 posts, so I am probably better at commenting than I am coming up with stuff to talk about. I always do better in conversations anyway. I was never one for writing drafts and then editing it. I always preferred the natural flow. But this only illuminated the gap between how fast I type and how slow I think. Missing words, mispellings, nonsensical ramblings. If I win $20 I will buy a nice crown on Amazon.