Introducing Features

06/17/2014 7 Comments

I shared a post the other day that has really inspired me on figuring out my content here on DBCII. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the idea came from Gene’O, of The Writing Catalog, as he is someone who blogs similarly to how I do.

The idea presented, and one I see a lot in reading blogs, is features. Posts that you can just expect to see, daily, or weekly. As a creator, they help you know what content you’ll need to create, to keep your blog going. As a reader, they help you expect what you’ll see, let you know to come back for more later when you find something you like.

Gene’O lists a number of features on Sourcerer that they run, but I thought I would note a few of my other favorites. On Love Pirate’s Ship’s Log, there’s a quote of the day. I love them – generally a picture from a movie or TV episode, and then a few lines of quote. They just make me stop and smile as I skim through my WordPress reader. Another favorite is the Box Office Top 10 on We Minored in Film, which just fill me with joy each week as I read it.

I see other features, such as episode recaps and reviews of popular shows, or Wednesday New Comics (it’s nice that most all new comics come out on one day, for the purpose of blogging about it!). These are the sorts of features we might consider on Comparative Geeks, but at the same time, because others are doing it, we want to leave it to them. Because we do so little content, as it were – with just our 6 posts a week – features would eat up a lot of that.

Also, it would force us to keep up with shows or reading comics or whatever we chose – which is against what we’re doing with the blog. We are writing for the joy of it, for the thought and sharing, and forcing timelines like that on ourselves would not be great. The closest we get is our ongoing LitFlix – where we read the book/comics and then see the movie.

And we have other ongoing series, like Science Fiction Today, Character Studies, or Science Fiction and Religion, but we don’t follow a schedule on those… it’s more like we try to do at least one of those a month. We could try to make these a scheduled feature, but they’re more of just an ongoing series, and for a blog, those are good too.

So let me introduce the features I am planning on here! Read more of this post

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Call to Action – Local Board Game Con! (Re-Blog)

06/13/2014 4 Comments

Hi all!

I wanted to push this a little bit to get input. I’ve been asked to help with starting up a board gaming convention here in town, and was hoping for success or horror stories, advice and thoughts!

I’ll likely be blogging more about it as it gets closer, but for now, share your thoughts and stories at the post below:

Call to Action – Local Board Game Con!.

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Sorry for my absence! Blogging, Contributing, and #SixWordStory

06/05/2014 2 Comments

Well, I can’t believe over a month has passed since the end of the A to Z Challenge! It’s been a busy one for me, with lots of blogging, but it probably doesn’t look like it here! I felt I needed to take a moment, after finding new readers and connections through A to Z, to talk about what I’ve been up to!

My main blog, that takes my most time and interaction, is Comparative Geeks. I post there three times a week, and after the A to Z Challenge over there, we had a lot of catching up to do on things. I think I’m approaching caught up to the present, or at least only a couple of weeks out from the movie I am highlighting this week – X-Men: Days of Future Past. So we’re almost stable again there.

I’ve been working on growing the related Tumblr for Comparative Geeks, with one post queued up for every day. That, along with the blog posts, means there should be TWO posts there most days! Granted, half of them are shares from other people’s stuff, but those are good too. I have shared a few of the more original memes or images I have put together, and those definitely are more successful, or at least the notifications track back to us! If you’re on Tumblr, give us a look and a follow!

I’ve also started contributing to a blog – I’ve shared a bit on that here. It’s a good feeling to have someone else accepting and sharing your work, to have new readers look at it, and also to work on integrating with the content and posts on that blog. Hopefully you like what I write there – trying not to just do my same sort of posts, but to mix it up. Much like my posts here end up quite different from my posts on Comparative Geeks! You can find my contributions and more over on Sourcerer!

My wife and I were also asked to contribute on another blog, but this is already filling up my weeks quite a bit. That’s four nights that I tend to be doing blogging, a fifth night where I am working a freelance job (the proceeds from which I use to pay for a lot of the games/movies/books/comics that we discuss on Comparative Geeks!), and that’s five days. I’m also working six days a week between two jobs, you add in serving on two non-profit boards, a little bit of church and volunteership, some social media, and I don’t have a lot of week left. I would like to do more contributing, but I think I need to add these sorts of things one-at-a-time.

The other impact, unfortunately, is that I really have not had/taken time to do much of any writing here, nor much of any fiction. And if I am going to fit more into my busy life, will it be blog posts here? Contributing to blogs elsewhere? Or writing fiction? I don’t know.

Well, we did a little bit of writing on Saturday, on Twitter with the hashtag SixWordStory: Read more of this post

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The Sunday Re-Blog – The Purpose of Education for #FeministFriday

06/01/2014 Leave a comment

I often cut in the text from one of my posts to re-blog it here, but this post is special. It is now the most-liked post on Comparative Geeks that has not been Freshly Pressed, and also has a poll with the most interaction, and the most comments for any of our posts.

As such, I would love if you read it for you to be able to read the conversation it sparked, and participate in the polls as well. As such, I present the link to the original post:

The Purpose of Education for #FeministFriday.

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Realistic vs. Romantic Literature – The Sunday Re-Blog

05/11/2014 4 Comments

This post originally appeared on Comparative Geeks, as the end of a series of posts I had done and have shared over here as well. The post is long, so I will keep my intro short – but let me just say this, this is a post I am proud of!

Hello my readers, time again for me to touch on a series of posts I’ve written over the course of the blog so far. It all started out from a definition of science fiction I read in a book, which led into a blog post exploring that. Then, for comparison, I explored a definition of fantasy based on a quote that’s floated around social media. So between the two, I had pitted Frank Herbert against J.R.R. Tolkien. Then, for another look at it, I compared Star Trek and Star Wars. I still really like my genre exploration there.

And then I listened to George R.R. Martin on the Nerdist Podcast, and it got me thinking that all this work of putting things in genres, and holding one over another or pitting them against one another, was wrong; and I was working on coming up with new terms or new ways of thinking about the differences, of trying to really articulate what I was trying to say.

That’s when I got a comment back on that first post, questioning what I meant about science fiction, making me really think about what I was saying. The commenter – who had the opportunity to interview the author, Paolo Bacigalupi – recommended and discussed The Windup Girl. So I felt I needed to read that first and consider it. And to consider what it is I have been trying to articulate, to think of the terms and groupings and ways that we talk about these sorts of stories, and so that is where I am coming from with this post. Let me know in the comments what you think!

Read more of this post

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