An author's collection of thoughts and stories
The endless echo
Of lightning tearing the sky
Wondrous thunderstorm
Brilliant yellow
Filling the air around me
A sunset sublime
The prettiest smile
Fills my heart with endless love
On the smallest face
My dearest baby
I love you so very much
Please let me sleep more
Swimming every day
Keeps me so healthy and strong
The water feels great
byautumnrain.com
As I’ve been learning how to weave, I very quickly came across the axiom: “THEY say that you can’t weave with handspun yarn, but THEY are wrong.”
And instead of scoffing at THEM for being judgmental and stupid, I was immediately all, “Who are THEY and why do THEY say that?” For some reason, people don’t seem to like me much, lmao.
Through research, I learned the truth. Good for me.
In terms of personal weaving, you have basically three types of looms: Inkle, rigid heddle, and shaft, in order of complexity. All three of them work by putting vertical yarns (called the warp) under tension and weaving back and forth horizontally between them (the weft). With inkle and rigid heddle looms, you can definitely use handspun yarn for both the warp and the weft: if it can be tensioned, it can be used (side note for “sticky” sheds that I’m not getting into right now).
Now, I haven’t used a shaft loom — they are expensive, and I’m just a poor sod surviving in the midst of an economic crash/the end of the world. But, the word on the street is that they are quite harsh on the warp threads.
So, THEY were talking about shaft looms, where you are much more likely to break a warp yarn through friction. Heck, THEY even recommend using a humidifier when working with linen because it’s stronger when wet, and we’re not kidding around here.
And it’s rather disingenuous to act like the advice was intended for rigid heddle looms, purely for the sake of appearing smarter. Just sayin’.
Now we’re all enlightened.
byautumnrain.com
Let me go into more detail about what I said here.
Okay, so if every post gets 10 views, obviously posting once a week will result in a total of ten views, versus posting every day will get 70 views. The increase is purely because of more posts.
However
My experiments with WordPress actually showed that a longer posting streak will increase the number of views each post gets via the WordPress Reader.
sO
Continuing with our 10 views per post example, that number will increase to 20, 30, or 40 views per post. Instead of ending the week with 70 views, you can end with 280. Also, older posts are more likely to get views as well.
bUt
These views aren’t coming from actual real live loyal readers. When you stop posting Every. Single. Day. your stats will plummet, and you have to start all over again. Dead internet, baby.
One of my favorite games is Swarm Simulator, which I like to joke is the pure essence of gaming without any of the filler crap like graphics or plots. The whole point is to watch the numbers get bigger. And bigger. I dunno why, but it’s kind of addicting.
I’ve decided to spend awhile playing the same sort of game on WordPress.
Back when I first got into paganism, I very quickly came across the criticism that most people used it to try to feel special. In fact, at the time it seemed quite true: the growing hipster trend seemed to be all about finding contrived ways to pretend that you were special.
I also immediately disliked New Age stuff for a number of reasons — while I enjoy some good “woo-woo”, there’s a limit before it gets to be too much. So, while I’ve known about “Indigo Children” for quite some time, it was not something I looked into.
For some reason, I’ve been thinking about the topic lately.
I come from a very normal family. Very. Normal. And I’ve always been the black sheep — I used to joke that I was adopted. I periodically and quite seriously wonder where I came from, because I’m not like the rest of my family at all.
So maybe there’s actually something to this whole “indigo children” idea after all.
Or maybe I just want to pretend that I’m special.
I brushed one of the cats, then as I cleaned the fur off of the brush, I wondered if I could…
So I did.
I spun cat fur into yarn.
Apparently, every single year I say, “I like August better than July.”
My husband was bemused when he replied, “I got the idea after the first four or five times you said that.”
So I told him, “Get ready to hear it fifty or sixty more times.”
Byautumnrain.com
Last year I did some experimenting to see what would boost my stats with blogging (without going off-site), and the one thing that had the most effect was posting at least once a day.
It didn’t seem to matter if I wrote paragraphs, or simply put up a picture. As long as I kept my streak, I got more and more views.
Then I got pregnant, and couldn’t be bothered, lol.
But hey, let’s see what we can achieve this time around.
By Autumn Rain 