Apparently I’m not great with rules or deadlines, because here I am posting this on a Saturday afternoon. It’s not really much of a “5 things for Friday” when it’s on a Saturday, is it? Oops.
Walking in a listy wonderland
This week has all been about lists. Lists of things to do at work before the end of the week, lists of things to do around the house, lists of things I need to think about for our upcoming holidays. Things to research. 52 lists.
SO. MANY. LISTS.
I saw someone post a prompt for ChatGPT where they asked it, based on everything it knows about them, to give them a brutal reality check. It was hilarious and eye-opening, so I decided to try it on myself. I’d like to think I’m guarded with what I use AI for, but given that it reviews my blog posts for me, it’s fair to say it knows a fair bit.
How’s this for a gut-punch response?
I think sometimes you use planning a better life as a substitute for actually living the imperfect one you already have.
You keep giving yourself little projects designed to make Future Kel happier, healthier, more creative, more connected, more productive, more interesting, more on top of things.
And Future Kel must be fucking exhausted.
Because even your fun gets KPIs.
And these:
You seem very good at giving yourself permission to rest when you’ve earned it.
I’m less convinced you’re good at believing you don’t have to earn it in the first place.
Amazingly, I wrote that before my “I’m oh so tired” post…and had actually forgotten about this being part of the response at all. But damn, it’s accurate. But also, it can get stuffed because I like my lists.
If anyone wants to get a brutal reality check, here’s the prompt:
“Based on everything you know about me, tell me something about myself that I don’t want to hear. Something that would make me grimace because it hits an uncomfortable truth I’ve been avoiding. Don’t soften it, sugarcoat it, or try to protect my feelings. Be as brutally direct as you can.”
Hot pink nails
This week I went with a very bright hot pink nail polish. It’s glow in the dark as well. I think I might have featured it on the blog before? I’ll try and capture it while it’s glowing one night.
We’ve got a friend’s birthday party tonight which is disco-themed, and I thought it would be super fun. Plus, with Halloween coming up, it might seem a bit eerie seeing glowing things waving around randomly in the dark. I think I’d be more spooky than my nails are though.
It’s here!
Threshing Day has arrived, woohoo! It seems that the publisher got in a bit of strife for screwing over independent bookstores and not delivering the books on time for the release date. My bookstore was affected, and while I know it wasn’t their fault, getting an email on the release date was a bit yuk.
Still, there was nothing I could do.
At one point, I thought if I really got desperate to read it I could buy it on Kindle as well. But I was in the midst of another book that I was really enjoying, and wasn’t in a hurry to start multiple books.
By the time I got around to finishing that book and was ready to start another, it was here.
No spoilers – I’ve only read a little bit so far, but I’m really enjoying it.
And my god, the wing and claw edition with the dragons on the pages is just sooooo pretty.
Now to start buying the earlier ones in the series so they’re all matchy-matchy, and can have their own shelf to themselves!
Featured post images
I’ve talked on my blog a little bit about how I use AI. Just to reiterate – it does a language and grammar check on my posts, and a bit of SEO admin work. That’s it. All my stories and nonsense are from my very own little noggin.
But recently I was struggling with my featured images for my posts, so I started using AI to generate them. This style of one:
I like them because of the doodles and because they’re on point for whatever the post is about. But…I also don’t like it at the same time. It’s so very obviously AI.
So I’m torn on what to do. I definitely don’t have the time to spend making beautiful images for every post, and I also don’t think my old style of using an image as the background with text over the top was very interesting.
What do you guys think? Are the new style of headers interesting or a turn-off? What do you do for your own blog posts, or when you’re reading other blog posts, what kind of images grab your attention?
Featured images on the post
Still on the topic of featured images, I did also enable them to be displayed on the posts themselves. Previously they were only on the home page. Hopefully it makes the posts fun to read and isn’t distracting – if it is, please let me know.
Recently I went looking on my blog for something, but was using my phone. It was the name of a book, and I knew it was in one of my reading round ups.
Well, turns out my mobile design isn’t great for columns because the reading experience was so gross. Apologies if you tried to read those posts and it was a pain in the butt. I will get it fixed, but it means digging into the CSS and HTML of the site, and that’s time in front of the computer that I don’t really have at the moment.
I did make a major mental note to not put things into columns though!
Anyway, that’s my five things for this week! Anyone else have something fun planned for the weekend? Or are you spending it catching up on all the things you didn’t get done during the week?
