This is Not The Worst

Hi Everybody.

I’m still here. Everybody in my world is still healthy. I’ve felt guilty about leaving the blog untouched for so long. But, as I said recently on Twitter, everything going on in the world has just felt so overwhelming that unless I had something important to say, everything just felt too trivial to bother. There’s actually lots of Shakespeare going on right now, but everything’s happening so fast and furious that by the time I got a useful blog post up it would already be old news.

Unfortunately, not everything is super here. Amazon has temporarily shut down its merchandise centers, which means no more t-shirts for awhile. This means that income stream dries up, right at the time when we all need whatever we can get. Though my wife and I are both lucky to still have our jobs, both of us have been impacted economically by everything that’s going on.

So you’ll notice a few small changes around here. The merchandise links are still up – only now they point to Redbubble. Redbubble’s not as big as Amazon, which means the volume isn’t there to help keep the prices down. But on the upside, Redbubble offers all kinds of merchandise that Amazon does not, including phone cases, stickers, and tote bags. I put up a new design, Have Patience and Endure, to mark the occasion.

Additionally, you may see that Google ads have come back. I’ve experimented with those over the years, as every blog did, and came to the same conclusion that most do – it’s just not worth it. But if there’s a number greater than zero to be had in there, well, I’ve got to give it a shot. I will try to keep them to a minimum. I’m sure that most folks these days are running ad blockers anyway. But I like being honest with my readers. When we get “back to normal” I’ll take them off again, believe me.

On a more positive note, I made a thing that I hope people will like and share. I call it Blank Verse and it’s pretty much Shakespeare Mad Libs. I made it a long time ago but for various technical reasons, I brought it back down again. I’ve rewritten it to be pure Javascript so it’s easier to host here. Right now it’s just version 1 so it doesn’t have many features, but I wanted to do *something* for people to enjoy and share. Please let me know what you think! I hope you like it.

Ok, that’s my brain dump of an update for now. I have stuff to talk about, products to review, links to share. I just have to get back into the mindset of making all that happen.

Take care, and be safe. Have patience and endure.