Goodbye, Blogger.

I used to blog here with Ehren. We shared an office, and we blogged to entertain each other.
Johanna and Shital were co-workers, who posted once or twice each.
Ehren stopped blogging about six months in.
In 2008, I started using Facebook and my blogging slowed dramatically.
In 2011, I left the organization we worked for, and not-entirely-coincidentally started blogging on Wordpress.
In 2012, Ehren moved to California and was Hardly Ever Heard From Again.
So, this blog is dead.
Bits of it are preserved over on my Wordpress blog, "Words | Web | Woad", at www.simoneparrish.com, where I'm still fairly lackadaisical.
The End.

I am not your target audience.

Not Your Target Audience I

Dear Hotel Chains:
Now that I am past the stage of life in which most people I know got married, I typically stay in one hotel a year. (This is whatever hotel the Nonprofit Technology Conference is in.) Sending me email for the rest of time about an $89 sale at your hotel in another city is wasting my time, and yours. Unsubscribe.
Sincerely,
-Me

Not Your Target Audience II

Dear Hulu:
It's nice that you ask me "Does this advertisement apply to you?" Have you noticed yet that I have clicked "No" on every single ad you have shown me that is not for REI or Subaru?

Not Your Target Audience III

You know how many calendars they have at Barnes & Noble? Lots, right? I hate them all.

Is good the enemy of the good?

11NTC was all a-buzz about NPower's Community Corps. As far as I can tell, Community Corps and Civic Actions' Geek for Good (which I caught some buzz about last year) are directly competing for the same eyes. They are both online services matching geeks (who have skills and time) with nonprofits (who have tech needs). Is Community Corps's clarion call the death knell of Geek for Good? I didn't hear any talk about the overlap, and Geek for Good's site doesn't have easy contact info. I just posted a contact form to Civic Actions, so stay tuned. (I guess. Not that any of you are tuned.)

Queen of the Universe, 10 & 11

10. Do you own or rent a property which has sidewalks that other people might have to walk or push a stroller or use a wheelchair on, ever? Has there been wintry precipitation recently? It's your responsibility to make your walk safe. No snow. No ice. Wide enough for wheels. If you can't do it yourself, my benign government will have a postal-code/neighborhood-searchable "Get shoveling help" app, so you can find paid or free assistance. If someone slips and falls on your property because you just didn't bother, there will be severe consequences. (For example, making you Snow Remover For Life. for your whole block.)

11. Highway sign change: Any sign that now says "Do not pass" or "No passing zone" will become "None shall pass!!"

Queen of the Universe Proclamation #9

100-year ban on all commercial fishing and ocean-based fish farming. (Sustainable inland farming is OK, like catfish and tilapia and barramundi. Also OK if you actually catch a fish yourself.)

Queen of the Universe, continued

7. Biting insects and blood-borne pathogens, begone! But with some kind of "don't screw up the entire food web/population balance" rider.
8. There's got to be some kind of population control. I know this is going to be why the peasants rise up and burn me in my palatial roundhouse, but I think there are too many people. Finding new ways to grow more food seems like a losing proposition, eventually, what with our planet being finite and all. Best suggestion so far: Everyone is reversibly sterilized at birth, no exceptions. Then, after you turn 21, if you want kids, you apply for a breeding license. At first I don't think there will even be any more hoops than that. You apply for one, you get one. Like a fishing license.

When I'm Queen of the Universe

I was gonna write these up in a Facebook note but then I got all paranoid about ownership and copyright issues. Weird.
Anyway: My Queen of the Universe Platform / List of Proclamations

1. Proselytization is punishable by death. Zero tolerance. You want to set up a storefront or a website or a mail-order business telling people about your god(s), have at it. But you start knocking on people's doors or invading their countries and telling them they have the wrong gods, and you will vanish without a trace.
2. All public trash cans that look like barrels with two legs and round heads shall be painted to look like R2D2.
3. Some kind of kilt subsidy. I used to think I would proclaim Tuesdays as Utilikilt Day, but I don't want to make it too structured. I just want more men to wear kilts, more of the time.
4. Ban advertising. (In part just to see what happens if people only buy things they actually need, or that they happen across and find delightful. Also because I think advertising is a corrosive force, spiritually and psychologically speaking.)
5. No patents for life forms. I feel like genetically modified organisms are a giant Promethean Frankenstein nightmare waiting to happen, but I also think that viral genetic medicine is interesting and potentially beneficial, and I love the Golden Rice concept, so I don't really know how far to take this one.
6. No Christmas music before Thanksgiving. And no "holiday medleys" of any kind. The severest penalties will be reserved for medleys of holiday music composed after 1900, played on "classical" instruments like violins and cellos and piano, and then broadcast by stations that should be playing actual classical music.