LET ME EXPLAIN ALL MY JOKES

I built the Unnecessary Movie Reviews page today. I had a cruddy version up yesterday and today I figured out a better way to organize it. Yet problems vex me still. For example, I wanted to highlight a few reviews -- say, five (out of 18 or 19 on the Monsters site) -- but I didn't know which five. Because if I post a review of a movie I hated, would someone read that and conclude I was a mean or negative jerk? I'm a delight to be around (unbiased opinion), and I felt an urge to choose reviews reflecting this reality.

It turns out, however, I am mean and negative in all my reviews. Even when I like the movie. So in the end I just used random chance to pick ones to highlight. I hope that you find each one to be a golden egg of genius. (Including the loser ones I didn't randomly spotlight.)

The other half of my vexation here is that the movie reviews have a style very different from the paranormal books. I hate to imagine a reader who decides not to try the books because the comedic reviews aren't his or her thing -- or a reader who likes the reviews and then orders the YA paranormal romance book hoping for more of the same, and gets disappointed. The reviews were written to make you laugh while bored at work or up late for no reason. The books have a separate purpose. I mean right? Okay, you get me, I'll relax.

THE BUZZ ALDRIN OF POSTS IS JUST AS GREAT.

I found the buttons I lost yesterday! Sort of. Then I lost them again. They were on a version of a page that shows up only sometimes and I don't know why. But it doesn't matter because I'm throwing out that page. 

I had a hard time trying to put a button on the pages dedicated to describing the individual books. I thought each book oughta get its own button that would whisk you to Amazon so you could actually get a copy and read it, but I went in circles all morning trying to get these buttons to appear. Then it turned out I had built my individual-book pages using a kind of webpage that doesn't allow buttons. So that explained why it was so hard to add them. 

Then I spent hours (hours! maybe. it felt like hours) rebuilding those pages using the correct page-types on the squarespace template (as far as I know). Anyway now there are buttons. I think. Huzzah! They don't actually whisk to Amazon yet, because I haven't uploaded the books for sale, but they look ready to whisk. Probably Monday things get whiskable? Yeah, so, the whole process of throwing a book out into the world is a weird blend of fun and tedious.

This has been super interesting to read, I'm sure.

This blog post is the Neil Armstrong of posts on this blog.

Squarespace makes this easy, I guess, and even so this is taking me forever. Yesterday I very carefully built some buttons to link this site to Amazon, and for a while I could look at them. Then they vanished.  Where are they now? No one knows.

Somewhere in New Zealand, a man pours himself a bowl of Captain Crunch and two interweb buttons fall out, befuddling him.

A woman in Minsk opens her purse to pay for a watermelon, and finds a single tube sock, still warm from the dryer. The melon vendor accepts it.

A small child in Peoria briefly has hold of my car keys.  When he sets them down, they reappear in my kitchen, where I just looked. All these small tears in reality, now added to by Squarespace.

I'll let you know if the buttons reappear. It will give us something to talk about.