On yet another blog post concerning social media marketing, this week we’re discussing Orkut, the social networking site named after Google’s creator: Orkut Buyukkokten.  Background The social networking site launched in 2004, which is considered early in the days of social media. It shut down in 2014, another temporary social media platform that did not meet the needs of its users (We’ll come back to that later) and got overtaken by the popularity of Facebook.

This is yet another blog post as a homework assignment. This one is a study on the Chinese social media app Weixin (Way-Shin).  Weixin is an all-in-one platform where users can do anything and everything it seems. It’s compared to What’sApp in the United States. I don’t use either, so I can’t compare personally, besides a few days using What’sApp (because it’s more secure…sure) and hating it. 

Contrary to the title, this is not a music review for the 1999 album by the Bloodhound Gang. Sorry fellow music enthusiasts.  Now that I have your attention, this week, we’re talking about the breast cancer awareness meme popular on facebook every October. The confusing one where women used to post a random fruit, or cryptic phrases like “I like to do it on the garage floor”.

How Warby Parker Changed the Options for Eye Wear This is part one of many explorations on companies and their effective uses of Social Media. Warby Parker, the glasses company. We’ve all seen the commercials on TV or while waiting for our latest YouTube video to load. They sell glasses, they send frames in the mail for you to try before you buy. 

Taking accountability for some mis-steps taken in the creative writing process.

Writing never has to be perfect. It does have to be understandable. A writing session can be anything from 1 word and beyond. If you wrote on your phone, you’re still a writer. Reading is inhaling, writing is exhaling. Not all days have to be writing days. Some days you can just live. Art inspires art. Pain inspires art. Too much pain and grief does not feed art.

A journey through the five stages of grief in song.

Politics, Femininity, Religion and Revolution all rolled into one

A Goodbye to all those who used to hold my heart

Some affiliate links listed here, gotta pay the bills somehow, right? When I first began to write seriously (Ok fine, semi-seriously) at around 14, I had no smart devices or even a computer. I started writing my first novel in a spiral bound notebook with a pencil. Image created by chatGPT— imagine this is the notebook before the project started. …

I can’t believe we’re in April. April, despite being the start of Spring and warmer weather, is always a horrible month for me. Not only do I have two birthdays followed by death days (yeah, those suck hardcore!), but there are several anniversaries of deaths over the last few years, birthdays of those who have passed on. April is just an awful month.

Grief, Pain and Deep Depression all wrapped up in one album

Here I am a day late. (Darn work schedules!) It’s April which means it’s the start of a new quarter. Out with Quarter One and in with the new!

Well, it’s happened. I woke up to the news this morning that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) will be no more. They’re shutting down. Part of me hopes this is an April Fools’ prank. Part of me feels like a weight is lifted from my shoulders. After the controversy in 2023, and so many more issues (which you can read about…

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash Here we are in 2025, a new year, a new opportunity to make things better than last year. New year, new goals. All of that positive new year stuff. There was a lot I wanted to do in 2024 that has now moved in to 2025. I wanted 2024 to be better, but life sucks sometimes and sometimes life has to kick your ass for you to grow to where you need to be.

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash Here we are in 2025! This year already feels like a breath of fresh air. A new book with 365 pages to make something with. Because 2024 was so terrible, I’ve decided I’m going to move to quarterly goals for 2025. That way, I have more time to focus on goals, more time to complete them (rather than month to month) and if one quarter sucks, I can regroup and try again in the next quarter.

Is it finally gone? Did we make it through that awful year? Ok, good. The me at the start of 2024 and the me now are two vastly different people. In 2024, before the chaos hit, I had a lot of goals I wanted to reach and projects I wanted to get done. A quick reminder of what those goals were:

A lesson that took all of 2024 to learn

Christmas is different this year, With so many friends and family missing from our table. So many stories left untold, Lives left unlived. Things lost that can never be returned. Still we sing Christmas Carols, Wish good tidings, And quietly pray for a better year ahead.

Not all Christmas Music Makes Ears Bleed