Painting Walls and Stuff

A pleasant holiday, a chance for a rest... Not exactly. Our kitchen walls are now a delicate shade of vanilla, which complements the tiling, (biscuit and light terracotta). This took all day. Climbing up and down ladders and moving kitchen stuff out of the way then putting it back again consumed more time than the actual painting. One wall, which I had misguidedly painted a gruesome shade of nicotine, (see the video above), will need a second coat or three to hide the orange hint that has come through. But that's enough decorating for one day. I strongly suspect my right shoulder will be grumpy tomorrow.

I have now finished transferring all my old Hubpages articles to this blog. Once upon a time, Hubpages served as a useful sideline for me, as articles published there earned decent revenue through the intelligently selected adverts placed on each webpage. However, Hubpages was sold, and the new owners had different ideas about the site, and moved away from the old magazine format and instead liberally plastered each page with videos and adverts which had no relevance to each published article. It looked like clickbait hell.

Google algorithms were unhappy. Web traffic plummeted. Writers who had been with Hubpages for years, in some cases for ten years or more, complained and shared suggestions for improvement on he site's forum to no avail. The upshot of all this is that the site died. The owners will be closing it completely soon.

Ah well, this is the fluid nature of the internet – it changes, new things come along, older things fade away. Some of us older websurfers can remember when LiveJournal was the cool place to be, then everyone found MySpace, and then social networking was born. And now many people are growing disillusioned with that, tired of its toxic undercurrents and the increasing avalanche of AI drivel and adverts masquerading as posts.

Something new will come along. Nature abhors a vacuum. And change really is the only certainty.

Anyway, enough of my prattling. So, this is why I've now transferred my old Hubpages articles to here, so you can still read them if you wish to and because I hadn't made a copy of them. I enjoyed seeing some old photos of my dogs again! That was the fun part of transferring them across to here.

Meanwhile, life goes on as usual! I've been steadily working on the 5^th Artisan-Sorcerer novel, and the word count currently stands at 85,000.

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