MuseBlog

Just upstairs from the ballroom: fresh air and a respite from dancing and music.

Known MBers’ birthdays this month.

05-01 Pentatonikk’s birthday (1992 – puce)
05-02 Nora the Violist’s birthday (1993)
05-04 Cat’s Eye’s birthday
05-07 Nancy Kangas’s birthday
05-08 Peace*’s birthday (1997 – turquoise, black, hot pink)
05-09 Axa’s birthday (1992 – natural blues)
05-11 Dancergirl13’s birthday (1994)
05-15 JJjetplane-girl w/cats’s birthday (1996)
05-15 Thanks For All The Fish42’s birthday (1996 – red)
05-18 Midnight Fiddler’s birthday (1992 – blue/purple/green/brown)
05-22 RoseQuartz’s birthday (1995 – pale pink and silver)
05-28 Syllabub’s birthday (1996)
05-28 MissSwann’s birthday (1996 – deep purple)
05-28 Elizabeth’s birthday (1992 – black and white “like a cow”)
05-29 Andrew’s birthday (1995)
05-31 Tesseract’s birthday (1994 – turquoise)

Turquoise will be 5,000 days old on May 6.
The Man For Aeiou will be 5,000 days old on May 23.

You turn 5,000 days old this month if you were born between August 24 and September 23, 1995.
You turn 6,000 days old this month if you were born between November 27 and December 27, 1992.

*Note: Listed MBers who have been inactive for several months won’t appear on next year’s birthday calendar unless they show up again.

Read more »

In 1958 when Ward Kimball produced “Magic Highway, U.S.A.” for Disneyland, the vision of the future looked a lot like…1958. Aesthetically speaking, that is. Much of the technology still waits to be invented. This month’s Random threads celebrate how imaginations of the past portrayed the future, but in the present, of course, you may be as random as you like.

For the curious, an 8:47-minute excerpt of “Magic Highway, U.S.A.” may be found on YouTube:
youtube.com/watch?v=F6pUMlPBMQA

(Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!)

It’s the biggest event of the academic year. The decorations are up, the food is ready, the musicians are practiced, rested, and in tune.

The ball lasts just a few hours in Musiverse time but unfolds over a whole month of blog time.

Formal attire required. Fortunately, all clothing is virtual and incredibly comfortable to wear.

Help others navigate the blog by signposting your favorite threads here, when they’ve scrolled off the main page.

(Note: Please include the URL (Web address) with your requests. It also helps if you limit your requests to a few at a time, four or five at the most.) Read more »

Need help? Comfort? A place to vent? Find relief here.

Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins.
Such harmony is in immortal souls;
But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay
Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

In celebration of this fateful birth,
Herein the GAPAs will communicate
In lines ten syllables in length apiece
(Or thereabouts). You’ve heard of it before:
Iambic (yes) pentameter–i.e.,
Five two-beat feet, one stressed, one unstressed. All
MuseBloggers may, of course, write that way too.
It’s easy once you get the hang of it
(Well, not exactly easy, but still fun.)

Attention, MBers! — Please Read

For your gravatar pictures, please do not use images that are photos of recognizable human faces. This includes celebrities.

The only exceptions would be famous people whose portrait Lady Bunniful has painted. Otherwise, she can’t make out the difference between a celebrity’s face and any random person in someone else’s yearbook.

WARNING! Will definitely contain spoilers!

To spare MBers reading the “Recent Comments” columns, please paste the following message in at the beginning of your posts:

SPOILER MUSE SPOILER SPOILER.

*The hyphens are continuing the experiment to try to fool spambots into ignoring this thread.

Let us know when your issue arrives. NO SPOILERS, please. There’s another thread for discussing the issue.

The comments sections now available on some pages are NOT normal MB threads. They are for posting information only. (“Pages” in WordPress nomenclature are the information posts accessed through the menu below the MuseBlog title banner: Who’s Here, What’s Here, etcetera.)

On the HTML page, for example, please don’t post questions asking “How to do I do such-and-such?” or experiments along the lines of “Will such-and-such work? Whee, it did!” That’s what the HTML Practice and Typographic Tricks thread is for. If you feel like telling others how to do something, however, go right ahead. We’ll transfer the information to the page and delete your comment to keep that section clear.

Thanks,

The Management

For topics that need to be handled with extra care. NO FLAMING.

Continued from version 2009.1.

For the 2nd Annual May Day Ball, a formal occasion that is the highlight of the Muse Academy social calendar.

This just in: The people who publish Muse and loads of other magazines are now selling T-shirts and such on CafePress.com. The address: www.cafepress.com/Cricketmag.

Spare the other threads; post your experiments here.

Continued from 2008.3.

Welcome home, MuseBloggers! The April Random thread awaits your posts.

(Users’ Manual: Obey The Rules. Consult The Guide. Have fun!)

Things are different around here. Here’s a place to post your questions, suggestions, observations, discoveries, and tips for navigating this somewhat-strange, somewhat-familiar environment.

Here is the story, as far as we’ve been able to determine:

Apparently on February 25, some evil non-MBer hacked MuseBlog’s WordPress code to show advertisements at the top of the lefthand sidebar. Now the inserted code is malfunctioning and causing slowdowns and other problems. Robert has been trying to track down the problem, but the commands are well disguised and seem to be spread out among the files in a way that will break other parts of the blog if he simply starts deleting them. He’s going to reinstall our software tonight. (He tried to do it last night but had to go to bed before he could finish the job.)

That’s our tale of woe, so far. With luck, it will have a happy ending soon.

A perennially popular series of threads in which MBers vent their frustrations and display their creativity by abusing the blog’s favorite scapegoat, . It really does seem to make people feel better.

Continued from Dissing Mr. Joe, Part 3.

A thread whereon MuseBloggers can guess what other MBers look like, continued from 2008.2.

And so it continues. From Part 4.

As request on the main Alternate-History thread.

Role-playing writing or round-robin writing — you work out the details.

Role-playing, with stricter-than-usual rules.

Continued from Part One.

Progress reports, anybody?