Wednesday, March 24, 2021

Join the Cult of Stupefying Stories!

 

As I continue to work on putting together new issues, dealing with that festering pile of unanswered correspondence in the back room, rebuilding our social media presence, and assessing and improving our web sites, I have—well, I haven’t exactly made a discovery, but I’ve had a bit of a disquieting minor epiphany.

All those contact links in the left column: if you’re looking at this site on your phone or tablet, you can’t see them, can you? In fact, if you are using your phone or tablet and are coming to this site from a link found on Facebook, you don’t see anything except the specific content you clicked through to see, do you?

Hmm…

We’ll have to get this figured out. In the meantime, just as a gentle reminder: 

» If you would like to be notified by email whenever a new post goes up on this site, click this link to go to FeedBurner and subscribe to receive email notifications.

» If you would like to be notified by RSS, Newsgator, FeedDemon, Netvibes, Atom, etc., etc. — seriously, does anyone use any of these feed services anymore? — whenever a new post goes up, click this link to go to Feedburner and subscribe using your news reader of choice.  

» If you have a Gmail account, there is a Follow button in the left column that you can click to be added to the list of followers for this page. However, the button seems to be a Java widget that cannot be extracted or moved into the center column. This link may work, if you are currently logged into your Gmail account. Or it may spawn a window that pukes and dies. If anyone knows how to put the Follow function inside a normal post, please let me know. 

» If you are on Facebook, by all means, follow Stupefying Stories on Facebook at this link: https://www.facebook.com/StupefyingStories

» If you are feeling really brave, you can friend me on Facebook, at this link: https://www.facebook.com/bruce.bethke. However, be advised that this is my personal page, not the official Stupefying Stories page; that my personal sense of humor is an acquired taste; and that I have very little patience with people who insist on seeing everything through a political lens. If you are a member of the Parting on the Left, please know that I have friends and relatives on the Right whose opinions and comments are likely to offend you. If you are a member of the Parting on the Right, please know that I also have friends and relatives on the Left whose opinions and comments are likely to offend you.

If you have an open mind, you will be welcome.

Finally, we get to the matter of our 2021 Submission Guidelines. As I’ve been clearing out the backlog of correspondence I have also been making updates to our guidelines, to improve the focus on what we’d like to see in 2021, assuming we do have an open reading period, which is not yet certain. You’ll find the link to the updated guidelines in the left column… 

But if you can’t see the left column, that’s kind of a problem, isn’t it? Just as I suppose this means you also can’t see the Search function, the Topic Tags, or the Blog Archives, can you?

—Bruce Bethke

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