By: Tom Henrich – CC BY 2.0

If this is happening to you, it's a VERY easy fix:

Clear your browser's cache!

As a web publisher, I'll say that clearing your cache is totally the new "reboot it." If you're experiencing weirdness on any website, clearing your cache is always a great first step… for me, I'd say it resolves weirdness at least half the time.

I'm so sorry about this issue — I've tried to get the word out about how to resolve it via every channel I can! I've sent emails to the newsletter lists, I've posted on every site's Facebook page and Twitter account. I haven't posted on the blogs themselves because, well, the whole issue is that the people affected aren't seeing the new posts… so a new post isn't going to do any good.

But I'm getting so many emails that I figured I'd post here so at least I'd have a link to point to. The solution is quick: CLEAR YOUR CACHE! (Oh, and here's how.)

We just rolled out a tiny tweak to the headers across the Offbeat Empire blogs! The goal here was three-fold:

• Reduce the "wall of green buttons" by getting the Offbeat Empire blogs into a drop down menu
• Make it easier for readers to find actions like Join, Submit, and Advertise
• Reduce the "tab overload" on Offbeat Bride
• Improve the mobile site and network navigation

I know when I mentioned this update on Friday, there were some concerns about folding the Empire blogs into a drop down instead of the wall of buttons that stretched across the top of the header. I totally share y'all's concerns — obviously I want people to navigate between the sites! That said, the wall of green buttons was so visually overwhelming that many people skimmed right over it, so we're going to try this for a while.

As always, clear your browser's cache… and then let me know if you see anything broken. (Note that I said BROKEN! I know we all have opinions about design changes, but at this point I'm just looking for stuff that's busted. I'll be watching my stats closely in coming weeks to see if I need to make design shifts.)

Thanks as always to my designer, Iris Chamberlain, and my developer, Kellbot! You bitches are powerful and brilliant and I love you.

Yay! Another week of hundreds of internet comments flooding in! Join us as we celebrate the insightful, the touching, the hilarious, and the creepy with this round-up of our favorite comments from across the Offbeat Empire. (Including a batch of weirdly timely ones we deleted last night!)

Offbeat Bride:

We feature gorgeous weddings every week, but A sunny picnic wedding with lawn games definitely packed an extra visual punch. This wedding clearly nailed the aesthetic dreamed of by many of our readers, and if I know anything about Offbeat Brides, it's that seeing someone else nail our aesthetic vision can sometimes be oddly uncomfortable. (See: special snowflake syndrome.) That's why I EXTRA loved beckasoup's comment:

When I first started planning my wedding I'd get a little sad when I'd see other weddings like this that seemed similar to my special snowflake vision. But now, I just get excited! Its like a preview!!

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it another 500 bajillion times: your wedding is not a contest! Beckasoup gets it.

Offbeat Home

Megan did a quick post about these clever wood-paneled power strips, and Denise's response cracked us up:

If only they made one that looked like it started out as nice hardwood, but had become uneven and also gouged in many places, and looked as if a well meaning landlord had painted it black and then painted over it, piling up more layers of black annually for decades. Then it would match my hardwood.

This is a DIY project waiting to happen. I think my power strip would need to have a gentle spackling of dog hair and toddler food droppings to truly blend in…

Offbeat Families

Speaking of toddler food droppings, Stephanie did a post about wacky baby products, and Katrina introduced me to a thing that I did not know was a thing.

The boon spoon! I took that thing everywhere. I put home made baby food inside so it was half lazy, half super mom (right?). I also liked the little spoon tips that attached to the store-bought baby food pouches

HALF LAZY HALF SUPER MOM! That's my parenting philosophy in a nutshell.

Crazy drive-by deleted comment award!

Wait, speaking of moms… this weekend is mother's day, and what better way to celebrate than with some weirdly disturbing comments that we deleted off this post on Offbeat Home? See, every once and a while, we get really weeeird late night comments from drive-by visitors coming in from search engines. Here's a batch of a half dozen deleted comments from one drive-by reader:

Sure a person can love someone of the same sex, like a daughter loves her mother, but once it becomes sexual lust over that, let's be honest that is not a straight thing. It's lust. And straight people lust over the opposite sex not the same. We are repulsed by the thought of same sex activities. Quit being childish in your way of thinking people.

Ok. Run of the mill homophobia. Whatever, buddy. But subsequent comments came back to a similar theme, over and over again:

Like I love my brother but I do not desire and am repulsed at the thought of sexual relationship with him.

Alrighty, then. Thank you for letting us know you don't want to have sex with your brother.

I do not want to marry or have sexual intercourse with my mother or father.
Sure, body parts do not equal love. I love my father, this does not mean I want the same relationship with him that I would have for someone of the opposite sex who is not related to me.

Yes, you mentioned not wanting to have sex with your brother, but now you're making sure we know you don't want to have sex with your parents either. Interesting.

It's not confusing, see we are allowed to love someone. Like I love my brother but I do not desire and am repulsed at the thought of sexual relationship with him. Love does not equal sex. The love a husband has for his wife is different from what he desires from his parents. Well I would hope so. But in today's society which blurs the lines, I would not be surprised by hearing of mother and daughter couples.

OH I SEE. So here we are, talking about sex with your brother and your parents again, kind commenterer. And now we're wrapping it up with your lack of surprise over incestuous mother/daughter relationships. Mmhmm. First we thought you were just a run of the mill homophobe, sweet commenter. But now we see that you may also be an incest fetishist! Thank you so much for swinging by in the middle of the night to share this with us!

Ah, the Offbeat Empire. Where the snowflakes are special, the powerstrips are custom, the spoons are boon, and the drive-by trolls have sweet dreams of incest. HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY, EVERYONE!

Oh and PS: Anyone notice the new header here on Offbeat Empire? We'll be working out some kinks (not of the incestuous sort) and then be rolling out that design Empire-wide.

Stupid picture of me courtesy of 2007, back when RSS was cool, only college kids used Facebook, and Pinterest didn't yet exist.

I've become increasingly aware however that, thanks to the popularity of Facebook and Pinterest, that's not how many Offbeat Empire readers think about content. These two social media tools are changing the way my readers learn about our posts, and as I adapt to the shift, it's changing the way I think about my social media broadcasting strategy.

Facebook

Referrals to offbeatbride.com from Facebook.

What I'm learning here is that unlike RSS followers who, like me, want RECENT posts… Facebook followers don't really care about recency. I've been experimenting lately with linking posts from our "archives of awesome" on Offbeat Bride's Facebook page, and followers see them and click them — often with higher engagement rates than our new content!

Offbeat Bride has a transient Facebook readership, and chances are if you're planning a wedding in 2013, you don't remember a really great advice post we did in 2010. Nor do you care that the post was written in 2010 — does the title make it clear that it's relevant to you now? Then you click! Facebook is a platform based on relevancy. They have a lot of algorithms based on trying to figure out if a given post is relevant to your newsfeed. Recency is not relevancy.

My RSS brain feels like I'm cheating somehow… "But these aren't new posts!" my blogger brain says. "Why would anyone want to read them?" The answer is that with our transient readership on Facebook, no one cares if the post isn't brand new. They care if it's relevant to them. The end. My RSS blogger brain is starting to understand.

Pinterest

Referrals to offbeatbride.com from Pinterest. Ignore the big dip — our analytics farted out for a bit in February.

What I'm learning here is that unlike RSS followers (who, again, just want to see the most recent posts), Pinterest followers want to see pretty shit. Sure, some of them want practical information or great advice, but Pinterest is a platform based on compelling visuals. Does this photo inspire you or make you curious? Then you click!

Again, my poor Web 1.0 RSS blogger brain feels like I'm cheating somehow… "But these aren't new posts!" my blogger brain says again. "Why would anyone want to read them?" The answer is that with our transient readership on Pinterest, no one cares if the post isn't brand new. They care if it's pretty and inspiring. The end. Again, my RSS blogger brain is juuuuust starting to understand.

What does it all meeeaaaaan

It means that while much of my work and business expenses go toward producing NEW content, ultimately when it comes to people following us via social media like Pinterest and Facebook… no one cares. Ok, ok, I'm being a bit hyperbolic: if we stopped producing new posts, people would notice quickly and the Empire would fall down. But I'm starting to understand that when it comes to social media, the Offbeat Empire's enormous back catalog is hugely valuable. We have tens of thousands of posts going back to 2007… most of which are still relevant, and lots of which are super pretty.

The challenge for me is shifting my RSS blogger brain into curator mode. At this point, I have to start treating my own back catalog as a powerful and productive harvest. When it comes to social media strategy, I have to break out of blogger brain, where NEW = MOST IMPORTANT and into curator brain where "relevant" and "pretty" reign supreme.

By: Jeff Wright – CC BY 2.0

Frustratingly, I lack the time to actually write thoughtful responses, but my hope is that by sharing them, y'all can benefit, and maybe we can talk about it together.

Ok, let's get to reading:

Pick Me Pick Me Pick Me, by Summer Pierre

I have spent the entirety of my life HOPING to be picked. This isn't to say that I haven't TRIED being picked—I absolutely have. However, the real truth of it is I have spent a great deal of my time hoping to be picked, which is to say, toiling away in the obscurity of my bedroom, wondering when I am going to be discovered. I believed that if I did good work and people saw it, I would be picked.

Then I was picked and [my books were] published and well, I had spent so much of my time hoping for this moment I did not understand that being picked is not an end, it's actually a responsibility. You STILL need to pick yourself in order to keep going in that picked world. I had a lot of expectations about being published—99% were totally unrealistic. Mainly, I thought it would launch me on a new more exciting and RESOLVED path. I wouldn't have to work so hard (HA!) in justifying my existence (double HA!). I thought it would dry up my yearning for acknowledgement, my yearning for nurturing work, my yearning in general (triple HA!).

Read it: Pick Me Pick Me Pick Me

No more love on the run: playing the long game, By Helen Jane Hearn

Strangely enough, in digital media, we assume that popularity should grow steadily over time, but we have no evidence in any kind of related arts business that would prove this — it's cyclical, it's random, it makes no sense, it's a sixth Fast and Furious movie (which I LOVE and I can still say it makes no sense).

Music, movies, they have hits, they have misses, but best of all, their creators have artistic growth over time. They're stretching and growing their work.

This digital culture is weird for a few other reasons too. We accidentally believe that creating is about ego when in fact the opposite is true.

It's not about ego and fame.
It's about the opposite. It's about humility and sacrifice.
It's about appetite.
It's about my audience.

Read it: No more love on the run: playing the long game

The Comment Paradox, by Charlie Warzel

As such, the thankless job of comment moderation has never been more difficult. Moderators are privy to some of the darkest elements of human behavior. Digital confrontations can sometimes bleed into the physical world; the job exacts a very real and emotional toll. And yet dissonance exists here too: It's the moderators who are, by and large, the most ardent supporters of comment sections.

Justin Isaf, the former director of community for the Huffington Post and longtime moderator, notes that the job can quickly overwhelm even seasoned veterans. "There are times where mentally it's just horrible, and it will twist your view of humanity to quite a degree," Isaf told BuzzFeed. "I've left jobs because I couldn't handle it. It got to a point with my mental sanity where dealing with hatred day in and day out and trying to shape the conversation got the better of me."

Read it: The Comment Paradox

Google Alert for the Soul, by Rob Horning

Social media are forums where we can test our uniqueness. While this can provide a sense of triumph (congratulations! 20 retweets!), it can also yield paranoia and a constant feeling of self-promoting phoniness as checking one's reblogs, likes, messages, and comments becomes compulsive.

The calculating self-consciousness cannibalizes authenticity, contravenes spontaneous self-expression. Authenticity starts to merely measure the gap between who we're trying to be and how we are actually seen rather than stand for some intrinsic essence. And given how social media can decontextualize these authenticity games, we can't possibly know how large that gap is. It becomes conceivably infinite.

Authenticity as fidelity to an autonomous, unified a priori self becomes untenable. Social media inevitably confront us with our inconsistencies and our poses.

Read it: Google Alert for the Soul
Warning: this last read is so dense that I had to print it out (!) and use highlighter (!!) to fully digest the concepts. As an editor, I wanted to rewrite the entire piece to make it more digestable (I think Horning buries his concepts in inaccessible language — and I say that as someone who gets a major boner for big words) but some of you may be more patient with dense academic writing. The concepts presented are fascinating.

I'm aware of the layers of irony in this image. By: Betsy Weber – CC BY 2.0

This post is long. This post is probably overly emotional considering we're talking about web apps and photo hosting. But man… photos are my memories, and as a publisher, photos are part of my business model. So let's get out our hankies and our rallying fists in the air and talk this shit over.

Using Flickr for myself

It was my own wedding that got me to sign up with Flickr in 2004. I had some blogger friends who used it for their wedding photos, and I was in the market for a social photo tool that would make it easy for me and my guests to pool our photos in one place. Flickr was so small at the time that I got a personal welcome from one of the founders when I signed up, and they helped me get a group set up so that we could collect shots from guests. I was so completely sold on Flickr that, fall of 2004, I became the site's very first Pro account holder.

In the 9 years since my wedding, I've posted over 7000 photos to Flickr, documenting the big events of my life: buying a house, releasing a book, getting pregnant, having a baby, raising a child…

Using Flickr for my publishing business

I totally remember when, at a blogging conference in 2006, I had the lightbulb moment of realizing that I could also use Flickr to help me collect reader photos to share on the new website I was going to launch to promote my book, Offbeat Bride. That website was offbeatbride.com, of course. And seven years later, the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool now has close to 25,000 wedding photo submitted to us from almost 5,000 members.

I have loved using Flickr as a photo hosting tool for readers to submit their shots to us. For starters, it's saved me thousands of dollars on bandwidth. All of the tens (hundreds?) of thousands of photos in our six years of wedding profiles are served up from Flickr's servers instead of my own. Relying on Flickr for photo embedding is a very real financial consideration for my business.

I also love that couples retain ownership of their images. Divorce happens, and I love that people can just quietly take their photos off Flickr without contacting us to remove the photos from Offbeat Bride. (The flip side of this is that yes, sometimes people inadvertently break our posts by removing their photos or deleting their Flickr account, but it's a fair trade-off for me.)

Also, since Flickr was the dominant photo hosting site for so long, most of my readers were already using it, making it convenient for them to add their wedding photos to our pool.

Sure, there have been challenges. Over the years, the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool has been abused in all sorts of ways. Once there was an up 'n' coming wedding blogger who trawled the pool daily and would rush to publish the photos submitted to us before we could. It also became immediately clear that there were thousands of wedding photographers who would spam their shots to any group they could find with "bride" or "wedding" in the title. There were also business owners (florists, dressmakers, invitation designers) who would spam the pool with product photos. Early on, I learned to make the group moderated, so that each photo had to be approved before it would appear.

Despite these abuses, I have loved Offbeat Bride's Flickr pool dearly. Madly. Intensely. Over the last couple years, however, I started noticing a few things:

• Reader submissions to the pool dropped (boo)
• Spammy submissions to the pool plummeted (yay!)
• Most readers who submitted the pool were using Flickr ONLY for wedding photos
• Lots more reader questions about how to use Flickr
• We got more inquiries about submitting photos posted on Facebook

Now the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool faces the biggest challenge of all: people just aren't using Flickr any more.

What are they using instead?

Clearly, since I first launched the Offbeat Bride Flickr pool in 2007, the online photo-sharing industry has grown drastically. In 2007, Facebook was still just an up 'n' coming social media network mostly used by college kids. Instagram wouldn't be invented for three years. Pinterest? HA! Not even a glimmer in the founders' eye.

Here in 2013, Flickr is an atrophying platform that Yahoo is desperately trying to revive. They released a super sweet mobile app (…but only for iOS, leaving out Android users like me out in the cold), and there was a flurry of press around "Flickr's BACK, baby!" but there's no denying that the site's base of users has dropped dramatically thanks to Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. And if ANY of these three tools did what Flickr has done for me as a user and publisher, I'd probably switch over… but they don't. They're just NOT set up for sharing photos in the same social ways as Flickr. In fact, they've taken a step backwards.

Wait, can I talk about Pinterest for a second?

This point was made especially clear to me when Pinterest recently switched the way they do photo embeds. I'm a bit chagrined now about ever having embedded photos from Pinterest. The code they served up was so crappy that my old developer had to create custom CSS styles to deal with it. The issues were always murky when it came to the Empire's attribution policies, but it was just so easy to get sucked into embedding from Pinterest.

Then last month, all those embedded Pinterest photos broke. Hundreds of embedded photos in dozens of posts across the Empire blogs: busted. No warning from Pinterest. No work-around. Just… busted. My editors are still slowly cleaning up the messes.

In seven years of embedding photos from Flickr, you know how many times they've broken their own code? ZERO TIMES. Because Flickr wants you to embed their photos. The tool is set up to respect sharing settings, attribution settings (WOOHOO, Creative Commons!), and embedding rules. Flickr was designed for sharing photos. Pinterest was designed for bookmarking photos, and sharing those bookmarks.

My editors weren't the only one caught off-guard by Pinterest's embedding switch. Six months ago or so, I started noticing a ton of Offbeat Bride Tribe members using Pinterest as a photo hosting tool. They weren't just using it to bookmark other people's photos, they were directly uploading their own photos to Pinterest, and then sharing the photos on the Tribe via embeds. So when Pinterest changed their embedding methods to javascript-based code that doesn't work in the same way they were used to (or work at all on the Offbeat Bride Tribe), members asked me what was going on. Here was my response:

Yeah, honestly: Pinterest embeds have never been great on the Tribe, and now they're completely unusable. Really, this is Pinterest making it clear that they're a bookmarking tool, not a photo hosting tool.

Basically, while Pinterest does indeed let you upload photos, they're really not set up to be used as a photo hosting tool.

Anyway, back to Flickr

In my opinion, Flickr really is the best way to share photos online. Yes, Yahoo's management has allowed the site to atrophy, but in terms of basic functions like privacy, sharing, embedding, pooling, and gathering photos… it's still the best. Not without its significant flaws, but still the best option we've got. And yet, I cannot deny that fewer and fewer people are using it.

As someone who's been on Flickr for 9 years, I'm sad that Flickr's community momentum has whithered. Photos I post there get almost no love… while the same photos I posted during my few months of using Instagram got tons of hearts. (I bailed on Instagram because while I loved the community, I hated what it was doing to my photos.) On a personal level, I'm sad that Flickr's community isn't what it once was.

But on a publishing level, I'm just mad. I watch Tribesmaids stumble around trying to use Pinterest for something it's not built for, and I whisper "Use Flickr instead." We now accept Offbeat Bride submissions on Instagram by asking peeps to tag @offbeatbride in their photos, and I cringe at the low-resolution, predictably over-processed results. (Insert me whispering again, "Use Flickr instead.")

I'm not stupid enough to think I can turn the tide on which photo tools people are using online. I've often said that as a community manager, the only "right" tools are the ones that your members use willingly, without being taught the "right" ways. If your members are not using the tools the way you intended, then you need to reassess the tool. That said, we make it clear that wedding profile submissions can only be accepted if the photos are on Flickr. That won't be changing. Other than that, I have to just adapt to the tools that people have decided to use… even if they're not as good as the tools that I was using 9 years ago.

Managing Editor Megan chugging cheap white wine from a honey bear jar. Photo by Copyeditor Caroline.

Anyway! The moral of the story here is that we're all back in action this week, working on posts, chugging away on code, scheming schemes, and enjoying your blog comments. Here are a few of our favorites for the week…

Offbeat Bride

Part of the joy of editing Offbeat Bride is getting to gently and respectfully ogle each other's scandalously hot partners. On Heather & Rylan's Pagans in Wonderland wedding, Cassie perfectly captured ogling when she said:

Dude, your husband is freaking hot. Enjoy him

I love all the symbolism and the clothes he made are AMAZING. I would hire him any day for costume designing (if I had a theatre…) How did your family react to your pagan coming-out?
And one more time, your man is sexy. Okay, I'm done drooling now. Promise.

Ok, look. CASSIE'S NOT WRONG ON THIS ONE:

Photo by Rachael Masako

Speaking of Heather & Rylan's photographer Heather Masako, can we say we love a wedding photographer who also shoots cosplay? And even shares her tips on awesome cosplay shots? COME ON. That's awesome.

Offbeat Home

We had an epic discussion about hand-washing dishes and clothes on Offbeat Home, with longtime F.O.E. (Friend of the Empire) KathyRo outing herself as a colleague of Megan's mother:

Your mother sounds awesome.

We've probably run into each other at the Order of the Dishwasher meetings and didn't even know it. Tell her I'll be under the Sign of the Limp Rag at the next meeting.

I, too, do not like to load other people's dishwashers UNLESS they're empty when I start. Otherwise I have the urge to rearrange everything and thus expose myself as a Dishwasher Emeritus which can be dangerous. It's like being a Sith Lord at a Jedi convention. You want to keep that shit on the DL.

Offbeat Families

On Offbeat Families post No, I'm not pregnant — and I never want to be again, we had a ton of very amusing perspectives on knowing when you're done procreating. See, for some of us, it's not all glowy and magical moments. As Ashley noted,

I have one pregnancy under my belt (I'm not sure if we're a one and done couple, but we are absolutely a "far spacing couple"). I relate to really disliking pregnancy. When women around me were enjoying their "healthy glows," I had a toxic sheen going on.

One of these days we're going to get around to making Offbeat Families tshirts, and one of them is just going to read "TOXIC SHEEN." Another one will read "HUNGRY UTERUS," which will make more sense after you read a post coming up on Offbeat Families next week.

I spent over ten years in the trenches of corporate marketing, so I have a lot of fist-bumping love for the creatives who find themselves paying the bills with public relations, marketing, and other sales work. That said, maybe having worked in marketing makes me even less patient with marketing mistakes. I'm like a former waiter, who's both prone to tipping 40% because I remember so clearly the challenges of doing that work… but who's also extra critical because, look: I know what it's like, and it's not that hard.

One of my favorite common marketing mistakes is when someone sends me a promotional email, but forgets to edit their template. Then sometimes the sender realizes what they've done, and desperately sends the same template again, but with the correct information dropped into place.

A couple examples…

First we got this email:

Hey Ruffled Blog,

We are huge fans of your site! We wanted to see if we could team up some how for a blog feature? Would you be interested in doing a blog write up/ story?

…and then this one, 30 seconds later:

Hey Offbeat Bride,

We are huge fans of your site! We wanted to see if we could team up some how for a blog feature? Would you be interested in doing a blog write up/ story?

Or a message that included this lovely template, clearly intended for some editing:

To help promote our product we'd love to be able to giveaway on your [website].

And then this two minutes later, because the only thing more embarrassing than forgetting to fill out your template is making a glaring typo in the company's name:

To help promote our product we'd love to be able to giveaway on your Offbeatdride.

Again, I've got a lot of sympathy for these folks. You know there's that moment of panic where they've clicked send, and as the page loads, they re-read their message and realize OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT. I know that moment. I've HAD that moment. And you know what the best response to that moment is?

Acknowledging it.

Instead of immediately re-sending the same templated message with the error corrected, ignoring that you just fucked up and revealed just how impersonal your message is… what if you actually just got human for a second and sent a non-templated message recognizing what just happened?

Ultimately, truly effective marketing (like any communication) is about connection and relationships. Real people make real mistakes. When you acknowledge it, you're actually taking a second to have a really human moment. Yeah, mistakes are generally bad for business… but humanizing your business by acknowledging those mistakes can be powerful tool for establishing a real human connection.

From left to right: Caroline, Kellbot, Ariel, Stephanie, Megan, Catherine aka Superman. Photo by Jenny GG.

Wait, is it still morning? (No.) Where am I? (Bainbridge Island, in a yurt.) Whose pants am I wearing? (Yours, but they're filthy.) I'm still a little hungover from all the good times I imbibed last night at the Offbeat Empire's party at Raygun Lounge in Seattle.

Many massive thanks to…

• Sweet-ass photo shenanigans from our beloved Jenny GG Photography
• Delicious noms from butter & bloom
• Disco stompers and other tunes by Domenica of Lost In Music
• And biggest hugest thanks to Kelli from Shindig Events for organizing the whole thing. (She is truly the RuPaul of wedding planning.)

Photo by Jenny GG

Our game of hipster bingo, Empire-style (which we called "Minglo") was a raging success, despite me not quite figuring out the rules until the party started. Everyone received a bingo card upon entry, and then went around asking each other inappropriate questions like "Do you have your genitals pierced?" and "Any chance you're lactating?" If you got five squares in a row, you shouted out MINGLO!! and collected sweet-ass prizes from our friends Babeland (vibrating things!), MarMar (cute things!), ZOMGsmells (smelly things!), Turtle Love Co (classy things!).

Hey, is that Tribesmaid AmandaTheGreat?! IT IS!!

The most fun for me was getting to circulate and connect some real-people faces to reader names… Tribe members! Couples whose weddings we've featured! Advertisers I've never met! Working from home is awesome, but getting out of the house to actually, you know, BE WITH PEOPLE was so much fun and made me even more excited for our 2014 schemes to throw wedding shows across America with the Lovesick boys.

Oh, and I posted a few of Jenny GG's party photos on Facebook.

The yurts at my mom's eco-retreat, Sacred Groves

Like last year, I'm loading up my white van with crates of cheap wine from Trader Joe's… but sadly this year the van is a rented mini-van, because my beloved Vantasy (my family's white VW Westfalia) was stolen last week. Picking up my bitches at the airport in a mini-van is kind of a bummer, but whatever: it'll get us onto the Bainbridge Island ferry and out to the forests of Bainbridge Island.

Unlike last year when staff basically holed up in the woods in their sweat pants, this year we'll be coming into town for a party on Wednesday, April 17th.

You can expect reduced posting frequency on all the Empire sites both this week and next… my editorial bitches will be busy trail-walking, drinking cheap wine out of chipped mugs, breathing moss-oxygenated air, and soaking in a horse trough that doubles as a hot tub.

Photo by Cat Rocketship