I made a big life decision, and it took less than a week. I’m selling my house and moving to a much smaller rental apartment. The idea of making a change germinated 18 months ago. I was recovering from major knee surgery after a trip-and-fall in the summer of 2019. I was on a day trip to Italy from Slovenia. (I talked about this on @theweeklyreview, if you want to hear the tale of how I ended up in a Trieste emergency room for 30 hours without a phone charger: “Putting the Trip Into Day Trip”)

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In October, Micro.blog is hosting a 24-hour photography challenge. Members of the community are asked to post one photo that presents a window on life where they are on one specific day. Here’s how it works: The challenge begins at 12 pm (noon) Central Time in the United States on Tuesday, October 13, and ends at the same time on Wednesday, October 14. During this 24-hour period, take a photograph and post it, along with a caption that provides the location and local time.

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It’s September 1, which means our month-long photo challenge is over. It was a great thrill for me to see all the contributions each day, responding to creative prompts suggested by members of the Micro.blog community. Thanks so much to everyone who participated! A number of people commented on the quality and the quantity of the resulting posts, compared to our first photoblogging challenge in February. I noticed a “leveling-up” too, though I didn’t try to quantify it.

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ScreenCastsOnline released a 46-minute tutorial on how to use Micro.blog. The presenter is a voice known to the Micro.blog community, Rosemary Orchard. (The editor is another one of my favorite people in the Apple community, J.F. Brissette.) If you are a Mac or iPhone user, and you like in-depth tutorials of software that are well-produced and well-presented, I highly recommend you check out ScreenCastsOnline. For a $8/month (or $72/year), you’ll enjoy access to a rich library of tutorials.

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After the success of Microblogvember and the February Photo Challenge, we are ready to challenge you again. Instead of a single month-long focus, we thought it would be fun to break things up with a series of challenge sprints! Each Monday in May, we’ll kick off a new weeklong challenge sprint. Here are the details: May 4: Quotations 💬 Inspiring, funny, serious, joyful, famous, made-up: it’s up to you! Bonus: We’ve just activated the quotation tagmoji as a Discover category.

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On March 4, 2020, I submitted a proposal for a guinea pig emoji to the The Unicode Consortium, the folks who decide these things. My guinea pigs are five-and-a-half years old, and I always wanted to have an emoji to represent them. There is a rabbit (🐇), a rat (🐀), and a mouse (🐁). There is even a hamster face (🐹), which some suggested would be usable as a guinea pig.

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Today is the 25th anniversary of the premiere of my favorite Star Trek series. You might say I am a big Voyager fan. I put together a guide to every Voyager episode with ratings and descriptions. I launched a podcast called [Voyager Revisited](http://voyager cast.com) for fans of Voyager and for those who might like to revisit their earlier opinions. 🤨 But there is nothing harder than choosing and ranking one’s favorite episodes.

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It’s one month until the new Picard series is here. When I saw Seven in first trailer, I shrieked with joy at the prospect of spending more time with this character. And I started rewatching Seven episodes of Star Trek: Voyager to prepare, using my handy Voyager Viewers' Guide. Expect this topic to come up, when Picard airs, on my Voyager Revisited podcast. Picard premieres on January 23. That’s 11.5 hours of television to watch over the next month.

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Micro.blog user Dominik Höcht posted that he liked the animated film Spider-Man: A New Universe. At first, I thought there was a new Spider-Man film I hadn’t seen. But instead, I learned some fun translation facts. In English-speaking countries, the title is Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse. But in many places, the title is Spider-Man: A New Universe, translated into the local language. And then there are a few interesting exceptions:

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On October 31, I mentioned to Micro.blog founder Manton Reece that I had seen references to a challenge called Blogvember. It sounded like a nice writing exercise for those who wanted to rededicate themselves to daily blogging, much like NaNoWriMo does for novel writers. Micro All The Things! Ever since I became the community manager of Micro.blog, I’ve developed an appreciation for the beauty of going “micro”: microposts, microcasts, micro meetups, microcosms of interesting humans interacting online on a human scale.

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