The Mandatory post: Takeaways from #MyFriendAlexa Season 4

Photo by Emre Kuzu on Pexels.com

Learning from #MyFriendAlexa is the best thing that happens all the month of September. I learnt to stick to a routine. I completed my long pending task of pursuing research on French authors which it is going to help me in my work.

The comments on each blog post were pretty encouraging and it sure supported my research. Appreciation was at its best. I felt that someone there got the real message of publishing the post.

The idea of self-hosting came more than twice and I spoke to people about it. If WordPress is listening, hopefully I should upgrade soon!

Twitter as a medium of sharing is easy and eventful, I would get notifications early morning and my day was made.

Reading Lists were ideally a mixture of parenting, education, entertainment, blogging and much more. I fell in love with the cover photo of a blog, was amazed by the font of a blog, was impressed by the variety a blog could offer, read comments to understand the multiple takeaways from one post. Some blogs addressed social concerns, some talked about festivals, happiness, tips on this and tips on that. The picture/photo/image blogs and the six-word story too were very informative. As some say, a picture can speak a 1000 words, and short sentences are more brief.

What more! The Blogchatter team, tracking our reading list completion, (I actually did that after a mail was sent to catch up on my reading, wrote the names on the list, tracked it on twitter with a tick mark, and only then rested) they sending us mails regularly, updating us on whatsapp, Facebook. Isn’t that for our blog, work together and get your blog going.

My website hits with a nominal 848 grew to 1,570 hits till date.

My Alexa Country Rank is under 25,000.

Merci Beaucoup!

Questy Musings is a musing with a question. What are your take-aways from the My Friend Alexa campaign? Why do you participate? Is it discovering blogs, is it preventing your blog from gathering dust, rust? I participate, I give my thoughts a medium, a voice, an image. Happy questing!

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa

Advertisement

Alexandre Dumas

Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was born on 24 July 1802  also known as Alexandre Dumas, also known as Alexandre Dumas pere was a French writer.

His works have been translated into many languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors.  His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films. At age 14 Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what became an illustrious career.

Some of his notable works were numerous stories and historical chronicles of high adventure, series of novels: d’Artagnan romances, The Valois romances, The Marie Antoinette Romances, The Saint – Hermine Trilogy. Drama was the area which earned him enormous success.

The Three Muskeeters written in 1844 is a historic novel, Situated between 1625 and 1628, it recounts the adventures of a young man named d’Artagnan In genre, The Three Musketeers is primarily a historical and adventure novel. However, Dumas also frequently works into the plot various injustices, abuses, and absurdities of the old regime, giving the novel an additional political aspect at a time when the debate in France between republicans and monarchists. was still fierce.

The primary friendship featured in The Three Musketeers is between four young gentlemen devoted to the King. Their friendship allows them to combine forces and defeat evil powers that might otherwise prevail. Friendship is thus portrayed in an immensely positive light in The Three Musketeers – the friends never argue, and they are always there to share with each other and support each other.

D’Artagnan, who is a poor gentleman who is good with a sword and has a lifelong dream to become a musketeer. Over the coming-of-age story, he changes from a boy into a musketeer.

About the three musketeers. Aramis is a good fighter and an accomplished ladies’ man…but he vows he will give it all up soon and join the priesthood. Porthos is a loyal friend and a fierce fighter. He likes to brag about the women he has enjoyed over the years, but most of it is just talk. Athos, who is also the Comte de la Fère, is the oldest and most accomplished of the musketeers. His life was ruined by Milady, and he has had trust issues ever since.

Finally, there is Milady, who is a career criminal whose specialty is ruining the lives of the men she comes into contact with. Only D’Artagnan’s pure heart can finally defeat her, and only at great personal loss. Constance Bonacieux is a young, beautiful woman who dies because D’Artagnan loves her and her death mark the end of D’Artagnan’s boyhood.

I got this novel as a Prize and it is very close to my heart. I was introduced to it at a very young age and it is one of the best books on my reading list.

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa

Simone de Beauvoir

Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French writer, intellectual, political activist. She had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.

Born on 9 January 1908, she was known for her 1949 treatise, The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women’s oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. De Beauvoir was intellectually precocious, fueled by her father’s encouragement; he reportedly would boast, “Simone thinks like a man!”

Writing of her youth in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter she said: “…my father’s individualism and pagan ethical standards were in complete contrast to the rigidly moral conventionalism of my mother’s teaching. This disequilibrium, which made my life a kind of endless disputation, is the main reason why I became an intellectual.”

It is believed that in one of the interviews De Beauvoir said: “No woman should be authorised to stay at home to bring up her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.”

First published in 1949 in French as Le Deuxième Sexe, turns the existentialist mantra that existence precedes essence into a feminist one: “One is not born but becomes a woman” (French: “On ne naît pas femme, on le devient”)

De Beauvoir defines women as the “second sex” because women are defined in relation to men. De Beauvoir asserted that women are as capable of choice as men, and thus can choose to elevate themselves.

De Beauvoir argued that men had made women the “Other” in society by application of a false aura of “mystery” around them. She argued that men used this as an excuse not to understand women or their problems and not to help them, and that this stereotyping was always done in societies by the group higher in the hierarchy to the group lower in the hierarchy.

She wrote that a similar kind of oppression by hierarchy also happened in other categories of identity, such as race, class, and religion, but she claimed that it was nowhere more true than with gender in which men stereotyped women and used it as an excuse to organize society into a patriarchy.

De Beauvoir also wrote a four-volume autobiography, consisting of: Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; The Prime of Life; Force of Circumstance (sometimes published in two volumes in English translation: After the War and Hard Times); and All Said and Done.

Some of her notable works are: She Came to Stay, her first philosophical essay, Pyrrhus et Cinéas, a discussion of an existentialist ethics, Les Temps modernes, The Mandarins that won her France’s highest literary prize, Le Prix Goncourt.

Studying De Beauvoir’s work during my Masters gave me an insight on how women subtly were dealing with Feminism in their days. It also highlights the fact that language is no barrier and translation works are widely read and taught.

I am taking my blog to the next level with Blogchatter’s #MyFriendAlexa