Links on Kimberly Hirsh

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 11:14:16 -0400

🔖 Read Attempting to Garden My Way Out of Sadness by Geetha Iyer (Electric Literature).

This is a gorgeous essay.

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 08:29:21 -0400

🔖🧶Read How Crocheting Is Bringing Me Back To Myself by Emily McGowan (The Good Trade).

This is a beautiful article about crafting not just beloved items, but our very lives.

Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:09:41 -0400

🔖 Read The Trump administration is illegally gutting NASA’s largest research library. by Brittany Allen (Literary Hub).

Read the article. Stand up for science every day, but especially March 7.

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 11:33:06 -0400

🔖📚 Read Arkansas Puts Complete Ban on Incoming Books, Magazines, Other Materials for Incarcerated Individuals.

I just signed decARcerate’s statement calling for the reversal of this ban and you can, too, even if you don’t live in Arkansas.

Wed, 14 Jan 2026 08:19:22 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read Behind the Writing: On Writers and Their Day Jobs by Ed Simon (Literary Hub)

Wed, 10 Dec 2025 08:28:50 -0400

🔖📚 Read Friendship Is My Writing Process by Ana Hein (Electric Literature).

I love this. I’ve been thinking about writing a lot lately, and this really resonates with me.

Tue, 09 Dec 2025 11:43:20 -0400

🔖📚 Read Public libraries in TX, LA, and MS are no longer protected by the First Amendment.

This is disheartening as can be and I don’t have the eloquence to explain all the ways it’s terrible.

Mon, 10 Nov 2025 09:12:04 -0400

🔖 Read W.E.B. Du Bois’s Remarkable Data Visualizations in Jillian Hess’s newsletter, Noted.

It’s thrilling to see how DuBois established practices for both data collection and data visualization that continue to be critical in the social sciences today.

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 13:00:58 -0400

🔖 Read Monster or victim?: The fascination of Hedda Gabler, the ‘female Hamlet’ who divides opinion by Miriam Balanescu (BBC).

Why not both?

Fri, 24 Oct 2025 07:15:54 -0400

🔖 Read What’s next after the historic No Kings protest? by Daniel Hunter (Waging Non-violence).

Reading about defections gives me hope.

Thu, 23 Oct 2025 06:27:06 -0400

🔖 Read No, you don’t need to optimize your morning routine.

This post from Fenn Priest is a gift. I’m so glad Katy Peplin linked it in her newsletter.

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:06:06 -0400

🔖 Read The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Story.

This is a super interesting read about comparative mythology. I had to borrow The New Yorker from my library in the Libby app to read it.

Sat, 18 Oct 2025 13:03:34 -0400

🔖📚 Read The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist.

Book heist! Fascinating stuff!

Wed, 15 Oct 2025 07:38:54 -0400

🔖📚 Read A Texas District Has Just Banned Students from Secondary School Libraries.

In New Braunfels ISD, middle and high school libraries will be closed for an indefinite amounts of time while books are reviewed. Read the article for suggestions on how to defend the freedom to read in Texas.

Sat, 11 Oct 2025 14:55:16 -0400

🔖📚 Read To Haunt and Be Haunted: On the Exhumation of Edgar Allan Poe by Ed Simon (Literary Hub).

I love that Simon is able to draw lines from Poe’s work to his burial, from his burial to his exhumation, to multiple author’s taphephobia to Barthes and the death of the author.

Fri, 10 Oct 2025 09:12:34 -0400

🔖📚 Read New NC law means teachers are providing fewer books for their students to read.

This bill requires schools to publish a complete catalog of all texts available to students. It creates an administrative burden and has a chilling effect on students’ access to materials.

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:45:34 -0400

🔖📚 Read Duke cut librarians. It never told the faculty they worked with.

This is one example of many where the people with whom library staff collaborate didn’t have the opportunity to advocate for them.

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 10:13:09 -0400

🔖 Read Why I’m One And Done (And Not Feeling Guilty About It) by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).

My experience is so similar to Fallon’s. Before having M, I thought maybe 2 kids. But he’s very high touch and when people ask, I always say, “I don’t have enough Kimberly for a second kid.”

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 11:50:00 -0400

🔖 Read We Cannot Give Up on Each Other by Kelly Jensen.

I really needed this today.

The page isn’t turned, and the book isn’t closed. There are chapters still being written, chapters still to be written, and people who are eager to be brought into the story to help make it what we all deserve.

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:32:32 -0400

🔖🧵 Read Just Make it Already! How to Boost Your Sewing Confidence.

Brooks Ann Camper includes this as a bonus link in the orientation for Skirt Skills, which I’m taking right now. It’s exactly what recovering perfectionists need to heal & works for any creative endeavor.

Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:11:33 -0400

🔖 Read The real reason Musk retreated by Daniel Hunter (Waging Nonviolence).

This article about the power of collective action really made me feel hopeful.

Tue, 06 May 2025 08:45:00 -0400

🔖 Read Should You Ditch Fixing Your Weaknesses And Lean Into Your Strengths? by Nicole Aherling (The Good Trade).

My top 3 strengths are either Input, Learner, Communication or Love, Curiosity, Creativity. Either way, I’ve built a life where these strengths lead the way. 💗

Thu, 24 Apr 2025 13:38:25 -0400

🔖 Here’s a project IMLS supported that you won’t see in partisan social media posts about where that 0.003% of the federal budget went: Libraries’ Roles in Disaster Preparedness and Recovery by Denise Lyons (Library Journal)

Fri, 11 Apr 2025 08:30:30 -0400

🔖🍿 Read Why Minecraft Movie Fans Are Getting Rowdy and Going Viral by Lynn Zubernis Ph.D. (Psychology Today)

Found this via Austin Kleon’s newsletter. I love this explanation of how rowdy theater behavior is developmentally appropriate.

And there’s a whole Science of Fandom Column? I am excite.

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 12:22:31 -0400

🔖 Book Riot’s Literary Activism Newsletter explains: Library Funding Targeted in New Trump Executive Order: What It Means & What To Do Now.

Mon, 17 Mar 2025 04:56:46 -0400

🔖 Read The clockwork universe: is free will an illusion? by Oliver Burkeman (The Guardian).

I’m trying to find a space where determinism and existentialism co-exist. I just keep coming back to the line from the TV show Angel: “if nothing we do matters, all that matters is what we do.”

Mon, 10 Mar 2025 16:18:38 -0400

🔖 Read HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me by Tim Carmody (Wired)

Carmody and I came to HTML within a year of each other, both via Netscape, and I love this love letter to my favorite programming language (yes, I love HTML more than BASIC). Count me in as part of HTML’s posse.

Thu, 20 Feb 2025 00:57:39 -0400

🔖 Read:

Thu, 13 Feb 2025 10:27:06 -0400

🔖 Read The Courts Can’t Stop the Trump-Musk Coup.

Courts are not known for their harm prevention—they’re best used when trying to hold someone accountable for the harm they already caused.

Wed, 05 Feb 2025 07:33:28 -0400

🔖 Read The history of anti-authoritarian struggle is a history worth repeating by Sarah Freeman-Woolpert (Waging Nonviolence).

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 21:36:54 -0400

🔖 Read The Logic of Destruction by Timothy Snyder.

Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 13:26:37 -0400

🔖 Read How to organize under authoritarian creep in a closing civil society.

This is my playbook moving forward.

Sun, 02 Feb 2025 08:30:34 -0400

🔖 Read Trump’s education department says book bans are a ‘hoax.’ Teachers disagree..

Wed, 29 Jan 2025 10:02:48 -0400

🔖 Read Primark launches clothing range designed for people with disabilities.

I love this. I hope we see it spread to other retailers.

Wed, 22 Jan 2025 23:32:46 -0400

🔖 Read Please Don’t Use Generative AI To Mimic Historical Figures.

This is all kinds of a bad idea. The BlueSky thread linked in the post shares a conversation that makes me think the LLM wasn’t trained on Anne Frank’s writing, given its ignorance of the ethnic part of Jewish identity.

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 09:32:38 -0400

🔖 Read Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King Jr.

I first read this in high school and was long overdue for a re-read. If you’ve never read it, I urge you to read it today and let it prompt you to consider what is just and what work remains.

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 07:54:33 -0400

🔖 Read 799 Books: The Story of The Stanford L. Warren Library.

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 07:41:38 -0400

🔖 Read For Durham Artist Gabriel Eng-Goetz, Community Is the Greatest Muse.

Sat, 11 Jan 2025 07:40:06 -0400

🔖 Read Wake County Employs SROs in 80 Schools; Some Parents and Civil Rights Advocates Say Their Presence Harms and Criminalizes Students .

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 17:29:01 -0400

🔖 Read The Endless Appetite for Fanfiction by Elizabeth Minkel (Fansplaining).

If you care about fandom, fanfiction, bad actors, and the pull-to-publish pipeline, this is a great read.

Fri, 13 Dec 2024 09:46:30 -0400

🔖 Read The open social web is the future of the internet. Here’s why I’m excited. by Ben Werdmuller.

This is a great articulation of what’s good.

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 08:27:42 -0400

🔖 Read 10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won.

This is helpful.

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 09:15:39 -0400

🔖 Read Please publish more (on your website) by Colin Devroe.

Micro.blog is the best way I’ve found to do this. (Full disclosure: I contract for M.b sometimes.)

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 10:44:57 -0400

🔖 Read Spinning your wheels by Annie Mueller.

This is a great read. Sometimes the only way out is through, and the only way through is patience, and that can feel really hard.

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 11:17:54 -0400

🔖 Read

Motherhood Is Antarctica: On the Underexplored Landscape of Postpartum Loneliness lithub.com
Literary Hub https://lithub.com/motherhood-is-antarctica-on-the-underexplored-landscape-of-postpartum-loneliness/

Thu, 03 Oct 2024 04:52:10 -0400

🔖 Read The IndieWeb is for developers.

This is a great set of points.

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:51:34 -0400

🔖 Read Chaos Layouts and Other Tales from Electric Worlds by Melon.

I love this so much. I want to be on Melon’s web. I think to make myself a space there but also keep using Micro.blog for my home will require me to enhance my technical chops.

Wed, 21 Aug 2024 09:54:27 -0400

🔖 Read The Comfort of Drawing Batman by Austin Kleon.

Austin Kleon’s newsletter is the one that I let come to my inbox even after I’ve switched all the rest to RSS. You should read the preview of this and if you like it, do the 7-day trial so you can read the whole thing.

Fri, 02 Aug 2024 09:49:41 -0400

🔖🍔🥤 Read The Enduring Mystery of Cook Out.

A Cook Out Junior Tray with a cheeseburger (mayo only), double fries, and Coke was the first meal I had after giving birth, and it was the best meal I’ve ever eaten. (I can’t remember if I also got a shake.)

Sat, 20 Jul 2024 07:27:42 -0400

🔖📚 Read Sherlock Holmes self-insert fanfic written by a 7th grader in 1903.

I love this so much.

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 10:03:02 -0400

🔖 Read Frida Kahlo’s life of chronic pain by Carol A. Courtney (OUPblog).

Looking for examples of chronically ill and disabled creatives to be models for myself. Frida Kahlo is such a great one.

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 09:21:58 -0400

🔖 Read Welcome to Your Cronehood by Catherine Newman (Cup of Jo).

I am not psyched about menopause. I’ve already lived a lot of my life for me rather than other people, so I feel ahead of the curve there.

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 06:49:41 -0400

🔖🗺️ Read How Paris Hopes the Summer Olympics Will Transform the City—for Good by Lindsey Tramuta (Condé Nast Traveler).

This is a fascinating article. Paris’s commitment to hosting the most sustainable Olympics ever and transforming an underresourced area for the long-term is inspiring.

Thu, 18 Jul 2024 05:52:24 -0400

🔖📚 100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read by James Folta (Lit Hub)

This is the kind of content carefully calibrated to please me, specifically.

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 07:05:02 -0400

🔖📚 Read Notes on Romance Novels as “Camp”.

Andrea, author of the Shelf Love newsletter, does an amazing job of arguing for romance novels as Camp.

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 10:03:37 -0400

📚🔖 Read The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy by Verlyn Flieger (Literary Hub)

Dr. Flieger says:

Tolkien created modern fantasy via fae-ery, the creations of secondary worlds.
The inclusion of hobbits in Middle Earth grounds Tolkien ’s fantasy.

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 09:58:07 -0400

🔖 Read Ten Years Out of Academia by Anne Helen Petersen.

I’m 3 years out from my doctoral defense and 6 months out from holding an academic job. I told an internet friend:

Right now it feels like librarian is the identity that was always really mine and academic was borrowed.

Mon, 03 Jun 2024 16:13:49 -0400

🔖📺 Read The Donald Trump I Saw on The Apprentice.

For 20 years, I couldn’t say what I watched the former president do on the set of the show that changed everything. Now I can.

Woof. I don’t think stories like this will move the needle for Trump supporters, because I don’t really think anything will move the needle for Trump supporters.

But I kind of hope they turn some non-voters into voters.

Thu, 30 May 2024 13:33:28 -0400

Today:

woke up way too early
read about Romance Writers of America filing for bankruptcy and the absurd way they’re trying to blame it on Courtney Milan 🔖📚
had my first mammogram (later than I ought) (they used cute stickers to mark my sebaceous cysts)
caught up on Season 3 of Bridgerton 📺

Mon, 20 May 2024 07:10:29 -0400

🔖📚 Read Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker Made an Irreverent, Charming Kids’ Book by Stephen Bell (Harper’s Bazaar).

I’m super curious to see the book. The article only contains one sample page. It’s gorgeous and I look forward to seeing more.

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:46:58 -0400

📚🔖 Here is the actual study with the evidence of the correlation between fiction reading and cognition.

Tue, 14 May 2024 08:11:58 -0400

🔖📚 Read If You Read a Lot of Fiction, Scientists Have Very Good News About Your Brain.

It’s always good to look at the actual studies behind news articles like this, but the evidence that reading fiction is associated with improved cognition suggests the importance of libraries, I think.

Mon, 13 May 2024 09:24:32 -0400

🔖 Read a pair of pieces about art and mothering:

The ‘Impossible Life’ of Equal Devotion to Art and Mothering by Jessica Grose (NYT Gift Link)

“Is This The Best Use of My Time?” Sara Fredman in conversation with Catherine Ricketts, author of The Mother Artist.

Thu, 09 May 2024 08:20:52 -0400

🔖📚 Read How Pregnancy Forever Transforms the Body and the Mind by Lucy Jones (Literary Hub).

Mon, 06 May 2024 17:27:54 -0400

🔖📚 Read What Eve L. Ewing’s Career Trajectory Tells Us About Black Women’s Place in Mainstream Superhero Comics by Ravynn K. Stringfield.

Dr. Stringfield does an awesome job illuminating how Eve L. Ewing’s comics career highlights structural inequality in the comics industry

Mon, 06 May 2024 09:05:01 -0400

🔖📚 Read A Daughter Becomes a Mother: On Inhabiting Both Roles in Fiction and in Life by Heidi Reimer (Literary Hub).

Thu, 02 May 2024 02:57:55 -0400

🔖 Read The films that gave us unrealistic expectations about what makes a ‘home’.

…I too had one of those houses I had always dreamed of. But it wasn’t by design… It was by living my life and creating a home that served the needs of that life.

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 05:19:37 -0400

🔖📚 Read Tackling Ballet’s History of Anti-Blackness as a White Woman.

The infinitely kinder cousin of ignorance is curiosity.

A great short piece that’s about cultural humility as much as anything.

Mon, 29 Apr 2024 09:09:41 -0400

🔖📚 Read My Son’s Love Life Is None of My Business, Except It Is by Yukiko Tominaga (Electric Literature).

This is a lovely piece about love and dealing with our children growing up.

Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:33:25 -0400

🔖 Read The Messy Places Are Where the Learning Happens: On Being a Beginner by Michelle Boyd (Digits and Threads)

A great reminder to deliberately be a beginner sometimes.

Sat, 20 Apr 2024 09:04:01 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read Mothering and Writing Are Both Undervalued Labor, so How Do Women Do Both? .

An excellent excerpt from the book The Mother Artist: Portraits of Ambition, Limitation, and Creativity.

Fri, 19 Apr 2024 10:34:18 -0400

🔖📝 Read An Oasis in the Desert: Why Libraries Are the Best Places to Write.

I love to write in a library carrel. More than once I’ve considered getting one for our home office. I wonder if my favorite local library branch has them. I haven’t noticed. Next time I’m there, I’ll check.

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 16:35:30 -0400

🔖🧶 Read This Is Your Brain on Fibre by Michelle Woodvine (Digits & Threads).

A great article that explores a lot of the reasons fiber crafting is good for our mental health.

Fri, 12 Apr 2024 08:45:46 -0400

🔖 Read You are having a midlife crisis. It’s fine.

This is an interesting pairing with The Cut’s The Case for Marrying an Older Man.

The former points out that a woman partying at midlife is not, in fact, a revolution. Which pairs fascinatingly with the latter’s framing of being a young artist supported by a partner as a brilliant life hack. I’m curious what the author of the latter’s midlife crisis will look like.

Tue, 19 Mar 2024 09:17:20 -0400

🔖 Read Why I Celebrate The Spring Equinox As The Real “New Year”.

I really love this. I want to live more in line with the seasons. Spring is a great time to make the changes so many people want to make in the new year: eat more produce, move around more.

Tue, 05 Mar 2024 07:44:17 -0400

🔖 Read The “Disney adult” industrial complex by Amelia Tait (The New Statesman via The Rec Center)

The grown-up Disney superfan has become a much-mocked phenomenon online. But creating these consumers was always part of the corporation’s plan.

I’m a second-generation Disney adult deliberately mixing other culture into my kid’s life. I appreciate this critique written by a fellow Disney adult.

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 07:49:19 -0400

🔖 Blogging is the medium of incomplete stories

I love this. I often feel that blogging is the most natural medium for my writing, which makes sense as I’ve been doing it for over 20 years. Maybe this incompleteness is part of why.

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 09:42:54 -0400

🔖 Read The Memex Method

Virtually every sentence that contains the word “brand” is [BS]…

Cory Doctorow on the value of a blog as a commonplace book.

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 10:05:14 -0400

🔖 Read What Is Mental Load? (And Why Is It Important?) by Randi Donahue (The Good Trade).

It feels a propos that I read this sitting in the dentist’s office a couple yards away from where my kid is getting sealant on his 6-year molars.

I’m lucky to have a partner who carries a lot of this load, but list-making and note-taking also help me immensely.

Tue, 09 Jan 2024 08:05:53 -0400

🔖 I’m genuinely thrilled for the Gen Zers and others who have the energy for a weekly everything shower, but this chronically ill Xennial is pretty sure it would use up all of her spoons.

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 18:58:27 -0400

🔖📺 Watched Pokemon Concierge and read Pokémon Concierge’s Psyduck Is for the Millennial Pokémon Fans.

I’m a Xennial: Pokemon was more for the kids I babysat than for me, though I did get into the card game my freshman year of college.

Psyduck has long been my Pokemon soul mate, with her constant headaches and love of water. And this article articulates why Psyduck appeals to me even more in Pokemon Concierge.

Thu, 04 Jan 2024 05:05:18 -0400

🔖 Read The Web Renaissance Takes Off by Anil Dash.

Sign me up.

(I’m trying to make a web-related pun here about Lucrezia Borgia, but it’s just not happening.)

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 09:11:09 -0400

🔖 Read Ambient Co-Presence by Maggie Appleton.

This sounds really nice. My favorite locale for physical ambient co-presence is a university library, which I use a Winter Whale sound video to replicate at home. I use a few co& working sessions via a Mighty Networks or Zoom to do this, too. I wonder what the role of services like Focusmate or Flow.club is here.

Tue, 02 Jan 2024 09:53:36 -0400

🔖 Austin Kleon’s list of 100 things that made his year is excellent, as always.

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 10:02:48 -0400

🔖 Read 2024: The Year of the Personal Website by Matthias Ott.

How about, from now on, we make every year the year of the personal website – and make the internet human, creative, personal, and weird again?

I’m down.

Tue, 12 Dec 2023 08:02:10 -0400

🔖📚 Read How To Get Started Reading Romance Novels by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade).

This is an excellent guide. Also? If you have unkind things to say about romance as a genre, please say them somewhere else. They’re not welcome in my replies.

Tue, 05 Dec 2023 08:33:55 -0400

🔖 Read Bring back the blog by Alan Jacobs.

Hear, hear.

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 13:08:07 -0400

🔖💻 Read The Indie Web Manifesto.

Before the IndieWeb, there was the Indie Web. This was published in 1997.

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 13:05:11 -0400

🔖💻 Read The Hacker Manifesto.

the beauty of the baud

I love this turn of phrase.

We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons…

This was published in 1986.

Sun, 03 Dec 2023 07:40:38 -0400

🔖 Read True/useful by Seth Godin.

Seth shares a handy matrix for helping us stay resilient and cultivate belief, shaking off cynicism and avoiding traps.

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 10:24:44 -0400

🔖Read Twenty Rules for the New Escribitionist.

23 and a half-year-old blogging advice that is still pretty solid.

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 04:49:22 -0400

🔖 Read You Can’t Unsubscribe from Grief by Jenessa Abrams (Electric Literature).

This is a gorgeous essay. I really needed it right now.

Wed, 15 Nov 2023 17:23:45 -0400

🔖💬 “Your death matters. You can choose something that will reflect the values and beliefs that you held in your life, and translate them into your death. What you choose to do, is your final act, your final gesture on this earth.” Sarah Chavez, The Order of the Good Death

Mon, 13 Nov 2023 07:38:18 -0400

🔖📚🎭 Read Why We Should Celebrate the 400th Anniversary of Shakespeare’s First Folio (Literary Hub).

Sun, 12 Nov 2023 11:08:04 -0400

🔖 Read The enshittification of academic social media (The Thesis Whisperer).

Thu, 09 Nov 2023 10:34:09 -0400

🔖 Read Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival?.

Fun to read about all the IndieWeb’s neighbors!

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 11:26:16 -0400

🔖 Read Two Wins for Public Libraries This Week at the Polls by Kelly Jensen (Literary Activism).

Good things are happening but we need to remain vigilant. The people trying to take books out of libraries and take control away from library professionals are immensely well-funded.

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 10:14:24 -0400

🔖 Read:

Thanks @gr36 for directing my attention to Whiona!

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 10:09:11 -0400

🔖💻 Read Why the Internet Isn’t Fun Anymore by Kyle Chayka (The New Yorker).

Tue, 07 Nov 2023 09:01:48 -0400

🔖📚 Read A Pennsylvania Public Library Had Funding Cut Because of LGBTQ+ Books. Then, An Olympian Stepped In..

An important reminder from Kelly Jensen about how libraries are on the ballot today in many places.

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 07:35:58 -0400

🔖 Read The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts by Brewster Kale (The Guardian).

A useful reminder that even publishers come for libraries now, with restrictions on digital lending.

Thu, 12 Oct 2023 04:41:15 -0400

🔖📺 Read How The Haunting of Hill House conveys the horror of family.

In the world of Hill House, devotion to family is a tender kind of madness that exists just on the other side of mourning, a ghostly insistence that the love that binds us is also the thing that keeps us chained.

Sat, 30 Sep 2023 10:06:21 -0400

🔖🖼️ Pokémon teams up with Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam

My kid doesn’t like art museums and only tolerated the Van Gogh museum because the scavenger hunt involved getting a prize at the end. I wish they’d had this going on when we were there!

Fri, 08 Sep 2023 08:04:39 -0400

🔖🖖🏻 Happy Star Trek Day! I just read Teaching in Trek: A Look at the Education System of the Future by @joepraska@universeodon.com.

I love thinking, reading, & writing about this stuff. This is great timing as I watch Keiko O’Brien start the school on DS9. Thanks for writing this, Joe!

Mon, 04 Sep 2023 08:48:12 -0400

🔖 💻 Read Now is the time for grimoires: It isn’t data that will unlock AI, it is human expertise by Ethan Mollick (One Useful Thing).

This is the most helpful take on generative AI that I’ve seen: create a prompt that is basically a computer program written in prose instead of code.

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 06:29:47 -0400

🔖📚 Read Shadow and Bone author Leigh Bardugo: ‘People sneer at the things women and girls love’ by Sian Cain (The Guardian).

She really is my hero.

Fri, 01 Sep 2023 06:21:40 -0400

🔖📚 Read Falling in Love With the Avengers, America’s Most Toxic Work Force by Leigh Bardugo (New York Times, gift link)

I love Leigh Bardugo so much.

Wed, 23 Aug 2023 23:03:44 -0400

🔖🖖🏻 Read ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Had to Update the Look of Beloved Characters — and Battle the Pitiless Gaze of HD.

I love that they were able to let Worf’s skin be the same color as Michael Dorn’s.

Sat, 19 Aug 2023 03:31:55 -0400

🔖 Read To Be a Consumer of Culture Means Living in a Hostage Situation by Aaron Bady (Slate)

A great exploration of the role of fan labor in culture work.

Fri, 18 Aug 2023 11:23:13 -0400

📚🔖 Read The Parentified Protagonist: From Shifting Roles to Shapeshifter, a guest post by Stephanie Willing (Teen Librarian Toolbox).

Sat, 12 Aug 2023 08:44:36 -0400

🔖 Read On looking down.

A lovely meditation from @dwalbert on the things we notice when we walked. Our family stayed in Le Vésinet, a garden city outside of Paris, for a couple of weeks in May and their greenways existed in a state of studied neglect. Wildflowers sprouted all along the sidewalks. It was beautiful—and something we were only able to notice because we had to walk a kilometer to get to the train station.

Sat, 05 Aug 2023 12:53:42 -0400

🔖 Read The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries.

Karawynn Long compares the trajectory of Overdrive/Libby to platforms like Amazon and Facebook and finds a lot to worry about. An important read for those of us in libraryland.

Fri, 28 Jul 2023 10:09:38 -0400

🔖 Skimmed Publicize Your Principles.

This idea might be helpful for articulating Micro.blog’s principles. ATTN: @manton @jean

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 10:55:25 -0400

🔖📚 Read IN A WAVE OF GREEK MYTHOLOGY RETELLINGS, WHERE ARE THE GREEK WRITERS? by Lyndsie Manusos (Book Riot).

Lots of exciting recommendations in here.

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 07:07:00 -0400

🔖🍿 Read Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a Fascinating, Spectacular Philosophical Experiment by Olivia Rutigliano (Literary Hub).

Well, I was already interested in seeing Barbie, but now that I know it’s about existential crises, I really want to see Barbie.

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 12:03:37 -0400

🔖📚 Read Let the Kids Get Weird: The Adult Problem With Children’s Books by Janet Manley (Literary Hub).

Mon, 17 Jul 2023 07:34:04 -0400

🔖📓 Read Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time by Ellen Samuels (Disability Studied Quarterly).

Fri, 07 Jul 2023 07:35:36 -0400

🔖🎭📚 Read It’s Getting Hard to Stage a School Play Without Political Drama by Michael Paulson (NYT, gift link) via Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter.

When I was in Europe reading censorship news from the US, I kept thinking, “I just want to fight censorship and make theatre.” Turns out these two things are related.

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 07:14:07 -0400

🔖 Read What Is A Third Place? (And Here’s Why You Should Have One) by Emily Torres (The Good Trade).

I’ve been thinking about third places, their role in fiction, what they look like online, & how they overlap with affinity spaces for a few days so it felt like serendipity when this hit my inbox.

Tue, 20 Jun 2023 06:52:28 -0400

🔖 Read Katy Simpson Smith on Writing a Southern Woman Louder Than Herself.

Writing, as a career, is inherently boat-rocking.

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 12:34:26 -0400

🔖📚💖 A couple of links about pleasure reading for your reading pleasure:

What Romance Novels Taught Me About Taking Pleasure More Seriously by Stephanie Fallon (The Good Trade)
Don’t Call Them Trash by Sophie Gilbert (The Atlantic)

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 10:02:46 -0400

🔖 Read A LETTER FROM THE NEW CORPORATE OWNERS OF HOOPER’S STORE (McSweeney’s).

This is hilarious and ends with a perfect button.

Mon, 05 Jun 2023 07:30:39 -0400

🔖 Some interesting links around “wholesome” as a word for things that restore us, rather than a conservative metric by which to judge people:

When Did ‘Wholesome’ Become a Gen Z Compliment? (NYT Gift Link)
Why Are We Craving “Wholesome” Things? (The Good Trade)
Wholesome Games 🎮

Sun, 04 Jun 2023 06:22:45 -0400

🔖📓 Read How Pew Research Center will report on generations moving forward.

I love some of these alternate ways of creating age groupings. I could especially imagine grouping people according to their age at the time of key historical events or technological innovations producing valuable insights.

Sat, 03 Jun 2023 23:27:35 -0400

🔖📓 Can ChatGPT Replace UX Researchers? An Empirical Analysis of Comment Classifications

This is an interesting study with implications for qualitative research beyond UX. Looks like the answer is, “It’s too soon to tell.”

Sun, 28 May 2023 10:43:16 -0400

🔖📚 Read This Is Dedicated To Anyone Who Ever Left - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Lyz Lenz.

Sun, 28 May 2023 10:05:35 -0400

🔖📚 Read “I think, like marriage, home is a fantasy” - Kelly McMaster interviewed by Amanda Montei

Here are all of my intellectual intentions and here is this adorable, smiling, chubby baby, swallowing it whole.

When writing real life, there is always going to be a connection between what is happening at the breakfast table and how you are showing up on the page.

Sat, 27 May 2023 10:32:36 -0400

🔖 Read Monkey House: Strange Reflections at the Singerie by Kate Zambreno (VQR).

Fri, 26 May 2023 07:49:39 -0400

🔖 Read The Winter Zoo by Kate Zambreno (The Yale Review).

For a few years when M. was a toddler, our family went to Knoxville - the place of my mother’s birth - for The Collective library conference. W. would present and M. and I would wander about town, exploring the best haunts and generally enjoying the adorable downtown and the home of the 1982 World’s Fair.

One of the places I took M. was Zoo Knoxville. We were there in mid-March so it was pretty much a winter zoo like Kate Zambreno talks about here, and our experiences there were very similar.

Thu, 25 May 2023 12:04:03 -0400

🔖 Read How to Scale Back, Even When It Seems Impossible.

Do you need to lose something else to find yourself? Katie Pryal writes about how she had to let so many things go to create space for herself to thrive.

Thu, 25 May 2023 07:43:47 -0400

🔖📝 Reading Revision can be fun. No, really. by Charlie Jane Anders.

…revision can actually be kind of exhilarating at times. Because instead of thinking of the revision process as fixing my garbage draft, I’ve started to think of it as unwrapping a series of presents that I wrapped for myself before.

Tue, 23 May 2023 01:20:19 -0400

🔖 Read The Healing Power of JavaScript.

❤️

Thu, 18 May 2023 20:20:16 -0400

🔖🌐 Read Webring History.

animated email gifs, web counters, scrolling and/or blinking text, midi background music that could not be turned off and the “under construction” images.

I’d forgotten about midi background music! This quote is basically a list of things that made the web feel fun for me. I’m going to work on recapturing that vibe, even if the tech looks different.

Wed, 17 May 2023 10:23:15 -0400

🔖 How Does Motherhood Impact Your Creativity? It’s Complicated vogue.com
Read: www.vogue.com
Vogue: Fashion, Beauty, Celebrity, Fashion Shows https://www.vogue.com/article/how-does-motherhood-impact-your-creativity

My inhibitions were methodically ripped to shreds by the pure chaotic energy of the small children and carers around me. I stopped caring about whether what I was doing made me feel silly, and that is a huge boon to anyone wanting to express themselves creatively.

Fri, 12 May 2023 12:18:57 -0400

🔖🎵 Read Patiently Holding the Sound: Gretchen Parlato on motherhood as a musical inspiration.

What a great interview.

Thu, 11 May 2023 21:24:53 -0400

🔖🌐 Read Bring Back Personal Blogging by Monique Judge (The Verge).

Sat, 06 May 2023 17:11:37 -0400

🔖📝 Read My Commitment to Wellness as a Lifelong Writer by Yolande House — Breathing Space Creative

I’ve learned that honouring my needs each and every day is a part of what loving myself looks like. When I finally learned how to love myself, I learned it’s not a goal with an end. Rather, it’s a process of committing and being true to myself each and every day, even when (and especially when) it’s hard.

Thu, 04 May 2023 15:34:52 -0400

🔖📚 Read BookTok encourages reading as an aesthetic and no one is safe from its gaze by Elena Cavender (Mashable).

Insightful piece about how limiting our reading to a particular aesthetic connects with our attention being commodified.

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 13:14:31 -0400

🔖📓 Read Automated transcription and some risks of machine interpretation.

Dr. Daniel Turner does a great job illuminating how large language models work and how we need to think about indigeneity and colonialism when choosing our transcription method.

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:51:49 -0400

🔖📚 Read Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men by Laura Miller (Slate).

The magnitude of an artist’s personal transgressions sometimes matters less than the nature of the attachment it disrupts.

Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"

Tue, 18 Apr 2023 04:11:55 -0400

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 03:35:53 -0400

🔖🎨 Read On growing alongside your artistic practice (The Creative Independent).

Mother-artist Bailey Elder talks about growing as an artist and being a mother. Elder is starting a blog to interview other artistic mothers!

Sat, 15 Apr 2023 02:14:11 -0400

🔖 Read Durham Officials Push for Affordable Housing in Southpoint Redevelopment.

Pleased with my city’s Planning Commission members.

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:21:21 -0400

🔖📝 Read When You Aren’t Sure Whether Your Writing Is ‘Important’ by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

You just need to find one person who understands and appreciates what you’re trying to do and why, and then you look for the next person…

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:14:19 -0400

🔖📝 Read Kids Will Still Read Banned Books by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

Chung doesn’t minimize the harm of book banning, but discusses how it’s impossible (and a bad idea) to try to control kids’ reading.

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 16:06:36 -0400

🔖📝 Read How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself? by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

Fri, 14 Apr 2023 15:49:44 -0400

🔖📝 Read On Pitching and Rejection by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

pitching is not just about figuring out what editors or publications may be interested in—figuring out what you are most interested in is vital.

Tue, 11 Apr 2023 00:32:48 -0400

🔖 Read Lois Before Clark: In Defense of the Superhero Girlfriend.

Dreamed I decided to get obsessed with Lois Lane, decided this meant I should actually get obsessed with her, knew this essay by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield was the place to start.

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 10:38:12 -0400

🔖📝 Read “I Hate the Idea of Healing” A Conversation with Maggie Smith

One thing that mothering has taught me is that I can’t be precious about where I work. When I work, I cannot demand uninterrupted space and time…If I got completely derailed every time somebody needed me, I’d never do anything.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 15:06:01 -0400

🔖📚 Read Ladies of Leisure.

This one bummed me out. I think it sells Dept. of Speculation short.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 14:50:33 -0400

🔖📚📝Read Is Parenthood the Enemy of Creative Work? by Kim Brooks (The Cut)

That’s one of the major things parenting is teaching me, the balance between letting go in writing and practicing craft, the balance between being ferocious with my imagination and rigorous in my practice. Shape and chaos. Learning to shape chaos.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 12:51:31 -0400

🔖📚 Read The books that help define motherhood – for mums everywhere to read

Is it ever possible to reclaim yourself without endangering your child?

I don’t know. Because for me it’s been more about reconstructing myself rather than reclaiming myself.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 10:02:33 -0400

🔖📚 Read Art or Babies.

you can make your art without being an art monster: You can do it as… an art mother.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 09:29:03 -0400

🔖📚 Read Why are we only talking about ‘mom books’ by white women? by Angela Garbes (The Cut).

I love Angela Garbes’s writing. This is another old one.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 09:16:29 -0400

🔖📚 Read The Stranger Guest: The Literature of Pregnancy and New Motherhood by Lily Gurton-Wachter (Los Angeles Review of Books)

Another old bookmark.

How will having a baby disrupt my sense of who I am, of my body, my understanding of life and death, my relation to the world and to my sense of independence, my experience of fear and hope and time, and the structure of my experience altogether? Dr. Spock is silent on these topics.

By the time a new mother has the time (or free hands) to write again, the most extreme experience is beginning to fade from her memory.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:55:52 -0400

🔖📚 In a Raft of New Books, Motherhood From (Almost) Every Angle by Parul Sehgal (The New York Times).

Recent books on motherhood, however, frequently and sometimes unwittingly, illustrate a different phenomenon: how motherhood dissolves the border of the self but shores up, often violently, the walls between classes of women.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:46:18 -0400

🔖📚 Read Maggie Nelson: Inflections Forever New by Ariel Lewiton (Guernica).

We’re all human beings with bodily needs living within a system. We don’t need to prove that we’re not a part of the fabric of the culture in order to want to change it.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 08:22:41 -0400

🔖📚 Read Why All the Books About Motherhood? by Laura Elkin (The Paris Review).

Another bookmark I’ve been sitting on for years.

These new books recast motherhood not as the reactionary choice, the choice made because it’s what’s socially expected, but as something hard won, intellectually demanding, a form of creative labor. Not something that takes you away from your work but something that is now both frame and canvas for it.

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 04:02:46 -0400

🔖📚 Read We Need to Talk About Whiteness in Motherhood Memoirs by Nancy Reddy (Electric Literature).

I bookmarked this 4 years ago & am only reading it now. Reddy points out admitting you’re struggling carries a different risk for moms of Color.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:50:48 -0400

🔖📝📚 Read The parent trap: can you be a good writer and a good parent? by Lara Feigel (The Guardian)

Feigel writes about motherly ambivalence.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:37:35 -0400

🔖 Read Writer Moms: Can We Do Deep Work While the Kids are Home? by Sara Bates.

Before we do… the practical things we need to do in order to create space for deep work, we need to cultivate the belief that our creativity is worth all that trouble.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 10:05:33 -0400

🔖📝📚 Read I left my baby to write this. How do artists balance creativity and the ache for their child? by Rhiannon Lucy Coslett (The Guardian).

Coslett has as many questions as answers and mentions a lot of books I’m keen to check out.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 09:50:34 -0400

🔖 Read How Writing and Motherhood Coexist for Author Taylor Harris by Ravynn K. Stringfield (Shondaland).

Great interview! I need to go track down Harris’s work.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 07:26:15 -0400

🔖 Read Rebecca Solnit on Women’s Work and the Myth of the Art Monster (Lithub).

I want to be an art monster like Grover: lovable and loving and imaginative.

Tue, 28 Mar 2023 07:02:38 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read The Mother, the Artist, and Me by Caroline Hagood (Elle).

This is a great essay about what can happen when we bring our kids into the work of art with us, when our kids become part of our creative community.

Wed, 22 Mar 2023 05:11:20 -0400

🔖 Read Should I learn coding as a second language? by Meghan O’Gieblyn (Wired).

the most celebrated historical revolutions (those initiated, that is, by humans) were the result of mass literacy combined with technological innovation.

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 16:11:52 -0400

🔖 Read

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/03/01/moving-slowly-and-fixing-things-we-should-not-rush-headlong-into-using-generative-ai-in-classrooms/ blogs.lse.ac.uk
Read: blogs.lse.ac.uk
blogs.lse.ac.uk https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2023/03/01/moving-slowly-and-fixing-things-we-should-not-rush-headlong-into-using-generative-ai-in-classrooms/

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 15:57:04 -0400

🔖 Read

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story wired.com
Read: www.wired.com
Wired.com https://www.wired.com/2013/04/hypertext/

Tue, 21 Mar 2023 06:45:28 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read

A Beginner’s Guide to Writing IP in Publishing — ERIC SMITH ericsmithrocks.com
Read: www.ericsmithrocks.com
ericsmithrocks.com https://www.ericsmithrocks.com/blog/2023/3/9/a-beginners-guide-to-writing-ip-intellectual-property-in-publishing

Awesome blog post from Eric Smith full of helpful information.

Being active in the spaces you want to write about, helps build your profile and helps get you seen.

Friends, I cannot stress the importance of community in the bookish and writerly space.

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 22:28:23 -0400

🔖 Read Understanding Blogs by Tracy Durnell.

An excellent exploration of what makes blogging its own medium.

Mon, 27 Feb 2023 10:32:38 -0400

🔖 Read Sci-Fi Publishers Are Bracing for an AI Battle by Elizabeth Minkel (Wired).

I’m interested to see how this shakes out.

Fri, 24 Feb 2023 07:45:08 -0400

🔖 Read The Battle for the Soul of Buy Nothing by Vauhina Vara (Wired).

This is an excellent long read. There are a lot of good questions here. How can we scale non-capitalist initiatives in a capitalist world? How can we acknowledge volunteer labor in that scaling? How can we support local action without resorting to geographic discrimination?

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 08:39:49 -0400

🔖📝 Read IF YOU LOVE WRITING, YOU SHOULD RELISH REJECTION.

This is a really helpful piece that reframes rejection as the water writers swim in.

Mon, 20 Feb 2023 08:58:55 -0400

🔖🎓 Read All my classes suddenly became AI classes.

I love the assignment here that asks students to work with ChatGPT as if it were a student and they were a teacher coaching it to get better writing out of it.

Thu, 16 Feb 2023 03:51:13 -0400

🔖📝 Read Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing by Anthony Ocampo, at the recommendation of Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield.

This is one of the reasons I want to study creative nonfiction, to dig into public communication of the social sciences.

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 13:43:10 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read Mess Up Your Good, Premium, Luxury Notebooks.

Yes! Great advice from Anna Havron.

Mon, 13 Feb 2023 03:43:43 -0400

🔖 Read Antisemitic text was projected onto the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. 💔

Fri, 10 Feb 2023 06:39:48 -0400

🔖 📝 Joanna Penn discusses her use of AI to help her write a short story. This could be a valuable model for educators to use to teach students how to use these tools ethically and for effective writing.

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 04:59:43 -0400

🔖 Read The Summer-Camp Feeding Frenzy Has Already Begun.

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 03:35:06 -0400

🔖 Read Theater never recovered from COVID — and now change is no longer a choice.

…the people who live in the shadow of the refinery often don’t have the bandwidth to think about attending an experimental physical theater show on a bus.

“The problems in these communities – where am I going to live? Do I have enough food? – are so large, that it’s hard to even talk to people about any of the environmental injustices,” Cummings said.

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 04:55:00 -0400

🔖 Read THE JEDI ACADEMY WILL NO LONGER TEACH ANAKIN SKYWALKER’S MASSACRE OF THE YOUNGLINGS.

A+ geek satire.

Tue, 07 Feb 2023 19:20:17 -0400

🔖 Read The Sad Clown Joke That Became a Beloved Meme.

My favorite take on Pagliacci is Rhett Miller’s theme song for the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression.

Mon, 06 Feb 2023 19:44:21 -0400

🔖 A swirling soup of thoughts in my head about self-presentation after reading these posts:

The personal brand paradox - Debbie Millman
Build a reputation instead of a personal brand - Tracy Durnell
The power of writing your story down - Jas Hothi

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 22:33:23 -0400

🔖 Read Is My Child Eating Enough Pirate’s Booty?

Parenting comedy is a microgenre that always lands with me.

Sat, 04 Feb 2023 19:15:35 -0400

🔖 Read “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.”

Took me a little while to get into the format of this short story but in the end I loved it. Big The Hazards of Love vibes.

Thu, 02 Feb 2023 11:21:38 -0400

🔖 Read Interview with Kelly J. Baker: “I can’t push through when I’m stuck.”

“My writing routine became write frantically whenever I had a chance or had the energy to do so.” Dr. Baker knows.

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 18:07:14 -0400

🔖 Read WE’VE LOST THE PLOT by Megan Garber (The Atlantic). “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”

Chilling. What now?

Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:10:33 -0400

🔖📺🎮 Read Television Is Better Without Video Games and Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic).

Maybe Ian Bogost should stop playing video games.

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:29:56 -0400

🔖 Read The online free speech debate is raging in fan fiction, too by Elizabeth Minkel.

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 13:21:32 -0400

🔖 Read The Fannish Potlatch: Creation of Status Within the Fan Community by Rachael Sabotini (Fanfic Symposium) via Lori Morimoto’s Introduction to Media Fan Studies.

How has the fandom gift economy changed since this was written in 1999?

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:29:06 -0400

🔖📺👱‍♀️ Read Sarah Michelle Gellar Returns to Fighting Form: “I’ve Earned the Right to Stand Where I Am”.

“Was it an ideal working situation? Absolutely not. But it’s OK to love Buffy for what we created because I think it’s pretty spectacular.”

Thu, 12 Jan 2023 15:26:52 -0400

🔖 Back on my dark academia bullshit thanks to WEDNESDAY (the show is DA, the character is goth) and so I read this interview with Donna Tartt.

Sun, 08 Jan 2023 05:37:43 -0400

🔖 Read How Wednesday Addams Birthed a Generation of Cynics by Emily Alford (Longreads).

This is my favorite Wednesday think piece so far.

Ricci’s Wednesday was devious, quietly furious, and most importantly, content to be so.

Fri, 06 Jan 2023 20:31:01 -0400

🔖 Read All in Good Fun: How Fanfiction Reignited My Passion for Writing by Briana Lawrence, linked in this week’s The Rec Center

The first time I started working on a fic in the past couple of years, I did it in a spiral notebook.

Sat, 24 Dec 2022 20:49:29 -0400

🔖📚 Read …and a partridge in a pear tree (19913 words) by strangehunger.

This is a beautiful and perfect Gideon the Ninth mall employee AU. Gideon works at Spencer Gifts. Harrow works at Hot Topic. And my boy Palamedes works at B&N, of course.

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 12:02:38 -0400

🔖📝 Read Finding the Secret Door Into Your Novel.

When a novel is wick, it has a life about it.

(Have we talked about how I married Dickon, Internet? Because I did.)

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 01:55:15 -0400

🔖📺 Read Wednesday Forgets Why We Fell in Love With the Addams Family.

“The Addams Family films were about family being a haven of pure acceptance and unquestioning love.”

This is a perfect articulation of something I’ve known in my heart since 1991.

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 13:31:34 -0400

🔖 Read

A year of new avenues robinsloan.com
Robin Sloan https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/new-avenues/

I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.

Yes! This! (hat-tip to Austin Kleon)

Wed, 14 Dec 2022 03:48:21 -0400

🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).

Tue, 13 Dec 2022 09:12:16 -0400

🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3

“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.

Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”

Mon, 12 Dec 2022 18:22:44 -0400

🔖💀 Read If You Want to Give Something Back to Nature, Give Your Body by Caitlin Doughty (New York Times Gift Link).

I hope we get human composting in NC eventually. For now, we can donate ourselves to Western Carolina’s body farm.

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 21:03:00 -0400

🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).

“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 03:32:00 -0400

🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.

I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.

Sat, 10 Dec 2022 03:23:00 -0400

🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).

🖤

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 15:39:00 -0400

🔖 Read Haunted by the Ghost of 2019, Helena Fitzgerald

“A return to 2019 is an attempt to erase all of the losses that happened between then and now, but those losses, like the monster in a horror movie, will devour us if we refuse to face them.”

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 08:48:00 -0400

🔖 Read How’d That Thing Go? by Kate McKean.

“I don’t want a schedule, I want a sandbox. I want a list of things that need to be done and a container of time to do them, and then I get to pick.”

Yes! Life as sandbox game! I needed this.

Sat, 03 Dec 2022 03:46:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read Playing ‘Tunic’ Reminds Me How to Approach Sickness and Recovery by Martin Cahill (Catapult).

Tue, 29 Nov 2022 21:45:00 -0400

🔖 Read ‘Y’all,’ that most Southern of Southernisms, is going mainstream – and it’s about time by David B. Parker (The Conversation), h/t @benwerd.

As my Latin teacher said when teaching us the 2nd person plural, “y’all” is a legitimate contraction.

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 22:39:00 -0400

🔖 Read 1 in 4 hiring managers say they are less likely to move forward with Jewish applicants (ResumeBuilder), h/t @benwerd.

The convenience sampling used here is a significant limitation but these are still distressing survey results.

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 11:57:00 -0400

🔖 Read Taking on the Feminine Labor of Creating Holiday Magic by Sarah Hunter Simanson (Catapult).

This year will be the first Christmas that my mom has leukemia, that she can’t walk. I hope we will have more Christmases with her. I think her household is in for an awakening about this form of labor. In our household, everyone is responsible for a little of the holiday magic - we decorate together and bake together. I’m hoping it builds a connection for our son while it also makes the labor visible and reduces my holiday stress.

Mon, 28 Nov 2022 11:36:00 -0400

🔖 Read PSA: Do Not Use Services That Hate The Internet by Jamie Zawinski. (h/t @manton)

At the moment, if I can’t do it in a browser, I’m not doing it. Which is why my Hive account is almost empty and I haven’t joined Post.

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 09:16:00 -0400

🔖🌲 Read On Mother Trees: What Old-Growth Trees Taught Me About Parenting by Kaitlyn Teer (Catapult).

A gorgeous essay in conversation with The Giving Tree, How to Do Nothing, the work of Suzanne Simard, and climate change. Read it.

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 08:07:00 -0400

🔖🍿 Read The Mom in ‘Home Alone’ Is a Messy and Magnificent Model of Motherhood.

It’s easy to forget how hard Kate McAllister works to make sure her kid is okay. I probably need to watch Home Alone again. It’s been decades.

Thu, 24 Nov 2022 07:58:00 -0400

🔖📝♿ Read As a Disabled Writer, I Am a Rich Innovator by [Sarah Fawn Montgomery](www.sarahfawnmontgomery.com/l (Catapult).

This is my new favorite essay about being a disabled writer. I love it so much. It reminds me that the way I work is a way that gets work done.

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 08:52:00 -0400

🔖 Read What is Jewish Spirituality?

Mystics have their experiences, but what matters is what they learn from them…

Tue, 22 Nov 2022 08:07:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Eight Genders in the Talmud.

Super interesting discussion of how halakhah handles things that don’t fit a binary.

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 12:19:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read As a Queer Author, I Thought I Had to Come Out Before My Books Did.

Excellent piece about the dangers of outing anyone before they’re ready. Nods to Becky Albertalli & Kit Connor, who both experienced this. 💔

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 08:39:00 -0400

🔖 How to Write a Novel (Or Anything, Really) with ADHD

Lots of helpful ideas for people who, like myself, struggle to finish writing long things.

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 08:23:00 -0400

🔖 Read Instagram Makes Parents Feel More Clueless Than We Really Are by Elisabeth Sherman (Catapult).

Great piece. Every time I think I’m parenting M wrong, if I just listen to him & follow my intuition, I’ll beat anything influencers can tell me.

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 14:50:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read How to Finish.

Should I force myself to Make New Work or should I let the blank pages stay blank and sharpen pages I’ve already made? Should I go run or walk and shake the fog out? Could the fog be interesting, if I try not to have too much control? Should I read or go look at art or ride the subway back and forth with a notebook?

This is all writing.

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 14:46:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read This Machine Will Make You Write More: A Product Recommendation with a Twist.

I covet the Alphasmart/Freewrite, but I don’t think it’s the tool for me. Gonna try & figure out what motivates me.

Tue, 08 Nov 2022 13:44:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read “You Make the Space, You Fight for the Space”

“…every draft after the first draft for me is a kind of process of stripping away the stuff that I had to write for myself & happening upon the stuff that I want to offer to other people.”

“I don’t have the sort of life where I can write every day and that’s fine.”

“…so much of writing is not writing but you have to inhabit that not writing space as a writer and not as a mother or a teacher or the 3,000 other things you are.”

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 20:40:37 -0400

🔖📚 Read The Art of Reading While Feeding (with a Newborn).

I love articles about how other people enjoy things that aren’t necessarily parenting-related as they parent. Good stuff here.

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 14:22:39 -0400

🔖📝 Read Writing Advice Isn’t Made for Bodies In Pain.

Too many things I want to quote here, so if the headline appeals you should just go read the whole thing.

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 13:09:07 -0400

🔖📺 Read ‘Bad Sisters’ Captures the Intensity of Having and Being a Sister

Ooh. When I’m ready for intense TV I might try this.

“Sisterhood was a world unto itself… together, we made bewildering terrain familiar.”

Mon, 07 Nov 2022 12:21:15 -0400

🔖 Read Emma Thompson’s Third Act.

I’ve always loved Emma Thompson, envisioned her as a kindred spirit, a screen aunt like Carrie Fisher is a screen mom. This profile made me love her even more.

“[When I act] I’m taking a holiday from myself.”

Fri, 04 Nov 2022 09:40:02 -0400

🔖 Read #AcademicTwitter Will Endure—for Now.

If you’re at an institution that provides hosted blogging, you could microblog there, pipe the feed into micro.blog, & then syndicate to Twitter. Let me know if a tutorial for this would be helpful.

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 10:47:55 -0400

🔖 Read Stuart Hall and the Rise of Cultural Studies | The New Yorker.

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 02:46:20 -0400

🔖 Read Editorial policies, “public domain,” and acafandom.

the importance of fans as both human subjects and creators… can be a discreet, yet ever-present and deeply internalized, part of [the acafan’s] methodology.

Fri, 28 Oct 2022 02:27:44 -0400

🔖Read Attention Economy, Layered Publics, and Research Ethics Kristina Busse / University of South Alabama – Flow

The dilemma that online researchers have to confront is how to respect a user’s or group’s perceived privacy while simultaneously not ignoring their voices.

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 20:27:45 -0400

🔖 Read SCMS 2011 Workshop: Acafandom and the Future of Fan Studies – transform

We need to ask ourselves how identifying as an aca-fan impacts the scholarship we produce, and if we have given our fan identifications too much influence over academic ones.

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 19:50:08 -0400

🔖 Read Post-SCMS musings on the value of the word acafan – transform

I would argue that aca/fan is most vitally understood as a contextual position that we bring to our work as well as to our investment in media texts and/or their communities.

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 18:05:33 -0400

🔖 Read Against Aca-Fandom | Ian Bogost.

Specialty humanities conferences are just fan conventions with more strangely-dressed attendees.

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 18:01:50 -0400

🔖 Read When is a Publication Not a Publication? | Just TV.

The thing that “counts” as a line on a CV is slow-moving and comparatively hard to access, while that which clearly is getting broadly read and cited is viewed as an optional hobby.

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 17:56:27 -0400

🔖 Read On Disliking Mad Men | Just TV.

It’s worth considering the role of fandom within media scholarship, not as a separate object of analysis… but as a structuring facet of academic research.

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:11:58 -0400

🔖 Everyone Wants to Be a Hot, Anxious Girl on Twitter

I am both fascinated and terrified by the phrase “the girl in the machine.”

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:00:55 -0400

🔖 NC Mutual Will Cease Operations This Month

This is heartbreaking and I’m ashamed I didn’t follow this story earlier.

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 13:18:57 -0400

🔖 Read Howl’s Moving Castle should be the model for every book-to-film adaptation (Polygon) by Petrana Radulovic

Thu, 18 Aug 2022 07:24:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Big Bang Didn’t Happen.

I know very little about cosmology, but this makes some good points about the limits of academic funding and publishing and the value of public science communication.

Sat, 13 Aug 2022 12:47:00 -0400

🔖 Read A CRITIQUE OF DARK ACADEMIA: THE ROMANTICIZATION OF OVERWORK.

Wearing tweed and wandering old bookshops is fine. Denying yourself sleep over an essay that isn’t due for days is not.

Say it with me: school should not take priority over your mental health. School should not take priority over your physical health. School should not take priority over your relationships.

If Einstein could take a nap, so can you.

Fri, 12 Aug 2022 18:33:00 -0400

🔖 Read Wear Me This: Dark Academia could be the answer to the very problem it romanticizes.

I would venture that slipping on a tailored button-up and sitting in the library because Aesthetics Wiki told you “studying and reading” are “activities” of Dark Academia could be the impetus for a powerful academic pursuit or useful social connection.

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 10:43:00 -0400

🔖 Read THE SCHOLARSHIP OF SEXY PRIVILEGE: WHY DO I LOVE DARK ACADEMIA BOOKS?

This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries. This ‘dark academia’ reminds me not to take things so seriously, to see the rot in the foundations of an institution I can’t stay away from, and build my own school in defiance.

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 19:30:00 -0400

🔖 Read What’s Dark about Dark Academia

I think the real power of dark academia is the way it compresses—and thus preserves—humanistic study at a time when the humanities are under constant threat… Creating and emulating dark academia content offers students a way to fantasize about a world in which higher education isn’t instrumentalized, but rather self-sustaining and inherently valuable.

An aesthetic that evokes the academy is more flexible, more malleable, than the academy itself.

But if dark academia commodifies education, they learned how from the corporate university itself. Their commodification as style has far less insidious ends than the university’s spreadsheets of departmental deliverables.

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 17:11:39 -0400

🔖 📺 Celia Rose Gooding, who does an amazing job playing Cadet Nyota Uhura on Strange New Worlds, wrote a beautiful guest column for The Hollywood Reporter on Nichelle Nichols’s legacy. 🖖

Fri, 29 Jul 2022 05:07:00 -0400

🔖 Read Rapport or Respect? (Helen Kara).

Dr. Kara makes excellent points about how research can seem friendly but be extractive. This is why I prefer either to do insider research or to maintain relationships after the study.

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 18:04:07 -0400

🔖 Read ‘Lost’ Fans Gave Me a Safe Place on the Internet. Is Such Fandom Possible Now? (Catapult) by Anna Myers

Fri, 15 Jul 2022 17:52:16 -0400

🔖 Read Violence Made Me Feel Like I’d Left My Body. Physical Theater Helped Me Return by Lindsey Trout Hughes 🎭

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 07:27:32 -0400

🔖📝 Read On Writing with Chronic Migraines (Catapult) by Yuvi Zalkow.

I really appreciate Zalkow’s metaphors for pain and tiered system for deciding what work to do. This may inspire me to create my own spreadsheet of task levels.

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 06:08:05 -0400

🔖 Read Black Women in Fantasy Saved Me Where Academia Failed (Catapult by Ravynn K. Stringfield.

I always love reading what Dr. Stringfield has to say. This is, in a way, a scholar’s origin story, and I love it.

Wed, 13 Jul 2022 05:48:00 -0400

🔖 Read Video Games Are for Everyone—And That Should Include Disabled People (Catapult) by Allyssa Capri.

Great discussion of where the gaming landscape is with respect to accessibility, plus resources for disabled gamers, and it ends on a positive note.

Mon, 04 Jul 2022 06:23:40 -0400

🔖 Ben Werdmüller has a different but related, equally valuable, set of insights on what we should be thinking about this Independence Day. 🇺🇸

Tue, 28 Jun 2022 11:11:12 -0400

🔖 A solution to writer’s block: Transcribe yourself (Austin Kleon)

This is a brilliant piece of advice. The 1000+ words of my post about sweetweird and hopepunk flowed out of me beautifully and easily. I use the Otter.ai app on my phone for this.

Fri, 24 Jun 2022 12:51:17 -0400

Anti-Racism Daily offers actions to take in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 14:59:42 -0400

🔖 Nathanial White writes Disturbing the Comfortable: On Writing Disability in Science Fiction. I freewrote 1100 words today on reading disability in Star Trek. I think Piers Anthony’s Killobyte might be good to put in conversation with White’s novella.

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 10:03:41 -0400

🔖 The Bullet Journal blog has a great interview with Tiago Forte, author of Building a Second Brain, which comes out today. I hope to get a full review up soon. Lots of good stuff in this book, will be revelatory for some & leveling up for others. 📚

Wed, 15 Jun 2022 08:21:56 -0400

🔖 Today’s #1000WordsOfSummer letter is all about letting writing be fun and silly. I needed to read this today. Maybe you do, too. 📝

Sun, 12 Jun 2022 09:03:28 -0400

🔖 Rebecca Schuman’s (@pankisseskafka) advice on being productive with long COVID is sound for anyone with chronic illness or many other disabilities. As I’m in the middle of some kind of flare due to stress, I’m going to operate in Safe Mode.

Thu, 19 May 2022 22:20:06 -0400

🔖 Read Durham GOP’s “Better Board, Better Schools” candidate slate is soundly defeated.

What a relief.

🔖🖖📺 In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed)(Trek News) by Bill Smith

Wed, 18 May 2022 11:54:54 -0400

In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed) (Trek News) by Bill Smith:

I agree with Smith’s assessment of Discovery. Each season, the stakes are bigger. In Season 4, they were literally extragalactic. Once you’ve broken the galactic barrier and made first contact with a species living beyond it, where else is there to go?

The race to solve the puzzle box is exhausting. The hyperfocus on serialization leads to a lot of intriguing threads being introduced and tied off more quickly than I would like. For example, in Seasons 3 and 4 we saw what looked like they were going to be mental health crises for Detmer (PTSD from the jump into the future), Tilly (depression related to existential crisis), and Culber (burnout). In Detmer’s case, I don’t recall being shown the road to recovery at all. Tilly seemed to have two episodes of feeling bad that were magically fixed by deciding to become an instructor. And Culber I guess just really needed a vacation?

I really enjoy Discovery. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wish there were more of it so we would have time to devote a whole episode to each of these characters.

I love Michael Burnham. But I also love so much of the rest of her crew. TNG started with a focus on the bridge crew and especially Picard, but opened up to give us time to get to know O’Brien, Barclay, and more. I wish Discovery had the breathing room to do the same.

I especially agree with Smith’s point here:

One of the things that Star Trek: Discovery did exceedingly well in Season 4 was First Contact with Species 10-C, the originators of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

It was its own challenge in unlocking the mystery of the DMA and I thought that aspect was something that the show did really well. It took this concept of seeking out new life and new civilizations and put a 32nd-century spin on it.

Discovery really leaned into that first contact situation hard and it worked. For 56 years, Star Trek has taught us that the unknown isn’t always something to be feared, but we should always strive to understand. There isn’t always a “big bad villain” when the puzzle is assembled or, sometimes, we find out that we are the villain however unintentionally.

These are the types of stories that have always found their way into Star Trek—from Gene Roddenberry’s first script right up to today’s iterations of the franchise. These are Trek’s roots and when Discovery revisits them, it works brilliantly.

Watching everyone work together to make first contact with the 10-C was exhilarating. It had all the delight of Picard figuring out the speech patterns in “Darmok” with an added bonus of getting to see a bunch of different people work together, leveraging each of their specialties to shine. This is foundational Trek stuff and I love when Discovery puts a spin on it.

I hope the writers will go a little softer in Discovery Season 5, giving it room to breathe. I look forward to seeing what they do.

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book

Wed, 18 May 2022 04:01:00 -0400

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book (Greg McVerry)

McVerry generously summarizes his workflow:

Document impetus of thought (often after the fact)

Collect initial bookmarks
Ask in networks, bookmark your queries
Collect research, and block quotes or use social annotations
Begin to formulate thoughts in random blog posts
Start to draft the long form thought
Publish an article on my Domain.

Tue, 17 May 2022 12:49:06 -0400

🔖 Read When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life (The Atlantic) by Cindy Lamothe

“she said she often distrusts that other people will take care of things. ‘That’s why I tend to step up and do it myself.’”

Sun, 15 May 2022 10:32:29 -0400

🔖 Read Why I Blog Part 1 and Part 2 (Kyle Mathews).

Sat, 14 May 2022 20:02:06 -0400

🔖💻 Read You’re Not Blogging, My Friend. (Tom Critchlow).

Sat, 14 May 2022 19:57:00 -0400

🔖💻 Read Incrementally correct personal websites (Brian Lovin).

Sat, 14 May 2022 13:17:23 -0400

🔖💻 Read envisioning my homepage as an online therapeutic space (Winnie Lim).

Sat, 14 May 2022 13:13:00 -0400

🔖💻 Read revisiting architectural blogging (Alan Jacobs).

Sat, 14 May 2022 13:07:00 -0400

🔖💻 Read Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick (Tom Critchlow).

I like this homesteading metaphor. Neither gardens nor streams quite work for what I do with my personal site. This is closer.

Sat, 14 May 2022 12:10:00 -0400

🔖💻 Read Why blog? (Chuck Grimmett).

Well said. These are my reasons, too.

Fri, 13 May 2022 19:42:16 -0400

🔖

Raising Us Wrecked Her Career But My Mom’s Thriving In Her Second Act romper.com
Read: www.romper.com
romper.com https://www.romper.com/life/my-mother-artist-second-act

My mom was just hitting her second act stride when leukemia knocked her down. I hope that as the treatment side effects are better managed, she’ll be able to get back into it.

Fri, 13 May 2022 07:07:00 -0400

🔖📚

Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion? | The New Yorker newyorker.com
Read: www.newyorker.com
newyorker.com https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/can-motherhood-be-a-mode-of-rebellion

An amazing essay in conversation with Angela Garbes’s new book, Essential Labor.

a person can get paid more to sit in front of her computer and send a bunch of e-mails than she can to do a job so crucial and difficult that it seems objectively holy: to clean excrement off a body, to hold a person while they are crying, to cherish them because of and not despite their vulnerability.

Her husband’s job provided health insurance and regular paychecks; Garbes writes that it “may take me a lifetime to undo the false notion that my work is somehow less valuable than his.”

It feels shameful to admit that I don’t have the desire to hustle up that same ladder.

Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.

parenting toward a more just world requires more than diverse baby dolls and platitudes about equality.

She quotes the writer Carvell Wallace, who, after the 2016 election, told his children, “One of the most important questions you have to answer for yourself is this: Do I believe in loving everyone? Or do I only believe in loving myself and my people?”

How can mothering be a way that we resist and combat the loneliness, the feeling of being burdened by our caring?

motherhood has also granted me a chance to see what my life is like when I reorganize it around care and interdependence in a way that stretches far beyond my daughter.

Fri, 13 May 2022 06:40:00 -0400

🔖📚

“This is the Book I’m Meant to Write Right Now” sarafredman.substack.com
Read: sarafredman.substack.com
sarafredman.substack.com https://sarafredman.substack.com/p/this-is-the-book-im-meant-to-write?r=2i5w&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

This interview is huge. Life-alteringly huge.

Angela Garbes, who usually line edits as she writes:

I can’t revise an idea, no matter how good it is, in my brain. I can’t revise it if I don’t write it down.

Interviewer Sara Fredman says:

I personally feel torn between feeling like motherhood is the most significant thing I do and that I’ll ever do in my life and also feeling like that’s a trap of some sort.

Fri, 13 May 2022 06:15:00 -0400

🔖📚

Angela Garbes Is Reclaiming Realistic Motherhood thecut.com
Read: www.thecut.com
thecut.com https://www.thecut.com/2022/05/angela-garbes-essential-labor-interview.html

🔖 You should read Josh Radnor's Museletter.

Wed, 11 May 2022 09:23:04 -0400

Josh Radnor writes a beautiful newsletter. It always feels like a gift. Here are some gems from the latest issue - italics are emphasis from the original, bold are mine.

There are no unwounded people. Wounding and trauma are features and facts of being a human being.

Why is it that I’m convinced my life should be linear and predictable, devoid of obstacle, conflict, and challenge, the very elements that make a story engaging and worth telling? Don’t I want to live a great story?

Nothing is the heaven or hell I want to make it out to be.

Wed, 11 May 2022 08:19:56 -0400

🔖📚 Kate McKean writes in today’s Agents and Books about professional jealousy. Her advice applies to academics, too, and probably any field. “No one is being successful AT me.”

Fri, 06 May 2022 06:39:27 -0400

🔖📚 Read Cozy Flash: The Cat and the Conerian.

Adorable. Cozy fantasy is my current genre of choice.

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 13:14:25 -0400

🔖 Micro.blog is one my favorite places on the Internet, and Jean MacDonald’s article A Guide to Micro.blog For People Who Have A Love/Hate Relationship With Twitter is a good introduction.

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 16:14:14 -0400

🔖 Read Review: A riveting biographer — and mother — works to solve ‘the mind-baby problem’.

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 14:22:31 -0400

🔖 Read Cranking.

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 14:13:59 -0400

🔖 Read The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done.

I’ve been thinking a lot about personal productivity, what it’s good for and what it isn’t. This article is about a year and a half old now but it points in a direction of collective solutions.

Thu, 21 Apr 2022 10:43:53 -0400

🔖 Read Who Is Steven Hotdog? Or, Untangling the “Braided Essay” |.

What’s Steven Hotdog to me, or I to Steven Hotdog, that I should weep for him?

Ever since I learned about the Steven Hotdog essay I have loved this descriptor. Jess Zimmerman is one of my favorite writers.

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 19:28:26 -0400

🔖 Read 11 Bookish Accessories to Make Reading More Accessible.

I love pieces like this. Getting a book holder changed my reading life.

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 10:09:37 -0400

🔖 Read Should you ever NOT listen to user feedback?.

I’m exploring the possibility of a career in UX research & reading this article showed me that it’s definitely an area I could get into.

Wed, 20 Apr 2022 04:12:58 -0400

🔖Read Being a Public Librarian Can Be Dangerous Work, Why Don’t We Acknowledge That? - Electric Literature

Libraries are resolutely radical institutions. They are free to use and open to the public, spaces that demand nothing from you to enter and nothing for you to stay. No exchange of money occurs between library user and library, save for overdue book fees, which are becoming more and more obsolete. Libraries are sanctuaries for the mind, body, and spirit. They are repositories of language, literature, community care, and human growth. And they are also places of objectification, racism, sexual assault, and other human atrocities. They are embodiments of our history and culture, for better, and also for worse.

Fri, 15 Apr 2022 14:21:25 -0400

🔖🎵🎭🍿 Read Judas Christ Superstar: Easter thoughts on being just (Reader) by Katie Prout.

This piece is excellent. JCS is an extremely important show to my family as well. I have a lot more thoughts about it and if I feel up to it, I’ll write them up later.

Wed, 13 Apr 2022 19:43:00 -0400

🔖 Read Projects: The Alastair Method.

Alastair Johnston has created a Kanban-like tracking system for the Bullet Journal that I may modify for use as an analog writing audit/pipeline.

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 14:19:08 -0400

🔖 Read ecosystem theory: how to reframe the “i do this or i do that” binary (Thrive PhD) by Katy Peplin

Such a helpful perspective.

Sun, 10 Apr 2022 08:26:34 -0400

🔖 Read Plan to rewrite NC teacher licensing could also raise pay, but it’s too early to say

Educators, what do you think? I’m not sure about the options for evaluation, but I like the idea of teacher leaders getting paid for their leadership work.

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:28:00 -0400

🔖 Read Dirty hands do all the thinking in LXD (LXD.org) by Patrick van der Bogt.

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 11:23:00 -0400

🔖 Read The incredible power of paper prototyping (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 10:43:00 -0400

🔖 Read Learning Experience Design vs Instructional Design (LXD.org) by Niels Floor.

Sat, 09 Apr 2022 09:08:00 -0400

🔖 Read Four Ingredients for a Memorable Learning Experience (LXD.org) by Rodrigo J. Gallego

Studying up on Learning Experience Design & Research. Feeling it out for a potential career pivot in 2024.

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:28:30 -0400

🔖 Read How to Use Evernote for Your Creative Workflow.

A couple key quotes:

Start acting like every idea you come across or come up with has the potential for brilliance, and that potential is more likely to be realized.

…don’t pursue goals; instead create systems that encourage attractors to emerge on their own.

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:26:19 -0400

🔖 Read The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps.

Mon, 28 Mar 2022 22:25:42 -0400

🔖 Read One-Touch to Inbox Zero: How I Spend 17 Minutes Per Day on Email.

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 10:04:31 -0400

🔖🎭 Read Having a Child Meant Imagining a New Way to Make Theater (Catapult) by Lindsey Trout Hughes.

This resonated with me more than anything else I’ve read recently.

“I wanted not abandonment but expansion.”

Fri, 25 Mar 2022 09:10:50 -0400

🔖🎵 Read “The Queerest of the Queer”: Listening to Garbage in the Nineties (Catapult) by Niko Stratis.

I enjoy Garbage so much and I appreciate this meditation on what Shirley Manson signifies about gender.

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 17:51:46 -0400

🔖 Read I Gained 70 Pounds During COVID. Here’s What Happened On My First Day Back In The Office. (HuffPost) by Emily McCombs

A good read; not nearly as dramatic as the headline makes it sound.

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 10:29:00 -0400

🔖♿ Read Disability Status Shouldn’t Have a Hierarchy (Catapult) by s. e. smith.

Excellent column illuminating the challenges in and importance of recognizing disability as a spectrum of experiences.

Thu, 24 Mar 2022 07:49:53 -0400

🔖📚 Read After the Green Ribbon (Catapult) by A. E. Osworth

The Green Ribbon is a favorite of mine. I love Osworth’s discussion of how it marks gender and symbolizes vulnerability. I want a world where masculinity embraces vulnerability.

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 19:11:38 -0400

🔖 Read My Mother Has Terminal Cancer, and I Can’t Seem to Stop Buying Sweaters (Catapult) by Rachel Vorona Cote

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 18:56:00 -0400

🔖 Read What Tarot Taught Me About the Stories We Tell (Catapult) by Mishka Hoosen

CW: Racism, rape

A beautiful meditation on one person’s relationship with the Tarot. My practice has fallen aside lately.

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 09:45:49 -0400

🔖 Read Teachers Are Told to Ignore Their Bodies, But Chronic Pain Made Me Listen to Mine (Catapult) by Chiara di Lello

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 08:55:27 -0400

🔖 Read The World Doesn’t Bend for Disabled Kids (or Disabled Parents) (Catapult) by Katie Rose Pryal

It breaks my heart when adults won’t figure out how to work with the kids in their lives who don’t conform.

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 06:04:00 -0400

🔖 Read twisty little passages (Catapult) by Jess Zimmerman.

A beautiful, heartbreaking short story told in the form of a text adventure.

Wed, 23 Mar 2022 05:09:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Coronavirus’s Next Move (The Atlantic) by Katherine J. Wu.

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 19:46:36 -0400

🔖 Read The Girlboss Has Left the Building.

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 19:29:59 -0400

🔖📺 Read The Comedies That Understand What Peak Scammer TV Does Not.

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 11:29:58 -0400

🔖Read The Ukraine Crisis Briefly Put America’s Culture War in Perspective.

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 09:46:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read Inside the fight to save video game history.

Great intro to the copyright issues at play in the conflict between game companies and museums & libraries over providing access to old games.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 12:38:13 -0400

🔖 Read COVID Won’t End Up Like the Flu. It Will Be Like Smoking.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 12:30:39 -0400

🔖📚 Read “The Invisible Kingdom” Shines a Light on Women’s Chronic Pain.

Another great interview with Meghan O’Rourke. Here are some quotes that stood out for me this time:

I used to say to one of my doctors that I didn’t care that I was in pain. The thing that undid me was the brain fog and the fatigue, because they subsumed my entire being. They washed away any effort of will that I might have. And so they made it impossible for me to write.

This is so true for me. I can tolerate a lot of physical pain. I didn’t know how much until with health coaching, hard work, and a good doctor I started to feel better. But I couldn’t, still can’t, push through fatigue and brain fog.

[With invisible illness] there’s no one coming to your bedside, there’s no meal chain organized.

I didn’t think about this just now but I have absolutely seen this play out with my mom. She’s been dealing with autoimmune disease for about 30 years. I don’t think she or my dad felt it was reasonable to ask for help with that, and so often when anyone in our family has talked about it, we’ve been met with advice about going gluten-free, doing acupuncture, meditating… These are all good and valuable things, but the contrast with the outpouring of questions about how people could help after her leukemia diagnosis is striking. Instead of “Oh you should try this” it’s “What can I do for you?” I suspect there were days when my mom was at her worst with Hashimoto’s that she was as low energy and could use as much help as she needs now.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 10:37:58 -0400

🔖 Read Have We Forgotten How to Read Critically?.

Another great piece with an argument centered on the importance of information literacy.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 10:23:52 -0400

🔖 Read How Gullibility Became Our New Normal.

I love when information literacy pops up in popular publications like this. These pieces can be models for my own public writing.

Mon, 21 Mar 2022 10:19:28 -0400

🔖📚 Read Back Draft: Meghan O’Rourke.

O’Rourke’s making the rounds to promote her new book, The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness which I want to read so much. (I’ve got it on hold from the library.)

There are a couple of key quotes from the interview I want to share:

when I was at my sickest, I couldn’t write anything much longer than a sentence. Not a paragraph, and definitely not a chapter.

On my worst days, I feel this way. The difference between days when my brain is zipping along in clarity and wheh it’s slogging through fog is hard to communicate. It is vast.

I was talking about this with a student the other day, and she made a great point. Writers are always being told that you need to be at your desk every day, that you have to push through. And for writers like herself — she has several chronic illnesses — that’s just not feasible. It’s an unreasonable expectation, and an unhealthy one.

Yes! I sometimes scold myself for not writing every day but this is important to remember. It’s also important to capitalize on the good days when we have them.

I wanted the book to be readable for people like me. When you suffer from brain fog, it’s tough to sustain your attention for so long. That’s also why I wanted the chapters to be relatively short and digestible.

This is awesome. I turn to essays when my brain is foggy but I want to read. I’m going to think more about what accessible literature means with respect to cognitive capacity.

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 15:16:37 -0400

🔖 Read How to Be A Successful Multipassionate Entrepreneur.

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 15:09:47 -0400

🔖 Read 5 Ways to Thrive as a Multipassionate Entrepreneur

“Clarity comes from engagement, not thought.”

Whoa, I needed to read that.

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 09:51:48 -0400

🔖 I’m always looking for Leonie Dawson’s post about heroic self-gentleness and struggling to track it down in searches so now that I’ve succeeded once, I’m dropping the link here so I can just search my own website for it next time.

Fri, 18 Mar 2022 06:26:42 -0400

🔖 Read Academic Waste. 🎓

Tue, 15 Mar 2022 09:21:52 -0400

🔖 Read Storytelling and the Craft of Quiltmaking. 🧵

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 08:20:23 -0400

🔖 Read It’s Called Acting: Learning to Fight for the Stage. 🎭

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 07:54:11 -0400

🔖 Read Network sitcoms are actually good again. 📺

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 20:09:48 -0400

🔖 Read Is it time to live with COVID-19? Some scientists warn of ‘endemic delusion’

“I don’t particularly want to be in a future where I get COVID twice a year,” Pagel adds.

Me either, Professor Pagel. Me either.

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 13:41:00 -0400

🔖 Loved reading what Kathy Tabbutt had to say about Social Science Communication in the January 23 Fancy Comma newsletter. I’ve been thinking through what #socscicomm can be for a few years and am still in process. If you’re interested in this, too, let’s connect!

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 12:50:39 -0400

🔖 Read Curing Coronavirus Isn’t a Job for Social Scientists. (This article is from May 2020, which is probably why it has the word “curing” in the title when that seems like, you know, not a thing that is possible.)

Fri, 25 Feb 2022 12:43:31 -0400

🔖 Read Why does social science have such a hard job explaining itself?.

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 13:35:32 -0400

This. The lifting of mask mandates. The expansion of what counts as high-risk.

Sigh.

Sun, 20 Feb 2022 12:03:15 -0400

🔖 Not their first rodeo: How Black riders are reclaiming their place in cowboy culture

This is so cool and the pictures are phenomenal.

Wed, 16 Feb 2022 20:18:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Millions of People Stuck in Pandemic Limbo

…people are still dying, and immunocompromised people disproportionately so. Ignoring that sends an implicit message: Your lives don’t matter.

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 19:57:48 -0400

🔖 Read How to Reclaim Normal Life Without Being ‘Done’.

I appreciate the acknowledgement here that inputs for risk calculation vary widely.

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 18:54:00 -0400

🔖 Read My Platonic Life Partnership Went Viral On TikTok, & People Have A Lot Of Questions

I’m a person who’s been squarely romantically committed for 23+ years but I am so happy this idea is out there for people that need it. It’s sort of like having a chosen sibling, I think - at least, it sounds like how I feel about my sister.

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 14:38:00 -0400

🔖 Read Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot Dot | Against the Contemporary American Essay by Jackson Arn.

Timely, given my own musings on essays. There’s a lot of fun to be had in this anti-essay essay.

Fri, 04 Feb 2022 17:37:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Holes We Live With by Katie Rose Guest Pryal.

I think my hole is named in the Encanto song “Surface Pressure”:

I’m pretty surе I’m worthless if I can’t be of servicе

Thu, 03 Feb 2022 08:28:00 -0400

🔖 Read Women of a Certain Age.

Great piece about how the Golden Age of TV creates space for roles beyond somebody’s mom, somebody’s wife, and harpyish crone. 📺🍿

Sun, 30 Jan 2022 22:24:00 -0400

🔖 Read A Counterintuitive Nighttime Routine For The Type A Insomniac.

I love this. I’m constantly trying to Type-A-away symptoms of chronic illness and it Does Not Work.

Tue, 25 Jan 2022 14:59:32 -0400

🔖 Read The Only Work Ethic I Care About is the One on Star Trek

Yes! When a 20th c guy ends up on the Enterprise and is all “What am I supposed to do if I don’t need to make money?” Picard is basically like, “Grow.” ❤️ 🖖‍‍

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 17:09:00 -0400

🔖Read What is “Dark Academia,” and why is it trending on social media in 2022?

Sun, 23 Jan 2022 11:37:00 -0400

🔖 Read Julia Cameron Says You Can Get Creative Indoors.

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 10:05:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Homebound Symphony by @ayjay

I’m trying to be the Homebound Symphony. Just one person sitting in my study with a computer on my lap, reading and listening and viewing, and recording and sifting and transmitting – sharing the good, the true, and the beautiful, with added commentary.

This is what I would like to do, too.

Thu, 20 Jan 2022 10:06:00 -0400

🔖 I highly recommend Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up as a tool for managing daily living when things feel hard.

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 20:16:00 -0400

🔖 Read Tamsyn Muir Understood the Assignment: The Locked Tomb Series’ Expansive Exploration of Death and Grieving by Emma Leff 📚

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 12:17:00 -0400

🔖 Read As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

This 1945 essay by Vannebar Bush is one of the first texts they had us read when I got my MS in Library Science.

Notes and highlights

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,

every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Bush points out that indexing systems and rules do not duplicate the human mind - we must convert our own mental associations to a form we can use to search them - but that the human mind works by association. I extrapolate from this the idea of hypertext as a model of how the mind works. I’m going to keep an eye out for other instances of this idea.

if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

How many people use Evernote as a Memex?

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.

This is tagging.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

It me! This is kinda what people who operate as web librarians do. Web librarian isn’t my job title or description, but it’s just kind of who I am.

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

This is one of my difficulties. I put a lot of stuff in my blog-as-memex but don’t have a good way of surfacing them again. Theoretically I could do this with categories, but that gets overwhelming fast. This is why I’m thinking about using a blog and a wiki together for this purpose.

He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.

I fear this is so.

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:31:58 -0400

🔖 Read Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing.

Awesome piece with an excellent argument. I’ve been tacking this direction for a while and it’s nice to see more scholars talking about it.

Wed, 19 Jan 2022 10:22:29 -0400

🔖 Read We Are All Hostages to Anti-Semitism by Yair Rosenberg

Excellent piece about how anti-Semitism is not individual prejudice, but part of a vast, centuries-old conspiracy theory that undermines people’s faith in democracy.

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 20:54:22 -0400

🔖 Read Hypertext Gardens.

Efficient traversal provides the information readers think they want, but may hide information readers need.

I love the 1998ness of this essay. It’s given me a lot to think about, though it’ll be a while before I figure out how I’d like to apply these ideas.

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 22:06:00 -0400

🔖Read What happens when we die.

Beautiful notes from Maria Popova on the novel Mr g.

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 08:19:00 -0400

🔖 Read The comedy of survival.

Fri, 07 Jan 2022 07:04:00 -0400

🔖 Read “I Feel Very Uncomfortable When People Call Me A Writer”.

Great conversation between Sara Fredman & Dr. Merve Emre. WRITE LIKE A MOTHER is a newsletter fave for me right now. Highly recommend.

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 22:28:24 -0400

🔖 Read Lost Time in COVID.

Overall, we have, of necessity, learned to value the quality of our time over the quantity of it, and to work with the rhythms of our energies.

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 21:21:00 -0400

🔖 Read Everyone should blog.

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 21:20:00 -0400

🔖 Read Celebrate by Writing.

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 00:04:00 -0400

🔖 Read True gender-neutral clothing must go beyond fancy sweatpants.

I love the idea of a shop where clothing is arranged by type (shirts here, dresses there) and silhouette (narrow shoulders over here, broad hips over there).

Sat, 01 Jan 2022 10:05:00 -0400

🔖 Read 6 ways to deal with anxiety and uncertainty this winter.

One way to embrace radical uncertainty is to develop coping mechanisms. This NPR piece suggests some possibilities.

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 22:50:00 -0400

🔖 Read What the Aztecs can teach us about happiness and the good life.

This is an excellent way to think about how to live.

Thu, 30 Dec 2021 16:11:00 -0400

🔖 Read There Is No “Best of” List From Me This Year. 📚

Beautiful writing from Kelly Jensen: how books impacted her this year; where she is in her journey as a writer, book blogger, reader. I’ll revisit this as I think about how I want to engage with & around books in 2022.

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 21:58:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read

All Your Followers Will Not Buy Your Book - by Kate McKean katemckean.substack.com
katemckean.substack.com https://katemckean.substack.com/p/all-your-followers-will-not-buy-your

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 21:51:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read

Yes, Social Media Can Sell Books. But Not If Publishers Sit on Their Hands | Jane Friedman janefriedman.com
janefriedman.com https://www.janefriedman.com/yes-social-media-can-sell-books-but-not-if-publishers-sit-on-their-hands/

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 21:44:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read

Millions of Followers? For Book Sales, ‘It’s Unreliable.’ - The New York Times nytimes.com
Read: www.nytimes.com
Www.nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/07/books/social-media-following-book-publishing.html?referringSource=articleShare

Mon, 27 Dec 2021 09:30:00 -0400

🔖 Read How your brain copes with grief, and why it takes time to heal.

This time last year, my grandmother was in the hospital. She’d been non-responsive for several days but had just started indicating that she was aware of what was going on around her. She recovered enough to talk to my mom on the phone and to be transferred to hospice. She died on January 2. I didn’t go to her memorial service because it was in a county with a very high COVID-19 positivity rate. Not gathering with my people has delayed my grieving significantly.

Mostly, at times when I would normally call her, I forget that she died until I start working out the logistics. I wanted to invite her to watch my dissertation defense. My graduation. To call her and tell her about the postdoc.

I only called her for big things: getting engaged, being present, Christmas, her birthday. There are many granddaughters more communicative than I ever was. But I made sure she always knew about the big moments.

I have to trust that if her spirit persists in some form, she still knows about the big moments. But it’s really hard not to actually hear her talking to me about it.

It’s hard knowing I’ll never again sit in her bedroom and talk with her and my mom late into the night, or lie in bed and watch TV with her until we both fall asleep, or sit out by her pool, or insist she come to the beach. Never amble about the little neighborhood market Wal-Mart around the corner from her house with her picking out groceries, or go to the Chinese buffet with her. There are so many little mundane things that I miss.

She didn’t die of COVID-related illness, but it’s COVID that kept me from seeing her for a scheduled visit in April 2020, that kept my mom from rushing down to Florida to bring her here to visit before Christmas or to be at her bedside when she was in the hospital.

I really appreciate how this article ends by urging people to remember that those of us who have lost loved ones in the past 21 months have traded everyone’s safety for the last moments with the people we love, and that in making that trade we have shifted our own grieving processes in ways we’re still discovering.

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 11:34:00 -0400

🔖 Read if we’re all about to get Omicron, here are 5 tips from a long-hauler (via @agilelisa on Micro.blog).

This is sound advice for living with any chronic illness.

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 13:42:53 -0400

🔖 Read The Scholarship of Sexy Privilege: Why Do I Love Dark Academia Books?

…there will always be fringe groups who parade their complete rejection of the source material and make it their own. This ownership over dark academia gives me the courage to keep going with real academia; to forge a space again in the gaps and achieve immortality in the sharing of ideas without boundaries.

Tue, 14 Dec 2021 10:38:34 -0400

🔖 Read and highly recommend Neurodiversity in Academia: The Autistic advantage in qualitative research.

Mon, 13 Dec 2021 10:23:37 -0400

🔖 Read The New Outliers: How Creative Nonfiction Became a Legitimate, Serious Genre.

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 22:34:10 -0400

🔖 Read Queer and Jewish Identity Are the Heart of “Where the Wild Things Are”. 📚

I love this. I want to look at In The Night Kitchen and Outside Over There and all the Nutshell books through this lens.

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 20:56:49 -0400

🔖 Read On the Fleeting Wonder of Youth and the Surreal Permanence of Motherhood .

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 20:55:31 -0400

🔖 Read Will Self: How Should We Read? In Praise of Literary Promiscuity in the Digital Age.

Sat, 11 Dec 2021 20:06:38 -0400

🔖 Read Two Musicals on the Perils of Aging. 🎵🎭

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 17:26:00 -0400

🔖 Read So You’ve Just Found Out You’re Jewish. What’s Next?

By DNA, I’m almost half Jewish. I’ve known this my whole life. By religious definitions, I’m not remotely Jewish. On a visceral level, I feel Jew-ish. A friend made me an honorary MOT. Regardless of the degree of my Jewishness, this blog post is full of helpful information.

Sun, 05 Dec 2021 12:14:00 -0400

🔖 Read The 100 Most Jewish Foods.

Fri, 03 Dec 2021 10:22:00 -0400

🔖 Read A Texas School District Banned My Book. Then Things Got Really Ugly.

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 11:31:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

How Indiana Jones, Rambo, and others ended up in 1980s Czechoslovak text-adventures | Ars Technica arstechnica.com
Read: arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/10/how-indiana-jones-fought-the-communists-and-led-an-era-of-activist-video-games/

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 10:27:00 -0400

🔖 Read Marked In Remembrance: How Tattoos Help Us Grieve.

Mon, 29 Nov 2021 08:13:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Death Positive Movement.

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 22:40:00 -0400

🔖Read Death Is Having a Moment.

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 20:14:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Death Positive Movement Encourages Us to Face Death Directly.

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 10:18:00 -0400

🔖 Read Feminist Death Work: A History.

Sun, 28 Nov 2021 08:53:00 -0400

🔖 Read Funerals are expensive, broken and exploitative. They have to change

I love what Sarah Chavez says:

Your death matters. You can choose something that will reflect the values and beliefs that you held in your life, and translate them into your death.

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 20:46:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Catapult | Minor Arcana | Marissa Levien catapult.co
Read: catapult.co
catapult.co https://catapult.co/stories/minor-arcana-short-fiction-marissa-levien

This is a really beautiful short story.

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 19:45:00 -0400

🔖

Will Real Estate Ever Be Normal Again? - The New York Times nytimes.com
Read: www.nytimes.com
Www.nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/magazine/real-estate-pandemic.html

Investors’ attitudes gross me out. This same thing is happening in my city.

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 18:38:00 -0400

🔖

Every King Arthur Retelling Is Fanfic About Who Gets to Be Legendary tor.com
Read: www.tor.com
tor.com https://www.tor.com/2021/03/23/every-king-arthur-retelling-is-fanfic-about-who-gets-to-be-legendary/

Tracy Deonn shares some important truths about how stories work and what “authentic” means.

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 10:20:00 -0400

🔖Read “How the Real Estate Boom Left Black Neighborhoods Behind”.

This is a long & valuable read. I’m researching how I can contribute to reinvestment without getting all white savior. 🏡

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 18:07:00 -0400

🔖 Read Who Writes the Books in Video Games? . This is relevant to my interests. 📚🎮

🔖Quotes from Lorraine Boissoneault's "Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance"

Mon, 08 Nov 2021 08:05:00 -0400

I really needed to read “Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance” today. Here are some bits that hit me hard:

It’s not enough to see a successful dance or personal essay—you can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.

The bad news about first drafts is that they are necessary. The good news is that they’re only a starting point.

There are many ways to get better at writing—take classes, join critique groups, read voraciously—but nothing gets you around the fact that you must also write and revise.

…take comfort in the fact that your words are still on the page. You’ve done the hard part and unleashed your awkward vulnerability.

🔖"Nobody cares if you're a writer except you." Kate Baer on being a writer who mothers. 📝

Sun, 07 Nov 2021 20:49:00 -0400

I highly recommend Sara Fredman’s Write Like A Mother newsletter, in which Sara interviews writers who are also mothers. Some bits from the recent issue with Kate Baer resonated especially with me, so I thought I’d share them here.

Mothers were so punished in this pandemic.

This. I’m playing the pandemic on easy mode - working part-time from home - and I still feel this. The social costs and lack of a village are what’s hurting me most. For the first time since the start of the pandemic, I hung out for a long time with other parents while our kids were at the park and it was huge. Pre-pandemic, M & I spent every weekday morning at a co-working space with a Montessori school on-site. My co-workers were almost exclusively fellow parents of young children, mostly moms and non-binary primary caregivers, and at the time I didn’t really appreciate how special it was.

…nobody cares if you’re a writer. Nobody, nobody cares if you’re a writer, except you. If you want to be a writer, then you have to take control of the situation. You have to think of yourself as a writer, you have to treat yourself as a writer. You have to treat this like this is a job… I have to be the one who cares so much about being a writer. And so I think part of that is just filtering out that noise and just taking yourself super seriously, taking the work super seriously.

I have only recently claimed the title of writer for myself, despite having written all my life and having my first paid byline 10 years ago, and I feel this so hard. I’m still working on taking myself and the work seriously.

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 04:38:00 -0400

🔖 Read ‘They start calling you Hitler’: Why Disneyland has some of the most toxic fans on the internet.

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 15:51:00 -0400

🔖 Read From Princes to Pigeons: A Beginner’s Guide to Otome Games 🎮

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 09:44:00 -0400

🔖 Read “The Girl With The Green Ribbon”: A Tale of Many Lives. 📚

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 09:30:00 -0400

🔖 Read Dear Congress: Paid leave is not a perk. It’s a requirement..

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 12:02:00 -0400

🔖 Lee Skallerup Bessette’s You Can Ask for Mental-Health Help, but Can You Find Any? is crucial reading. It hits extra hard in the wake of a clear mental health crisis at the school I graduated from (4 times). 🧠

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 09:01:00 -0400

🔖📚📝 Read

Catapult | I Found My Literary Community by Writing Book Reviews | catapult.co
Read: catapult.co
catapult.co https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/erin-flanagan-i-found-my-literary-community-by-writing-book-reviews

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 07:59:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Catapult | Why Full-Time Freelancing Isn’t For Me | Gabrielle Drolet catapult.co
Read: catapult.co
catapult.co https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/gabrielle-drolet-why-full-time-freelancing-isnt-for-me-writing-money-media-industry

Mon, 11 Oct 2021 19:47:00 -0400

🔖 Read The Quiet Crisis of Parents on the Tenure Track.

Sun, 10 Oct 2021 19:57:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Wear Me This: Dark Academia could be the answer to the very problem it romanticizes – The Daily Free Press dailyfreepress.com
Read: dailyfreepress.com
Sujena Soumyanath https://dailyfreepress.com/2021/10/04/wear-me-this-dark-academia-could-be-the-answer-to-the-very-problem-it-romanticizes/

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:01:21 -0400

🔖 Read The Invisible Burden That Leaves Moms Drained. Especially timely since I just hosted my kid’s (outdoor masked) birthday party last weekend. I’m blessed to not have as heavy a burden as many others but it’s still there.

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 13:59:30 -0400

🔖 Read On Pandering. This piece made me think about how lucky I’ve been to always be writing for my past or future self or for a body of colleagues that is mostly women.

Sun, 03 Oct 2021 10:55:00 -0400

🔖 Read Why Everyone Is Always Giving Unsolicited Advice (Tressie McMillan Cottom for the New York Times).

Fri, 01 Oct 2021 02:55:00 -0400

🔖Read “So Coke-y…So Entitled!”: This Is What It Was Like Going to Bennington College With Bret Easton Ellis, Donna Tartt, and Jonathan Lethem. 📚🎙️

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 03:35:00 -0400

🔖📺 Read Nathan Lane on Only Murders in the Building’s Big Twist.

Thu, 30 Sep 2021 03:29:00 -0400

🔖📺 Read Why Only Murders in the Building Is the Most Romantic Show on TV.

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 07:17:00 -0400

🔖 Read Star Trek’s food replicators may be on their way to your kitchen. 🖖

Wed, 29 Sep 2021 06:58:00 -0400

🔖 Read Amia Srinivasan: “Feminism is a political practice, not just a set of ideas”.

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 19:13:00 -0400

🔖🎭 Read On and Off Stage: The Deep-Seated Bias in the Culture of American Theatre.

In addition to thinking about whose plays get produced, promoted, and awarded, Kayser makes me think about who gets to be critics and who can afford to go to shows.

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:14:00 -0400

🔖 Read What Reading Looks Like When You’re a Full-Time Author (Book Riot).

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 10:25:00 -0400

🔖 Read Please Keep Doing Virtual Book Stuff After The Pandemic.

Jessica Pryde makes a great argument for maintaining virtual and/or adding hybrid book events even when it’s safe to hold them in person.

Mon, 27 Sep 2021 09:48:00 -0400

🔖Read

The Caregiving Economy - The Atlantic theatlantic.com
Read: www.theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/new-economy-caregiving/620160/?utm_source=feed

Sun, 26 Sep 2021 08:43:00 -0400

🔖📚 🍿 Some good things I’ve read so far today:

Revisiting The Flight of Dragons, a Forgotten Gem of ’80s Fantasy (Tor.com)
How Harrow the Ninth Uses the Language of Fanfiction to Process Grief (Tor.com)
“What did I know of mortal babies?”: Six Parenthood Lessons From CIRCE (Book Riot)
Out of the Closet and Out of Time: On Being an Old(ish) Mother (Literary Hub)

Mon, 20 Sep 2021 06:17:00 -0400

🔖

Portrait of the Mother as an Artist – Guernica guernicamag.com
Read: www.guernicamag.com
Diane Benjamin (Litman ‘64) https://www.guernicamag.com/portrait-of-the-mother-as-an-artist/

To think of the mother as artist does not necessitate a conflict, nor does it require a choice between passive domestic surrender or total domestic rejection, although for a long time the world demanded that it did. Such frames only reinforce hierarchies, limit her to merely a fragment when, of course, she is com posed of many pieces.

–

Craft — a designation used to subjugate many art-making practices that have been the domain of women: needlepoint, pottery, quilt making. With their connections to the home, these mediums have been historically dismissed, supposedly lacking the rigor and intellectual complexity of high art.

–

“I have drawn my children and painted them endlessly and I cannot distinguish them from my soul…"

–

she sometimes wonders why an artist must inhabit turmoil or drama to be taken seriously.

Fri, 10 Sep 2021 09:57:08 -0400

🔖💻 Read Why bad technology dominates our lives, according to Ron Norman. If you didn’t already believe we were living in the Matrix, this article will convince you we are.

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 19:30:54 -0400

🔖📝 The Heartbreaking Ingenuity of the Mother-Writer ‹ Literary Hub

if you’ve read a book penned by a woman with young children recently, there’s a significant chance it was written while hiding, losing sleep, or using inventive distractions. (Or even all three.)

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 19:21:00 -0400

🔖Read

The Public Writing Life: How to Lose an Editor in Five Days katieroseguestpryal.com
katieroseguestpryal.com https://katieroseguestpryal.com/2021/09/05/the-public-writing-life-how-to-lose-an-editor-in-five-days/

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 19:03:00 -0400

🔖Read Ravynn K. Stringfield’s essay, Bullet Journaling to Save a Life. Beautiful.

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 15:07:00 -0400

🔖💬 Parents Are Not Okay:

Through these grinding 18 months, we’ve managed our kids’ lives as best we could while abandoning our own.

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 19:50:00 -0400

there is no separation between mother and writer, nor can I tease apart the time I spend tending to my child from the time I spend thinking about my writing, or actually doing it.

Finding Literary Spaces Amid the Intensity of New Motherhood 🔖📚💬

Thu, 26 Aug 2021 08:58:00 -0400

🔖📚 Sara Fredman’s How Motherhood Helped Me Reject the ‘Father Tongue’ of Academia is both about writing the kind of thing I want to write and is itself the kind of thing I want to write.

Sun, 15 Aug 2021 09:19:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read

The Loneliness of the Full-Time Writer ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com
Read: lithub.com
lithub.com https://lithub.com/the-loneliness-of-the-full-time-writer/

Fri, 13 Aug 2021 06:49:00 -0400

🔖 Ravynn K. Stringfield’s How I Became a Scholar of Black Girl Fantasy is an energizing read. Psyched to be in her workshop on creative non-fiction for scholars.

Sat, 31 Jul 2021 13:25:00 -0400

💬🔖 “What did I learn today about how to live this life?” This question applies to a lot more than writing.

Catapult | On Writing (with a Day Job) | Richard Mirabella catapult.co
catapult.co https://catapult.co/dont-write-alone/stories/on-writing-with-a-day-job-how-to-write-working-9-to-5-richard-mirabella

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 14:03:00 -0400

🔖📺🍿This piece identifies what made LOKI less than ideal for me: Loki himself is constrained, not as grand or mischievous as we’re used to. Great piece overall:

Loki as Other: Why Do Queer and Female Viewers Love the Trickster? tor.com
Read: www.tor.com
tor.com https://www.tor.com/2021/07/20/loki-as-other-why-do-queer-and-female-viewers-love-the-trickster/#more-653029

Wed, 21 Jul 2021 13:33:00 -0400

🔖🍿📚 It’s nice timing to read this after recently starting my Dorian Gray re-read:

Manic Pixie Dream Portrait: On 500 Days of Summer and Dorian Gray. ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com
Read: lithub.com
lithub.com https://lithub.com/manic-pixie-dream-portrait-on-500-days-of-summer-and-dorian-gray/

Tue, 29 Jun 2021 12:18:00 -0400

🔖 Putting a pin in this article to remind me to write later about the perils of outsiders researching affinity spaces, the overlooked punk rockness of the new domesticity, & how academia is constantly “discovering” things that have been going on for yrs.

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 12:14:00 -0400

🔖▶️ Watching Meet Courtney: An American Girl Movie & trying not to lose it every time they mention the Challenger or Christa McAuliffe. 35 years & yet it doesn’t seem like history to me.

Mon, 28 Jun 2021 07:52:00 -0400

🔖📺 Listen, as a 90s babybat I welcome the new Anne Rice television universe. 🦇

Sat, 26 Jun 2021 07:28:09 -0400

🔖▶️ Watched Create Your Unicorn Career from Scratch. Engaging talk from a science communicator/comedian! Don’t throw any part of yourself away! (That’s from Austin Kleon.)

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 08:17:00 -0400

🔖📝 I love Austin Kleon’s advice to relocate your darlings. I have a file for every project with the word “Cut” in the filename and anything I don’t use goes there in case I want it later.

Wed, 16 Jun 2021 07:42:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read

What We Can—and Can’t—Learn About Louisa May Alcott from Her Teenage Fiction - Electric Literature electricliterature.com
Read: electricliterature.com
electricliterature.com https://electricliterature.com/louisa-may-alcott-lost-story-rediscovered-juvenilia-aunt-nellies-diary/

I love that Pynchon shared his juvenilia with commentary. I’ve shared my student writing. Maybe I’ll start writing commentary for it.

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 16:55:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Toll from political push at UNC continues to mount | NC Policy Watch ncpolicywatch.com
Read: www.ncpolicywatch.com
ncpolicywatch.com http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2021/06/14/toll-from-political-push-at-unc-continues-to-mount/

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:29:25 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Loki episode 1 finds a startling way to rest the antihero for Marvel TV - Polygon polygon.com
Read: www.polygon.com
polygon.com https://www.polygon.com/22526851/loki-episode-1

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:29:01 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Loki episode 1 recap and Easter eggs: Thor’s naughty brother gets busted for time crimes - CNET cnet.com
Read: www.cnet.com
cnet.com https://www.cnet.com/news/loki-episode-1-recap-and-easter-eggs-thors-naughty-brother-gets-busted-for-time-crimes/

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:21:41 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Star Trek | Games of Fame gamesoffame.wordpress.com
Read: gamesoffame.wordpress.com
gamesoffame.wordpress.com https://gamesoffame.wordpress.com/star-trek/

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:21:27 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

1974: Super Star Trek - 50 Years of Text Games if50.substack.com
Read: if50.substack.com
if50.substack.com https://if50.substack.com/p/1974-super-star-trek

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:21:10 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Addendums | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/06/25/before-adventure-addendums/

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:20:59 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Part 5: Wumpus 2 and 3 | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/04/05/before-adventure-part-5-wumpus-2-and-3/#comments

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 16:20:43 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» Hunt the Wumpus, Part 2 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/05/hunt-the-wumpus-part-2/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 20:46:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» Hunt the Wumpus, Part 1 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/05/hunt-the-wumpus-part-1/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:22:36 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Part 4: Hunt the Wumpus (1973) | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/04/03/before-adventure-part-4-hunt-the-wumpus-1973/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:22:23 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Part 2: Mugwump, Hurkle, Snark (1973) | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/03/15/before-adventure-part-2-mugwump-hurkle-snark-1973/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 16:22:08 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Part 1: Hide and Seek (1972) | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/03/14/before-adventure-part-1-hide-and-seek-1972/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 12:29:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Before Adventure, Part 3: Caves (1973) | Renga in Blue bluerenga.blog
Read: bluerenga.blog
Jason Dyer https://bluerenga.blog/2019/03/20/before-adventure-part-3-caves-1973/

Thu, 10 Jun 2021 12:27:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

1973: Hunt the Wumpus - 50 Years of Text Games if50.substack.com
Read: if50.substack.com
if50.substack.com https://if50.substack.com/p/1973-hunt-the-wumpus

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 08:57:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Forty Years of Lunar Lander technologizer.com
Read: www.technologizer.com
technologizer.com https://www.technologizer.com/2009/07/19/lunar-lander/

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 08:56:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Lunar Lander: The Full Story of the Legendary Game and Genre fictionphile.com
Read: fictionphile.com
fictionphile.com https://fictionphile.com/lunar-lander-video-game/

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 08:55:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

1972: ROCKET - 50 Years of Text Games if50.substack.com
Read: if50.substack.com
if50.substack.com https://if50.substack.com/p/1972-rocket

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:57:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Something Found In The Oregon Trail - Code Dive codedive.substack.com
Read: codedive.substack.com
codedive.substack.com https://codedive.substack.com/p/something-found-in-the-oregon-trail

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:06:44 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 5 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/04/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-trail-part-5/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:06:31 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 4 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/04/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-trail-part-4/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:06:18 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Oregon Trail Ver. 3 (BASIC 3.1, 1978) | Desert Hat deserthat.wordpress.com
Read: deserthat.wordpress.com
deserthat.wordpress.com https://deserthat.wordpress.com/2010/11/07/oregon-trail-ver-3-basic-3-1-1978/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:06:01 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 3 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/04/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-trail-part-3/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 22:03:52 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 2 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/03/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-trail-part-2/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:14:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Rafting Down the Columbia River died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/rafting-columbia.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:13:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Matt’s Store & Starting the Game died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/matts-store.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:02:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Crossing Rivers died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/crossing-rivers.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 21:00:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

The Earliest Versions of the Game died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/early-versions.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:51:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

A Brief History of the Oregon Trail Game died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/brief-history.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:50:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

The Oregon Trail Memes died-of-dysentery.com
Read: www.died-of-dysentery.com
died-of-dysentery.com http://www.died-of-dysentery.com/stories/memes.html

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 19:34:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Designing the Travel Screen for “The Oregon Trail” | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.com
Read: medium.com
medium.com https://medium.com/the-philipendium/designing-the-travel-screen-for-the-oregon-trail-535491bc2cfc

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 18:44:00 -0400

🔖🎮 The FEMICOM museum is my new favorite thing.

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 13:12:00 -0400

🔖🏳️‍🌈 Read

The Power of Pride - Arc Digital arcdigital.media
Read: www.arcdigital.media
arcdigital.media https://www.arcdigital.media/p/the-power-of-pride

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 13:11:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

Designing the Hunting Game for “The Oregon Trail” | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.com
Read: medium.com
medium.com https://medium.com/the-philipendium/designing-the-hunting-game-for-the-oregon-trail-257924bdc6ae

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 10:25:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

How I Managed to Design the Most Successful Educational Computer Game of All Time | by R. Philip Bouchard | The Philipendium | Medium medium.com
Read: medium.com
medium.com https://medium.com/the-philipendium/how-i-managed-to-design-the-most-successful-educational-computer-game-of-all-time-4626ea09e184

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 09:21:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

» On the Trail of the Oregon Trail, Part 1 The Digital Antiquarian filfre.net
Read: www.filfre.net
filfre.net https://www.filfre.net/2011/03/on-the-trail-of-the-oregon-trail-part-1/

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 08:33:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

The Forgotten History of ‘The Oregon Trail,’ As Told By Its Creators vice.com
Read: www.vice.com
vice.com https://www.vice.com/en/article/qkx8vw/the-forgotten-history-of-the-oregon-trail-as-told-by-its-creators

Tue, 08 Jun 2021 08:24:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read

1971: The Oregon Trail - 50 Years of Text Games if50.substack.com
Read: if50.substack.com
if50.substack.com https://if50.substack.com/p/1971-the-oregon-trail

Mon, 07 Jun 2021 13:01:00 -0400

🔖 Martha Bautells’s On Writing Through a Residency That Never Happened (But Did?) resonates with me, as I still grieve the dissertation I didn’t write.

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:25:00 -0400

🔖🧵🧶 Read

What We Learned From a Year of Crafting - The New York Times nytimes.com
Read: www.nytimes.com
Www.nytimes.com https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/style/craft-boom.html?smid=tw-share

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:12:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read

Kristen Arnett Gets Her Best Ideas at the Bar - Interview Magazine interviewmagazine.com
Read: www.interviewmagazine.com
interviewmagazine.com https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kristen-arnett-rough-draft

💬🔖📚 Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 15:04:00 -0400

The postpartum experience isn’t just expensive; it can also be one of psychic trauma and creative crisis. Someone who was a person becomes a mother. “You’re not a person. You don’t have a name,” says Zambreno. This feeling of erasure is a current that runs through her work, reaching peak intensity in “To Write as if Already Dead.” “I need to restore myself after being made into a ghost,” Zambreno says. “I always feel like writing the most when I’m being made invisible.”

Kate Zambreno on her new book "To Write as if Already Dead" - Los Angeles Times latimes.com
latimes.com https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/books/story/2021-06-02/the-fierce-author-who-writes-like-shes-running-out-of-time

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 14:32:00 -0400

🔖🖥️ Elizabeth and Gav promised in this week’s The Rec Center that 1992: Silverwolf would be the most engrossing post I’d read all week and it did not disappoint.

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 07:35:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read Together As We Burn: On a Complicated Maternal Bond and Intergenerational Love. A heartbreaking excerpt from Ashley C. Ford’s memoir, Somebody’s Daughter.

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 07:32:00 -0400

🔖📚 Read Stories and Hormones Shape Our Lives by Elanor Broker. Beautiful essay weaving together personal experiences of trans matrescence and the books Detransition, Baby and The Argonauts.

Thu, 03 Jun 2021 07:13:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read Finding Time to Write About Motherhood… While Parenting During a Pandemic . The usual fragmented life of a mother is intensified by the pandemic.

Sun, 09 May 2021 17:07:00 -0400

🔖 I’ve started calling my kid Little One & after reading Meg Elison’s How Lwaxana Troi Became Our Space Aunt I couldn’t be happier to be aging into my natural camp grand dame-ness. 🖖🏻📺

Tue, 04 May 2021 10:56:00 -0400

🔖📚 Austin Kleon writes today about [wintering and dormancy] (https://austinkleon.com/2021/05/04/wintering-and-dormancy/), quoting Katherine May’s book Wintering. I’m reading the book right now. What I didn’t know before reading but appreciate is that May is writing about leaving academia.

Mon, 03 May 2021 16:04:00 -0400

🔖📺🖖 Read The Measure of a Man Demonstrates the Many Forms of Love by Anna E. Gant

Mon, 03 May 2021 15:48:00 -0400

🔖📺🖖 Hrisoula Gatzogiannis’s The Only Work Ethic I Care About Is the One on Star Trek details what Picard explains in the TNG episode “The Neutral Zone.” A 20th century man asks “What’s the challenge?” & Picard says “To improve yourself… enrich yourself.”

Sun, 02 May 2021 07:57:00 -0400

🔖Read

Post-SCMS musings on the value of the word acafan louisaellenstein.com
Read: louisaellenstein.com
louisaellenstein.com https://louisaellenstein.com/2011/03/17/why-the-term-acafan-matters-but-maybe-we-could-lose-the-dom-in-acafandom/

A seemingly objective position is only subjectivity rendered invisible but still implicated.

Sun, 02 May 2021 07:54:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Against Aca-Fandom bogost.com
Read: bogost.com
bogost.com http://bogost.com/blog/against_aca-fandom/

Sun, 02 May 2021 07:54:00 -0400

🔖 Read

SCMS 2011 Workshop: Acafandom and the Future of Fan Studies louisaellenstein.com
Read: louisaellenstein.com
louisaellenstein.com https://louisaellenstein.com/2011/03/16/scms-2011-workshop-acafandom-and-the-future-of-fan-studies/

Sun, 02 May 2021 07:49:00 -0400

🔖📺 Read

On Disliking Mad Men justtv.wordpress.com
Read: justtv.wordpress.com
adornofangirl https://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 09:41:00 -0400

🔖 Read No One Makes a Living on Patreon.

Mon, 26 Apr 2021 02:19:00 -0400

🔖 Read ‘Buy Nothing’ groups: A place to share goods, services — and gratitude.

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:11:00 -0400

🔖 Read

Rebuilding the Web We Lost anildash.com
Read: anildash.com
anildash.com https://anildash.com/2012/12/18/rebuilding_the_web_we_lost/

Sun, 25 Apr 2021 19:05:00 -0400

🔖 Read

The Web We Lost anildash.com
Read: anildash.com
anildash.com http://anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 21:08:41 -0400

🔖🍿📺 Read

Marvel movies have a weird relationship with kissing and romance - Polygon polygon.com
Read: www.polygon.com
polygon.com https://www.polygon.com/entertainment/22394564/marvel-cinematic-universe-kissing

(via baldur on micro.blog)

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 14:00:00 -0400

🔖 Read

How Bookishness Affects the Book Biz publishersweekly.com
Read: www.publishersweekly.com
publishersweekly.com https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/86110-how-bookishness-affects-the-book-biz.html

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 11:19:00 -0400

🔖 Read

How to Read When You Have a Baby | Book Riot bookriot.com
bookriot.com https://bookriot.com/how-to-read-when-you-have-a-baby/

Sound advice here.

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 08:17:02 -0400

🔖 Read

On the Relationship Between Motherhood and Madness in Victorian Literature ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com
Read: lithub.com
lithub.com https://lithub.com/on-the-relationship-between-motherhood-and-madness-in-victorian-literature/

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 12:31:00 -0400

🔖 Reagan Ray has collected a bunch of hand-lettered logos from Marvel comics pre-2000. My favorite series from this era is the 6 issue miniseries Kitty Pryde & Wolverine. Ray doesn’t have that logo, but I did grab a Kitty Pryde logo and a Wolverine logo to stick here.

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:23:00 -0400

🔖Also, the Sesame Street Tiny Desk Concert made me tear up. 📺🎵

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 12:10:00 -0400

🔖 I highly recommend this video of the Yip Yip Invasion at Phoenix Comicon 2017, in which a group of cosplayers dress as The Martians from Sesame Street and hilarity ensues. 📺

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 12:00:00 -0400

Don’t mind me, I’m just over here flailing in response to the Picard Season 2 Teaser Trailer. 🖖🏻📺🔖

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 11:52:00 -0400

Reddit user JaytheChou is photoshopping Paddington into a different movie every day and it is a source of joy. 🍿🔖

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 11:34:00 -0400

I’ve always been resentful of the trope where girls have to pretend to be boys to get stuff done, but Natalie Zutter’s piece about Leia disguising herself as Boushh especially the part about Padme subverting it, is a welcome fresh perspective. 🍿🔖

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 11:21:00 -0400

Improv as community/business/cult has a lot of problems that would require a radical new model to fix but improv as playful art form taught me a lot about the openness to unexpected conversation & skill for listening that Austin Kleon writes about here. 🔖

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 19:06:00 -0400

🔖 I somehow missed Linda Holmes’s beautiful piece about The Muppet Movie soundtrack. She pulls out the very lines that always makes me cry. 🌈🐸🎵

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 12:42:00 -0400

🔖 I love this take. I’d love to see it even more fleshed out: WandaVision Is Basically a Retelling of the Scarlet Letter (LitHub) 📺

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 13:19:00 -0400

🔖 This piece about WandaVision & fan theories has me musing on the difference between trying to figure out who will make a cameo and, say, analyzing the cinematography in Veronica Mars to see how it draws on the visual language of noir. via Elizabeth Minkel. 📺

Thu, 04 Mar 2021 13:14:00 -0400

🔖 This piece about WandaVision and fan theories has me thinking about fannish meta and where it lives now, if anywhere.

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 13:44:00 -0400

🔖 These images of comic book heroes redrawn to have average body types are fascinating from a cosplayer’s perspective. The “real” bodies look every bit as heroic to me & I wonder if it’s bc I’m used to seeing real bodies in these costumes. via @ohBananaJoe on micro.blog.

Tue, 02 Mar 2021 11:05:00 -0400

🔖 Check out Riana Mckeith’s period-appropriate cartoon homages to WandaVision. So great! It will surprise no one that the 80s one is my fave. (via kottke.org) 📺

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 11:32:00 -0400

🔖 This is a library that is also a theater. I want to go to there.

Tue, 16 Feb 2021 09:12:00 -0400

🔖 If you love beautiful writing with a wistful vibe, you should be reading Jess Zimmerman’s Dead Channel. The latest issue talks about the erosion of physical third places during the pandemic.

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 21:03:33 -0400

🔖 Y’all, Sir Ian McKellen has been blogging about his work since he started working on “X-Men” in 1999 & I love his writing.

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 20:47:00 -0400

🔖 Go read what Tim Carmody has to say about two songs from “The Muppet Movie”. I’m hoping to be able to write a detailed response but for now I’ll just say it’s beautiful and it resonates with me deeply.

Sun, 14 Feb 2021 21:02:38 -0400

🔖 The spellbinding history of cheese and witchcraft is the witchy content I didn’t know I needed. 🧙‍♀️🧀

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 21:35:00 -0400

🔖 One option the New York Times didn’t mention in their piece about keeping a digital commonplace book: doing it on your own website.

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 12:13:00 -0400

🔖 This deep-dive into fans reverse-engineering knitwear like Bernie’s mittens & the fourth Doctor’s scarf sits at the center of a Venn diagram of two of my interests, fandom & textiles. I love it.

Wed, 10 Feb 2021 10:49:00 -0400

🔖 Jess Zimmerman’s latest Dead Channel compares the old Internet to Faerie & tackles what it means to know someone’s handle. It resonated especially with me bc when I recently said “I’m Kiba” to someone I know outside of fandom, she said, “YOU’RE Kiba?”

Mon, 08 Feb 2021 14:15:00 -0400

🔖 My granddaddy got his Ed. D. in 1972 and I just found the record for his dissertation in the UF catalog.

Fri, 05 Feb 2021 16:01:00 -0400

🔖 Highly recommended: Library Ambience Sounds for Studying / Relaxing White Noise.

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 11:10:00 -0400

🔖 I am a Book Person. I don’t love the shots this piece takes at Book People, but I appreciate its conclusion: it would be good to calm down about books. (The verbs attacks Book People are defending themselves against are published, rather than imagined.)

We Have to Save Books from the Book People

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:17:31 -0400

🔖 The Power of German Playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-Effekt: Oliver Mayer discusses the connection between the January 6 insurrection and Brecht’s work with alienation.

Mon, 25 Jan 2021 11:14:30 -0400

🔖 What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction‘?: Soledad Fox Maura writes about why we need to reconsider genre.

Sun, 24 Jan 2021 12:42:15 -0400

🔖 An old piece that the Rec Center brought to my attention: How Writing Fanfic Introduced Me To Myself.

I’ve been feeling the need to do some fun, low-pressure writing. Fic may be just the thing.

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 22:05:00 -0400

🔖 I continue to be proud of my city: Durham Moves to Protect Residents Against Natural Hair Discrimination

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 08:41:00 -0400

🔖I went into reading this expecting a fluff piece. I came out of it with a reminder of the spiritual and psychological depth of tabletop RPGs: How One Rabbi Uses Roleplaying Games to Build Community

Fri, 22 Jan 2021 08:30:12 -0400

🔖This interview is extremely validating! Just Move: Scientist Author Debunks Myths About Exercise And Sleep

Thu, 21 Jan 2021 12:57:00 -0400

🔖 Gaby has curated an amazing collection of Bernie memes. The Beetlejuice and Clerks ones are my favorites.

Wed, 20 Jan 2021 06:25:44 -0400

🔖Paging Through Broadway While the Stages Are Dark: 2020 was supposed to be the year I got back into theater. 🎭

Sun, 17 Jan 2021 09:12:00 -0400

🔖 In “The Black Casting Choices in BRIDGERTON Were…A Choice”, Jessica Pryde explains the ways this was very much NOT colorblind casting. I especially appreciate her acknowledgement of the trauma related to maternal health outcomes. 📺

Fri, 15 Jan 2021 18:56:00 -0400

🔖 This is really cool. I hope that in addition to making it possible for scholarship recipients to show up, they make it so scholarship recipients actually want to stay: ‘SNL’ And ‘Second City’ Announce Scholarships For Diverse, Emerging Comic Talent

Tue, 05 Jan 2021 13:49:52 -0400

🔖🍿 The Wonder Woman Movies Have a Women Problem A great analysis with ideas for how Wonder Woman movies could better reflect all the best stuff about other Wonder Woman media.

Fri, 01 Jan 2021 23:58:24 -0400

🔖 Tips for Starting a Bookstagram: Getting started in the bookish corner of Instagram can be overwhelming. This blog post offers some helpful advice.

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 11:57:35 -0400

🔖 Yes to Masks. No to Parties. 2021 Will Be a Lot Like 2020: disheartening, but not surprising.

Thu, 31 Dec 2020 09:44:43 -0400

🔖 Run, Die, Repeat: How Roguelike Games Helped Us Get Through 2020 - Roguelikes reflect not only the cycle of the pandemic year, but also the cycle of chronic illness.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 15:03:49 -0400

🔖 Where Year Two of the Pandemic Will Take Us I will never not appreciate Ed Yong.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 14:38:53 -0400

🔖 The Vaccine Rollout’s Known Knowns and More In Zeynep Tufecki’s Insight newsletter, Whitney R. Robinson explains the intersection of exposure, infection, and fatality risk and how it interacts with vaccine prioritization.

Tue, 29 Dec 2020 13:50:07 -0400

🔖 The Life in The Simpsons Is No Longer Attainable I don’t have a word for how this article hit me, but it hit me hard.

🔖Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 20:18:00 -0400

via @Miraz

Humans Used to Sleep in Two Shifts, And Maybe We Should Start It Again sciencealert.com
Archiving...
sciencealert.com https://www.sciencealert.com/humans-used-to-sleep-in-two-shifts-and-maybe-we-should-start-it-again

🔖 How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market

Sat, 26 Dec 2020 16:13:00 -0400

This piece by Sarah Lonsdale describes the kind of literary friendship I fantasize about having. Who wants to be my literary bff?

How Literary Female Friendships Shaped the Fiction Market ‹ Literary Hub lithub.com
Read: lithub.com
lithub.com https://lithub.com/how-literary-female-friendships-shaped-the-fiction-market/

Highlights & Notes

Naomi Royde-Smith was an astute literary editor of the Saturday Westminster and brought Macaulay, an awkward “innocent from the Cam” as she described herself, into her circle of friends, who seemed to Macaulay “to be more sparklingly alive than any in my home world.”

Please. Bring me into your literary circle.

Macaulay would often stay in her friend’s Knightsbridge home where they held soirées for authors and journalists to bolster each other’s standing and forge mutually supportive networks.

We can host soirées. I’ll set up the video chat.

Tell me about your favorite literary friendships and relationships! I’m especially fond of the Shelleys, who wrote collaborative diaries. ♥️

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 08:55:00 -0400

🔖 Laurie Penny’s WIRED piece about falling in love over Zoom is one of the most hopeful things I’ve read in a long time. It makes me really happy.

Sun, 13 Dec 2020 08:29:00 -0400

🔖 This NPR piece about keeping warm and embracing wintry outdoor adventures is exactly the kind of thing a Florida baby like me needs. I want to enjoy the outdoors in winter; I’ve just never learned how!

Wed, 09 Dec 2020 15:51:00 -0400

I really enjoyed reading this piece about Star Wars stormtrooper strategy & tactics, which is super unlike me. 📺🍿

🔖In ‘The Mandalorian,’ Stormtroopers Have Finally Discovered Tactics wired.com

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 20:49:47 -0400

🔖Lee Skallerup Bessette sums up so much:

Just because its hard, doesn’t mean it’s good and when everything is hard and you have issues with executive functioning, how can you even ever tell the difference?

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 13:18:07 -0400

🔖📚 From Petra Mayer at NPR: Welcome To Story Hour: 100 Favorite Books For Young Readers

Well, that’s a help in choosing which books to share with my kid next. A nice mix of classics and newer stuff.

Mon, 31 Aug 2020 11:46:00 -0400

🔖📚 From Megan Mabee at Book Riot: How The Hunger Games Prequel Helped Me Realize I’ve Changed

I can relate to Mabee’s realization that being a mother has changed how she responds to books.

Wed, 12 Aug 2020 06:37:36 -0400

🔖 Here’s a study that combines my loves for qualitative coding, comedy, and tween media: More than Just a Laughing Matter: A Coding Framework of Humor in Media Entertainment for Tweens and Teens

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 14:22:00 -0400

🔖2015 Kimberly would be SO EXCITED about this article: ‘Whose Line Is It Anyway?’ Using Improvisation to Hone Library Employees’ Customer Service Skills 📓

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 11:09:00 -0400

🔖From Pat Thomson, the ’later on’ PhD

…what the professional usually wants from their PhD are systematic ways into core scholarly practices in research, and academic writing, rhetoric and argumentation, as well as immersion in the scholarship in their field.

This is me. I began my PhD at age 34. By this time I had two Masters degrees, five years’ experience as a classroom teacher, one as a school librarian, and three as a managing editor/digital asset manager/public communications specialist.

My department at work was clearly going to be eliminated and I didn’t have a plan for what to do next. I knew that I wanted to get a PhD eventually, that I wanted to have a kid in the next few years, and that while being a PhD parent is hard, it would allow me to have more flexibility in my schedule than any other job I was likely to get. I decided to go ahead and move my PhD plans up by a few years.

I don’t know what I will do next. I am extraordinarily unlikely to apply for any of the few tenure-track jobs that will open up in the next few years. I have a lot of experience from both my professional work and my personal pursuits, so I’m not worried about developing particular skills.

I came to the PhD because I wanted to understand research methods better, because I wanted to learn how to capture great work happening in libraries and education, and because I wanted a job where research and writing were expected. I’ve gotten those things out of it.

As I said, I don’t know what comes next. For now, I’m writing my dissertation, researching academic makerspaces, making the most of all the kid snuggles I can get and blessing my mother-in-law for being with M. so I can do any work ever, doing informational interviews, and otherwise trying to do what’s fun. 📓

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 11:32:35 -0400

🔖 Katie Yee’s Very Good Writing Advice from New Girl’s Nick Miller is the most delightful thing I’ve read this week, and makes me want to re-watch New Girl. 📝📺

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 04:17:39 -0400

🔖 From The Oatmeal: Marvelous & Melancholy Things I’ve Learned about Creativity

This is so good. If he makes it into a book, I’ll probably buy it and carry it around just like I do with Austin Kleon’s books.

Thu, 23 Jul 2020 15:17:32 -0400

🔖 5 Productivity Practices That Helped Me Finish My Dissertation

Thought I would feel attacked by this post, then I read it and it said “If I was experiencing pain, brain fog or fatigue due to my chronic health issues, I gave myself permission to take breaks, rest and take the rest of the day off.” I do this too!

Wed, 22 Jul 2020 12:49:43 -0400

🔖 The Allure of the Nap Dress, the Look of Gussied-Up Oblivion

I don’t have a clothing budget these days, but if I did, you can bet I’d be scouring eBay, ThredUp, and Poshmark (among others) for nap dresses. I have many aesthetics and would love “Victorian Ghost” to be one of them, though I think I like the idea of embracing my Madwoman in the Attic status even more.

Mon, 20 Jul 2020 16:52:00 -0400

🔖 Kelly J. Baker’s essay, “You Were Ambitious,” struck me to the core.

Cross-posted to: Twitter

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 15:26:00 -0400

🔖📺 Alex Brannan’s article, “It Could Be About Anything”: Middleditch & Schwartz and the Viability of Televised Improv Comedy is an interesting read. Longform improv is definitely hard to explain to non-improv normies but also, in my experience, it’s um, not great fun for most people who aren’t “yes…and” nerds, as Thomas Middleditch calls them, to watch. Like… Does anybody NOT initiated into longform WANT to watch a Harold? Maybe they do, but I’m not sure. By the time I was about to stop performing improv, I was over the Harold as an audience member. And I got to see some really amazing teams. Still not a format I would recommend to just anybody. It’s a performance art piece as much as a comedy piece. I don’t know. Anyway, I’d been thinking about watching the show and now I definitely will.

It’s worth noting that I myself never was on a team that did longform without a gimmick. I think our gimmicks were a huge part of the fun for me. We may never know if I would be able to sustain interest in performing the Harold for longer than a six-week class.

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 18:10:35 -0400

🔖 Adrienne So’s Wired piece, ”‘Crisis Schooling’ and the New Rhythms of Pandemic Parenting," makes me feel okay about how extremely unstructured and screen-heavy my kid’s last 120+ days have been.

Tue, 07 Jul 2020 20:31:00 -0400

🔖 📚 I found myself wanting to read so many of the books on Book Riot’s Best Books of 2020 So Far list that I decided it makes more sense to bookmark the whole list than to add each title individually.

Tue, 02 Jun 2020 15:32:18 -0400

🔖 Where do I donate? Why is the uprising violent? Should I go protest? And other commonly asked questions by white and/or privileged people, answered by other white and/or privileged people*

Fri, 29 May 2020 08:21:40 -0400

🔖 75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice is immensely valuable, because it gives you concrete actions to take in the face of our overwhelming and appalling reality.

Fri, 29 May 2020 05:22:58 -0400

🔖 Read recently:

Thu, 21 May 2020 23:47:46 -0400

🔖 Read ‘A joyful thing’: the man who wrote his wife a poem every day for 25 years. I have a bad habit of idealizing other people’s marriages. This article isn’t helping.

Wed, 20 May 2020 10:12:26 -0400

🔖 Stuff I read yesterday:

Mon, 18 May 2020 22:42:19 -0400

🔖 Read today:

6 Ways to Maximize Your Reading Time During the Pandemic - I can’t tell whether some of these suggestions are jokes, but they all make sense to me.
time for new rules. A lot of these rules work for me.

Mon, 18 May 2020 08:04:00 -0400

🔖🎵🎭📚 Read 8 Musicals that You Might Not Know Were Based on Books by Emily Neuberger.

I’ve been grieving the fact that public performances likely won’t be a thing for the next couple of years. I grieve it both as an audience member and as a performer. Neuberger’s book is going on my to-read list, as her main character’s early experiences with musicals are nearly identical to mine. The musicals and books she writes about are now on my radar if they weren’t, or things I’m going to make a point to revisit if I was already familiar with them.

I bet Neuberger’s book would pair well with The Secret Life of the American Musical, which acts as a Poetics for musicals, describing their shared structural features.

Mon, 18 May 2020 07:36:00 -0400

🔖📝 Read How to Write 1000 Poems in a 1000 Days by Nick Asbury. More why to than how to, this is a moving read and a great argument for making art in response to crisis.

Wed, 06 May 2020 15:41:00 -0400

🔖 From Austin Kleon: Not Everything Will Be Okay But Some Things Will I share Kleon’s frustration with platitudes like “We’ve gotten through worse, we’ll get through this.” Many of us won’t. But more of us will.

🔖 Keeping kids busy at home

Fri, 13 Mar 2020 10:41:26 -0400

Storing links here so they’re easy for me to find when I need them during the next two weeks. Maybe they’ll help you, too?

More to come.

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 13:27:40 -0400

🔖 Read:

Fake News and Instagram
7 Ways to Survive a Flare When You’re Chronically Ill
16 Simple Ways to Relieve Stress and Anxiety
11 Journaling Tips For People Who Are Absolutely Terrible At Keeping A Journal
10 (cheap and easy) ways to pamper yourself
I Tried The Reggio Emilia Method, & It Made Me A Much Better Parent
19 Mystical and Practical Tools I Use Daily to Run My Business
A Guide: How To Prepare Your Home For Coronavirus
academic creativity in the here and now (Some interesting questions here about what life would be like if research had more improv about it.)
The Creative Academic

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 12:54:31 -0400

This is pretty much two weeks’ worth of online reading.

🔖 Read:

I’ve also been binge-reading Erin Morgenstern’s blog from the very beginning. I’ve just finished 2008.

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 22:16:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 07:39:28 -0400

🔖 Read:

3 Supplements I Give My Kids to Boost Their Immune Systems at Preschool and Daycare by Jennifer Anderson
4 Most Filling Easy Dips to Add to Fruits and Veggies by Jennifer Anderson
The Eating Routine that Will End Your Food Battles by Jennifer Anderson
But What About Food Waste? by Jennifer Anderson
When I Thought of Autism, I Never Thought of Someone Like Me by Kalina Jones
PCOS hirsutism v. vanity: The battle with excess hair by Renae Gylbert
Managing unwanted facial hair naturally by Renae Gylbert
7 Things I Would Do Differently If I Was Growing My Intuitive Business From Scratch by Michelle Pellizon

Thu, 06 Feb 2020 22:37:00 -0400

🔖 Read Ask an Astrologer: How can I create more success and flow for in my career according to the stars?

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 23:54:00 -0400

🔖 Read How to build wealth slowly Paul Jarvis

Tue, 04 Feb 2020 23:32:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

“Welcome back blogging?” by CJ Chilvers
”The life model of blogging" by Colin Walker

Thu, 30 Jan 2020 22:35:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

Are Docs Comfortable? 10 Reasons to Wear Dr. Martens Boots by RosaMorelli
How to Break in a Pair of Doc Martens Shoes by Rachel Vega

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 22:31:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

How I Tricked Myself Into Reading More Books by Patrick Allan
14 Ways to Cultivate a Lifetime Reading Habit by Leo Babauta
Document and website structure by Mozilla Developer Network

Wed, 29 Jan 2020 06:56:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

Motherhood and Spirituality: A New Kind of Enlightenment by Astra Niedrea
What Is Hygge? Everything You Need To Know About The Danish Lifestyle Trend by Lyndsey Matthews
Baking 101: My Favorite Vegan Egg Substitutes by Joy Wilson
Civic Hacking by Joshua Tauberer
Trump unveils new Space Force logo, draws comparisons to ‘Star Trek’ Starfleet Command by Jeanine Santucci

Sun, 26 Jan 2020 00:09:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

A Checklist for Your Very First Altar by Amy Wall
How to Soften Acrylic Yarn & Save Your Project! by Shehla Ahmed
‘The Mandalorian’ Broke This 1 Absurd George Lucas Rule by Eric Robinette
Being Soft Is Not A Weakness, It’s What Makes You Strong by Nikita Mor
The homebody economy, explained by Kaitlyn Tiffany

Sat, 25 Jan 2020 13:13:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide by Asher Elbein
Hopepunk, the latest storytelling trend, is all about weaponized optimism by Aja Romano
Punk in Science Fiction and Fantasy by Dawn Vogel
One Atom of Justice, One Molecule of Mercy, and the Empire of Unsheathed Knives by Alexandra Rowland

Wed, 22 Jan 2020 21:09:00 -0400

🔖 Read If Your Wellness Isn’t Intersectional Then You’re Not “Well.” You’re Racist. by Michelle Pellizon

First, hard agree. Second, I really appreciate that Michelle Pellizon has included resources to explore and organizations/businesses to support here.

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 21:45:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

How the Web works by Mozilla Developer Network
HTML by Mozilla Developer Network
Introduction to HTML by Mozilla Developer Network
Taking Note: What Commonplace Books Can Teach Us about Our Past by Taylor Pipes
The Commonplace Book as a Thinker’s Journal by Kevin Eagan

Tue, 21 Jan 2020 10:50:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

Did Inadequate Women’s Healthcare Destroy Star Wars’ Old Republic? by Sarah Jeong
Hide and seek by Austin Kleon
Read old books by Austin Kleon
Your Guide to Semicolons in JavaScript by Alex J.
What are browser developer tools? by Mozilla Developers Network

Mon, 20 Jan 2020 09:17:00 -0400

🔖 Read What’s wrong with sitting down in the shower? by Tom Meltzer

Since I sprained my ankle but don’t want to invest in a shower chair, I investigated whether just sitting in the tub/on the floor is a thing people do. It is.

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 21:00:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

The old internet by Rebecca Toh
How and why to keep a commonplace book by Ryan Holiday
What is a commonplace book and why you need one by Aly Juma
Getting started with the web by Mozilla Developer Network
Installing basic software by Mozilla Developer Network
How do I start to design my website? by Mozilla Developer Network
How does the Internet work? by Mozilla Developer Network
What is the difference between webpage, website, web server, and search engine? by Mozilla Developer Network
What is a web server? by Mozilla Developer Network
How do you set up a local testing server? by Mozilla Developer Network

Wed, 15 Jan 2020 23:10:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

3 ways to make Spotify’s killer feature even smarter by Xiomara Blanco
These five tricks will make your Spotify Discover Weekly playlists bang every week by Dave Fawbert
Update: Creating and managing a lifestream as an Early Career Academic by Kay Oddone
‘Commonplace Books’: The Tumblrs of an Earlier Era by Alan Jacobs

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 22:47:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

Mon, 13 Jan 2020 20:43:00 -0400

🔖 Read:

These readings are influencing my thinking about my own reading+posting workflow. Some people set annual IndieWeb goals. I think mine for 2020 will be to create and document a reading+posting workflow that works for me.

Sun, 12 Jan 2020 21:27:00 -0400

🔖 Read Bloggers are not reporters and Journalists: We are not you by Dave Winter via Frank McPherson’s response.

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 23:18:53 -0400

🔖 Read The Bassist in Marvelous Mrs. Maisel Is Inspired By the Revolutionary Real-Life Musician Carol Kaye by Lauren Kranc

Sat, 11 Jan 2020 17:56:00 -0400

🔖 Read Thoughts on linkblogs, bookmarks, reads, likes, favorites, follows, and related links by Chris Aldrich

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 22:36:00 -0400

🔖 Read An IndieWeb reader: My new home on the internet by Aaron Parecki

Fri, 10 Jan 2020 12:52:00 -0400

🔖 Read Titling it “The Problem That Has No Name” seemed a bit heavy handed by Drew Zandonella

In the latest issue of her newsletter, Drew Zandonella speaks the truth of my heart about parenting and the stage of life I’m in right now.

The last time Jacob and I had more than an hour alone to do anything together besides stare lovingly at our screens I asked, “well, what the fuck do we do next?” With degrees, a marriage, a mortgage, and a kid we’ve hit of all the outdated traditional markers of adulthood, however flawed they may seem. In a reaction that could have essentially just been a screenshot of the end of The Graduate, he replied, “I guess we just keep going.”

Things are a bit different for us, as I’ve got a degree left, and W. has some professional aspirations he’s working toward. But those will be achieved or not in the next couple of years, and then… then we keep going. (And get cats. We get cats in a couple of years.)

…I would like to embark upon an elaborate vision quest to ring in my forties. Or at least take a long bath alone. Or sleep for twelve hours between crisp, cool hotel sheets, waking only to order room service.

It wasn’t until I got pregnant that I realized how much I wanted to be alone. Or maybe I finally understood that there are a lot of people in this world who enjoy the company of others more than I do.

This only reads as bitter if you don’t understand that the feral need and desire to absorb my child is so inherent that I’ve forgotten to figure out a decent way to explain that to others.

A world of “yes this.” I spend my days with this immensely engaging, startlingly perfect human, and he is absorbing like nothing else, and also it’s maddening to have someone else’s chatter constantly in your head. So the greatest gift I’ve given myself in the last year were the two times I went to a float spa. For an hour each time, I was in complete darkness and silence. It used to be this would sound terrifying; now, it is a blessed relief. (But the pure sensory deprivation is necessary. If there were background noises of the road or birds or whatever, I think the spell would be broken.)

Last week when a well-meaning family friend asked about the state of my uterus I replied that I plan on riding the Orient Express on my fortieth birthday and unfortunately that journey is not reasonable while catering to the needs of young children.

I had the occasion to hold the 4-month-old baby of a friend from high school over the holidays. (The baby spit up on me. Of course.) As I held that baby, I imagined some parents of three-year-olds would hold this tiny larva of a creature and think “Awww I want another!” I thought, “If I had another, that’d be okay, but I’m not really going to pursue it.” I’ve given so much of me to M. I don’t know if I would have much left for a sibling.

This only reads as selfish if you don’t know that I’ve weighed the feeling of wanting another baby with wanting to fund a reboot of my current baby over and over again.

Yes! I mean, more a reboot of my motherhood than of my baby. Those earliest days in particular I wish I had done differently. But I think you’re in such a haze, so how would you even be able to brain enough to remember what you learned from the first time around?

Maybe what I really want is to appreciate Frida’s past and present selves from a more well-rested vantage point, but I think that’s what being a grandparent is for. For now, Frida begs to see photos of “baby Free-Free” on my phone and we both attempt to wrap our heads around the fact that she was once in my body, then brand new, and now able to articulate her needs so eloquently that I can hardly believe that she once had gills.

When M. was tiny and I thought he was adorable, I had no idea how he would be even more adorable when he was big and looking at a photo of his tiny self and saying “Ohhh so cuuuuute!”

I will spend my entire life shocked that I willed this one person into existence and that she is permanently in on the joke.

So will I, with mine.

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 17:30:00 -0400

🔖 Read Carbon monoxide emergency is Durham’s Katrina, McDougald Terrace residents tell city.

CW: Infant death

Many families have been displaced from public housing in my city due to this crisis. If you’re interested in helping, here are some options:

United Way of the Greater Triangle’s Durham One Fund is accepting donations to assist with crisis relief.
Local photographer offering tiny photo sessions with proceeds to benefit affected families

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 00:49:00 -0400

🔖 Read 100 things that made my year (2019)

Austin Kleon captures so many beautiful small moments here. I find myself inspired to keep a daily log like his to help me do likewise.🕸️

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 11:12:00 -0400

🔖 Gee, J. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today’s schools. In D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond communities of practice: Language, power, and social context (pp. 214–232).

Much of what Gee has to say here is similar to what he said in his book in 2004. He adds here the designation “semiotic social space” to name the types of spaces he described in his book. He emphasizes that generators create signs that make up the content of the game. These signs can be viewed as internal, the original content itself and its design, or external, the individual and social practices surrounding the content and how people “organise their thoughts, beliefs, values, actions and social interactions in relation to the signs made available” in the content (p. 219).

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 07:19:00 -0400

🔖 Songs By Librarians For Librarians: NYPL Sings

I love this! I have long dreamed of being a children’s entertainer and I love the idea of librarians writing songs for other librarians and parents to listen to with kids. M. and I will be listening to this today!

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 12:48:00 -0400

🔖🎮 Read Hitting the Restart Button: Mass Effect Andromeda (The Learned Fangirl) by Kristin.

From Princess to General: How Many Times Can Leia Save the Galaxy?

Fri, 23 Mar 2018 12:48:00 -0400

🔖🍿 Read From Princess to General: How Many Times Can Leia Save the Galaxy? (The New York Times).

Thu, 14 Dec 2017 23:56:47 -0400

🔖🎮 Read The Nintendo Switch Gave Me Back My Video Games by Mark Serrels (Kotaku AU)

Yes, this.

When my son was a tiny thing, I could strap him into his carrier and wear him to sleep as I sunk hours into Dragon Age Inquisition or Final Fantasy XV. But as he’s gotten more mobile, that’s stopped being an option. The Switch solves this problem beautifully. I can play as he naps and stay at his side. If I wake up early, I can play. I think it will take me forever to beat Breath of the Wild but that’s fine.

I love the Switch.

Links on Kimberly Hirsh

Response to Charlie Jane Anders's "What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures"

🔖🖖📺 In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed)(Trek News) by Bill Smith

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book

🔖 You should read Josh Radnor's Museletter.

Notes and highlights

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