🔖 Read The Healing Power of JavaScript.

❤️

🔖🌐 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.

🔖 How Does Motherhood Impact Your Creativity? It’s Complicated vogue.com

Read: www.vogue.com

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.

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

What a great interview.

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

🔖📝 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.

🔖📚 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.

🔖📓 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.

🔖📚 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.

🔖📝📚📺🍿 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.