Links
🔖 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.
🔖 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?
🔖📺🎮 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.
🔖 Read The online free speech debate is raging in fan fiction, too by Elizabeth Minkel.
🔖 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?
🔖📺👱♀️ 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.”
🔖 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.
🔖 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.
🔖 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.
🔖📚 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.
🔖📝 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.)
🔖📺 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.
🔖 Read
A year of new avenues robinsloan.com
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)
🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).
🔖 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.”
🔖💀 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.
🔖 Read Creativity as Spiritual Practice by Rabbi Adina Allen (My Jewish Learning).
“Each of us is endowed with creative capacity simply by being human.”
🔖📺📝 Read TV Recaps Taught Me How to Write Criticism by Joelle Kidd.
I love Kidd’s discussion of the role of pleasure in criticism.
🔖📺 Read Wednesday Addams Is the Ultimate Outcast by Miyako Pleines (Catapult).
🖤
🔖 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.”
🔖 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.
🔖🎮 Read Playing ‘Tunic’ Reminds Me How to Approach Sickness and Recovery by Martin Cahill (Catapult).
🔖 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.
🔖 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.
🔖 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.