You have 40 minutes before your childcare ends. Do you:

A) ? take a shower

B) ? take a nap

C) ? take a bath and ? read

D)? put away clean laundry

E) ?start a new load of laundry

F) ? watch TV?

Reading this book in the car while the toddler naps. I started this book on Monday. It’s a very engaging read. It uses second person effectively to pop the reader right into the middle action. It includes what seems to me to be a straightforward and sensitive handling of gender identity, especially non-binary gender identity. Not finished yet, but so far, highly recommended.

I’ve been awaiting this book since it was announced. Now it’s here and I’m going to devour it! I’ve neglected true self-care most of my life. In the months before I got pregnant, I was finally taking better care of myself. But since M. was born, I have once again let it slide. I’ve claimed it in little ways here and there, but it’s time to devote myself to it more fully for a while. I’m doing the prep work now and starting the actual 21-day program May 14. Let me know if you want to join me and we can do daily check-ins. (If there’s a bunch of us, we can even maybe do a GroupMe!) #pcosdiva #pcos #bookstagram #amreading

Probably going to write a series of fics in which Giles just has to do normal school librarian stuff.

Thanks to Saturday Night Live’s Lobster Les Mis, Clawsette and Epawnine are now in the running for future cat names. (Meowrius is also a possibility.)

How Children Learn by John Holt

Marked to-read 04/28/18.

If you got me one of these, it would arrive just in time for my birthday in mid-July! I like the teal one. $12

I love this so much.

Here’s a complete list of everything I’ve got going on right now. And by “going on,” I mean a level of intensity ranging from “thinking about maybe doing it” to “seriously working on it.” (Categories come from the Integrative Nutrition Circle of Life exercise.)

Spirituality

• Daily tarot card pull as a means of connecting with my intuition

Creativity

• Things of Bronze podcast
• Compiling a YouTube playlist of comedy sketches that epitomize my comedic sensibility
• Developing a concept for a geeky variety show
• A memoir about adolescence/early adulthood in the early days of the World Wide Web
• Something for the 10th anniversary of Doctor Horrible
• Daily blogging
• Indiewebifying kimberlyhirsh.com

Finances

• Reducing grocery spending via using my Soda Stream, freezing leftovers, and eating out of the pantry/fridge/freezer

Career

• Writing culturally sustaining pedagogy online curriculum module for Project READY.
• Steeping myself in the world of YA librarianship

Education

• Working on the Makerspaces section of my comprehensive literature review

Health, Home Cooking

• Eagerly awaiting Healing PCOS

Physical Activity

• Resuming walks with my family
• Swimming with the Total Immersion Effortless Endurance self-coaching course

Home Environment

• Putting together a list of tasks for the handyman
• Cleaning out the upstairs linen closet as part of packing and purging in anticipation of putting our house on the market

Relationships

• Treating Will to a birthday surprise
• All the parenting: deciding how and when to potty train, buying springtime clothes, selecting toddler tableware

Social Life

• Figuring out when to schedule game nights
• Planning Google Hangouts

Joy

• Continuing to have a super cute kid with an excellent giggle

What, you DON’T have a bunch of Harry Potter role-playing names just lying around?

This has me thinking about the dangers of algorithms and the role of social media silos in the blogging economy. I have been watching hobby blogs become businesses for about 15 years. Affiliate links have always been one of the top ways to monetize a blog or website, but I think social media has changed how that traffic moves. (I haven’t paid as close attention to this sphere in the past 5 years or so but I’m sort of always a little bit aware of it.)

I’m thinking about the relationship between this phenomenon and the IndieWeb, of course. The thing is that all of the bloggers quoted in the article have their own domain names and seem to run their own independent blogs, but clearly get a lot of traffic from Instagram. Publishing on your own site and syndicating on Instagram wouldn’t protect you from this kind of content scraping. The way this affiliate economy seems to work, telling these creators to just wean themselves off Instagram seems like telling them to stop having their primary source of income.

If I were in a position to give them advice (as, say, a librarian whose job it is to advise young people on smart practices for information creation and dissemination), I’m not sure what advice I’d give them.

This has illuminated for me several issues I want to research/revisit, though:

• The current state of affiliate marketing
• The difference between a blogger and an influencer
• The relationship between an influencer's blog and social media presence (Is their content being syndicated or do they publish different things in each venue?)

My friend who is a fifth grade teacher told me that all her students are already YouTubers and expect to monetize their content and support themselves full-time. Once of the bloggers quoted in this Racked article, Nita of Next with Nita, finished law school and then moved to LA “to pursue [her] dream as an influencer.” (She has over 210,000 Instagram followers. I can’t imagine telling her to just quit Instagram would be good advice.)

Those jobs that didn’t exist yet that those of us who were teaching 10 or 15 years ago were preparing kids for? Influencer is one of them. YouTuber is one of them. Educators and technologists need to think about how to talk to youth about their creations, how they are monetized, and who gets to monetize them.

This blew my mind. I narrowly managed to avoid falling down a rabbit hole looking for thinkpieces on deepfake, which is truly some cyberpunk dystopian stuff.

When my mind is sharp, I work on my comprehensive exams. When it’s fuzzy but not dull, I work on IndieWeb stuff. When it’s dull, I work on my podcast. When my body has energy, I tidy. When I’m ready to trade outputs for inputs, I listen to podcasts. In any given moment, I check in with myself and let how I feel guide my next action.

Was watching Silicon Valley S5E3 and Richard started waxing poetic about redecentralizing the internet and users owning their data and I got all ?.

I’ve always enjoyed The Bloggess when she came across my radar (And that’s why you should learn to pick your battles is a particular favorite). For some reason, though, I’ve always resisted becoming fully obsessed with her. Maybe because she’s popular and I’m inappropriately contrarian? Well, no more. After listening to her episode of THWoD I’ve decided we should be BFFs, and you obviously can’t befriend someone without reading their books and blog, so off I go…

Haenyeo: Women Divers of Korea - Marked to-read on 04/20/2018.

Found via Broadly via Laura Olin.

Splash (1984), Labyrinth (1986), Beetlejuice (1988), Beaches (1988) Tagged by @allieacts. Tagging @tceles_B_hsup, @ailuruscosmos, @Folio_Ninja, @WhitneyEllenB

Mars and Her Children - Marked to-read 4/19/18.

Found via Laura Olin.

This morning, I popped M. in the stroller and walked him the three quarters of a mile to the doula offices for their Movers & Shakers meeting. As the first babies they ushered into the world became toddlers, the community of parents who had worked with them wanted to continue meeting with each other beyond the New Parents hangout, and even some of the babes who had not technically aged out of the New Parents Hangout group got so mobile and handsy that the parents of said babes (mine included) started to wonder how safe it was for the little ones to be exposed to our friendly acrobats. So the doulas started a group for older, more mobile babies up to age two. Michael and I make it out about once every three weeks. This is a much better attendance rate than we had for the New Parents Hangout, probably because as he’s gotten older and more mobile I’ve lost any illusions I had about being able to get work done as he played, so we might as well go play with other families.

So, as I said - this morning, I popped him in the stroller - and when I say “popped” I mean that I strapped him in his five-point harness, ensured he had plenty of pretzels in the cupholder, realized that I had left his water bottle on the floor, picked up his water bottle, put that in the grown-up’s cupholder (because again, M’s was full of pretzels) and headed out to the doula office.

Michael was the only toddler in attendance, but he had the time of his life playing with the seven-year-old son of one of the owners. As the Movers and Shakers time ended and time for the New Parents Hangout approached, other families started to arrive, including one family with a very new baby.

I told Michael it was almost time to leave. I sang him the relevant Daniel Tiger song. (There is a relevant Daniel Tiger song for almost every toddler/preschooler parenting moment. A mom used the same “It’s almost time to stop” one on a playground recently and when I said, “Hey, M! We know that song!” she replied, “Daniel Tiger is my co-parent.") I re-filled his cupholder, this time with veggie straws. I strapped him into the stroller and asked him to wave goodbye to everybody.

As I was strapping him in the stroller, I remembered my earliest New Parents Hangout, sitting with this tiny, fragile, incoherent, precious person in his huge carrier, not knowing how to do anything yet. I imagined what that version of myself would think watching me go through this process of getting Michael in the stroller, settling him in, getting him out the door.

I decided she would think, “Wow. That lady can parent a toddler so effortlessly. That’s amazing.”

And it was beautiful to have that dual perspective, to remember myself as a newbie and be able to look upon my expert self, shepherding this relatively giant creature, having him say goodbye to the doulas.

Then getting to the door and realizing I’d left my backpack in the classroom, then going back and getting it and truly heading out, then not realizing my phone had fallen out of the stroller in the parking lot until I’d walked a couple hundred feet past where it happened, then running back to find it while praying a car hadn’t run over it, then sighing with relief after finding it lying on the ground unharmed, then continuing the walk home.

These things keep us humble in the moments when we would be proud. I think it’s nice to be able to feel both at once.

And, of course, observing this moment is a nice reminder that whomever I’m looking at and thinking, “Wow, she really has it together!” is probably struggling in some way I can’t see, and that potentially any time I’m struggling, there’s somebody looking at me who thinks I’m doing a great job.

Step 1 was returning to my own site. Step 2 was returning to RSS  I think Step 3 will be returning to bookmarks.

This is basically what I’m doing on my own website. I ask myself, “How did I use the Internet in 2001?” because the Internet of 2001 is definitely the Internet for which I’m most nostalgic.

In 2001, I owned my own domain name. I blogged in a hand-coded html file. I made friends with other people through the Buffy the Vampire Slayer posting board. I made other friends through those friends visiting their blogs and commenting on their posts. We had link lists, blog rolls, fan Listings, and web rings, and that’s how we found new sites to visit. We made fan art and wrote fanfiction.

Some of this is still happening, most especially the fan works part. And some innovations have definitely made the Internet better - I switched to automated blogging software in 2002 and I haven’t regretted it once since. Other pieces inspired by other people working on the IndieWeb, I’m bringing back: my following page is basically a blog roll and I’ve started reading blogs again.

This is a beautiful piece about trees, forests, libraries, reading, writing, distance, and connection. I found it thanks to Austin Kleon. I will definitely be picking up Rebecca Solnit’s books.

Families at Play - Marked to-read on 04/15/2018.

Found via Connected Learning Alliance.

Library: An Unquiet History - Marked to-read on 04/15/18.