I mentioned in my month notes for September that I’ve been playing epistolary RPGs with my friend K.

K lives three states away from me and is a trailing spouse; his husband got a tenure-track professor job and as one does, K moved with him to the area where the university is. Unfortunately, the gaming scene there was… not what K was looking for. So in the hopes of combatting some of K’s trailing spouse isolation, we started a D&D game that we play over Zoom with a couple of our other friends who are local to me and thus also far from K.

But getting 4 busy people together at the same time is hard and that group will often go 9 months or more without playing.

I buy charity bundles on itch.io sometimes and I noticed that some of the games there are for only two people and are easy to play asynchronously, so I asked K if he wanted to try some of those and he did, so here we are.

The obvious benefits of this kind of game are that you can play it whenever one of you has time and the other can then catch up at their convenience. There are a lot of different ways of doing it, but we play in a shared Google Doc we create for each game.

So far the games we’ve played have used a deck of cards, either standard playing cards or Tarot, to randomly select prompts for you to address in writing as you play.

I anticipated the gaming benefits of this style of play, but what’s been a delightful surprise is the effect it’s had on my writing and my writerly identity.

I thrive as a writer of fiction when I know there is an audience of at least one. In fifth grade, we had to write stories using vocabulary words and I wrote a series featuring characters based on my classmates. They eagerly awaited each new installment. In ninth grade, I wrote a story called The Hog Prince and shared it with friends.

I prefer writing fanfiction to writing original fiction partly because I know where to publish it and know that someone will read it.

An epistolary RPG means that the other player(s) are going to read what you wrote, so that audience I crave is built in, with no delays for publication.

Like fanfiction, when you’re writing in these games you kind of get to play with someone else’s toys. And when the players know each other well, you can give each other gifts in the text. You can make something appear that you don’t have a plan for but that you know another player will do something great with. Which is even nicer, I think, than just picking up and playing with toys that weren’t built for you.

A third piece of these games that makes them really work well for me is that they inherently require you to be creative within constraints. Kate Bingaman Burt gave a great TEDx talk about the value of these kind of constraints. I’m the kind of person who gets paralyzed by the number of choices available when doing something creative. I could write anything, so I don’t know how to begin, so I write nothing. The prompts in these games and the contributions of other players mean that I don’t have to choose a starting point, and that’s huge. And if I get stuck, well, soon I’ll have a new prompt to work with.

If you’ve been struggling to do creative writing, maybe find a way to make it a game. There are solo RPGs you can play this way, too, and maybe I’ll try one of those soon.

If you asked me what happened in September 2024 and I answered without looking at my calendar, I’d say nothing much. My mom was hospitalized for pretty much the whole month (with any luck she’ll go home tomorrow) with idiopathic colitis that seems to have gotten better but was never explained.

But if I look at my calendar, I see that it was actually a full month with a lot of fun stuff going on. So here we go!

Fun

Our local Bricks & Minifigs had their grand opening. W. and I took M. and his best friend. My brother joined us, too. The line was long and it was sunny, but eventually we got in and I got what I had come for: Kermit and Miss Piggy minifigures. W. won the raffle grand prize, which is a Back to the Future Time Machine set signed by the Broadway cast of Back to the Future. I’m torn because this is a set I really want to build but I know building it will ruin any collector value it has, so. I don’t know. I guess maybe I’ll buy the set separately sometime? I also got a couple of the D&D Minifig surprise bags.

W. and I went to see [Clue Live On Stage](https://clueliveonstage.com/, which was incredibly fun. It’s got all your favorite stuff from the movie, and lots of other jokes that you can only do in live theater.

A family we’ve known for a while since their kid and M. have been in school together hosted a Chilean Independence Day party, which was very fun to go to. And I remembered that I don’t need to try Pisco Sour again because it is way too strong for me.

W.’s mom wanted to take M. to Paperhand Puppet’s annual show, so we all went along with M.’s best friend and his dad. The artistry of these giant puppets is incredible and I loved seeing how clever they were doing things like having bubbles come out of fishes’ mouths. The scale of those puppets is not to M.’s liking so I don’t think we’ll go next year, but I do hope to see them at a fairy festival or something sometime because they’re very cool to look at.

My friend K. and I have been playing epistolary RPGs, which are great because he lives in another state. We just have a shared Google Doc to play in. First we played The Only Amenity in This Endless Dungeon is a Daemonic Postal Service and then we started Tether.

Work

We had Back to School Night, where caregivers come and learn a bit about how their kids’ days go and what to expect over the course of the school year. My role was to hang out in the library and chat with the grown-ups who wanted to learn more about the library. It was really great to meet everyone and talk with them about their kids’ use of the library. One parent expressed interest in volunteering in the library, so I’m in the process of getting that set up.

Another parent who has been volunteering in the library for years really started working in earnest once I finally figured out what would be most helpful for her to do, and that has melted away tons of stress I had about not being able to get everything done in 20 hours a week. Is it still enough work for a full-time position? Of course it is, but at least now I can focus my attention on the things only I can do, like instructional support, collaboration, and collection development.

Speaking of instructional support, I put together both print and digital resources for the 1st & 2nd year (equivalent of 1st & 2nd grade) classes about North American animals. This is a fun way for me to learn about what’s already in our collection. I also pulled together statistics about things kids were interested in for a 4th year rounding lesson, which it sounds like the kids really enjoyed.

Stress

There’s been one big source of stress, which is that in August I took my and W.’s watches to get their batteries replaced, as a little anniversary gift left over from our anniversary in July (15 years modern gift is watches but we both already had great watches, hence watch batteries) and the glass on W.’s limited edition Mr. Jones Sun and Moon Miyamoto watch got broken. The store employee told me they’d send it to a jeweler and have it ready in a few days. I didn’t hear from them and after a month, I finally went back and asked about it. The store employee took my name down and said he’d look into it and call me. Two more weeks went by and I had no word, so Monday I went down there and was ready to just ask them to give me the watch and I’d take it to a jeweler. But they tracked it down, I laid eyes on it, they corrected my phone number because the original person had written it down wrong, and then they called me later to confirm it was at the jeweler. So here’s hoping that gets resolved soon.

Media

I read 6 books, a bit of a slow down from earlier in the year but what can you do? When you go from unemployed to employed, your reading is going to slow down a bit.

W. and I have been watching the new season of Only Murders in the Building. We watched the latest season of Hilda as a family and finished up a Gravity Falls family watch, too.

My brother and I saw Beetlejuice Beetlejuice in the theater. Beetlejuice is such a critically formative piece of media for me. There was no way its sequel could hold a candle to it in terms of having a place in my heart. But I think they did a great job. It’s super fun and I think has exactly the vibes that a 35-years-later sequel to Beetlejuice should. Also I love our Baby Goth Queen Jenna Ortega.

I played a little bit of Dragon Age: Origins but once my mom was super extra sick, I didn’t want something that intense, so I’ve been playing Disney Dreamlight Valley, which pleases me greatly.
Whew. That’s enough that I think maybe it’s time for me to start doing weeknotes instead of monthnotes.

How was your September?

When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman is a middle grade novel that imagines what Anne Frank’s life might have been like before she had to move to the attic of her father’s office building. Here’s the publisher’s description:

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history’s most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank’s life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne’s journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family’s life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force

.I’m going to diverge from my usual review format for this book and be a bit more stream of consciousness. But I hope you’ll still get a sense of the book and whether it might be for you, someone you love, or someone you work with.

I’ve never read anything by Alice Hoffmann before, and many other reviews talk about her using lyrical language and that being a struggle for them. For me, the early chapters of the book read like a middle grade nonfiction book, describing Anne’s experiences, with little dialogue or direct action portrayed. I think that’s a bit tricky, especially for a book like this that isn’t nonfiction but draws heavily on research and might be hard to distinguish from nonfiction.

The lack of action and dialogue made it hard for me to read this at first, but eventually I really got into imagining Anne’s life in the city of Amsterdam, and that’s what really brought the book to life for me. I think many of us only imagine Anne in hiding during the Holocaust, rarely thinking about the many years of her life before this event that both defined her literary voice and led to her death.

That’s the great joy in When We Flew Away for me: thinking about her daily life before going into hiding. Anne went to bookstores. She ate ice cream. She flirted with boys. She ice skated. And all of these activities and more are things she does in this book.

Like many women, I imagine, Anne Frank’s diary was very important to me as a young person. I first read it in sixth or seventh grade. I read it again before auditioning for the play adaption of it when I was in ninth grade, and I think I’ve probably read it again as an adult. One of the things that’s so remarkable about Anne Frank’s diary is how true to the developmental experiences of a wide variety of Western teenagers across time and place it is. I think many young people reading it can see their own dreams and anxieties, family relationships and hopes for romance, in Anne’s writing.

Because Anne’s writing has been so important to me, I made it a priority to visit the Anne Frank House while I was in Amsterdam. Before you go into the attic, you walk through rooms with video and audio about the time Anne was living in and the expansion of Nazi occupation into the Netherlands. Then you walk through the bookcase hiding a secret door and up a very narrow staircase (typical of staircases in Amsterdam) and find yourself in the attic.

Wandering through the rooms, I was disheartened by how hard it was to feel connected to that time long ago and the people who lived there, even though I was in their space. I was surprised by the things that really made me feel closer to their experience: the pencil lines on the wall tracking Anne and Margot’s heights. The view of a tree through the one place Anne could see the sky.

And of course, seeing the diary itself. That was the most powerful thing of all.

In the same way that seeing these things helped me understand Anne’s experiences, reading this book and thinking about the things I experienced in Amsterdam beyond the Anne Frank House added a whole new dimension to my understanding of her life. Anne walked the same streets I did. She looked at the same houses I did. She went to the same parks.

Readers who need action and dialogue to stay engaged with a book will struggle with this book, but readers who want details that help them imagine other people’s lives more fully will find so much here.

Book: When We Flew Away
Author: Alice Hoffman
Publisher: Scholastic
Publication Date: September 17, 2024
Pages: 304
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

It’s been a full month since the official first day at my new job, and we’ve had the kids at school for three weeks. And, as you might expect, in that time I’ve learned some things.

There’s a 40-minute recess period before lunch and I have the library open during that time. Kids are welcome to come in, check out books, sit and read, or draw. In the first two weeks, I felt slammed during that time. There will often be a LOT of kids in the library. Maybe eventually I’ll actually count but all I know is it feels like maybe as many as 30 at a time. And inevitably 8 - 10 of these kids will require my help at once: to find a book, to check out a book, to suggest a book that we purchase. I am so glad they’re there, so happy that so many kids (there are about 130 at the school and I would guess at least a third of them come through at some point in lunch recess) are excited about reading. Of course I want to help them all! But it was overwhelming and exhausting.

So I started thinking about how we can make it so that the help I’m giving has the most impact.

The most obvious place to start was to teach even the youngest kids (1st graders) how to check out books themselves. Many of them have learned, and there are usually at least a few other kids who already know how that are happy to help. This frees me up a lot more to help with finding and choosing books.

We were having super long lines at checkout, and kids were getting back to lunch late, so I ended up dedicating two computers to checkout. In the early days, hardly anyone was using the catalog. Now we’re getting long lines at the catalog computer, so I may need to reconsider this set up. It is possible for me to have them set up for kids to do both, but that will require slightly more training.

Next, I realized that kids didn’t know how to use the catalog to find the physical location of the library, because the initial screen that pops up gives a call number but because our library is genrefied, the kids need to know both the call number and the location. So once I learned how to find that information in the catalog, I developed a brief lesson to share what I learned. That seems to be working well; kids are now able to find locate most things in the catalog on their own.

My goal is to make these sort of administrative tasks as independent of me as possible. Because the real joy in my job happens when a kid says, as one did this week, “I really like books like Guts, Drama, Ghosts, and El Deafo. Do you know any others like that?” Things are so busy at lunch recess I had to say, “Give me a day to work on it.” But the next day I had a big stack of other books for her to try. This is called readers’ advisory, and it’s one of my favorite parts of library work.

Another of my favorite parts is supporting instruction, which I did for the first time this week. Our younger students will be learning about North America this week including animals, people, and maps/land features. The teachers working on the animals lessons asked me to pull some resources together for them. So I spent a couple hours on that, getting a big stack of books together and building them a collection of ebooks on the ebook service we use, as well as recommending iNaturalist for photos of the animals out in the world.

I could only do that, though, because the teachers happened to catch me on a day when I didn’t have any students in for circulation.

The key thing to note is that I work 50% time. And the way that 50% is scheduled, about 2 of the 5 hours I work on a given day are dedicated to front-facing, direct student support. Another hour or two are dedicated to administrative tasks like getting books checked back in.

This only leaves an hour or two a day for the deep work of readers’ advisory, instructional support and collaboration, and collection management. (I haven’t even really gotten started with collection management yet; I’ve been thinking about it, but not doing it.)

I do have high school TAs who can help with shelving and checking in, but when they’re available and when I need to have books ready to go back out to kids or free up space (they’re allowed a maximum of 10 books checked out at a time) aren’t always the same.

So. I’m trying to create systems to help me make more time for the deep work.

I think I had a different high school experience than a lot of my peers. When the reunion committee asks, “What was your favorite after school hangout?” mostly people mention fast food restaurants or the mall. I’m all, “My house? No, wait, play rehearsal.”

First, I didn’t have a car.

Second, I genuinely can’t imagine being able to just go and hang out somewhere after school. As I remember it, I would (in 9th & 10th grade) ride the bus or (in 11th & 12th grade) be dropped off by a friend, always at home. I might watch Animaniacs and Batman: the Animated Series, but then I’d get right to homework. And then I’d have dinner and head to rehearsal.

I have no regrets about living in theaters in high school.

The other thing though as I think about it is that if I wasn’t home, who was going to hang out with my siblings? My mom was so sick with pernicious anemia and hypothyroidism, she barely had the energy to get out of bed. (I have worked very hard to make sure this isn’t my adult life. She didn’t have the access to information that I do.)

My brother was ages 1 - 4 when I was in high school and childcare was prohibitively expensive. Was I going to make my 9 - 13-year-old sister care for him? No. Was I going to consign her to a fate of waiting in after school care until my dad could pick her up? Definitely not; we’d lived that life when I was in elementary school and our school’s after care felt very sad.

So I didn’t go hang out anywhere until my dad got home from work, and then I went to rehearsal. Usually he drove me, but sometimes a friend did.

I had such a bad experience in driver’s ed and driving with my permit that I didn’t get my license until I was 20. So there’s a real sense of freedom that my peers had at 16 that I just didn’t.

But even if I’d had my license: we had one car. If I’d gotten a job to buy a car, the childcare question would come up again. (I just realized that of course my mom had to care for my baby brother during the day, so now I’m thinking that’s where all her spoons went. She had to save her energy for that.)

Anyway, yeah. My favorite after school hangout was our futon I guess until my dad got home and could take me to the theater, my actual favorite after school hangout.

But my favorite weekend hangout?

That was the library.

This is a romance. I would say on the romance.io steam rating scale, this is 🔥🔥: behind closed doors.

Helena Greer’s romances set at Carrigan’s Christmasland, a magical lodge/Christmas tree farm in the Adirondacks owned by a Jewish family, come to a close with Hers for the Weekend. Carrigan’s is a place as real to me as many of the actual magical-feeling places I’ve been in my life and the Carrigan’s Crew are all immensely lovable people with supremely relatable flaws.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

No-nonsense Tara Sloane Chadwick is practically perfect. An impeccably mannered Southern belle, she’s the youngest to make partner at her law firm and still friends with all her exes. However, when the woman behind her most humiliating breakup invites Tara to her wedding, Tara panics at the thought of showing up alone and impulsively declares she’s bringing her very serious girlfriend.

One issue: Tara is seriously single.

Waitress and wild child Holly Siobhan Delaney may be lusting over Tara—but Tara only dates women she can marry, and Holly’s sworn off relationships. So when Tara needs a fake girlfriend, Holly’s eager to propose a no-strings, temporary fling. Only sharing secrets and steamy kisses show Holly the caring woman beneath Tara’s picture-perfect exterior, tempting Holly to break her own rules. Can these two opposites trust their feelings enough to try for forever—or will their relationship go down in flames?

What I loved

Helena Greer’s whole deal is taking beloved Hallmark tropes and queering them. In this one, the frosty blonde fiancée gets the girl. And I adore this frosty blonde fiancée. Tara Sloane Chadwick is a Southern belle with a wild past using her degree from Duke law (where my Dad probably would have been working when Tara was in law school, if she were real!) to subvert the inequitable justice system from whose bias she benefited as a young person.

Tara is less ice queen than snow queen: she just needs someone to help her melt. And a propos of a snow queen (of which I am one, which is to say, I melt easily), her favorite Disney movie is Frozen II. This comes up in the book A Lot. If you don’t know the movie, you’ll be fine, but if it spoke to your heart (it did to me, even more than Frozen), you are going to appreciate a lot of bits of this book even more than you would otherwise. So I love this, I love Tara feeling like she’s Elsa.

I love that Tara struggles to believe she is loved by her friends, especially her platonic twin-flame, Cole. But she is. And this is a romance novel so part of the happy ending is her accepting that love, eventually. But the journey, whew. It left me weeping.

Holly doesn’t speak to my heart as directly as Tara does. But she is still a great character, who has sanitized her punk rock self into a more socially-acceptable rockabilly quirky girl. Like Tara, she is haunted by a mistake she made in her youth and doesn’t trust herself because of it.

Both of these women mask themselves from the world and both of them, over the course of the book, will learn that it is not just okay, but actually great, for them to be themselves.

There are lots of fun Christmas wedding hijinks here, and if you’ve read the first two Carrigan’s books, all the Carrigan’s interactions will feel extra rich and make everything more fun. (And if you haven’t, you should. They’re great.) All of the secondary characters feel full and whole.

What I wanted more of

Listen, I have no notes, I’m just sad not to have new Carrigan’s stories.

What I need to warn you about

There are some really awful parents in here. Helena Greer writes great warnings at the start of her books, so be sure to check those out.

Who should read this

Anyone who likes to cry during their rom-coms. Anyone who wants the ice queen blonde fiancée to get a happy ending after her quirky partner leaves her. Anyone who wants to spend time in an idyllic mountain area with a festive destination and a delightfully queer-friendly and racially-diverse small town. People who like Courtney Kae’s books.

Book: Hers for the Weekend
Author: Helena Greer
Publisher: Forever
Publication Date: August 27, 2024.
Pages: 368
Age Range: Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley

If the Paris 2024 Olympic Opening Ceremony has you dreaming of reads with Parisian vibes, I’ve got a new release for you. Love Requires Chocolate, by Ravynn K. Stringfield, is a coming-of-age story with a soupçon of romance (it has a happy ending but the romance takes a back seat to the coming-of-age). It releases on August 20 and I loved it.

(Full disclosure: Dr. Stringfield was my instructor for a workshop on creative non-fiction writing for academics. We have since bonded over our shared loves of comics and YA fiction, as well as our shared experiences navigating PhD programs and life after them. We’re Internet friends.)

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Whitney Curry is primed to have an epic semester abroad. She’s created the perfect itinerary and many, many to-do lists after collecting every detail possible about Paris, France. Thus, she anticipates a grand adventure filled with vintage boutiques, her idol Josephine Baker’s old stomping grounds, and endless plays sure to inspire the ones she writes and—ahem—directs!

But all is not as she imagined when she’s dropped off at her prestigious new Parisian lycée. A fish out of water, Whitney struggles to juggle schoolwork, homesickness, and mastering the French language. Luckily, she lives for the drama. Literally.

Cue French tutor Thierry Magnon, a grumpy yet très handsome soccer star, who’s determined to show Whitney the real Paris. Is this type-A theater nerd ready to see how lessons on the City of Lights can turn into lessons on love?

What I Loved

I mean, everything? But specifically? Whitney is a list girlie. I love a list girlie. She has Plans. Her fashion is always on point. (Check out Ravynn’s WhitneyCurryCore reel on Instagram.) Her love of theater is palpable. Her knowledge about Josephine Baker is impressive but her commitment to learning more is even more impressive. Whitney’s mixture of confidence and insecurity resonates so hard for this type A- former theater teen.

Whitney herself is enough to make this book awesome. But Stringfield layers in an incredible sense of place. Yes, she gives you plenty of looks at tourist destinations, but it’s the more quotidian Parisian moments that make this feel lived-in. Whitney gets lost in Montmartre. She has a dinner party at Thierry’s family’s home. She explores the streets of Paris. She sings “J’ai deux amours” swinging from a street lamp. (And have you seen a Parisian street lamp? They’re gorgeous.) Oh look, here I am trying to talk about Paris and ending up still telling you how much I love Whitney Curry. Whoops. Well, just trust that this book is full of awesome Parisian places, because Stringfield was a flâneuse herself when she studied abroad.

I love Whitney’s growth, her passion, and her outlook.

I love the romantic elements here, too. Thierry is wonderful. I mean a grouchy footballer whose family owns a chocolate shop? Come on. I mean. (This brought to you partly by my new obsession with retired footballer Zizou and partly by my old obsession with Roy Kent.)

Something that I think is worth pointing out is that Whitney is a Black American looking for the history and culture of Black Americans in Paris as well as Black Parisians of any descent. The importance of this piece of Whitney’s identity adds another layer to the Bildungsroman vibes. As a white woman I don’t feel equipped to discuss all the work Stringfield has done here at length, but I really appreciate her highlighting how important this is to Whitney, the conflicting feelings Whitney experiences about Josephine Baker’s recognition as an artist of Paris coming about after her death, and the contrast between Whitney’s image of how Black people experience Paris and the reality Thierry, whose grandmother came to Paris from Mali to escape trouble caused by French colonialism, shares with her.

What I wanted more of

The adventures of Whitney Curry? This is the first in a series but it’s an anthology series, so the other books will be by other authors and about other characters. Guess I better start writing some Love Requires Chocolate fanfiction.

What I need to warn you about

Not much. There is, as you might have guessed from what I said earlier, discussion of racism.

Who should read this

People who love Paris or think they might love Paris. Theater nerds. Football (i.e., soccer) fans. People who enjoy YA romance. People who like chocolate.

Book: Love Requires Chocolate
Author: Ravynn K. Stringfield
Publisher: Joy Revolution
Publication Date: August 20, 2024
Pages: 288
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley (but I loved it so much I pre-ordered it too)

Sod shared 7 links people shared with him. I really liked the idea that we can learn something about ourselves by looking at that, so here are 7 people shared with me.

1. Before the first days checklist - My friend Casey sent this to me. Teacher Chanea Bond created it. It’s hugely helpful, especially as I’m launching into a very intense time starting my new job tomorrow.
2. My husband Will sent me a news piece from Playbill about Keanu Reaves and Alex Winter starring in Waiting for Godot. This is a sweet spot for our 90s theater nerd hearts.
3. The mother of one of my son’s friends shared this summer camp with me, because my son wants to try a Minecraft summer camp next year.
4. My friend Sean wanted our group chat that’s him, me, and our friend Kit to know about the Haunted Mansion Bar on the Disney Cruise Line ship, the Disney Treasure.
5. Speaking of Kit, he sent me this video about having hobbies. It validated both of our large hobby supply collections.
6. Will let me know that he pre-ordered this special Hyrule Edition of the Switch Lite for me. He likes special editions and I don’t tend to play with the Switch docked, so he’s going to give me this and I’m going to give him my Switch so he can stop having to share one with our kid. Will is the best, by the way.
7. Kit sent me this xkcd comic. I don’t know if that says more about his headspace or what he thinks mine is, but either one works.

Mostly what I learned hunting these down was that I send way more links than I receive, and that’s probably as it should be, because information is my love language.

So here’s a link I sent Will today: Harris campaign launches GOP outreach effort, led by former NC Justice Bob Orr. Will worked as an intern for Justice Orr when Will was in law school 18 years ago. Justice Orr’s politics often are not my fave, but I find this very heartening.

It’s my birthday on Sunday! As my birthday is Bastille Day and this is the second birthday I’ve had since going to France and confirming that I do love it as much as I thought I would, I’m celebrating with French stuff, like crêpes. If you want to party in my honor, here are some options:

• wear a marinière
• have a French breakfast
• listen to a musical based on a French novel, such as The Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables
• form a leftist coalition and save your national government

Thanks for celebrating with me!

Disclaimer: This is not an official Micro.blog communication. Just me explaining my process. And it’s all rather stream-of-consciousness.

Hey! I thought some increased transparency about what goes in the Discover tab might be helpful. There is some info in the help forum but as Discover is curated by humans, there are some idiosyncrasies beyond what you’ll see there, depending on who’s doing the curation.

Here are the things you’re likely to notice an uptick in when I’m curating:

• Pet photos
• Parenting stuff
• Jokes

I try to rarely highlight my own posts because doing so feels icky to me. I do try to feature announcements from Manton about the service.

On the screen I use for curation in the backend, I can see how many times someone’s posts have been featured in the past week, how many times they’ve been featured ever, how many replies a post has received, and how many posts a user has ever made. As I understand it, Jean, Manton, and Vincent worked together to create this interface.

I try not to feature anyone who has already been featured 4 or more times in a week. I try to feature people who have rarely been featured or are new to Micro.blog.

I feature things I think are funny, photos I think look extra cool, questions that might start a conversation, and posts that explicitly are from a new user saying they’re new.

I try to prioritize inclusion, highlighting women of any race or ethnicity, BIPOC of any gender, posts about queer experiences including trans experiences, and posts about disability experiences.

Micro.blog skews the way a lot of tech spaces skew: cis, het, white, male, able-bodied. Inclusion has been a growing edge for Micro.blog for a long time. I do what I can to promote it within the scope of my role, but the work is bigger than me. I know members of the community have been talking about this for a long time. I can advocate for it but I am not the inflection point for it. I hope it will be a priority for the service going forward but that’s a Manton decision, not a Kimberly decision.

While I’m not here for toxic positivity, I do try to focus on joy and information on the Discover timeline, rather than partisanship or criticism. If I feature a political post, it’ll be about a specific issue that crosses partisan divides, such as the importance of voting. On Juneteenth, I highlighted posts that wished people a happy Juneteenth and also information about the history of the day. Likewise for Pride month. When I feature something related to religion, it’s usually a big theological question or textual analysis, not evangelical.

As is policy, I rarely feature photos that don’t have alt text. Please use alt text! So many of you share cool photos without it and it makes me sad.

All of this stuff is specifically about how I curate. Manton and Vincent aren’t me, so they naturally curate differently than I do.

I hope this has been helpful to hear about.

Here’s a final disclaimer that this post is an explainer from Kimberly, not an official Micro.blog communication.