📺 Watched Velma. The two primary criticisms - that it relies too heavily on meta-humor and that the characters are selfish & don’t grow - are spot on, and yet I still found it compelling enough to watch all 10 episodes.

🔖 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.

🍿 Watched Howard.

It’s always striking when you realize the outsize influence an artist has had on you, and watching this it really hit home what an influence Howard Ashman has been on me. I think tomorrow is its lady day on Disney+. I hope they’ll release it for purchase after that. I’d buy it.

📚 Here comes the BBC with a list of the 100 Greatest Children’s Books of All Time. Maybe when I’m recovered from jetlag I’ll see how many are on both this and Time’s 100 Best Fantasy Books list.

Want to read: The Light Room by Kate Zambreno 📚

Time for a needs assessment! Micro.blog community, what resources do you need in the Micro.blog Community Library?

📚 Purchased 2 different books from museums to be shipped directly to my house rather than carrying them home myself:

Just learned that it would cost £22 to have 100g of Tchai-Ovna’s Faeries Blood Tea shipped to me here in the US. Yikes.

🔖 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.

🔖📝 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.

Home again and happy to be here.

🔖 Read The Healing Power of JavaScript.

❤️

Happy World Goth Day!

Tomorrow I will go home, where I will have access to all my goth perfumes and jewelry.

Today, I give you this photo of Sarah Bernhardt wearing her bat hat, which I hope to recreate with a needle-felted bat.

Actress Sarah Bernhardt wears a hat with a taxidermied bat standing in the center of it.

I’ve created playlists on YouTube for all 3 Micro Camps, in case you, like me, have a long flight and might want to download and watch them all on the plane (if you have YouTube Premium, that is):

Last full day in Europe and I’m spending it alternating between packing and lying down. Don’t underestimate how much stuff you can acquire in 4 months, even when you’re doing your best to be really selective.

“Y’all” is the best contraction. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

📚 Revisiting Time’s The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.

N. K. Jemisin:

Don’t think of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to train for reality. It always has been, after all.

📺 Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures is exactly the Star Wars show I would have written as a kid:

  • Kai Brightstar
  • Nash Durango
  • The Crimson Firehawk

Brilliant targeting for its audience.

Finished reading: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale 📚

A sweet historical romance involving a Quaker and a rakish Duke.

Announcement time!

Do you write a blog? Send it to me and I’ll read it!

🔖🌐 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.

I was feeling disconnected from the Micro.blog community, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just because I wasn’t posting that much. So I changed the setting so that I see replies in my timeline. (I’d had them hidden.) I already feel more part of the conversation.

O no two meetings left, not done for 3+ hrs, and yet so sleepy. Might be an afternoon caffeine day. I would love to just live in Paris forever but it will be really nice when I’m only 3 time zones away from my colleagues.

🔖 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.

I’m in Paris this week so I don’t know how much of Micro Camp I’ll catch live, but the schedule looks great.