Kimberly Hirsh

It’s just a terrible time for timelines. I’m mostly hanging out in my email inbox and Discord these days.

Later-coding update from Monday:

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn the CSS Box Model by Building a Rothko Painting.”

Thoughts: The basics of the box model were already quite familiar, but I really appreciated the reminder that we now have CSS properties (and have for a very long time) for things like making drop shadows, blurring, rounding corners, and rotating. Again, these are not new properties, but my internal sense of CSS is based on CSS 2.0 circa 2002, so these are useful reminders.

Today’s Coding Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Flexbox by Building a Photo Gallery.”

Thoughts: This is where my conceptual understanding of CSS starts to fall apart. I’m definitely going to dig deeper into this topic before I move on at freeCodeCamp.

🔖 Read The history of anti-authoritarian struggle is a history worth repeating by Sarah Freeman-Woolpert (Waging Nonviolence).

I played Spyro the Dragon (Reignited Trilogy version) and had fun but 3D games mostly give me motion sickness so now I feel gross. Uninstalled and will try Kirby Super Star tomorrow. 🎮

📚 Happy book birthday to Adriana Herrera and A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke!

Information is my love language and how I like to learn about the world, but I also can start to drown in too much of it and need to scale back. So if you are like me, especially right now when there is A Lot Going On, you might like to do what I’m doing.

For calls to action, I have picked one main issue to focus on (library advocacy) and follow a few organizations dedicated to that work (Every Library, For the People, ALA). For broader concerns, I am reading my local Indivisible group’s newsletter.

I am focused on taking one action daily, ideally one that doesn’t activate my nervous system extra. So today I emailed my senators and told them to vote NO on Vought’s confirmation. (Please don’t at me about the effectiveness of email vs. phone. Or how I should really show up in person. Please trust me to know my own availability and capability.) I also emailed my representative and asked her to demand accountability re: an unelected private person’s access to the treasury.

I am also trying to remember to do other things that keep me grounded, like crocheting and reading romance. I’m trying to find joy where I can.

I hope this has been helpful for you.

Finished reading: Rule of the Aurora King by Nisha J. Tuli 📚

🔖 Read Trump’s education department says book bans are a ‘hoax.’ Teachers disagree..

🔖 Read How to organize under authoritarian creep in a closing civil society.

This is my playbook moving forward.

🔖 Read The Logic of Destruction by Timothy Snyder.

Nothing is inevitable. Do not be alone and do not be dismayed. Find someone who is doing something you admire and join them.

🍿 Watched Dog Man.

Exactly what it says on the tin. If you enjoy the Dog Man graphic novels, you’ll enjoy the movie, and if you don’t, you won’t.

Today’s Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp certification project, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: This was fun to do and after doing some reading, I’ve realized that for my purposes, I don’t actually need to know how to draw with CSS unless I decide to try and make some wacky layouts with shapes or something. In which case, I’ll review. But in the meantime, CSS is for styling HTML that structures content, just as I feel it should be. This project is not hard but I definitely had to use references sometimes. Which is fine! But slows things down a bit. For this project, the use of a checkbox gave me the idea to make this a Mystery Shack feedback form so I could use Mabel’s rigged “Do you like me?” form.

Link(s) to work: Mystery Shack Feedback survey

Today’s Coding Progress: Completed the freeCodeCamp projects, “Learn CSS Colors by Building a Set of Colored Markers.”

Thoughts: CSS is already breaking my brain here. Using it to style empty containers chafes against my feeling that it should be for styling content, not styling blank space. I thought this was a thing of me not being smart or with-it enough to understand this use of CSS, but now I think it’s a conceptual problem. From this conceptual problem flow all kinds of struggles with understanding properties and the arguments they take. This is definitely a place where a reference will come in handy. So I think I’ll hunt down some writing about using CSS this way and a resource that will be a good reference.

Bless Miss O’Kistic for this timeless tweet.

It’s hard to feel much like writing these days. I’m going to be building some hand-coded projects and learning more hand-coding stuff, so I’ll be blogging about that process.

🔖 Read Primark launches clothing range designed for people with disabilities.

I love this. I hope we see it spread to other retailers.

Little coding update! Completed the freeCodeCamp projects “Learn HTML by Building a Cat Photo App”, “Learn Basic CSS by Building a Cafe Menu.” This is all familiar stuff, but I always appreciate the reminder to use semantic tags like section & the refresh of how forms work.

In Austin Kleon’s newsletter today, he writes about 7 questions he asks himself when he doesn’t know what to do next. (The newsletter has free editions on Fridays and paid ones on Tuesdays.)

At the end of the newsletter he asked his subscribers, “Do you have a question that helps you?”

My response got so big and I liked it so much, I decided to turn it into a blog post, so here you go!

I feel like I have stolen this like an artist in the best way, in that I’ve taken from multiple sources that get at this idea and combined them into something new:

“What does my body need right now?”

I manage multiple chronic illnesses, and the answer to that question can change from moment to moment. I often feel like a brain floating around in a meat cage. So I drop in to my body and see what it needs: water? A nap? A shower? A hug? Stillness? Motion?

Because I can’t do everything I need or want to do, I have to prioritize, and asking this question helps me choose what to do first, what to expend my energy on in a way that gives me hope of sustaining or even increasing my energy for the rest of the day.

Finished reading: A Seditious Affair by KJ Charles 📚

A Tory pursuing seditionists for the Home Office and a radical pamphleteer fall in love in Regency England and it’s just as perfect as you’d expect. 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Help me out, Internet. I saw someone talking about a cross-posting service a while back, maybe @pratik@writing.exchange? What is that service called? Thanks!

Finished reading: A Fashionable Indulgence by KJ Charles 📚

Just excellent.

Me just now: I think my boots don’t look as cool with the laces looser on the foot and tighter on the ankle.

Also me: Kimberly, you are a middle-aged school librarian. You don’t need to look cool.

Sharing more resources to help you defend libraries. Kelly Jensen works so hard on the Book Riot Literary Activism newsletter. It is the best place I know of to get news about censorship. Sign up here.

Stepping away from timelines and replies for a little while, but still planning to share resources and blog. If you want to be sure I see what you have to say, every post on my website has a Reply by email button.