Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean 📚

Sarah MacLean is just the best.

🎮 Finished Metroid: Zero Mission.

This is a remake of the original NES Metroid with a lengthy epilogue. I mostly enjoy Metroidvanias for the exploration.

I think my thumbs need a rest after this. It might be time to play an RPG or puzzle game. But eventually, I’ll move on to Super Metroid.

Some years on my birthday, I share who I want to be in the following year.

This year, in addition to the stuff from earlier years, I want to add:

I want to be someone who gives the same attention to writing that she has to other creative hobbies.

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!

I’ve been doing French on Duolingo for a bit over a year (and Dutch before that) and this morning I realized I can translate a not insubstantial amount of Threw It On The Ground into French.

Je suis un adulte!

Mon pere n’est pas un téléphone! Duh!

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.

Hey friends of Micro.blog.

1. I am a contractor working mostly on M.b curation for about 5 hours a week. So if you perceive I’m not doing as much as Jean did, you’re right!

2. I also haven’t been around for about a week because of a big family medical emergency. Everyone’s okay now.

💗

“I luxiriated in books.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Finished reading: Wicked and the Wallflower by Sarah MacLean 📚

I love this one. The hero is so dreamy.

🔖📚 Read Notes on Romance Novels as “Camp”.

Andrea, author of the Shelf Love newsletter, does an amazing job of arguing for romance novels as Camp.

📚💬 “One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

📚💬 “I understood immediately the thrill of seeing oneself in print. It provides some sort of primal verification: you are in print; therefore you exist.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

📚💬 “Seeing yourself in print is such an amazing concept: you can get so much attention without having to show up anywhere.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

📚💬 “All I ever wanted was to belong, to wear that hat of belonging.” Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

Finished reading: The Day of the Duchess by Sarah MacLean 📚

This one made me cry. I just really love a second chance.

Me: What if I eat yogurt and granola for every meal today?

Finished reading: The Rogue Not Taken by Sarah MacLean 📚

Finished reading: A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean 📚

That thing where you’ve just spent a couple days immersed in something over which you have no control, so you very carefully align all the Nintendo games on the shelf.

Want to read: The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives by Adam Smyth 📚

🔖 Read Ten Years Out of Academia by Anne Helen Petersen.

I’m 3 years out from my doctoral defense and 6 months out from holding an academic job. I told an internet friend:

Right now it feels like librarian is the identity that was always really mine and academic was borrowed.

📚🔖 Read The Literary Power of Hobbits: How JRR Tolkien Shaped Modern Fantasy by Verlyn Flieger (Literary Hub)

Dr. Flieger says:

1. Tolkien created modern fantasy via fae-ery, the creations of secondary worlds.
2. The inclusion of hobbits in Middle Earth grounds Tolkien ’s fantasy.

I watched the documentary, Jim Henson: Idea Man yesterday. I found it incredibly moving. I re-read Austin Kleon’s Steal Like an Artist frequently and just before watching the documentary, I was listening to the audiobook. One of the sections in the book urges you to “climb your own family tree,” picking a creative whose work you admire and learning about the work that influenced them. I often struggle with this part of things, with choosing who has influenced me.

But watching the documentary, I distinctly saw the influence of Henson and his collaborators, especially writer Jerry Juhl and performer/director Frank Oz, on my own artistic and comedic sensibilities. Here’s an example:

This structure, wherein Fozzie gives Kermit instructions that Kermit then follows far too literally, with Kermit increasing in his manic energy and Fozzie increasing in his frustration, is the bedrock of at least 50% or maybe more of my bits as an improv performer. A parallel structure:

Both of these are Henson and Oz, both with Oz as the straight man and Henson as the manic player. I adore this dynamic. So. Jim Henson. That’s the creative tree branch I’ll climb first.

The documentary itself is lovely. If you’re a Henson nerd (as I am), you’ll be delighted that there’s Sam and Friends and advertising footage that I don’t think you can find anywhere else. The narrative thrust is that Henson was a figure not unlike Lin Manuel Miranda’s interpretation of Alexander Hamilton, an artist with incredible drive and the sense that there would never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do, so he had to be doing work all the time. It does a good job honoring the importance of Henson’s work while honestly portraying the cost this had to his family. His son Brian Henson talks about the very different experience of being his son at home versus being his colleague working on Labyrinth.

A lot of the time narratives about Henson talk about the critical failure of Labyrinth destroying his confidence, but this documentary did a great job emphasizing that even in the face of that failure, his work continued: in the years after Labyrinth he created Fraggle Rock, The Storyteller, and The Jim Henson Hour.

Overall, I think the documentary does a good job of showing that Henson was an ambitious artist with an incredible legacy and was, at the same time, just a human. I found it incredibly moving.

Here are a couple of fun links about Henson’s Kermit Car:

• Breakdowns, Bank Robberies, and Other True Stories of Jim Henson’s Kermit-Looking Lotus Eclat
• Kermit the Car: Jim Henson’s beloved green Lotus

Finished reading: The Price of Pleasure by Kresley Cole 📚

This one made me smile at the end.

Here are a pair of blog posts that ended up in conversation with each other in my brain because I read them both this morning in quick succession.

CJ Chilvers asks, “What’s with the hostility towards personal publishing?

And it’s almost as if Seth Godin answers, “The Coney Island problem.”

Chilvers says:

our innate trust in individuals over brands will determine the winners of both attention and revenue. Everyone in media should be racing to become a trusted individual right now.

and Godin points out:

We’d like to believe that we prefer to walk down the picturesque street, visiting one merchant after another, buying directly from the creator or her gallery. We’d like to think that the centralized antiseptic option isn’t for us… And yet, when the supermarche opens in rural France, it does very well. It turns out that we respond well to large entities that pretend that they’re simply a conglomeration of independent voices and visions, but when masses of people are given a choice, they’re drawn to the big guy, not the real thing.

Where does this leave personal publishing and blogging? I’m not sure. But I think it’s an interesting question and an interesting thing to think about. I suppose a lot of it comes back to that old question, why blog? Are we doing it for ourselves or for our readers? I find that even when I don’t mean to, I tend to blog for my future self. And future me would rather hear what past me has to say from me, rather than an LLM trained to sound like me and everyone else. That said, I am intrigued by the idea of training an LLM on my own diary and journal entries and blog posts and then having a conversation with my younger self, like Michelle Huang did. In fact, I think I’ll try it now.

edited to add: I tried it, but because I don’t have a payment method in OpenAI it didn’t let me do it. Ah well. I guess I’ll just have to extrapolate from old blog posts and LiveJournal entries what a younger me would have said.