🔖📺 Read Wednesday Forgets Why We Fell in Love With the Addams Family.
“The Addams Family films were about family being a haven of pure acceptance and unquestioning love.”
This is a perfect articulation of something I’ve known in my heart since 1991.
Apparently tonight is a waking-after-every-sleep-cycle night. Not my favorite.
I want my hair to look like Emily Axford’s hair.
🍿 Watched Santa Games (Hulu).
Super cute. A sweet story about family & the power of second chances mixed with a funny take on social media, livestreaming, and reality competitions. A mostly Black cast which is rare in TV holiday movies.
🔖 Read
A year of new avenues robinsloan.com
I want to insist on an amateur internet; a garage internet; a public library internet; a kitchen table internet.
Yes! This! (hat-tip to Austin Kleon)
On being an escribitionist
In November, when I realized there was no way I was going to be able to get 50,000 words of writing done, I decided to try writing 750 words a day using the website 750words.com. I enjoyed doing morning pages this way. The traditional writing-in-a-notebook way tends to give me hand or wrist pain. But I was using the new site, and after a streak hiccup, I realized that it wasn’t quite the write tool for me. I actually do better without streak tracking, because if I mess up (and I didn’t, their system didn’t save my 750 words even though I’d written them), my perfectionism has me go NEVER MIND!
So I decided to use a combo of my Google Calendar to send me an email reminder like 750 words does and Scrivener to set up a journal where each entry had a 750 word target. That went well, for a while, until I hit a day when I just didn’t feel like it. And I gave myself permission not to. And that was fine, too.
I got back into it but overtime it just felt like… not quite what I was looking for. I would write things in there, and then I would think I had said those things to someone, but I hadn’t. And I realized that private journaling is great and valuable, but if I’m looking to be motivated to keep up a regular practice, I want an audience. (Can you tell I’m an obliger?)
I’m not a journaler. I’m not a diarist. I am an escribitionist. I have been for over 20 years. So if I want to keep up a writing process, blogging is the best way to do it.
I also really appreciate blogging as a mode of thinking, as a way of finding out what I think. When I write for no audience, words come out, but they don’t have sticking power in my mind. I do best when my ideas are things I can talk out with another person, even if that other person is a silent reader. I love having my blog as a tool I can refer to when I need help, a place where advice from my past self bubbles up for me.
So hi. I’m trying out daily blogging, again. I’m not setting a word target. I’m not going to stress if I miss a day. But this is my plan, to get something a little more deliberate than a quick note written every day.
🔖 Read What Is a Strike? Reflections from the Virtual Front Lines of the UC Academic Worker Strike by Mary Jirmanas Saba (LA Progressive).
Currently reading: Rule of Wolves by Leigh Bardugo 📚
Kind of resent that I have to do anything besides read this book, even though I love a lot of the other stuff I do.
🔖 Read Attention, trust and GPT3
“If your work isn’t more useful or insightful or urgent than GPT can create in 12 seconds, don’t interrupt people with it.
Technology begins by making old work easier, but then it requires that new work be better.”
📚💬
“I am most interested in confessional writing when it allows us to move into the personal as a way to go beyond it. In all my work I invoke the personal as a prelude.” bell hooks, remembered rapture: the writer at work