Kimberly Hirsh

Fun with migraines: in the past year or so I’ve started having vertigo in the prodrome stage, tilting involuntarily when I walk. In the past couple of months I’ve developed olfactory hallucinations. I don’t like migraines, y’all.

📺🍿🎄 Watched The Naughty Nine.

This is a heist movie about kids on the naughty list breaking into Santa’s workshop. It honors all the heist tropes and is super fun. Watch with a kid if you can.

🔖 Read True/useful by Seth Godin.

Seth shares a handy matrix for helping us stay resilient and cultivate belief, shaking off cynicism and avoiding traps.

🔖💻 Read The Hacker Manifesto.

the beauty of the baud

I love this turn of phrase.

We make use of a service already existing without paying for what could be dirt-cheap if it wasn’t run by profiteering gluttons…

This was published in 1986.

🔖💻 Read The Indie Web Manifesto.

Before the IndieWeb, there was the Indie Web. This was published in 1997.

🍿 Watched Airplane!.

Super fun. I can’t begin to imagine how delightful it must have been for the people who saw it when it was first released.

A list of lists: in his book Keep Going, Austin Kleon writes about a variety of types of lists you might keep and I made a list of them:

• to-do
• to-make (he says to-draw)
• to-learn
• Someday/Maybe
• to-not-do
• pro/con
• thanks for/help me
• end-of-year
• commandments

📓 I know Twitter is all the things we all know it is now but I still love that some scholars wrote a journal article about the relationship between emojis and identity in Twitter bios.

New bio on most of my profiles: Mom & PhD with a librarian’s heart and an academic’s mind. I manage multiple chronic illnesses and I love books and games. 🌈♿

🔖 Read You Can’t Unsubscribe from Grief by Jenessa Abrams (Electric Literature).

This is a gorgeous essay. I really needed it right now.

I’ve had kimberlyhirsh.com for fifteen years today. I had other domains before that. I’m really glad I claimed this one. It’s been great for me both personally and professionally.

🔖Read Twenty Rules for the New Escribitionist.

23 and a half-year-old blogging advice that is still pretty solid.

I was thinking about Austin Kleon’s urging to show your work and I thought, “But Austin, what do I do when I don’t even feel up to making things to show my work on?” and then I thought, “Well he already told me: Keep going.”

💬

“Recover yourself. That’s where your creativity is.”

Kate McKean in today’s Agents & Books Q&A issue.

Me: I’ll put this little tumbled sodalite crystal on my bedside table, it will make me happy.

The Kitten: Ooh a new toy!

📺🍿🎄 Watched Reporting for Christmas.

I really like this one. A hard-hitting Chicago reporter heads to a small town in Iowa to cover the 40th anniversary of the local toy company’s most popular product. Life changes ensue.

Super cute, winning cast.

📺🍿🎄 In the movie A Timeless Christmas, I can suspend my disbelief enough to accept that a man time-traveled from 1903 to 2020, but asking me to accept that his love interest is a shoe-in for a history faculty job simply by virtue of having a PhD is a bridge too far.

Well, it’s taken more than 7 years, but it’s finally happened: my child’s taste has completely eclipsed mine in my Spotify Wrapped.

📺🍿🎄 Watched A Biltmore Christmas.

Mostly for Jonathan Frakes & Robert Picardo 🖖🏻 but I ended up really liking it. There’s a lot of 40s Hollywood glamor. Also, I love Biltmore. I’ve been there only twice but I still love it.

💻 Recently my less-than-alma mater asked, “Remember the 90s at Carolina?

I didn’t get there until 1999 so I had different things in my metaphorical Carolina Jeep.

Darth Vader and I are finishing off the Thanksgiving babka with some cherry Coke.

🍿📺🎄 Watched A Christmas Frequency. A radio producer sets her show’s host up on on-air blind dates to save the show from the slump it’s in because the host is no fun after separating from her husband. It’s not a solid movie but I liked it because the cast is adorable.

📺🍿🎄 I was watching Hulu’s A Christmas Frequency and everything was going great but then it shattered my suspension of disbelief by having one guy give another guy an expense report, printed on paper.

📺🍿🎄 By the way, time travel is a whole subgenre of holiday made-for-TV movie. See:

• Eve’s Christmas (yes, that IS Amber from Clueless!)
• Back to Christmas (featuring Veronica Mars’s Michael Muhney and 1990s Jan Brady!)
• Christmas Comes Twice (Tamera Mowry!)
• A Timeless Christmas

🍿 Saw Wish. A story full of good ideas. Music nice but not as memorable as, say, Encanto. Chris Pine is, of course, a delight. Full of beautifully casual representation.