Kimberly Hirsh

📚🔮 “…the Tarot constitutes first and foremost an apprenticeship in seeing.” Marianne Costa, The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards

J’aime les vacances. ⛱️

🎮 Played the Pikmin 4 demo, ended up buying the Pikmin 1 + 2 bundle, and I feel so guilty every time my little plant guys die in battle. 🌱

I may be leaning into being a middle-aged librarian stereotype, but I’m leaning into being a goth middle-aged librarian stereotype.

Finished reading: Solomon’s Crown by Natasha Siegel 📚

Gorgeous prose in this book that’s like if The Lion in Winter was mostly a romance between Richard and Philip. Recommend!

📚💗 August 19 is Bookstore Romance Day!

My fiction reading has been almost exclusively romance (across a variety of subgenres) since May and it’s making me very happy. Why not support your favorite indie bookshop & buy a romance from them?

I’ll write up some recommendations in the coming days.

This is true friendship.

📚📺 The trailer for The Power dropped. I loved this book so much. The show has an amazing cast. I’m looking forward to watching it.

📚💬 “…my body is the keeper of secrets, and this pen is its liberator.” J. C. Cervantes, The Enchanted Hacienda

Finished reading: The Enchanted Hacienda by J.C. Cervantes 📚

This one didn’t click with me right away, but that was about me and what else I’ve read recently, not about the book. It’s beautiful and sweet with a bit of spice, too.

📚💬 “Why can’t life work whatever way we want it to? What’s the point of living if you only do it how others want you to?” TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

📚💬 “We are who we are, not because of our birthright, but because of what we choose to do in this life.” TJ Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

🔖 Read The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries.

Karawynn Long compares the trajectory of Overdrive/Libby to platforms like Amazon and Facebook and finds a lot to worry about. An important read for those of us in libraryland.

Finished reading: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune 📚

Listened to the audiobook. I understand why so much of the beginning of this book had to establish for us the dreariness of Linus Baker’s life. I didn’t really get into it until he arrived at the eponymous house. And from then on it made my heart sing.

📺👱‍♀️🖖 Glen Weldon’s rewrite of song titles from “Once More, with Feeling” to include Star Trek stuff is precisely calculated to delight me, specifically.

The musical episode of STAR TREK: STRANGE NEW WORLDS is still yet another reason to love the show.

Formally, it’s ONCE MORE, WITH PHASERS, but at least they acknowledge the debt the episode owes to B:TVS when a character says “I’ve got a theory….”

Great opening number.

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) August 3, 2023

Going Through the Photons

Walk Through The Fire Phasers

Something to T’Pring About

What You Neel(ix) https://t.co/ntlQtaIa7R

— Glen Weldon (@ghweldon) August 3, 2023

Finished reading: The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest 📚

Adorable romance about a publishing assistant who starts an email friendship with the author of her favorite book, then he unknowingly moves into her apartment building. I love stories about book people. Highly recommend.

Finished reading: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett 📚

Lovely! A scholar of faerie lore travels to a frozen Scandinavian town to research for her book and along the way, her annoyingly wonderful colleague decides to join her. Brilliant use of both academia and faerie stuff in this one. Highly recommend.

🍿 Watched Ladybug & Cat Noir: The Movie.

A reimagining of the TV show. I loved how well it used the Palais Garnier. Sweet story and you get all the emotional payoff fans of the show had to wait 5 seasons for in only 105 minutes.

🔖 Skimmed Publicize Your Principles.

This idea might be helpful for articulating Micro.blog’s principles. ATTN: @manton @jean

📚 I am a very specific kind of nerd. In this book, set in 1909, a scholar studying faeries says she’s going to use naturalistic observation and ethnographic interviews as her research methods. I immediately thought this was anachronistic, because I knew Naturalistic Inquiry wasn’t published until 1985.

I was wrong. It’s not anachronistic, but it does show that Dr. Wilde is using cutting edge methods. While ethnography was first developed as a science in the 18th century, naturalistic observation wasn’t formalized until the turn of the 20th century.

So. Who cares? Well, me, because I’m a qual nerd. But I’m also a book nerd, so I feel like Wilde’s choice of methods reveals something about her as a character.

The way she writes about her research shows that she thinks of herself as a natural scientist, observing faerie behavior much as one would observe animal behavior. At the same time, the questions she’s asking and the way she treats her research “subjects” (a term that isn’t cool to use now but is absolutely what you’d use in 1909) shows that she can’t help but treat her research as social research, because surprise! in her world, faeries are people, not animals.

(What distinguishes people from animals? I’d say for Wilde’s purposes, speech and self-awareness.)

And now that I’ve written 200+ words about an imaginary scientist’s research methods, I should probably get back to bed.

📚💬 “I was supposed to remain comfortably outside the stories with my pen and my notebook.” Heather Fawcett, Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries

📚💬 “Home is where we get to be who we are.” T. J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

📚💬 “He felt lighter somehow. Like he wasn’t paint blending into the wall. He felt real. He felt present. Almost like he could be seen.” T. J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

There’s a special irony in the fact that GalaxyCon Raleigh’s Cosplay, Cons, & Parenting panel takes place from 6:30 to 7:30 pm, exactly when parents need to be feeding their children and moving them toward bedtime.

o no I am become the dad in the LEGO movie