Kimberly Hirsh

🔖🗺️ Read How Paris Hopes the Summer Olympics Will Transform the City—for Good by Lindsey Tramuta (Condé Nast Traveler).

This is a fascinating article. Paris’s commitment to hosting the most sustainable Olympics ever and transforming an underresourced area for the long-term is inspiring.

🔖📚 100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read by James Folta (Lit Hub)

This is the kind of content carefully calibrated to please me, specifically.

🎮 I got Metroid: Samus Returns. I’m really enjoying it. I know there will be parts that are super difficult, but I am happy to use walkthroughs or whatever. I’m also finding that I don’t mind having to repeatedly try a fight in this game as much as I sometimes do, so that’s nice.

Hey y’all! The Connected Learning Lab published the work from my postdoc today! Two new reports for library staff and leaders compiling valuable insights and recommendations to foster teen engagement through Connected Learning. Learn more about the project and find reports and checklists here.

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 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.