Kimberly Hirsh

🔖📚📝 Read

A Beginner’s Guide to Writing IP in Publishing — ERIC SMITH ericsmithrocks.com

Read: www.ericsmithrocks.com

Awesome blog post from Eric Smith full of helpful information.

Being active in the spaces you want to write about, helps build your profile and helps get you seen.

Friends, I cannot stress the importance of community in the bookish and writerly space.

🔖 Read

Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story wired.com

Read: www.wired.com

Want to read: The Magician’s Daughter by H. G. Parry 📚

Want to read: Saving Time by Jenny Odell 📚

Want to read: A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again by Joanna Biggs 📚

Scenes I want to explore more: TTRPGs, literary (incl but not limited to sff). What pubs, websites, podcasts, people, other stuff should I check out?

Ah yes, that weird need-to-cry, don’t-know-why feeling… (I suspect this is about the fact that the amount of stuff you have when traveling expands to fill the luggage available.)

🗨️ My response to Kottke.org Is 25 Years Old Today and I’m Going to Write About It

Happy anniversary, Jason! Is the font on that Notes entry Tahoma or Verdana? I’m having some big early blogging nostalgia looking at it.

I love what you say about the kottke.org being a process. I got the web only a little while before you started kottke.org. I was 14 or 15 and I’ll be 42 this year. Since I first opened up Netscape (after my dad, who ran IT for Duke Law School, told me that Prodigy and AOL were a waste of my time and the web is where it’s at), the web has been a key piece of my identity development and construction.

Here’s to 25 more years or as many as you would like, if that’s too many.

📺 Shrinking is doing a great job dressing a teen in 90s throwback clothes and if y’all see me walking around in overalls with one side undone now you know why. THIS IS OUR MOMENT, XENNIALS, find a grown-up way to wear the clothes you loved as a teen!

Had abbrevia.me describe me based on my tweets. Alt text contains the text of the description, which was too many characters to include here. I know personal branding is whatever, but “friendly and knowledgeable” is a brand I’m happy to have.

hey hey you know how that moral philosopher profiled in the New Yorker would solve the trolley problem? whichever way would give her the most material for her next book

I had my first high-pain day since we came to Europe yesterday (or today, if you’re in the US when I’m writing this).

I think I must have eaten something with cornmeal in it, because my joints and muscles were (and still are, though less so) sore from the moment I woke up.

It was a rough time to walk around Cologne in the cold and rain. I know I complained about the pain often, and I really appreciate my sister, her husband, and my friend Kessie having such patience with me.

We’re in Cologne for another day and I hope if I rest now, I’ll have a better time.

This is such a classic variable disability/chronic illness scenario. Sometimes you’re walking around Aalsmeer in 40 degree weather with no problems, and sometimes you ache with every step and even if you’re lying down. It’s easy to forget you’re disabled at all, until it isn’t.

The tricky thing is that you need rest, but if you’re in pain, it’s hard to sleep.

📚💬 “Life is absurd. It has no meaning. But it has beauty, and wonder, and we have to enjoy that.” Frieda Menco, Holocaust survivor, quoted in Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto

Finished reading: Amsterdam: A History of the World’s Most Liberal City by Russell Shorto 📚

This has been a great read while wandering Amsterdam. I have a much better understanding of the significance and uniqueness of the city, and have been able to attach more meaning to particular places, than I would have if I hadn’t read it. Highly recommend.

“She didn’t die. She was killed. Because she was a Jewish girl.” Hannah Pick-Goslar, a friend of Anne Frank’s 💔

Anne Frank kept a commonplace book.

Haven’t listened to Worlds Beyond Number yet but Erika Ishii in this TechCrunch interview is making me cry so that’s cool:

“When you find people to create with, you gotta grab onto them and just keep doing that for the rest of your lives together.”

I guess I missed World Book Day & International Cat Rescue Day in Europe but it’s still March 2 back home, so happy both of those! As I like to say when beatboxing poorly, BooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCatsAndBooksAndCats. (Because boots are good but books are better.)

🔖 Read Understanding Blogs by Tracy Durnell.

An excellent exploration of what makes blogging its own medium.

I’ve got a couple recent co-authored articles:

Description framework of makerspaces: Examining the relationship between spatial arrangement and diverse user populations in Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology

&

Makerspaces in Libraries at U.S. Public Colleges and Universities: A Census in portal: Libraries and the Academy.

My excellent co-authors are Dr. Maggie Melo, Dr. Laura March, & researcher Emily Arnsberg.

Hi friends! It’s time for an Amsterdam Photo Dump! There are 8 photos here so if you’re viewing this on a timeline, be sure to click through to kimberlyhirsh.com to see them.

Here’s what you’re seeing:

1. A street lamp that has been decorated to look like Nijntje (known as Miffy in English).
2. The facade of the Royal Palace Amsterdam. (The word for “rabbit” in Dutch is “konijn” and the Dutch name for the Royal Palace is “Koninklijk Paleis,” so I keep trying to come up with a rabbit-palace pun.)
3. A detail of a relief on the front of Amsterdam Centraal Station featuring the patron deity of our household, Athena.
4. The clock tower at Amsterdam Centraal Station.
5. A pedimental sculpture on the National Maritime Museum featuring Neptune, whose image is used heavily in Amsterdam due to the importance of sailing to its history and economy.
6. and 8. Votive ships made of wax at the National Maritime Museum.
7. A house near the Vondelpark that I thought looked cool and haunted.

🎮 Playing Kirby’s Return to Dreamland Deluxe with my kid. Super fun. Couch co-op Kirby seems to be his gateway to playing instead of just watching. Might do Kirby Star Allies next.

🔖 Read Sci-Fi Publishers Are Bracing for an AI Battle by Elizabeth Minkel (Wired).

I’m interested to see how this shakes out.

Austin Kleon blogs about pilers and filers, a dichotomy/spectrum he learned about reading Temple Grandin’s book, _Visual Thinking _, in which Grandin discusses Linda Silverman’s work:

In a presentation about the differences in learning styles, Silverman flashes a slide showing a person with a tidy file cabinet and a person surrounded by messy piles of paper. The “filer” and the “pilers,” to use her terms. You probably know which one you are. What does it say about the way you think?

Kleon says:

All of these “versus” type situations can be rethought as spectrums and/or creative tensions. There are times when I want to access that sequential part of my brain and bring order to things, and filing does that, but there are other times I want to access my visual brain, and piles help.

I am my father’s daughter, which means I’m a piler-filer.

Both my dad and I often have stacks that look like a mess to other people. But when I was a teacher, my colleagues marveled at my ability to run exactly what I needed from one of these piles within seconds.

I also had immaculate file cabinets full of things like student paperwork. I love a label maker.

For me and for my dad, piles are for current projects and files are for reference materials and archives. If something goes into a file before we’re done with it, it ceases to exist until an external event prompts us to track it down, by which point it may be too late for us to have done what we needed to do with it.

.
This is a panorama of my desk when I was managing editor at LEARN NC. The stacks on the desk and in the standing file were projects in-progress. I filed finished projects in the drawers in the file cabinet/snack station on the left side of the desk.

So. We’re piler-filers. Are you one, the other, or a combination?

Finished reading: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers 📚

Happy to have read it. Turns out vibes are enough when you’ve got charming characters.