Kimberly Hirsh

📺 Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures is exactly the Star Wars show I would have written as a kid:

• Kai Brightstar
• Nash Durango
• The Crimson Firehawk

Brilliant targeting for its audience.

📚 Revisiting Time’s The 100 Best Fantasy Books of All Time.

N. K. Jemisin:

Don’t think of fantasy as mere entertainment, then, but as a way to train for reality. It always has been, after all.

A while back I said I was going to get obsessed with Sarah Bernhardt (I seem to have said it somewhere other than my own website ☹️) but never followed through. But today I went to the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at the Petit Palais and now I’m recommitting myself to this plan.

If you want to read about the exhibition, here are a couple articles:

• The Original Influencer Was French—A Show Dedicated to Sarah Bernhardt Celebrates the World’s First Superstar
• Why Actress Sarah Bernhardt Was the First Modern Celebrity
• Before Taylor Swift or David Bowie, There Was Sarah Bernhardt

Did you know Sarah Bernhardt was a goth multipotentialite? She acted, directed, sculpted, painted, wrote, ran a theatre, and led charity work. She had herself photographed in a coffin and was super into bats. And she was friends with Oscar Wilde. And she kept acting even after having her leg amputated and began her film career at age 56. I love her.

Announcement time!

Do you write a blog? Send it to me and I’ll read it!

Finished reading: Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale 📚

A sweet historical romance involving a Quaker and a rakish Duke.

I was feeling disconnected from the Micro.blog community, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t just because I wasn’t posting that much. So I changed the setting so that I see replies in my timeline. (I’d had them hidden.) I already feel more part of the conversation.

🔖🌐 Read Webring History.

animated email gifs, web counters, scrolling and/or blinking text, midi background music that could not be turned off and the “under construction” images.

I’d forgotten about midi background music! This quote is basically a list of things that made the web feel fun for me. I’m going to work on recapturing that vibe, even if the tech looks different.

🔖 How Does Motherhood Impact Your Creativity? It’s Complicated vogue.com

Read: www.vogue.com

My inhibitions were methodically ripped to shreds by the pure chaotic energy of the small children and carers around me. I stopped caring about whether what I was doing made me feel silly, and that is a huge boon to anyone wanting to express themselves creatively.

O no two meetings left, not done for 3+ hrs, and yet so sleepy. Might be an afternoon caffeine day. I would love to just live in Paris forever but it will be really nice when I’m only 3 time zones away from my colleagues.

I’m in Paris this week so I don’t know how much of Micro Camp I’ll catch live, but the schedule looks great.

Missing Moulin Rouge playing in my hometown but it’s okay because I got to see the actual Moulin Rouge.

🔖🎵 Read Patiently Holding the Sound: Gretchen Parlato on motherhood as a musical inspiration.

What a great interview.

Je suis à Paris. J’adore Paris. Yesterday I sat in the reading room of Shakespeare and Company, wrote in my notebook, and pretended to be A Writer. (I am a writer. But I am A Reader.)

Reading the souvenir book they sell at Shakespeare and Company, Shakespeare and Company: A Brief History of a Parisian Bookstore.

For George, it was more important to have a community of readers and writers than just to sell books.

😍

I’ve been obsessed with this chandelier for a long time and today I finally got to see it in person.

My blog host, Micro.blog, has declared it the Summer of Blogging and is offering 4 months of their standard hosting plan at a price of $1/month. I highly recommend them. If you want a simple way to have your own website, this is worth a try.

🔖🌐 Read Bring Back Personal Blogging by Monique Judge (The Verge).

There’s an AP news piece confirming what I suspected when I first saw Manton’s post about Heather Armstrong’s death.

Heather Armstrong, also known as dooce, was a prolific personal blogger, called “queen of the mommy bloggers,” a writer of books, a person who lived with depression and alcoholism. She was an early and high-profile example of someone who lost her job because of her blog. Her episode of The Hilarious World of Depression is one of my favorites. I didn’t read her blog consistently at all but I definitely read it both in some of its earliest days and in the past couple of years. She has been an influence on me without me even realizing it.

Armstrong leaves behind two children.

A little over sixteen years ago, my friend Sherrie died by suicide. It sent me into a big anxious spiral. Sherrie left behind a four-year-old son.

When my brother was a baby or toddler and I was fourteen or fifteen (and my sister was eight or nine), my mom had untreated hypothyroidism, pernicious anemia, and depression. She had suicidal ideations. She later told me that she didn’t act on them because my brother needed her. She believed my sister and I would have been fine.

We would not have been fine.

Even though I know that she was listening to the lies depression tells, I felt angry hearing that we were not enough to stay alive for.

Depression makes me so angry. Suicide makes me so angry.

I, too, live with depression. It’s usually in remission.

Every day, I choose to live. Most of all for my son, but also for myself, for the rest of the family. I think about how angry I am when I hear someone has died by suicide. I think about how I don’t want the people I love to feel that anger. I think about how I don’t want them to be angry at me.

I don’t have a strong conclusion for this post. Depression is bullshit and I wish nobody ever had to deal with it.

I’m grieving dooce by going through her archives and reading this post while I am in Paris is extra beautiful. I was cranky and tired and in pain the day we got here, and even so as soon as I stepped out of the train station into the city, it took my breath away. I’ve always suspected Paris would be my heart’s true home (I was born on Bastille Day) and it’s lovely to have it confirmed.

Starting Season 7 in my rewatch of Star Trek: The Next Generation, finding myself very glad there’s so much other Trek media including TNG tie-ins so I basically never have to say goodbye to my Enterprise D friends. 🖖🏻📺

Want to read: The Witch of Woodland by Laurel Snyder 📚

Over the past week, I’ve worked through Esmé Weijun Wang’s workshop, Building a Writing Habit While Living with Limitations. In the workshop, we assess our limitations, set writing goals, inventory our resources, explore how we can make the most of our 24 hours. Highly recommend, $117. 📝

🔖📝 Read My Commitment to Wellness as a Lifelong Writer by Yolande House — Breathing Space Creative

I’ve learned that honouring my needs each and every day is a part of what loving myself looks like. When I finally learned how to love myself, I learned it’s not a goal with an end. Rather, it’s a process of committing and being true to myself each and every day, even when (and especially when) it’s hard.

🔖📚 Read BookTok encourages reading as an aesthetic and no one is safe from its gaze by Elena Cavender (Mashable).

Insightful piece about how limiting our reading to a particular aesthetic connects with our attention being commodified.

Finished reading: Mr. & Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond 📚

Loved it. Scorchingly hot, fun secret agent hijinks. Highly recommend.