Kimberly Hirsh

📚💬📓 “… being transparent about one’s positionality, and choosing a granularity of analysis appropriate to your actual knowledge and experience, are key choices soneone must make as they enter fan studies.” Henry Jenkins, “Textual Poachers, Twenty Years Later”

🔖 Read The Sad Clown Joke That Became a Beloved Meme.

My favorite take on Pagliacci is Rhett Miller’s theme song for the podcast The Hilarious World of Depression.

You know what’s really great for a migraine is the monthly test of public warning sirens in the Netherlands. OH WAIT NO THAT DOES NOT HELP WITH A MIGRAINE.

🔖 A swirling soup of thoughts in my head about self-presentation after reading these posts:

• The personal brand paradox - Debbie Millman
• Build a reputation instead of a personal brand - Tracy Durnell
• The power of writing your story down - Jas Hothi

🔖 Read Is My Child Eating Enough Pirate’s Booty?

Parenting comedy is a microgenre that always lands with me.

🔖 Read “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather."

Took me a little while to get into the format of this short story but in the end I loved it. Big The Hazards of Love vibes.

Today’s adventure: NEMO Science Museum. Very cool, but I’m spoiled by having an awesome science museum in my hometown. I think it would have seemed even cooler were I not so blessed.

🔖 Read Interview with Kelly J. Baker: “I can’t push through when I’m stuck.”

“My writing routine became write frantically whenever I had a chance or had the energy to do so.” Dr. Baker knows.

Finished reading: The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas 📚

I’m extremely late to this one. It’s excellent, of course. I love the way Angie Thomas shows that even in the face of tragedy and appalling oppression, there’s room for joy.

I’m so excited to hang out with my friends for new stories.

I made a menu of Dutch foods for us to try. They’re sort of home food staples, not anything too elaborate or traditional. This is the first thing we tried: hagelslag, which literally means hailstorm. It’s bread and butter topped with real chocolate sprinkles.

Another Dutch meal: stamppot boerenkool. This is smoked sausage with sauce on a bed of potatoes mixed with kale. I really liked the sausage but it turns out even mixing it with potatoes can’t make me like kale.

🔖 Read WE’VE LOST THE PLOT by Megan Garber (The Atlantic). “Our constant need for entertainment has blurred the line between fiction and reality—on television, in American politics, and in our everyday lives.”

Chilling. What now?

My kid made a Kirby and the Forgotten Land fanzine, I am dead from cute.

🔖📺🎮 Read Television Is Better Without Video Games and Video Games Are Better Without Gameplay (Ian Bogost, The Atlantic).

Maybe Ian Bogost should stop playing video games.

Finished reading: Hell Bent by Leigh Bardugo 📚

I love it so much. I left the hardcover at home but bought the ebook to read while I’m traveling, which meant I could highlight without feeling weird about it and I highlighted a ton of stuff.

📺🖖🏻 When I watch TNG or Picard, Data is Data, but anyone else Brent Spiner plays is Brent Spiner doing an awesome job. But Data is, viscerally for me, Not A Character Brent Spiner Plays, but instead A Guy (an android guy but still).

Our second week in the Netherlands has been quiet so far. Exactly a week after we got here, I came down with a cough that has developed into a pretty standard respiratory virus. The COVID self-test was negative. This wasn’t a surprise because the rate of infection here is vanishingly small. Aalsmeer has about 32,000 inhabitants. One of them has tested positive this week.

Meanwhile in Amsterdam, 13 out of about 903,000 people reported positive tests last week.

For the purposes of comparison, that’s 1.2 cases per 100,000 people over 7 days. At home, there were 153 new cases per 100,000 people last week.

I know ground water numbers are more reliable but I struggle to interpret them, so this is what I use to determine risk.

So, it’s probably not COVID given the low incidence of COVID here and the negative test.

I’ve still felt pretty crappy, so I’ve been sleeping a ton. ME, M, and I ventured out to the Grote Poel (the large pool) of the Westeindeplassen. The humidity outside really helps my breathing but I have to be careful not to overexert myself.

Today both ME & M are feeling poorly.

In the meantime, W has been into the city a couple times and loved exploring. I’m looking forward to getting the whole family there next week once we’re all back on our feet. It always takes at least an hour to get there from the village.

(When we booked the house, there was a bus that went directly to the airport train station but they changed the routes right before we came so it doesn’t run anymore. This adds one or two transfers to every trip.)

I guess people really want to know about what food you get when you travel. We mostly buy groceries and prepare our own food, so we haven’t tried anything extra Dutch besides stroopwaffels. Those are delicious.

The eggs here are super fresh and excellent. They have all the produce you might expect. They have a mix of Dutch brands and other brands. Froot Loops are Unicorn Froot Loops. We eat a lot of Nature Valley granola bars. There is, of course, immense variety in the cheese available.

That’s the latest here. I hope to be more adventurous soon!

📺 Watched Ares.

Brilliant dark academia horror with all the hallmarks: secret society, dangerously powerful young people, gorgeous fashion, a lower class newcomer, with the spirit of LEGENDBORN or ACE OF SPADES critiquing the aesthetic’s Eurocentrism.

Duolingo really emphasizes the importance of learning the Dutch word “krant,” which means newspaper. I was confused at first because it seems like a specialized term now that print news doesn’t have such a big market share but one of these comes to our house each Thursday, so?

In just a bit I’ll be contributing to the live-streamed Pop Culture Dialogue on Inherited Fandoms, hosted by the Popular culture Studies Journal. You can tune into their YouTube channel at 11 am CST/12 pm EST/5 pm GMT/6 pm CET (where I am!) to watch!

The video of the Pop Culture Dialogue I was part of on inherited fandoms is now on YouTube.

I love your newsletter, whoever you are, but I’ve put it on web-only. Trying to get quiet in here 🧠. I’ll find you when I’m ready.

Well I guess the jet lag is over because instead of getting a brilliant solid stretch of sleep that didn’t start until 2 am, I was out by 11 but up around 2:45 & now can’t get back to sleep because restless legs so I guess I’m feeling at home in the Netherlands now.

We took a walk through the village down to the Westeindeplassen (a lake) today. Here are some photos from that walk.