Kimberly Hirsh

The other day W pointed out that the way we communicate in memes is basically the same as Tamarians in “Darmok” 🖖🏻. When I say, “Spiderman pointing at another Spiderman,” it’s not that different from “Shaka, when the walls fell.”

Me in the Netherlands on Day 3: UGH I can’t believe I haven’t been to ALL THE MUSEUMS, what am I even doing

🔖 Read The Fannish Potlatch: Creation of Status Within the Fan Community by Rachael Sabotini (Fanfic Symposium) via Lori Morimoto’s Introduction to Media Fan Studies.

How has the fandom gift economy changed since this was written in 1999?

🔖 Read The online free speech debate is raging in fan fiction, too by Elizabeth Minkel.

In case you missed it: my husband, W, received a Fulbright award to study European & transatlantic copyright harmonization, especially with respect to fair use/fair dealing. M and I are accompanying him. My sister ME is here as well serving as a mother’s helper for the first couple of months so I can actually do my job. (After she leaves, W and I will trade off childcare time.)

We’re currently based in Aalsmeer, a town closer to Amsterdam than Chapel Hill is to Durham. (That distance means more to people from our hometown than it will to other people but I thought it might be a useful comparison.) The University of Amsterdam is Will’s Fulbright host. He’ll interview scholars there as well as in Maastricht.

Because his award is specifically a Fulbright-Schuman award, his research is international, so we’ll also be visiting Helsinki and Rovaniemi in Finland, Bonn in Germany, and Brussels in Belgium.

In March, we’ll leave Aalsmeer and travel the UK and Ireland so he can interview scholars there. We’ll finish up in Paris and head home before Memorial Day.

…….

We left the US Monday evening and arrived in Amsterdam Tuesday morning, then road a train and a bus and walked about 600 meters to the house where we’re staying.

…….

I already love it here. Harbor cities always make me happy. I’m delighted by all the canals.

Also, the roads: buses have a completely separate set of lanes divided from the car lanes and so do bikes. Aalsmeer is a very walkable town.

…….

Yesterday we briefly went into Amsterdam proper for our appointment with immigration. UvA is used to international scholars sticking around, so they’re following all their normal processes with us including getting us set up with Dutch identification numbers and everything.

…….

Because we are using public transportation, it takes us about an hour to get into town. I already feel disappointed that we haven’t explored more but I have to remind myself that we haven’t even been here for 72 hours yet and I was in immense pain after the flights here.

…….

More to come. For now, have a picture from the chocolate shop near our house.

Me: wants to message all my friends and family My friends and family: are sleeping, I hope, as it’s 3:30 AM where most of them are

Woont u in Nederland? Ik ben in Aalsmeer. Wil u afspreken? Ik spreek een beetje Nederlands, maar ik spreek veel Engels.

🔖📺👱‍♀️ Read Sarah Michelle Gellar Returns to Fighting Form: “I’ve Earned the Right to Stand Where I Am”.

“Was it an ideal working situation? Absolutely not. But it’s OK to love Buffy for what we created because I think it’s pretty spectacular.”

🎮 Played the Dragon Quest Treasures demo.

Cute with some fun mechanics and a cool world but not so compelling that I’d purchase without a steep discount.

Well, a cat walked us home from the bus stop so I guess we and everyone we know are moving to Amsterdam.

📺 Finished watching Wednesday. Glad I stuck with it. I appreciate Wednesday refusing to be in the same teen drama show as everyone else. I was delighted by the ending. Be warned: replies may contain spoilers.

📺💬 “It’s not my fault I can’t interpret your emotional morse code.” 🖤 Wednesday 🖤

📺💬

Tyler: Come on, don’t you like a day that’s all about you?
Wednesday: Every day is all about me. This one just comes with cake and a bad song.

🖤🌧️🖤

Real struggle to focus today which is probably a combo of getting to bed late because I wanted to keep tabs on how my mom was doing in the ER (poorly but her heart’s okay), janky sleep, and travel anticipation.

🔖 Back on my dark academia bullshit thanks to WEDNESDAY (the show is DA, the character is goth) and so I read this interview with Donna Tartt.

I’m taking Lindsay Mack’s tarot class called The Threshold. Here’s my reading for the year ahead. Four major arcana - huge!

This whole spread fits with what’s going on with me. We leave for W’s Fulbright on Monday and hoping to do a lot of internal work while we’re away, vibing with the Hermit.

One of the things I’m struggling with is feeling a sense of purpose. I feel like Judgment combined with the Hermit gives me big “Show Yourself” (from Frozen 2) vibes - “You are the one you’ve been waiting for all of your life.” I have to look to myself for purpose. All the career quizzes and analysis of my 10th house in the world isn’t going to get me where listening to the quiet voice in myself will.

In being invited to give up the Sun, I see myself letting go of the need for bright, external, paternal clarity. It’s time to dwell in shadow for a while, to live in the murky and liminal.

With Temperance, I’m moving towards integration, integrity, my whole self being welcome in every part of my life. I think this will be key for the work I’m doing with the Hermit and Judgment.

And finally, the Ten of Pentacles: a reminder that I already have an abundant life, and that this abundance can carry me through the quiet and seeking.

Deck is the Wayhome Tarot.

In Austin Kleon’s paid newsletter post today, he asked his readers, to share how we begin.

I opened by saying, “I don’t know how I begin.” Then I proceeded to describe how I begin.

Because the biggest projects in my life have been scholarly writing projects, I thought about those. I thought about the most recent one, my dissertation, and the oldest one, my Master’s paper.

I realized that for both of these, I had a sunshine-soaked AHA! moment when I knew: this was the topic I was going to write about, this was the research I was going to do.

But then I thought about it, and that wasn’t the beginning for the dissertation. (It may have been for the Master’s paper. I don’t remember.)

In my PhD program, writing a comprehensive literature review that demonstrated our familiarity with the state of our research area was a major milestone. I went into this process with no clear research question or idea, just a set of topics that interested me. I don’t remember all of them, but they included makerspaces in libraries, gaming in libraries, and connected learning, among other things. I wrote two or three chapters of this lit review (one for each topic), flailing about, no research plan in mind, just getting familiar with the literature.

But this flailing was part of my process! I arrived at my dissertation topic by reading someone else’s dissertation and deciding to answer one of the questions she posed as a possibility for future research!

And yet, I had read her dissertation before that sun-soaked day.

What was different upon this reading?

What was different was that I had been living the night before, not working. (Work is a part of life but you know how it’s easy to forget to do all the parts of life that aren’t work? Or at least to berate yourself for not focusing on work all the time? If you’ve ever been a grad student, you know what I’m talking about.)

The night before my sun-soaked AHA!, I had gone to a concert. A video game concert. Where I saw cosplayers who inspired me. And it was putting together the dissertation I read with the inspiration I felt at that concert that led me to my dissertation topic: how cosplayers find, evaluate, use, and share information.

So these are the ingredients in my process:

1. Read what other people have written, especially keeping an eye out for interesting questions that I might want to anwer. What do I read? Whatever seems interesting.
2. Do interesting things that aren’t work.
3. Sit in the sun and think.

If I skip any of these three steps, I struggle to begin.

📺 Watching WEDNESDAY and every time Christina Ricci says, “Wednesday,” I’m all, “Are you talking to yourself?” in spite of the killer job Jenna Ortega is doing.

Pro-tip: asking questions about why you’re doing the research in the way you’re doing it and what you originally said you were going to do and how close you’re getting to that and what needs to shift and what that shift will look like is all part of the work. 📓

📚💬 “Be open to the possibility that you are bigger, more magical, more powerful than you dare imagine, that you are here to do something that is necessary and consequential and that only you can do.” Bakara Wintner in WTF Is Tarot? And How Do I Do It?, on XX JUDGMENT

Hey librarians! Where do you get information to help you do your job?

Make a note: 2023 is the year of unsubscribing.

🔖 Read How Wednesday Addams Birthed a Generation of Cynics by Emily Alford (Longreads).

This is my favorite Wednesday think piece so far.

Ricci’s Wednesday was devious, quietly furious, and most importantly, content to be so.

🔖 Read All in Good Fun: How Fanfiction Reignited My Passion for Writing by Briana Lawrence, linked in this week’s The Rec Center

The first time I started working on a fic in the past couple of years, I did it in a spiral notebook.

It seems extra cruel that while my mom can’t actually carry herself around on her legs, she can feel lots of pain in them.