Kimberly Hirsh

“When we are making our art we must bend all of the resources and possibilities to work for us, not the other way around.” -Jami Attenberg in this week’s issue of Craft Talk 🎨🧶🧵📝

Finished reading: Star Trek: Discovery - The Light of Kahless by Mike Johnson 📚

Finished reading: Star Trek: Discovery: Succession by Kirsten Beyer 📚

I honestly don’t know how anyone is left living in the Terran Empire. Mirror Universe stuff stresses me out. But Discovery Annual #1 is chef’s kiss. Seeing how Paul and Hugh meet? 😍

About 7 years ago, Geek and Sundry (RIP) published a post titled HOW TO HAVE A GREAT, GEEKY WEEKEND WHEN YOU’RE NOT GOING TO SDCC.

As a chronically ill person with an immunocompromised mom, I have no idea when I’ll feel safe going to cons again. G&S’s advice was for a PRE-COVID world. Here’s my updated set of tips, inspired by their original article.

Get into some trivia with the Dorky, Geeky, Nerdy Podcast. This podcast shares their trivia questions as playable text pages online and on YouTube if you want to share with friends and play together over Zoom or something. They cover tons of different topics and have three difficulty levels. They even have rules and scoring advice. I enjoyed the Star Trek: The Next Generation trivia, of course.

Catch up on comics with your local comic shop, library, or favorite online service. I’ve got some unread books left over from Free Comic Book Day. My local shop does online ordering and curbside pickup. My library offers comics both in physical form and digitally via Hoopla and Libby. And of course there are your bigger operations like Marvel Unlimited and DC Universe Infinite. I’m going to try some of the Eisner Award nominees in the Early Readers category to share with my kid.

Work on a cosplay project. I’m putting together a vaguely genderbent (in that I’m a woman and won’t be making any effort to crossplay) Eddie Munson (BEWARE OF SPOILERS AT THAT LINK!) from Stranger Things 4. I’ve got a jacket and vest. I’m waiting for my Hellfire Club shirt to arrive. Next, I want to dig out my black jeans and try distressing them.

Do some gaming. I’ll probably play some Metroid: Zero Mission myself, but I’m also going to go prep the first Magical Kitties Save the Day adventure to play with my family as soon as I’m done writing this post.

Watch something geeky. For me, it’ll probably be Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I might also rock the 1976 Carrie. If you want to stay home but not watch alone, you can try a virtual watch party tool. I like Scener.

I hope you have some fun this weekend, wherever you are!

It’s my and Will’s 13th wedding anniversary today. The traditional gift for this anniversary is lace. The modern gift is fur or textiles. I gave him a gift card for a cat cafe. 🐈☕

I speak Dutch with a Yiddish accent, I can’t help it, it’s in my blooooood. 🇳🇱

Finished reading: The Dead Zone by Stephen King 📚

I love the way King has characters reference his own other work. “Like in that book, Carrie!”

Another, as W. puts it, compulsively readable book. A little chilling in its political prescience, really.

Pro-tip: Stuck in or overwhelmed by your research? Write a memo.

True facts about my dreams: when I was reading CARRIE and started having dreams related to it, it felt like a relief, a respite from my stress dreams about being a bad caregiver.

I was all, “My blog isn’t cross-posting to Twitter! Whyyyy?” but then I saw that I had disabled it cross-posting anywhere. This post is a test to see if enabling cross-posting was all I needed to do.

Thinking about writing a blog post about the alignment of research, especially qualitative research, over the life of a project. We live in a world where we may repeatedly have to reconsider our research scope. Where and how can we stay true to our original research purpose?

The Internet is all “Check out the Whimsigoth aesthetic!” and y’all, a better name for it would be dELiA*s-core.

Currently reading: The Dead Zone by Stephen King 📚

Finished reading: Carrie by Stephen King 📚

I don’t recall the last time I read a book inside of 24 hours.

Birthday selfie from yesterday in my South Square Mall - oops I meant Starcourt Mall - hat.

🔖 Read Violence Made Me Feel Like I’d Left My Body. Physical Theater Helped Me Return by Lindsey Trout Hughes 🎭

🔖 Read ‘Lost’ Fans Gave Me a Safe Place on the Internet. Is Such Fandom Possible Now? (Catapult) by Anna Myers

I’m 41 today and it’s a big deal because every day that I live is a day I chose to be in the world and a whole year of sticking around is huge.

40 has been by turns amazing and rough. But mostly I’ve loved how it feels like the perfect age to really go all in on unapologetically being myself and to completely bail on caring about any superficial opinion anyone has of me. It’s also a great age to realize mostly people aren’t silently criticizing me, because they’re too focused on themselves to pay attention to me.

Who I wanted to be at 40 is also who I want to be at 41. I’m doing a good job on all of those. 41 will be a year of maintaining that and having new adventures.

If you want to be part of the virtual celebration of Kimbertide, I offered some good suggestions in 2020 and 2021. I’ll probably do some of those.

Thanks for hanging out with me on the Internet this year, y’all. You bring a lot of love and connection into my life.

Posted on my birthday in 2018:

Yesterday I found out that my thyroid is out of whack again. I’m trying to remember everything I learned before, not just about how to heal, but also how to cope.

plus ça change…

Me: I don’t know what to do! Should I spend the next 45 minutes reading CARRIE or playing METROID?
W: I like the 80s, too.

🔖 Read Video Games Are for Everyone—And That Should Include Disabled People (Catapult) by Allyssa Capri.

Great discussion of where the gaming landscape is with respect to accessibility, plus resources for disabled gamers, and it ends on a positive note.

🔖 Read Black Women in Fantasy Saved Me Where Academia Failed (Catapult by Ravynn K. Stringfield.

I always love reading what Dr. Stringfield has to say. This is, in a way, a scholar’s origin story, and I love it.

🔖📝 Read On Writing with Chronic Migraines (Catapult) by Yuvi Zalkow.

I really appreciate Zalkow’s metaphors for pain and tiered system for deciding what work to do. This may inspire me to create my own spreadsheet of task levels.

The past few years, I’ve written a blog post on my birthday about who I want to be that year. My birthday’s in 2 days & as I look back at the past year, I’m too exhausted to come up with new thoughts on who I want to be. I’m going to let last year’s stand.

I keep asking myself, “When will I not be too tired for x?” and it turns out my thyroid hormone levels are suboptimal so now that we’re upping one of my meds doses I really hope the answer is “In about 6-8 weeks.”