Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 Read Welcome to Your Cronehood by Catherine Newman (Cup of Jo).

I am not psyched about menopause. I’ve already lived a lot of my life for me rather than other people, so I feel ahead of the curve there.

🔖🗺️ Read How Paris Hopes the Summer Olympics Will Transform the City—for Good by Lindsey Tramuta (Condé Nast Traveler).

This is a fascinating article. Paris’s commitment to hosting the most sustainable Olympics ever and transforming an underresourced area for the long-term is inspiring.

🎮 I got Metroid: Samus Returns. I’m really enjoying it. I know there will be parts that are super difficult, but I am happy to use walkthroughs or whatever. I’m also finding that I don’t mind having to repeatedly try a fight in this game as much as I sometimes do, so that’s nice.

🔖📚 100 of the Greatest Posters of Celebrities Urging You to Read by James Folta (Lit Hub)

This is the kind of content carefully calibrated to please me, specifically.

Hey y’all! The Connected Learning Lab published the work from my postdoc today! Two new reports for library staff and leaders compiling valuable insights and recommendations to foster teen engagement through Connected Learning. Learn more about the project and find reports and checklists here.

Finished reading: Brazen and the Beast by Sarah MacLean 📚

Sarah MacLean is just the best.

Some years on my birthday, I share who I want to be in the following year.

This year, in addition to the stuff from earlier years, I want to add:

I want to be someone who gives the same attention to writing that she has to other creative hobbies.

🎮 Finished Metroid: Zero Mission.

This is a remake of the original NES Metroid with a lengthy epilogue. I mostly enjoy Metroidvanias for the exploration.

I think my thumbs need a rest after this. It might be time to play an RPG or puzzle game. But eventually, I’ll move on to Super Metroid.

It’s my birthday on Sunday! As my birthday is Bastille Day and this is the second birthday I’ve had since going to France and confirming that I do love it as much as I thought I would, I’m celebrating with French stuff, like crêpes. If you want to party in my honor, here are some options:

• wear a marinière
• have a French breakfast
• listen to a musical based on a French novel, such as The Phantom of the Opera or Les Miserables
• form a leftist coalition and save your national government

Thanks for celebrating with me!

Disclaimer: This is not an official Micro.blog communication. Just me explaining my process. And it’s all rather stream-of-consciousness.

Hey! I thought some increased transparency about what goes in the Discover tab might be helpful. There is some info in the help forum but as Discover is curated by humans, there are some idiosyncrasies beyond what you’ll see there, depending on who’s doing the curation.

Here are the things you’re likely to notice an uptick in when I’m curating:

• Pet photos
• Parenting stuff
• Jokes

I try to rarely highlight my own posts because doing so feels icky to me. I do try to feature announcements from Manton about the service.

On the screen I use for curation in the backend, I can see how many times someone’s posts have been featured in the past week, how many times they’ve been featured ever, how many replies a post has received, and how many posts a user has ever made. As I understand it, Jean, Manton, and Vincent worked together to create this interface.

I try not to feature anyone who has already been featured 4 or more times in a week. I try to feature people who have rarely been featured or are new to Micro.blog.

I feature things I think are funny, photos I think look extra cool, questions that might start a conversation, and posts that explicitly are from a new user saying they’re new.

I try to prioritize inclusion, highlighting women of any race or ethnicity, BIPOC of any gender, posts about queer experiences including trans experiences, and posts about disability experiences.

Micro.blog skews the way a lot of tech spaces skew: cis, het, white, male, able-bodied. Inclusion has been a growing edge for Micro.blog for a long time. I do what I can to promote it within the scope of my role, but the work is bigger than me. I know members of the community have been talking about this for a long time. I can advocate for it but I am not the inflection point for it. I hope it will be a priority for the service going forward but that’s a Manton decision, not a Kimberly decision.

While I’m not here for toxic positivity, I do try to focus on joy and information on the Discover timeline, rather than partisanship or criticism. If I feature a political post, it’ll be about a specific issue that crosses partisan divides, such as the importance of voting. On Juneteenth, I highlighted posts that wished people a happy Juneteenth and also information about the history of the day. Likewise for Pride month. When I feature something related to religion, it’s usually a big theological question or textual analysis, not evangelical.

As is policy, I rarely feature photos that don’t have alt text. Please use alt text! So many of you share cool photos without it and it makes me sad.

All of this stuff is specifically about how I curate. Manton and Vincent aren’t me, so they naturally curate differently than I do.

I hope this has been helpful to hear about.

Here’s a final disclaimer that this post is an explainer from Kimberly, not an official Micro.blog communication.