Kimberly Hirsh

Gonna be live-posting #FanLIS2022 today & tomorrow. Will transition to LiveNoter in an hour and a half but posting through Micro.blog until I’m done taking my kid to school.

A squirrel is trying to break into my house.

Missed a huge chunk of the current #FanLIS2022 paper due to Zoom crash & also lost my NoterLive log because I didn’t think to post it before rebooting.

Definitely just brainstormed the paper title “Screw General Order One: Representing Positionality as an Insider When Doing Fan Studies Research.” #FanLIS2022

There are a lot of great things about attending a conference from home. Still, it’s a bit sad not to be able to go hide in a hotel room and let all the new ideas roll around while disconnected from your usual responsibilities.

Week 3 of #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds and there are already 189 works on AO3. Looking forward to discovering new favorite creators. 🖖🏻

🔖 Read Durham GOP’s “Better Board, Better Schools” candidate slate is soundly defeated.

What a relief.

🔖 Read How I Build My Common Place Book (Greg McVerry)

McVerry generously summarizes his workflow:

• Document impetus of thought (often after the fact)

• Collect initial bookmarks
• Ask in networks, bookmark your queries
• Collect research, and block quotes or use social annotations
• Begin to formulate thoughts in random blog posts
• Start to draft the long form thought
• Publish an article on my Domain.

I’m adding things to it slowly, but I’ve created a Connected Learning page curating my notes, memos, and blog posts on this topic. I have so much more to add.

In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed) (Trek News) by Bill Smith:

I agree with Smith’s assessment of Discovery. Each season, the stakes are bigger. In Season 4, they were literally extragalactic. Once you’ve broken the galactic barrier and made first contact with a species living beyond it, where else is there to go?

The race to solve the puzzle box is exhausting. The hyperfocus on serialization leads to a lot of intriguing threads being introduced and tied off more quickly than I would like. For example, in Seasons 3 and 4 we saw what looked like they were going to be mental health crises for Detmer (PTSD from the jump into the future), Tilly (depression related to existential crisis), and Culber (burnout). In Detmer’s case, I don’t recall being shown the road to recovery at all. Tilly seemed to have two episodes of feeling bad that were magically fixed by deciding to become an instructor. And Culber I guess just really needed a vacation?

I really enjoy Discovery. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wish there were more of it so we would have time to devote a whole episode to each of these characters.

I love Michael Burnham. But I also love so much of the rest of her crew. TNG started with a focus on the bridge crew and especially Picard, but opened up to give us time to get to know O’Brien, Barclay, and more. I wish Discovery had the breathing room to do the same.

I especially agree with Smith’s point here:

One of the things that Star Trek: Discovery did exceedingly well in Season 4 was First Contact with Species 10-C, the originators of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

It was its own challenge in unlocking the mystery of the DMA and I thought that aspect was something that the show did really well. It took this concept of seeking out new life and new civilizations and put a 32nd-century spin on it.

Discovery really leaned into that first contact situation hard and it worked. For 56 years, Star Trek has taught us that the unknown isn’t always something to be feared, but we should always strive to understand. There isn’t always a “big bad villain” when the puzzle is assembled or, sometimes, we find out that we are the villain however unintentionally.

These are the types of stories that have always found their way into Star Trek—from Gene Roddenberry’s first script right up to today’s iterations of the franchise. These are Trek’s roots and when Discovery revisits them, it works brilliantly.

Watching everyone work together to make first contact with the 10-C was exhilarating. It had all the delight of Picard figuring out the speech patterns in “Darmok” with an added bonus of getting to see a bunch of different people work together, leveraging each of their specialties to shine. This is foundational Trek stuff and I love when Discovery puts a spin on it.

I hope the writers will go a little softer in Discovery Season 5, giving it room to breathe. I look forward to seeing what they do.

Next time I take it into my head that words won’t come out of me in written form, I’m going to re-read this 2018 blog post in which I calculated that I wrote 98,000 words in the first 5 semesters of my doctoral program.

🔖 Read When Kids Have to Act Like Parents, It Affects Them for Life (The Atlantic) by Cindy Lamothe

“she said she often distrusts that other people will take care of things. ‘That’s why I tend to step up and do it myself.’”

Pool’s open!

Stole a quote from the woodland goth page of Aesthetics wiki for my bio/tagline: “…a hybrid of fey imagery, Glam Rock glitter, and the lighter side of 80s Goth.”

🔖 Read Why I Blog Part 1 and Part 2 (Kyle Mathews).

🔖💻 Read Why blog? (Chuck Grimmett).

Well said. These are my reasons, too.

Voting selfie!

🔖💻 Read Building a Digital Homestead, Bit by Brick (Tom Critchlow).

I like this homesteading metaphor. Neither gardens nor streams quite work for what I do with my personal site. This is closer.

🔖💻 Read revisiting architectural blogging (Alan Jacobs).

🔖💻 Read envisioning my homepage as an online therapeutic space (Winnie Lim).

🔖💻 Read Incrementally correct personal websites (Brian Lovin).

🔖💻 Read You’re Not Blogging, My Friend. (Tom Critchlow).