Kimberly Hirsh

🔖 I highly recommend Everything Is Awful and I’m Not Okay: questions to ask before giving up as a tool for managing daily living when things feel hard.

W’s aunt gave M an amaryllis and it’s blooming. Big Alice in Wonderland vibes. [Image description: a large red amaryllis flower blooms.]

Peak IndieWeb Eldest Daughter Kimberly: considering for a few minutes trying to do a self-hosted version of CaringBridge before deciding it’s okay to use a silo for that purpose.

I haven’t seen ENCANTO but I gather Luisa is the middle sister and yet her song is the anthem of eldest daughters the world over. 🍿🎵

🔖 Read We Are All Hostages to Anti-Semitism by Yair Rosenberg

Excellent piece about how anti-Semitism is not individual prejudice, but part of a vast, centuries-old conspiracy theory that undermines people’s faith in democracy.

🔖 Read Why PhDs Need to Study Creative Writing.

Awesome piece with an excellent argument. I’ve been tacking this direction for a while and it’s nice to see more scholars talking about it.

🔖 Read As We May Think by Vannevar Bush

This 1945 essay by Vannebar Bush is one of the first texts they had us read when I got my MS in Library Science.

Notes and highlights

A record if it is to be useful to science, must be continuously extended, it must be stored, and above all it must be consulted.

one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it,

every time one combines and records facts in accordance with established logical processes, the creative aspect of thinking is concerned only with the selection of the data and the process to be employed and the manipulation thereafter is repetitive in nature and hence a fit matter to be relegated to the machine

Whenever logical processes of thought are employed—that is, whenever thought for a time runs along an accepted groove—there is an opportunity for the machine.

There may be millions of fine thoughts, and the account of the experience on which they are based, all encased within stone walls of acceptable architectural form; but if the scholar can get at only one a week by diligent search, his syntheses are not likely to keep up with the current scene.

The human mind does not work that way. It operates by association. With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. It has other characteristics, of course; trails that are not frequently followed are prone to fade, items are not fully permanent, memory is transitory. Yet the speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures, is awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature.

Bush points out that indexing systems and rules do not duplicate the human mind - we must convert our own mental associations to a form we can use to search them - but that the human mind works by association. I extrapolate from this the idea of hypertext as a model of how the mind works. I’m going to keep an eye out for other instances of this idea.

if the user inserted 5000 pages of material a day it would take him hundreds of years to fill the repository, so he can be profligate and enter material freely.

How many people use Evernote as a Memex?

When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. At the bottom of each there are a number of blank code spaces, and a pointer is set to indicate one of these on each item. The user taps a single key, and the items are permanently joined. In each code space appears the code word.

This is tagging.

There is a new profession of trail blazers, those who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record.

It me! This is kinda what people who operate as web librarians do. Web librarian isn’t my job title or description, but it’s just kind of who I am.

His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

This is one of my difficulties. I put a lot of stuff in my blog-as-memex but don’t have a good way of surfacing them again. Theoretically I could do this with categories, but that gets overwhelming fast. This is why I’m thinking about using a blog and a wiki together for this purpose.

He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good.

I fear this is so.

Related video

🔖 Read Tamsyn Muir Understood the Assignment: The Locked Tomb Series’ Expansive Exploration of Death and Grieving by Emma Leff 📚

I am immensely pleased to be getting so much new Star Trek in the next few months. 🖖🏻

Just a little pro tip, muting words on Twitter will not prevent them from appearing in the “What’s happening” sidebar. A little public service announcement for you today.

I’m taking an indefinite hiatus from checking or cross-posting to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and most other social media services, with the exception of Micro.blog. I’m doing this right now because I don’t like when stuff pops up in front of me without me choosing to see it, and that’s most of what social media is. In particular, when my mute filters aren’t working because they apply to timelines but not other parts of an interface and ads are proliferating so it’s hard to find content from the people I actually followed, I just end up grouchy and I don’t need extra reasons to be grouchy.

If you want to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@kimberlyhirsh.com or text my Google Voice number at +1 ‪(919) 794-7602‬. If you want to know what’s up with me, you can subscribe to my newsletter or RSS feed. If you want to respond to something I post, you can reply by email, join the conversation on Micro.blog, or send a webmention from your own site.

I’m not deactivating or deleting accounts, just logging off.

Life just ran more smoothly when she got her way. Leigh Bardugo, KING OF SCARS

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I’m experimenting with building a digital garden via a personal wiki so of course my first page is about Digital Gardens and Streams. I won’t be shocked if I end up going back to putting everything in my website/blog, but I thought I’d try this out.

🔖 Read Hypertext Gardens.

Efficient traversal provides the information readers think they want, but may hide information readers need.

I love the 1998ness of this essay. It’s given me a lot to think about, though it’ll be a while before I figure out how I’d like to apply these ideas.

Okay, I’ll do the 10 year challenge.

What gave her strength then? We cannot know for sure. That contrary thing inside her? The hard stone of rage that all lonely girls possess? - Leigh Bardugo, THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS 💬📚

Finished reading: The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo 📚

I definitely want to write a longer review of this one, but I need some time to sit with it first. I love it.

This week is really asking me to live my commitment to embracing radical uncertainty. I’ve had a hypothyroidism flare due to the cold weather, which has impacted my sleep habits and energy levels. We had a big winter storm and while it hasn’t been a huge problem, it shifted some childcare plans away from what we usually have. The kid is home today for a school holiday, which is expected but different than normal, and due to the winter storm he’ll have a two-hour delay tomorrow. (Guess who won’t? His dad. Which means I’m in charge of all the dealing with the delay, I think.)

This has been a test, too, of my ability to do my job while living the life I live. Last week, I was able to get a lot done, even in the face of brain fog. I have hopes that I’ll be able to do likewise this week, and it’s nice that my next real deadline isn’t until next week or the week after anyway.

It’s hard to be a person who craves system and consistency and also live with the built-in uncertainty of chronic illness and parenting, and of course a pandemic adds another layer. I think it would serve me well to build some resilient, flexible systems. Sort of like menus as Dr. Katy Peplin and Dr. Katie Linder have written about, maybe. I’m going to keep thinking about this. I’ll let you know where I land.

New bio/tagline: “mothering, researching, reading, writing, playing, making, always learning”

Yesterday I interrupted my kid’s marathon viewing of BLIPPI and transformed it into a marathon viewing of PHINEAS AND FERB, I am the best at parenting, AMA

Easy magic is pretty. Great magic asks that you trouble the waters. It requires a disruption, something new.Leigh Bardugo, THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS

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Currently reading: The Language of Thorns: Midnight Tales and Dangerous Magic by Leigh Bardugo 📚

I have so much respect for how dark Bardugo is willing to go with these fairytales. The twist is consistent but shocks me each time.

Since the Micro.blog community is starting a reading group in the near future, I thought it would be a good time to talk about my reading habits and tastes.

My favorite books I’ve read in recent years are Tamsyn Muir’s GIDEON THE NINTH, Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s MEXICAN GOTHIC, and Tracy Deonn’s LEGENDBORN. My favorite book of all time is Piers Anthony’s ON A PALE HORSE. (I’m aware my fave is problematic. I love his books anyway.) I first read it in seventh grade. It was the first urban fantasy book I had ever read and I loved that it combined an interesting world, cool philosophical and metaphysical ideas, and characters I loved.

I read widely and enjoy many popular genres. My default fiction genre of choice is fantasy. I also really enjoy soft science fiction, cozy mystery, and Regency romance. I rarely like realistic or literary fiction, but sometimes an author or book in those categories will catch my interest. I read a lot of nonfiction, too, usually focused on my latest obsession or professional needs.

Right now I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s THE LANGUAGE OF THORNS, Caitlin Doughty’s SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES AND OTHER LESSONS FROM THE CREMATORY, and Kelly J. Baker’s SEXISM ED.

I read physical books, ebooks, audiobooks, and sequential art (comics/graphic novels).

I tend to read books marketed as young adult or adult books that crossover well to a teen audience. This is partly because of my professional history as a high school teacher and middle school librarian and partly because I love a good bildungsroman. I love the possibility and promise of the teen years. Also, I think reading should be fun.

I’m really impressed by authors who can create an evocative sense of place, like Erin Morgenstern or Alicia Jasinka.

I love to chat books and recommend reads, so please feel free to get in touch if you’d like to talk about books!

Wisdom from my blog archives: What if everything I am - everything I’ve tried to improve in this particular, optimizing, tool-utilizing way - is just fine? (It’s my half birthday. Happy half birthday, me!)

My workplace harassment training is promoting person-first language, but ends with “Ultimately, it is important to treat everyone as an individual and respect the words with which they define themselves.” Wish that part was up front. Person-first v. identity-first is so fraught.