Finished reading: The Forgotten Girls by Monica Potts 📚
Potts brings her reporting background to this memoir about coming of age in Arkansas, one of the poorest, reddest states, with lengthy explorations of the economic and social policies that create conditions in which women struggle to thrive. I really enjoyed this read for so many reasons, and was pleased that Potts’ voice is empathetic, smart and searching. Very recommended.
I’m v excited about the PJ Harvey Tiny Desk concert out today. 🎵
PJ Harvey is one of my favorite musicians because she is a weirdo and an artist in the same vein as a Kate Bush, or even a Bob Dylan, who concentrates on mythology, atmosphere, artistry and sense of place. For a lot of my life, my fav album was “Rid of Me.” It was present in a lot of formative moments as a kid and still resonates for me as an adult, despite some of its flourishes not aging well. As an adult, “Let England Shake” genuinely moved me. She draws on music and poetry traditions to explore what it means for England to be an empire, sitting atop a throne of bones and bloodshed. It’s ambitious and dark and sounds incredible, in part thanks to her use of the autoharp (yes, seriously).
She’s also among the artists who made a hard left in my musical interests as a kid, when she and John Parish released “Dance Hall at Louse Point.” This album was called career suicide when it came out because it is so atonal and avant garde. As an album, listening from beginning to end, it’s delightfully sinister. It could be a sister or a cousin album to Nick Cave’s “Murder Ballads.”
Need a brilliant bauble for the holidays? How about a beautiful box of blooming instant miso soup bombs? www.brooklynmisomaru.com/shop/p/mi…
Someone reminded me of the story of Charlie the goat, who played Black Philip in “The Witch,” and had two modes: sleeping or asshole. Method actor or brilliant casting? www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/gene…
🚨 Cat in a basket 🚨 🐱
This is a real life nightmare. Nobody deserves to live this way, nobody deserves to die this way. www.npr.org/sections/…
For the old heads, “No Alternative,” the 1993 AIDS benefit compilation album, turns 30 today. www.stereogum.com/1541231/n…
Made the mistake of telling my family I’ve had “Like a Rock” in my head all day, and now my family is streaming Bob Seger videos and old Chevy commercials.
“More than one-fifth of college students are parents, and about one-tenth are single mothers.” www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2…
Here are some pictures of my cat sleeping like a weirdo. 🐱
My biggest complaint about the slow, excruciating car crash of Twitter/X is that all of my journalist friends moved to Bsky and all my geek friends moved to Mastodon.
One of the stranger parts of watching Golden Bachelor, which otherwise mimics the shiny gloss of the rest of the franchise, is how much they openly discuss death, grief and dying. www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2…
I’m a dummy, but I can’t log into mastodon.social since connecting with micro.blog. What am I doing wrong? Or do I need to log in elsewhere?
Microblogging on the open web - and why care? book.micro.blog
My phone camera has been busted for most of the summer, but tonight I have an appointment to get it fixed. When it is, it’s all over for you suckers (I’m going to post a lot of photos).
While noodling around on other things, I ran across the omg.lol domain (https://home.omg.lol/), clicked around, found Neatnik (https://neatnik.net/), and this fun PHP project where he created a year-long calendar that automatically resizes to fit a single page.
See the whole year on one sheet of paper. Any sheet of paper: neatnik.net/calendar/
This is one to watch: www.theverge.com/2023/10/2…
Finished reading: The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin 📚
When I realized I’ve read more about him than by him, I had to rectify that problem. So many of the geopolitical problems he discusses are still relevant, and Baldwin’s voice is as clear and urgent as ever.
Finished reading: Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver 📚
It holds up.
Finished reading: Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver 📚
I forgot how much I love Kingsolver. After I finished this one on a road trip, I turned around and reread Poisonwood Bible on a camping trip.
🐱 Testing video. This is a zine I started doodling, depicting my cat’s favorite things.
As a professional poster (derogatory), this is exactly the kind of posting stream I’m interested in supporting for institutional communications. When you speak on behalf of a company or institution, you need the power to own your own platforms and content, the agility of posting to multiple channels from one platform/location, and it needs to be user friendly. We need support and ease of use, and since I’m also in public education, it would be great if we could do some of that for free or close to it.
I’m here after listening to this podcast yesterday, after a months-long conversation about abandoning social media in my department (https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/23/23928550/posse-posting-activitypub-standard-twitter-tumblr-mastodon). With the move to algorithmic CPC taking priority over newsworthiness across most platforms, we saw a major drop in engagement. That was after the ridiculous “pivot to video” disaster, though departments like mine nonetheless consider video production in a real way every few months. We decided to call it after Twitter, the final app that answered our need for just-in-time communication, decided to become a walled garden with bad SEO. We’re going to let those channels go dark and focus on talking to our stakeholders in more effective ways.
I’ve been playing with Bluesky and Mastodon on my own, and in many ways, this micro.blog communication channel fits what we need. It doesn’t hurt that I like an indie model with a friendly vibe (micro.blog functionality reminds me a little of early self-hosted blogging and this site feels a little like early Tumblr). The problem: our audiences are not here. We still need to be able to post to myriad platforms, including the big baddies that we’d rather ignore.
My daughter is into block printing at the moment, so I am too. I started carving this shrimp past weekend without a plan, and now I wish I had some background to it, so I’m going to play with making a second stamp that implies water. A shrimp’s gotta shkrimp. 🎨
My ultra rural friend wants to use the Libby app to listen to and read library books but can’t get a library card in her county without playing an exorbitant fee. She lives in an area of the Midwest that is mostly farmland, depopulated by age and brain drain and the death of family farming, and her district does not pay into the county library system.
Maddened by this, I found this list of inexpensive libraries that allow for annual out-of-state memberships.
One of my toxic traits is that I think I can make everyone love beets. Another is that I think I can make everyone love beans.
I’m a new poster posting.
