Month: January 2024

Occasionally, I can be a bit of a notebook nerd and buy cool (well, cool to me) journals, notebooks, pens, and other such accoutrements. The latest one I bought is a physical version of The Theme System journal (designed by CGP Grey and Myke Hurley.) A few weeks ago I had a small epiphany about how I want to think about and frame my goals for 2024 – I don’t always have such an epiphany near the start of a new calendar year, but this one worked really well, so I thought making an attempt at using their ‘theme system’ was worth a shot. The theme, by the way, I’m currently labeling “Clearing Away and Removal.” There are a number of things that need to be removed from my life (less passively: that I need to actively evict from my life) and there are a number of things for which I need to make space and to which I need to become more open. We’ll see how it goes.

The UUA every year suggest a ‘common read’ – this year it’s the book On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. I’ve started making my way through it and will be sharing occasional highlights on Goodreads. Rabbi Ruttenberg also has a substack that I subscribe to. Well, she did have a substack – she just recently moved her public writings to a new place because of the ongoing Nazification of Substack.

Speaking of the Nazification of Substack, another writer I read there, Cat Valente, is not leaving yet, pointing out the dilemma of letting the goblin hordes constantly run us off – read the whole thing (link below).

I do not know if I’m going to stay here. I just don’t know. I came to Substack because of the Twitter diaspora. I managed to build a small audience, built mostly on hating fascism and idiocy. I like the community I and all of you have built here and I’m reluctant to migrate and lose people. But I don’t want to support the Badness by being here. And yet, if I go, does that not just abandon another space because bad people are also here, handing them control of yet another hugely-recognized platform, control they could never achieve on their own just on numbers and popularity, while the people who have any moral compass whatsoever have to continually start over from scratch? 

Which one helps the goblin horde more, staying or going?

I just don’t know.

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/on-recent-developments-at-substack

Trying out a feature I think I’ll call “Journalesque” – short little journally bits here relating to things that are happening in real life. 😆

Journalesque: This morning, I dumped hot coffee ☕️ all over myself twice before I figured out that the travel mug was not working as designed. Fortunately, I hadn’t left the house yet. I also took a nice nap with my puppers this afternoon (who is truly the absolute best napping companion). This photo is from a different nap, but you get the idea.

I mean, would you ever get up from a comfy nap if you had a snuggler like that? You see my challenge!

One of the things I’m trying to be deliberate about again, is intentionally reading regularly and also updating my reading progress on various books in Goodreads. This is part of what I mean by “reading in public.” I also mean writing about, or reflecting on the things that I’ve read now and then – – in public here on this weblog.

If you go to my Goodreads page, you’ll see that I have a dozen or more books that I am partway through or currently reading. This is almost always true, but I’m gonna try to get through some of them this calendar year that have been on that list since even before the pandemic. I seem to almost always have a combination of speculative fiction; religious, theological, or meditative offerings; productivity guidebooks; and very occasionally some regular old literary fiction. (I also read a bunch of smut/romance that I don’t track on Goodreads, because who needs to see all that and, besides, if we know each other and you read the same kind of smut I do, we probably already know that about each other and share recommendations elsewhere! The tropes, people, the tropes are endless! Who knew? Reading modern romance novels is a habit I picked up again during the pandemic, after dropping it when I was about 14.)

Today I finished a speculative fiction novel called The Goblin Emperor. It wasn’t bad. I give it three or four stars — it was definitely readable, definitely enjoyable, but I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll pick up the next book by this author in this world which is why I’m keeping it at 3 or maybe 4 stars.

Some stuff I’ve read or listened to lately that seems worth sharing:

On Chris Hayes’ podcast “Why Is This Happening?” (WITHPod), he interviews Robinson Meyer, executive director of Heatmap about the state the climate crisis, trends in fossil fuel use, S-curves and possible inflection points, and more. Really well-informed but also accessible discussion. Too many interesting ideas to find a good pull-quote – go have a listen.

Recently read an sf novel about cognition and AI and cephalopods that was well-done modern sf: The Mountain in the Sea. I highlighted a few things as I was going along – visible in my Goodreads account.

A question I found very provocative from adrienne marie brown’s book “emergent strategy“: How do you show up in the world? And, related: How do you want to show up in the world? How do others close to you perceive how you show up in the world? What about those not close to you? I love this for its emphasis on action – showing up. If justice is love in action, if generosity is gratitude in action, then I think how one shows up in the world can be seen as character in action.