Readers

“I sincerely believe that books don’t live until they’re read. While I think I’d write even if nobody was reading - it’s who I am - I thrive because I know the stories are being brought to life by all of you. In this, stories are a special kind of art, particularly ones written down. Each of you imagines this book, and its characters, a little differently - each of you puts your own stamp on it, making it yours. I don’t think a story is quite finished until that has happened to it - until the dream in my head has become a reality (even if briefly) in yours.

And so this book is yours, as are all of them once you read them. Thank you so much for bringing life to my work, and to the Cosmere.”

Brandon Sanderson, The Sunlit Man, Postscript

Alchemic Cross Pollination

“The most wondrous thing about these seeds is that, when they first fall into the fallow ground of the mind, we have no sense of what they will bloom into years, decades, and selves later, what alchemic cross-pollination will take place between them and other seeds in the dark underground of consciousness where we become who we are.”

Maria Popova, The Fairy Tale Tree

The Marginalian

Why I’m not moving off Substack (for now).

These posts share many of the reasons I find the pressure to leave Substack problematic.

First, ”The amount of revenue Substack makes from my newsletter is insignificant to them, while the income is life-changing for me.” Anastasia Shelby

Second, “All labor under capitalism involves moral compromise.” Tara McMullin

Third, “Every social platform profits from extremism in some way… “ (If not from subscription models then data mining.) ”The only content we can truly control is our own.” (Kathleen Schmidt

Because of these, is no clear alternative.

This is doubly true for smaller creators. (For example, I can’t afford the paid tier of Ghost.org that offers the same storage capacity.)

But also, is it wise to cede this amazing tool for communication and connection to the bad actors? Why not use the platform instead to share positive messages to counter the hate?

Anyway, these posts put it better than me.

Hi, it’s me. I’m here. by Anne Trubek

On Recent Developments at Substack by Catherynne Valente

Rock, Creator, Hard Place by Tara McMullin

See also: enshittification

Disability is needfulness.

Krista Tippett: “You said in adulthood when something really big happens to you, you either just kind of assimilate it into the preexisting story that you’ve been living by, or you accommodate and you make room for this experience, and your story shifts.“

The following quotes are all Sara Hendren:

“My dear friend and colleague John Adler studies narrative identity in adulthood… And he taught me this kind of, that we make stories of our lives as a biological imperative… We need to tell stories that do make sense over time of how we got to where we are… it’s a feature of, really, how we exist. There’s genetic factors, and there’s nurture, environmental factors, and then there’s this story-making.”

“Disability is needfulness.”

“[Needfulness] is temporal and changing and over the lifespan.”

“What shall we build?”

“…have wrested my husband and me from the grip of rigid time.”

“…that atypical way of maneuvering through time, yes, has helped all of us in our family to see what are we attached to in our worth and what will we do? How will we build the kind of lives that we want?”

“…making friends with that slowness and trying to ask ourselves, “Well, what is the hurry about? Do we want our lives subsumed by our economic worth?” Again, none of this is to say that we don’t, in a realistic way, live in a time in which we work for money. Yes, I get it. But, the invitation is also to ask what are our lives about.”

On Being, Sara Hendren - Our Bodies, Awareness, and the Built World

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Further reading:


What Can a Body Do? by: Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren on Substack

Engineering at Home Project

2023 Reading Wrap Up

I read a lot of Fantasy this year. A lot of Sanderson and Pratchett and I also discovered Jason Denzel’s work.

Here are screencaps of my stats from Storygraph.

* I’m pretty sure the longest book was also something by Jordan or Sanderson, but the page count stats got mixed up somehow.

I was enjoying this read, but something else took over. Maybe I’ll come back to it sometime.

Along with this being the Year of Sanderson (5 new books from Brandon Sanderson this year) I also decided to start Discworld again. I reread the first few Discworld books and then started working my way forward chronologically..

Art as a tool for seeing.

The idea of art as a tool for seeing or a tool for life.

(Observations on Asawa’s work by Sarah Sze & Helen Molesworth.)

The Legacy of Ruth Asawa, Dialogues, September 26, 2023

Cluedo

“Cluedo = Clue + Ludo. Ludo is a classic British game – a simplified game of India. Ludo is not played in the U.S. Instead, Americans play Parcheesi. But ‘Cluecheesi’ doesn’t quite work. So we just stuck with ‘Clue’.” via bit.ly/41IHTTS