a stream

My knee has recovered enough that I went on somewhat of an actual hike!

Here’s a photo of a grasshopper on the door of the shed in my backyard.

Link: Reality Is Just a Game Now | Jon Askonas

Type: Essay

Source: The New Atlantis

I don’t have a quote, but this essay makes the case that we have basically gamified reality now. It’s unfortunately pretty spot on.

Do I really need to get credit for every random thing I read and find at all interesting by semi-publicly recording it here on this website?

Maybe, yeah.

Link: Authors on Authors: Nevada | Dan Bouk

Type: Book Review / Marketing Blurb

Source: Electric Eel Newsletter

Halfway through Nevada, Binnie gives us this line: “It’s clear that being responsible has not been a positive force in her life.” It’s describing an idea the protagonist, Maria Griffiths, is just then working out, or maybe taking for a spin.

She’s thinking about all the responsibility she had borne up to that point: a responsibility to hide, to fit in, to cram herself into the identities or check-boxes or cheap clothes that had been assigned to her and declared acceptable. She bore that responsibility to protect herself, but more so to protect those around her, from discomfort, from standing out: “When she was little, she was responsible for protecting everybody else from her own shit about her gender—responsible for making sure her parents didn’t have to have a weird kid.” This is a burden children bear, and especially trans kids.

Link: “A Very Small Animal Entirely Surrounded by Water” | sam sax

Type: Poem

Source: The Atlantic

. . .
[music | oil | trash] filled our rivers
stayed up for the after [party | life | math]
the forests were [protected | sold | ash]
wrote [letters | checks | ads] against corruption
blamed [science | systems | depression] for our cities
when the [oceans | fires | droughts] came
when the [rains | bomb | flu] came
when the [weather | weather | weather] came
we [weathered | welcomed | watered] it
we were [prepared | shocked | responsible]
. . .

Link: Everything Is Going Too Fast | Imani Perry

Type: Essay / Newsletter

Source: Unsettled Territory (Atlantic Subscriber Newsletter) ($)

“There are no easy ways to live now. But I do think we have to be deliberate about moments of quiet reflection in which we make decisions about what we will do, however modest, in response to so many social and political challenges. And by that I mean what we will do in a sustained fashion—both in terms of what we commit to knowing about by regularly reading and keeping abreast of those topics, and also in terms of what civic actions we will weave into our daily lives. I’m not one to rail against the internet or the television. But I am an advocate of regularly stepping away to concentrate one’s attention. It still feels inadequate, of course. But it is something.”

A log of my music listens in the past week, by albums and playlists, not including completely random shuffles.

Really, most of the time I just like sitting beneath trees, and it turns out my backyard is an extremely serviceable place for that, so no need to go anywhere else to write or work.

I’m playing around with reorganizing almost my entire site into topic- and theme-based files and folders on the back end.

With keeping my new “digital garden” off to the side of the rest of my content, I can’t decide where to put things. It feels redudant; so I’m making the whole site into the garden.