You may have heard that Substack recently came under scrutiny (to say the least) for its position on platforming/making money off Nazis – namely, they don’t see a problem with it. So I want to get out of the Nazi bar. I’ve spent the past few days trying out alternatives to Substack, and I’ve settled on Beehiiv. I’m sure it’s not perfect* but I’ve seen encouraging statements about their position on this sort of thing. […]
Why I left Substack Read More »
I’m having a lot of fun with my newsletter. It’s been nice to return to slightly longer forms of expression considering, you know, *gestures vaguely at the state of social media*. I realize that this blog/journal can count as a longer form of expression, but honestly I’m still not sure how to best use this space. So in the meantime, here are some of the recent topics I wrote about: ☾ How pandemic
Want more journal stuff from me? Read More »
Recently, I heard Jeanne Dielman described as “three and a half hours of a woman in her apartment going about her daily life. I watched it once in college when I was really depressed.” I decided to watch it based on this description alone. A couple of the IMDB tags for the film are “peeling potatoes” and “existential loneliness,” and I can’t really put into words why the alchemy of of those two things combining
Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Read More »
Javi came to life before I got into bookstagram (as little as I consider myself “into bookstagram,” that is), and his love of books was extrapolated from my own. But during final edits of The Quiet is Loud, I started to worry that maybe I had been an unwilling host for an invisible AI entity to create bookstagram in human form. That in itself would make for a weird sci-fi novel, I think. Wouldn’t it
Did I create this character, or did bookstagram create this character? Read More »
I recently asked people on Instagram to recommend “pretty and fartistic” movies to me, and I got several good suggestions. I picked the first two, The Terrorizers and La Notte, at random, and was pleasantly surprised to find that books and writers featured heavily in them. These movies were also very pretty, and I took a lot of screenshots for the blog. This might surprise you, but my screenshots skewed heavily towards the writing and
Writing & books in movies: The Terrorizers and La Notte Read More »
Will spend the cooler months watching all the movies I should have watched by now. I’m happy to have finally watched the original Dawn of the Dead. Intensely moody and atmospheric, and strangely nostalgic even though this came out two years before I was born. I’m probably not supposed to have fondness for the mall, but I can’t help it – I do. Will spend the cooler months watching all the movies I should have
When I think about some of the memorable parts of my years writing online, I’m usually most nostalgic for the earliest years: 1997-2001-ish. But recently, I fell into a different sort of nostalgia spiral. I forget how it even started, but I found myself missing the way blogging was just a handful of years ago. In 2008, when I was living in Calgary, I started a new blog called Clock & Bell. I’d started it
In 2016, I wrote the following blog post for my history blog, The Small Histories. I was thinking about it again recently and wanted to share it here as well – book lovers will appreciate it! Also, I had to actually laugh out loud when I read “I’m not a worldbuilding sort of writer” – Oh if only the me of 2016 knew that worldbuilding would be ALL she’d do just two years later!
The history of fictional worlds Read More »
There is a middle-aged woman in the building behind mine who I relate to. She has a big comfy chair by the window, and she likes to sit in that chair with her computer or a book or a crossword. There’s a lamp right next to the chair and a desk across the room, but she forsakes the desk for her comfort zone. I like her style. In the apartment above her, a cat often
January 2009, Calgary: Neighbourly. Read More »
Overheard, in a book store: “Must it be rhyming couplets?” “Oh, yes.”
December 2008, Calgary. Read More »
