Building Community

What’s Tracy up to lately? Updated 4 March 2024 Writing a sci-fi novel 📝 I’m grinding on revisions right now Designing a couple interpretive signs about salmon Recovering from having my gallbladder removed unexpectedly Continuing to mask up and avoid indoor spaces 😷 Posting thoughts and saving bookmarks here 🤓 I don’t know how I…

Spring is here — it was a big wildlife week in the neighborhood! Heard coyotes howling in the greenbelt and the frogs started their evening chorus, saw a doe in the backyard and a hummingbird out front, and spotted the first bees cruising. But, allergies also hit me hard 🤧

I downloaded my Google Takeout data. I’d forgotten they own Blogger and was delighted to discover they had atom feeds for all of my old college blogs! No photos, but still funny to see what I wrote about twenty years ago. I’ve marked the date of my very first post on my calendar so I can celebrate the anniversary come September 😁🥂
I’ve been working on keeping fewer tabs open on my phone. I was doing pretty well till yesterday but left six tabs open overnight 😂
Stuff I Did:

About eight hours of consulting work
Developed a new revision plan for my novel
Started exploring webfonts for my consulting website
Went to Homebrew Website Club
Watched a webinar about home design
Walked with a friend twice
Baked scones
One appointment

Reading:

Read Alien Mercenary’s Destiny by Mina Carter and re-read The Suffragette Scandal by Courtney Milan
Started reading Effortless by Greg McKeown
DNF’d Breath of Life by Jocelynn Drake and Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood
Added five books to my TBR

Words I looked up / concepts I learned:

cognate
caliginous
No free lunch theorem

New newsletter I’m trying out:

Ann Friedman’s newsletter

Pretty things I saw:

Ryan Swierczek of Swierczek Design Co — I like the color palettes, especially the photo tints, and the photo collages on their posters
Roland Kraemer on ThatBloom.com — lots of neat abstract natural photo series, and I thought the inverted cursor overlay was cool looking (although the size changing was a little confusing)
Parag Sahasrabudhe on parag.micro.blog — a series of colorful doors in Puerto Rico

Website Changes:
New organizing section!
I created a new section called “Big Questions” which organizes a lot of my notes and reading under broad questions that I’ve been thinking about a lot over the past couple years:

Balanced Lifestyle
Effective Creative Processes
Writing Fiction – this one hasn’t been populated yet
Thinking Better
Information Diet
Future of the Internet
Resisting Fascism
Building Community

I got some good ideas at Homebrew Website Club that I’ve only started implementing on the ‘balanced lifestyle’ page, so these still have some work to do. I also need to figure out what system I’m going to follow to update them since it’s all manual 😉
New page
I also finally published a page collecting “neat websites” as an addition to my pages for interesting people and cool artists and blogroll. I’d been sitting on it, feeling like it needed more content before I could post it, but whatev, may as well post now and can keep adding 🤷‍♀️

Liked Not Normal by Kerri Krueger (frenetic.ink)

What annoys me most about the phrase “This is the New Normal” is that it implies that we just have to accept it and there’s nothing we can do about it.

Speaking as though it’s too late to act on climate is a tactic intended to make you hopeless and numb. Don’t give in.
Acting as though the fascists represent the majority when they’re a small minority is meant to make you accept their rule without resistance, and cede more power than they have stolen. Don’t comply in advance.
Declaring elevated death rates and constant sickness to be normal makes it easy to dismiss those who complain as irrationally fearful. But you’re not unreasonable to want to protect your health.
Marketing AI as a fait accompli and a tool that will rewrite the world thus too important to restrict, gives corporations a reason to dismiss valid criticism and blast ahead full-steam in contradiction to their stated values. They’ve broken enough stuff already moving too fast and ignoring marginalized groups; we could impose regulation on the industry.
Rebranding failures as victories is meant to placate you with marginal substitutions. Don’t be satisfied with piddling half measures.
Lamenting there’s no viable alternative for healthcare when every other wealthy country has figured it out besides the US is gaslighting you. It isn’t normal for people in rich countries to lose everything just because they got sick or had a kid.
Dismissing legitimate requests for accountability because ethical standards don’t currently exist is a copout. It is possible to make new laws, and change the ones we have. The Constitution is meant to be a living document, not solely the brain trust of a bunch of morally corrupt slaveholders two hundred years dead. Justice should not be constrained by the failures of the past.
Know this: it’s ok to want better. To expect better. To demand better.
Let their resistance to doing what is right radicalize you. Practice solidarity. Build community. Advocate for the future you want to live in.
And don’t accept that any of this bullshit is normal.