By the potted plant with the weird artsy couches

I've mentioned a couple of times that I'm subscribed to Amal El-Mohtar's newsletter, and her most recent post viewable online here is a perfect encapsulation of why. It reminds me of the things I miss about the old internet: the lack of urgency, the lack of immediacy, and the sense that posts can be public and personal, but only on the writer's own terms, with each writer feeling comfortable in setting their own boundaries, letting longform posts come only when thoughts are fully considered and developed, rather than feeling an expectation to think all thoughts out loud, in real time, in public. Back when most of professional (and aspiring professional) publishing was on LJ, I remember Amal's LJ having this same quality, so I'm glad she's bringing it back to her newsletters.



This leads nicely into my final snowflake_challenge post for 2022:

In your own space, create your own challenge.

My challenge is not something that can be completed in a single post or a single day, and it's sparked in part by Amal's newsletter, and in part by comments and posts I've seen during the whole snowflake_challenge lamenting the decline in longform blogging, and the general lack of fannish activity in spaces like Dreamwidth. The challenge is: be the change you want to see. I'm not asking people to post or comment here every day, or to write 1000-word posts when all you feel like writing is 100. But I'm saying that if you want to spend more time on slower-moving platforms, make a conscious decision to do so. Comment on a post every so often rather than scrolling on by. If you created a new fanwork, share a link on Dreamwidth as well as on Twitter. Do whatever tiny things you need to make building a community here something habitual. I don't need you to tell me you've done it, and I don't need this to involve daily wordcounts, frequency of posting, or any other measurable statistic — do what feels best for you.

I will certainly be sticking to this!

Dressed in gold

Today the house is filled with sunlight, and flocks of wood pigeons have descended on our garden, where they appear to be munching their way through our lawn, and the shoots on the tops of the cherry trees. It's still wintry, but change is definitely in the air.

Yesterday, Matthias and I headed into Cambridge to meet up with notasapleasure and her husband, with whom we went to a museum exhibition of exquisite gold jewellery and other archaeological finds from the Saka nomads, who lived in what is now Kazakhstan. (They lived elsewhere as well, but what I mean is that these pieces were found in Kazakhstan.) The pieces — excavated by Kazakh archaeologists — were amazing, although I felt the exhibition itself was somewhat lacking in context, even by the standards of archaeology (which we always joke will fall back to assuming an object had 'ritual purposes' if its use isn't immediately apparent). It was more a collection of shiny pretty things — but it was a nice way to spend an hour or so. Since entry to this museum and exhibition was free, we followed it up with a quick look around another exhibition on medieval coins, partially the work of our friend Rory_Naismith, who was a PhD student on the same programme as all of us.

Today is, as planned, a lot quieter: pottering around Dreamwidth, a bit of cooking, some yoga in the afternoon. Ideally I'd like to finish my current book, but I'll have to wait and see how that goes.

I can't see that I'm going to finish any more TV shows in the next two days, so I've written up my TV roundup for January a little early.

( The order written reflects order of completion )