April 2013
3 posts
4 tags
Infectious.
Every once in a great while, I have a need to achieve TOTAL SOCIAL MEDIA SATURATION with something because it is that awesome. Friends and assorted Tumblr-knowers, an event tomorrow is just that awesome thing. It is Ag47’s annual showcase, 7-10 pm, at the Hairpin Arts Center (2800 N Milwaukee). There will be live poetry and artmaking and performance. There will be some weird blobs...
2 tags
March 2013
1 post
empathy champion →
February 2013
2 posts
a thought on rereading Achewood
The alt text on this comic pretty much describes how I ever write anything: first I do something meandering and strange, hoping to get to something even stranger. (And I’m kind of bad at both editing and managing time, so sometimes I only get around to the first thing.)
I told you that story so I could tell you this one. Although I can only aspire ever to make something as wholly bizarre...
old souls and in-between souls →
January 2013
3 posts
writing housekeeping
I never actually mentioned this here, but: I had enough Weird Emotions About Tumblr that I decided to move all my longish writing over to my own actual website that I pay money to have. It all comes up here as link posts via fancy IFTTT magic, but if you’re like me and prefer to pile everything you might want to read into Google Reader, writing.torridly.org is the site to follow. The latest...
bad vocation →
December 2012
1 post
people we know who died →
failure journal →
October 2012
5 posts
discontent; slow webs
Something I’m wondering: why do we call everything we put online “content” just because we’re putting it online? The act I’m doing when I make this thing that I’m going to post on a website is writing; it doesn’t feel cognitively different from trying to make anything else out of words. So why not call it a piece of writing?
Possibly this seems like a...
September 2012
4 posts
2 tags
Top 3 Mountain Goats Lyrics That Have Something To...
lindsayzoladz:
3. “Sleep like dead men, wake up like dead men.”
2. “Woke up afraid of my own shadow, like genuinely afraid!”
1. “The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it’s you, and that you’re standing in the doorway.”
As someone who is currently re-reading Wittgenstein’s Mistress, a beautiful novel which is pretty much entirely about language’s...
on xoxo
I attended my first-ever tech/design/nerd conference this weekend in Portland. I’m writing this on the plane home, while it’s still fresh in my exhausted mind (and while I am still on vacation).
Whenever I told people that it was my first conference, they’d say that most of them aren’t like this, that it was all downhill from here (should I choose to go to other...
the medium and the messages
Astute friend Gordon said something that’s stuck in my head for weeks about the pitfalls of web presences: how they rewire some bits of our brains we might most want to use to have creative ideas. The lab-rat-like endorphin hit I get when I refresh Twitter and Tumblr (and I do it more than I’d like) is a different thing from the much more difficult work of being alone with my thoughts...
August 2012
3 posts
No Experiences.
Here is something that’s spent such a long time inside my head that it feels unreal to be writing about it for public consumption:
I wrote a series of poems.
Each poem has one @Horse_ebooks tweet in it.
I want to print these poems in a little chapbook.
I have a Kickstarter project to make this book.
You can pledge to this project now.
You can begin reading the poems now, too. (If...
today in books and categories
Yesterday I finished reading Invisible Cities which was fantastic though I didn’t like it as much as I like my memory of reading If on a winter’s night a traveler for the first time aged sixteenish. At first I thought If on a winter’s night a traveler was the first metafiction I read and then I thought no, that’s not right, and then I remembered There’s a Monster at...
Mark Richardson: The Name of the Subject Shall Not... →
markrichardson:
I’m a few New Yorker issues behind but I just loved this piece by John McPhee about working with various editors at the magazine over the years. He talks about how he filed an 80,000-word story and editor Robert Gottlieb called him to discuss it in detail THE FOLLOWING MORNING.
Yes! This article is so wonderful; I have read the New Yorker for a very long time and I always ...
July 2012
6 posts
F word.
(Here’s the lengthy disquisition on my feminism, as promised!)
Lately, the corners of the internet where I hang out have had some really great things to say about what it means to be a feminist (and how to grow into a better one), making respectful online communities, and so many more that I’m sure I’m forgetting. And I don’t think I am the person to change anyone’s...
“It’s too bad that Marissa is only seeing the negative connotation given to the...”
– My mom, regarding Marissa Mayer’s rejection of the term “feminist”. (via nique)
YOUR MOM IS REALLY COOL AND RIGHT ABOUT THINGS. “I’m not a feminist, but…” is such a big problem for me: it just seems like yet another way for women to compete with each other over what...
2 tags
“…we have at last begun to live life in earnest, as a grown-up person, to...”
– A Proustian Yolo (from Sodom and Gomorrah)
June 2012
2 posts
noticed tonight
It is important to know one’s limits, and sometimes those limits for an evening are: minor bike repair, nail-painting, drinking one beer, listening to records, and not talking to anyone.
(Which is not to say that I don’t love to talk to some people sometimes, but just that I am limited, in ways that I think I’ve only recently begun to name correctly without apologizing for them...
all this again
I think almost no one who follows me on Tumblr has actually ever seen me post anything here, because I am a digital hermit. But it feels like something’s missing if I’m not keeping an online record (and Twitter, which I do use, is more of a conversation than a record), so I am trying again. I’m always trying and trying again (and if you’re going to read one thing I’ve...
April 2011
1 post
Vegan Chocolate Orange Ginger Cupcakes →
rozma:
I’ve made these twice now. I don’t think I’ll ever make any other cupcake ever again.
dang, with that endorsement, I can’t wait to try these.
March 2011
2 posts
most of a hat
I fell slightly off the thing-a-day bandwagon while traveling for work. I still worked on making something every day, though: this hat is a pattern called Wabbit Season on Ravelry, and it is for my friend Adrienne. I’m glad her favorite color is yellow: this bright golden yarn looks pretty darn cheerful. (It is Malabrigo Rios, for the curious yarn nerds.) Another thing I sort of made is...
February 2011
5 posts
mix cd thing today
My very dear friend Kate has not listened to my favorite band Sleater-Kinney very much, so I spent the past week or so obsessing about a mix to make her about this. Then I packaged it nicely, I think (Kate do not look at this picture if you are reading this and want to be surprised by the mix CD you are getting): I made a little book about how I found out about Sleater-Kinney and why certain...
lovely gloves
here’s my thing-a-day for all week. these are elbow-length fingerless gloves, knit up from some awesome custom-dyed yarn I got from my birthday. I improvised the pattern: it’s a mock cable ribbing that stretches out nicely. I wonder if there is a long German word for the satisfaction one feels upon completing a knitted item while away from home as it has gotten colder outside and...
a pinboard and some writing
Today’s thing-a-day was inspired by my friend Leigh, who makes way nicer-looking versions of it. She has an etsy that is pretty rad for you to check out, and is an all-around excellent lady. <img src=”http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5292/5422634193_3d4cbf8db9.jpg” width=”333” height=”500” /> This is my pinboard for displaying all the pins that I no...
sewing and drinking, but not at once
Today I actually made two things, one of which was rather involved. I made a skirt out of two old t-shirts from my massive stash of old t-shirts that need to get turned into things. The sleeves of one shirt became pockets for the skirt, although they’re not deep enough to be terribly excellent pockets. It’s possible that the next thing I make will be a tutorial for making this thing: ...
knitting in the thundersnow
Day 1 of my thing-a-day commitment is a bit less of a thrill than it maybe could be. I took the gentleman friend out for a birthday dinner and then worked on one of my ongoing knit projects, a brioche stitch scarf to replace the first scarf I ever made for myself which I left on an airplane two weeks ago. I like to think that a flight attendant or cleaning crew member or someone is currently well...
February 2010
1 post
Write one leaf about wearing a hat.
(via writeoneleaf)
Oh, all right, I’ll finally do one of these writing prompts. I made a new hat over the past couple of weeks. It is purple with a strip of teal (which I only realized later means it’s in Charlotte Hornets colors, so I am accidentally propping a defunct sports team that was on its slow decline during the time I lived in its city). It is supposed to look like a turban...
January 2010
2 posts
serendipitous peas
Split pea soup! It warms me while also reminding me of the Claymation Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer special where the little elf and Yukon Cornelius argue about whether the fog is as thick as peanut butter or pea soup. Also it is pretty easy to do it up right proper in the slow cooker, and I was pretty pleased that I was able to wing it more or less completely and have it turn out so well....
December 2009
3 posts
San Francisco – Pictory →
me3dia:
Naz designed a beautiful slideshow.
I have a photo in it! Props to some internet, a very small part of which I made.
favorite things →
Knitting and poetry! I particularly enjoy the block-quoted analogy: knitting is like writing, and maybe this is a path towards being less writer’s-blocked than I’ve felt the past few months. (It’s hard to hold a pencil and needles at the same time, though.)
finished objects
Oh my god what I have a blog or two (or three), maybe I should say some things! Hello! I have been knitting up a storm, and I’m getting to a point in my knit-knowledge where I’m consistently satisfied with the results. For a while there it was sort of all “ehhh this has a couple weird problems but I guess I’ll wear it anyway, sometimes, who cares” but now I have...
October 2009
1 post
a breakfast and a costume
Yeah, so I guess I made a ton of knitted things during that whole time that I forgot to knit-blog for the past like two months. I am not going to write about them just yet. Instead, I am going to tell you the two things I made this evening:
Thing the First: Erin’s Super Fun Times Delicious Granola A+++
I’ve been refining this recipe for a time. It’s based on the one in the...
August 2009
3 posts
in case you were wondering what I am baking right... →
Stoutcakes! But with Rogue Chocolate Stout instead of Guinness, because clearly I needed to cram in more chocolate in the cupcakes and more alcohol in the beer, which is currently going in my face. I’m also using yogurt instead of sour cream, because I only buy ingredients that I will actually use before the un-baked-with portion rots in my fridge.
I’m pretty sure that a nice dark...
thank you for being the font of all knowledge,... →
bestofwikipedia:
Knitters use the term Sweater Curse to describe a situation in which a knitter gives a hand-knit sweater to a significant other, who quickly breaks up with the knitter. Despite its name, the Sweater Curse is treated in knitting literature not as a superstition governed by paranormal forces, but rather as a real-world pitfall of knitting that has real-world explanations and...
July 2009
2 posts
internet what I made
The relevant ballads is what I made today for yelling about music in particular, because I’d like an alter-tumblr-ego for reblogging/responding when people I follow write about things I’d like to respond to which don’t fit the self-enforced stuff-making theme herein, since it can never accurately be said that I “make music” unless you consider atonal griping to be...
