📝 Hello, World!

I’m testing out Zonelets and Neocities. This account used to just be a place for me to host my bitsy journal entries but I think I will also supplement it with some straightforward blogging. I quit WordPress about a month ago and Twitter two months ago. I moved the Indie Tsushin blog to Blogger but I mean… I dunno. I want to continue working on it, but I’m also feeling incredibly burned out. And let’s be honest, Blogger and Google isn’t much of a step up from Automattic. Zonelets so far seems pretty great. I may just move everything over here at some point. We’ll see. (EDIT: I did indeed move Indie Tsushin to Neocities!)

This place is probably gonna be where I stick my ramblings and musings about the things I’m reading. I am also trying to wean myself off of Goodreads, and so have moved all of my reading logs from there to a good ol’-fashioned spreadsheet. I’m trying to break away from consumptive reading habits, of reading things just to say I read things and to check off boxes saying yep, I sure have consumed that bit of content. Having reading goals is fine and all, but there’s just something about Goodreads that really encourages amassing books in the TBR for the sake of it. No shade to those who do it, I respect the hustle, but it seems like so many reviewers on the site jockey for ARCs by pumping out reviews that are just a lot of vague nothingness about ““beautiful writing”” (what does that even mean) in order to rack up likes and comments and engagement and, blah. There’s an almost competitive edge to this kind of consumption, people building their brand around book hauls and Bookstagram/BookTok/BookTube accounts that exist mostly to show off how many glossy hardcover books they own. I dunno, it’s all very overwhelming. Maybe I’m just getting old.

Anyway.

Last night I couldn’t sleep, so I read though more of Uncanny Magazine #45. Three stories stuck out to me: The Goldfish Man by Maureen McHugh hit on a lot of the minute-to-minute survival calculus and spinning uncertainty of being homeless and utterly at the mercy of people who have their own lives and their own plans. I Will Have This Diamond for a Heart by Carlos Hernandez is the kind of unstuck-in-time, alternate dimensions created from incomplete yet shared human perspectives, cerebral yet down-to-earth speclit that I adore. It’s hard not to think of Russian Doll S2, which recently came out (and is EXCELLENT). And finally, The Kaleidoscopic Visitor by Shaoni C. White, which reminded me that I need to uhhh get a haircut.

It wasn’t that I was especially attached to childhood—mine had never been all that great. It was more that all throughout my life, I’d known I wasn’t yet an adult, and that knowledge had felt like a stay of execution. Why it was that way, I had no clue, but it had something to do with how being an adult meant being an adult woman. Just thinking about it was like standing on the edge of a tall building: the fear of my falling more a nausea in my stomach than a thought in my head.

Did Shaoni C. White steal my old diaries?! What even is this. Get outta my head.

I’m still trying to figure stuff out, specifically how to get RSS set up. (EDIT: npckc over at tiny wanderer let me know that Neocities has a built-in RSS feed! So, that’s that done.) I don’t think I’m going to set up a comments section, so if you want to get in touch with me, you can reach me via Discord. Don’t know my Discord? Then, uh… this contact form will have to do. Or to really get my attention, you can buy me a coffee. (SHAMELESS, I know.)

Talk again soon!

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