Today is World AIDS Day. Here’s why this day is so important. This is a day of awareness, but it’s also a day of mourning.

My time off work and off social media was wonderful. I read two books that I’d been meaning to read for months (reviews coming soon), read a metric ton of short stories (reviews coming soon), wrote an essay, played way too much Animal Crossing on my phone, and cleaned out the spare room so it’s usable by people who aren’t me.

I’m going to continue curtailing how much time I spend on social media, because the last couple of weeks have made it really clear that spending more than about an hour is emphatically not good for my mental health and my ability to work on projects. This is how I feel about most of Twitter these days. I am trying to be more conscious about how I spend my time and being more thoughtful about my online experience is a big part of that, along with actively making time for writing and other creative work. And, as Clive Thompson writes, social media keeps us stuck in the present and makes it more difficult to see larger trends and contexts.

• An Open Letter With Respect to Reviews Published on Rocket Stack Rank
• The Myth of the Male Bumbler: “The line on men has been that they’re the only gender qualified to hold important jobs and too incompetent to be responsible”
• Why All the Comedy Men Are So Awful I read articles like this and all I can say is that there are times that I think there’s no way comedy can possibly be redeemed–if it was ever worth anything to begin with.
• The Digital Ruins of a Forgotten Future I closed my Second Life account earlier this year when I realized I didn’t have the client on either of my computers, so I clearly didn’t need the account anymore.
• Dante’s Nine Circles of Hell, Reimagined for Linguistic Transgressions
• The Narrative Spectrum This essay by Malka Older really made me think about the current news cycle.
• Gossip and News, Strange Bedfellows
• An Author Photo Is Worth a Thousand Words
• Why My Family Takes a Thanksgiving Vow of Silence
• The Last of the Iron Lungs I had no idea that there were still some people who used iron lungs.
• Can Meaningful Design Survive in the Age of Shitposting?
• The best gift guide of the year! Naomi Kritzer is a treasure. Gifts For People You Hate, 2017
• Ain’t Half Bad I love it when I randomly discover new music like this.
• On Being Midwestern This is part of what I was hoping to talk about on the Midwest panel at Readercon last summer instead of what the panel ended up being.
• The Making of an American Nazi and The Nationalist’s Delusion
• How One Woman’s Digital Life Was Weaponized Against Her But it’s just online, how serious could it be?
• Tidying up I found this essay by Austin Kleon about tidying up and the creative process to be quite interesting.
• Ushering My Father to a (Mostly) Good Death
• ‘Tiny House Hunters’ and the shrinking American dream
• HGTV Is a Never-ending Fantasy Loop. Look Deeper, and It Gets Pretty Ugly. When we were house hunting, we looked at a couple houses that had been obviously flipped–one had had an electrical fire at one point (noted in the fuse box) but no new electrical but they had a horribly laid out kitchen where the light switch for the overhead light was underneath the island counter. The other one had a half bathroom that had been obviously carved out of the furnace room–it was so small that I couldn’t go in. Told our realtor that I didn’t want to see any more houses that had rooms that I couldn’t use. Then we found our house and it’s perfect for us, despite the builder basic kitchen and bathrooms. The structure and the utilities are solid and I’d much rather that than granite countertops and a white kitchen.

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