If you don’t have anywhere to wear a very specific piece you have in your wardrobe, grab a friend or three and host a “soirée.” Get some $5 sparkling wine or grape juice, some cheese or cocktail onions or grapes if you don’t eat cheese and make a Playlist and just walk around one of your homes being fancy together. It’s nice to go out but if you can’t, don’t let that stop you.
i just got soirée and séance confused and the last two minutes were a bit distressing
Honestly? Invite your ghost friends too. They probably have hella looks to serve.
Give the events names, give them themes, make them reoccur.
I have a friend that I see 3-6 times a year for “Dracula Breakfast.” We meet at a diner and drink coffee and I eat waffles and she eats eggs and we talk about Dracula. Then other things. Then monsters in general. Then back to Dracula.
For about 2 hours, then we schedule another Dracula Breakfast and go our separate ways. This is our only form of communication because we’re both introverts who like to spend time apart.
There is no other standing appointment in my life that could rival Dracula Breakfast.
We exchange tiny gifts occasionally (almost always something we’ve made and nothing that is ever more than a few dollars). I’m always 5 minutes late. I usually do not sleep the night before to try to make it on time and I inevitably fail ever. Single. Time.
short semi-stream-of-consciousness zine. i like putting my art and textposts/tweets/random journaling stuff together, especially when they end up being unlikely companion pieces. a lot of these are illustrations from the marigold tarot with the accompanying notes/text i haven’t shared alongside the cards yet. i’m planning on bringing printed copies with me to short run in seattle this weekend!
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
Okay, you need to make sure you play this game at some point. Maybe not today or anything, because you’ll need about thirty minutes and a serious willingness to understand how it works, but – it’s so worth it. It’s basically an answer to our occasional frustration – why do assholes always come out on top? – and the beautiful thing about it is that not only does it explain how that happens, but also how we can change it.
“In the short run, the game defines the players. But in the long run, it’s us players who define the game.”
This is fascinating if you’re into math or sociology or computer programming or all of the above.
Everyone, everywhere, without exception, should play this thing through.
Don’t check just this – check out all of Nicky Case’s work.
They’re a brilliant creator and I heavily recommend checking out at least one of their projects. Their website can be found here.
Parable of the Polygons – an interactive experiment that shows how tiny individual biases can collectively cause segregation on a massive scale.
To Build a Better Ballot – an interactive experiment that shows the alternatives to the voting systems we currently use and how they can be more representative and democratic, along with their faults.
Coming Out Simulator – a short interactive story/novel about coming out, based off of Case’s own experiences. Not one I’ve played myself but still one I can recommend.
Loopy – a very simple but useful tool to show how systems interact with each other and how things can self-propagate.
a game about news cycles, vicious cycles, infinite cycles.“ A short five-minute game about news and media. Warnings for violence, blood, death and stress.
[after spending weeks of trying and failing to read anything that might remind me of Lydia Davis, I instead, as always, just return to Lydia Davis.] –
These days I try to tell myself that what I feel is not very important. I’ve read this in several books now: what I feel is important but not the center of everything. Maybe I do see this, but I do not believe it deeply enough to act on it. I would like to believe it more deeply.
What a relief it that would be. I wouldn’t have to think about what I felt all the time, and try to control it, with all its complications and all its consequences. I wouldn’t have to try to feel better all the time. In fact, if I didn’t believe what I felt was so important, I probably wouldn’t even feel so bad, and it wouldn’t be so hard to feel better. I wouldn’t have to say, oh, I feel so awful, this is like the end for me here, in this dark living room late at night, with the dark street corner outside under the street lights, I am so very alone, everyone else in the house asleep, there is no comfort anywhere, just me alone down here, I will never calm myself enough to sleep, never sleep, never be able to go on to the next day, I can’t possibly go on, I can’t live, even through the next minute.
If I believed that what I felt was not the center of everything, then it wouldn’t be, but just one of many things, off to the side, and I would be able to see and pay attention to other things that were equally important, and in this way I would have some relief.
But it is curious how you can see that an idea is absolutely true and correct and yet not believe it deeply enough to act on it. So I still act as though my feelings were the center of everything, and they still cause me to end up alone by the living-room window late at night. What is different, now, is that I have this idea: I have the idea that soon I will no longer believe my feelings are the center of everything. This is a real comfort to me, because if you despair of going on, but at the same time tell yourself that your despair may not be very important, then either you stop despairing or you still despair but at the same time begin to see how your despair, too, might move off to the side, one of many things.
i’m too damn old and childless for these parenting guides and shit so this book? written for me. written for us, fam.
running themes are: breaking down your life into bite-sized segments, tracking progress, keeping reminders, being kind to yourself, and figuring out your strengths in executive functioning to help with your weaknesses.
i just finished the chapter on task initiation (my weakest execfunc) and every single piece of advice was fucking doable. it was initiatable. nothing’s ever initiatable. that’s like, task initiation’s whole thing.
i really wish i would’ve found this book sooner. good shit. highly recommend.
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