Pinning this for all the new faces!

#MeetTheNauts

✍️ of sci-fi, news analysis, essays, translations, reviews
👨‍🍳 of baked goods, hearty meals
🇨🇦 by birth
🇨🇴 by residence, since 2018
🗣️ English, Español, familial French (learning Arabic)
🏳️‍🌈 Queer & nb (but I don't stress pronouns because I move in 2 very different language contexts)
🌎 Secular humanist
🦋 (nature)-lover: no pets, but will share insects & birds!
📖&🎞️ nerd

And all-around advocate for being kind to yourselves. Life's tough enough as is. 💙

Hey #CoSo! 👋 For my upcoming article at #OnlySky about my first week here, I've put together a visual guide for the new free-account user, to help them make sense of the maybe-new-to-them layout.

I thought it might be a good shareable resource right away for the #CoSoTips crowd, too, though, so I hope this is useful for others just getting started.🤞 If you see someone confused, please feel free to send this image along!

M L Clark's 3 #Writing rules:

1) Write what you *want* to know.

2) When writing another context, always elevate its own storytellers. Be a megaphone to the lesser-heard, not a "voice to the voiceless".

3) Let any given story go. If the theme is true, it will come back to you. 💛

Didn't quite finish newsletter revisions before class (I quarrel with myself in the editing phase, and today came to new places with the thinking), but I'll of course have the piece up later tonight.

I'm also thinking I'll take a wee reprieve from social media after Sunday (I have a BookTube I want to share). Next week I have a rough meeting with the agent, and I should probably focus on making sure I'm ready to leap into next steps right away.

More later. Be well, all.

And tread gently, eh?

Also--with apologies to Picard--I WISH there were four lights.

:( Alas, there are not.

No home internet tonight.

(Fingers crossed that I have enough data for a YouTube before bed. 🤞🏻)

#Philosophy

Understanding different subject-positions isn't easy work, and many people will suspect you of both-sides-ism for doing it.

But seeking to understand others protects you from two fallacies: straw man and incredulity.

Straw men are fun punching bags that tell you nothing useful about what you're resisting.

Incredulity lets you say "I can't imagine how anyone would naturally hold another POV"--& fill in the blank with conspiratorial conjecture.

Both leave us tilting at windmills.

Ha. They cut off internet at 8 on the dot.

I didn't have the full essay revised in time, so I've sent along a prelude to readers instead. Paid subscribers will get another as my home internet allows.

This piece reflects on the strangeness of thinking that what we do online matters.

It does to an extent, but this is not "the world", & what we're doing here can sometimes distract us from that fact.

This piece recommends two excellent audio reflections on "culture", too.
https://mlclark.substack.com/p/a-prelude-to-building-on-culture

Another walking thought...

As much I try to stay informed of other info silos, even if that means reading views that routinely have me shaking my head, it can be easy to forget why I do it:

1) to remember the humanity of those who disagree, and avoid making caricatures of them;
2) to temper my own opinions by routinely checking in with other points of view;

And most of all

3) to remember that the world is bigger than all of us, but we all have to live together in it.

Any other use is folly.

Drat. Still no home internet. Found out it's definitely not just me in the building, though.

Going to try the mall across the way, and draft something by hand that doesn't require as much research as my original planned piece.

Then hopefully I can pull off a phone upload, in the worst case scenario, before midnight.

Just another nuisance of a lost day though, eh? I feel like I'm barely treading water, when I wanted to do so much this month.

(Good exercise, though, so not a total loss!)

Just a few of my favourite things...

Musing while walking...

One thing I love about CoSo is that it's *very* easy to see the people behind even awful statements made here.

Because we're all openly "human" here, I never just see, say, statements that I deem false or cruel; I always see people with a wide array of difficult experiences venting at our mess of a world differently.

And that difference matters. It's just super easy to forget online, where our worth is routinely measured by the worst things we've ever said or endorsed.

😅 And... this mall wifi has a glitch now, too. Both phone and laptop went down together, so it's not on my side.

Ah well. When I got a tinto, the lady asked if I was Brazilian, which is a lovely boost. My Spanish accent will always differ from locals, but when I'm clocked as "on the continent" because of expressions, pronunciation, and general ease in conversation, that's always a cute win.

Well, I guess I'll be walking again.

Fingers crossed that my home internet is on when I get back. 🤞🏻

Wifi for my laptop acquired, though!

And the view ain't too shabby.

Now, we work.

#Colombia

Walking across town this morning meant moving through at least four levels of poverty: the people so lost to addiction and trauma that they're just out surviving; the people lucid enough to beg; the people with just enough to operate a little food/drink stand, hustling in the streets; and the people with slightly more stability, working in shabby tiendas with lean, lean margins.

And... I was listening to a podcast on white-collar grifters while walking.

Our world is broken in so, so many ways.

One vein of research I didn't get to use in yesterday's piece is something I think about often: the OT is *filled* with rich references to pantheon gods. The word for "dawn" in Hebrew is literally one of the twin gods, Dawn and Dusk, children of El, and both words are used to bestow a sense of divinity upon David's line.

Sometimes I wonder what it must have felt like to live in a world with so many god stories from intersecting tribes.

Then I chuckle at my silliness: that's us, today, as well.

Google Maps will be happy for me, at least.

Every month it tries to send me a report of all my travels in the region.

Every month it's essentially mocking me by showing me all the places I did not go. 🙃

Internet went off last night, and is still off this morning. 🤔 Hm.

It's entirely possible that an excuse to visit a new mall in the vicinity (mine has rotten wifi) has presented itself.

Time for a nice long walk across the district. Been a while since I've left a five-block radius. Definitely need to reconnect with the larger world again soon.

Happy Thursday, all. 💛

Be good to your weird brains and the packaging they come in.

Today in Genders Weirder Than The Ones Stigmatized By Right-Wing Politicians:

Lil buddy got super lost (I live high up), but now we get to hang for a while. They're currently playing dead and I'm currently playing sane, so it's a good match.

#Nature

Anyway--

Long way of saying I can be a real numbnuts sometimes. 🙃

Any learning that estranges you from your fellow human beings isn't *finished* learning: not by a long shot.