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. 💛

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.

But the risk of conflating "times to share knowledge" and "times to just be human together" is ever-present.

I find it best to think about my spheres of subject knowledge, and my voracious appetite for ongoing learning, as a *loss* in one pretty key way.

Every time I do a deep dive, I'm going on a solo journey through the data.

*Wisdom* comes from returning from that deep dive with the humility to realize that time away from others means I have a whole bunch of catch-up "peopling" to do next.

When I realized the bid he was making, I switched gears immediately, and we made space for him to tell his story and feel included, but I'd definitely hurt his feelings with the way I'd answered the initial ask.

As such, I found a mediating way to reaffirm this fellow by shifting to a chat about how often people are left in the dark unfairly by government officials not explaining many of their normal tests and operations. That eased the blunder I'd made from a misapplication of knowledge.

+

The other day I was sharing some of that deep historical knowledge with a friend of mine on the street, on an astronomy/atmosphere theme, when a fellow sitting near us wanted to feel included in the conversation.

So he ventured a question - do you believe that aliens have visited us - that I far too quickly dismissed.

Only after I'd given my initial reply, though, did I realize that he was trying to share an experience of wonder he'd had (which by the sounds of it was a weather balloon).

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I was reminded today of a chat I've had with others here, about how difficult it can be difficult to carry knowledge well.

Knowledge ≠ wisdom, but it's so easy--if you've done plenty of deep dives into an historical theme, sifted through all the awful evidence yourself, or pored through the scientific studies--to react dismissively to someone raising a doubt or credulous belief in something you know flat-out is false.

It's *so easy* to forget the work that went into arriving at your truth.

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Hanging with the crew before class.

#Nature #OneOfTheseThings

I still didn't get to sleep 'til 2am last night, so I'm still waiting for the return of early morning runs and days full of energy...

But I *do* feel my executive function returning (tasks are getting finished, and I'm about to catch up on--eesh--eight long-overdue WhatsApp conversations before classes 😬), so I just want to call it now:

Thank you *so* much for sitting with me through this last nuisance of a downcycle. Everything was unbearably hard to process for a bit, but we keep swimming. 💛

(It's actually going to be a great verbal exercise. We're working on complex noun phrases, but the code-switching required to pull off this sentence effortlessly for mid-range English students will be fun!)

I'm putting together readings for my students tonight from recent news, but this excerpt's going in just because it made me laugh:

“Actually seeing this one-to-one increase, I was like, wow,” says a study author, Kathy Willis, a marine socio-ecologist from the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia.

(Journalists are supposed to edit quotes with some grace, but sometimes the speaker doesn't offer much to work with. 🙃 I still would've written this differently.)

For today’s Rewind Wednesday, I mark a very difficult Passover by reflecting on a diverse range of Jewish perspectives flattened by war. In times of global violence with strong ethno-religious components, it can be incredibly hard to remember our humanity amid constant pushes for groupthink to come first.

But this is still vitally important work--for human dignity now, and any hope of a better world ahead.

#GlobalHumanism
#BetterWorldsTheory
https://mlclark.substack.com/p/the-stories-of-judaism-lost-to-war

All right. Good night, good luck, and good crimes to you all. ❤️

Tonight's aim is to get to bed early.

That is it.

Straight to bed after classes. No screen time.

And up before dawn again, for the first time in weeks.

These bones need to run.

This meatsack needs to flap.

I need my energy BACK. 😬

Today’s Tough Times Tuesday blends literature, domestic assault, and climate economics into a broader meditation on an abiding media myth around the ability to win over people who do harm by trying to find their “love language”.

Is it fair to fellow civic participants to presume that everyone’s operating in good faith when it comes to matters as serious as tackling climate change?

#BetterWorldsTheory
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/scenes-from-our-boring-dystopia

But! I do have today's newsletter drafted. 🎉 Just need to run an errand for tonight's classes, and then hopefully I can come back, revise easily, and build on this momentum with another finished freelance project this afternoon.

NOT TODAY, CAKE. YOU SHALL NOT DEFEAT ME TODAY.

Some schools of therapy talk about us having an "inner child". Mine is the kid from The Hours.

Sometimes, when I'm having a tough time getting through a simple task, I hear little Richie looking up helplessly at his mum trying to make a cake and barely holding it together.

That fragile, small-voiced

"Mommy, it isn't that difficult" and her answering "I know, sweet pea. I know it isn't difficult. It's just..."

gets me every time.

Some days it really is hard, though, to make the darned cake.

Anyway, good morning, and good Tuesday to all of you. ☕

We have *so* much psychological damage to address in the coming years.

But we're not going to heal overnight (if at all). And no coronal mass ejection is going to save us from problems online, alas.

All we can do is try not to be angry with ourselves and others for living through such stupid, cruel, and stressed-out times.

We're all doing the best we can. 🫂💛

Infowars are so powerful, and we're so ill-prepared to meet them.

Yesterday, I was struck by how much media illiteracy reigns. How gullible we still are in every news cycle.

Is it genuine?

Or do people know full well what they're weaponizing?

That's the kind of despair infowars breed.

One no longer knows if one's neighbours are being honestly manipulated or eager participants in their own manipulation.

All one knows is that propaganda reigns, and has made the world unsafer yet again.

Sleep well, folks.

I know we're all tending to our part of the map as best we can. 🫂