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  • Reading: The Gold Diggers #books 📚 app.thestorygraph.com

    27 May 2022
  • CW: Covid

    My partner and I both recently got Covid. We were both ill by mid-April, and we are both still exhausted. This week, they seemed to relapse, and yesterday, so did I. Getting out of bed in the morning was not even an option.

    It’s easy to forget that even a mild case of this is serious. Certainly, based on the public conversation and health guidelines, I did not expect to be sick this long. So we are both feeling a bit frightened right now to still be sick.

    It turns out, it’s not really abnormal. I was digging around for information about long covid this morning, and found this NPR article about “medium” covid. It made me feel a lot better about what’s happening with me and my partner.

    I guess the other thing I want to call out here is the connection to American work culture and our deeply Puritan roots. I felt terrible yesterday, but I kept feeling like I should be over this by now and was just being lazy. I even tried to work from bed for a little while, but it was just impossible.

    As if I have any control over what an illness does to me. I’ve no doubt that this is part of why we’re not talking about what a “mild” form of this disease is really like. Thanks, Puritans, for breaking us.

    7 May 2022
  • Finished reading: The Iron Council by China Miéville. 📚 #books #reading

    app.thestorygraph.com

    3 May 2022
  • A couple of recent pictures of my cats: Bikkhu (orange) and Subha (Siamese). I am ridiculously in love with them.

    The face of an orange cat, looking away from the camera, lying in a hammock in a window. He looks thoughtful.Siamese mix cat, lying on a brown rug in dappled sunlight, with her eyes closed, licking her paw.

    30 April 2022
  • New #weaving project started! This will be a set of four kitchen towels, and is the longest warp I’ve done so far, at 125 inches. 🧶 #fiberarts

    red and white yarn warped on a rigid heddle loom

    27 April 2022
  • Yes, I'm (mostly) leaving Twitter. No, not (just) because of that.

    Over the past month or so, I’ve been taking a break from social media. I didn’t go right back to it when the month was up—partly because I had Covid and was generally disengaged / abed, and partly because I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do about social media.

    When I took the break, I had developed a habit of reflexively refreshing Twitter, and to a much lesser extent, Instagram. Pulling down that Twitter timeline out of boredom, waiting for it to entertain me somehow, to hit that little dopamine button in my brain, had begun to feel like a game I couldn’t win. The best case scenario seemed to be that I would hit something entertaining, informative, or funny, and then I would quit. But mostly, I didn’t quit. It often felt frantic and depressing, the endless fucking doom scroll.

    At its best, Twitter has connected me to some really great people, those who I know from either offline or online life. Twitter has been a tool for meaningful connection and conversation. If I quit Twitter, I would miss those folks!

    Then today’s news came. I went—where else?—to Twitter, for the Discourse. And y’all, it’s not good for me. It’s not a healthy space. Even if I curate the bejebus out of my timeline, even if I lock it down and make my profile private, it’s not great. So, it’s not really about M*sk buying Twitter. Well, it’s not just that.

    You can keep up with me on micro.blog (@jeanb or tinybirds.net) or Mastodon (banjoden@toot.cat), and sometimes on Instagram (jeanbpdx). I’ll likely continue crossposting to Twitter, but I’m not reinstalling it on my phone, and I don’t plan to check it regularly. If you want to reach me, other methods are more reliable.

    25 April 2022
  • Please enjoy this photo of my giant, silly cat. 🐱

    25 April 2022

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