Friends, is it weird to admit that things haven't been the same since I rage quit Notion? I had my whole life neatly organised into lists and tables, and the app just got worse and worse, dropping AI in my every path until I couldn't take it anymore, and then my brain was scattered to the wind. (And now Notion is doing email.)
In April, while I was catsitting for my parents on their month-long cruise, I fell deep into PlannerTube and impulse bought way too much stationery. It's much easier to get packages delivered to a house than a basement apartment.
I know this about myself, and yet I do it every year. At the end of 2023, I bought the Hemlock & Oak planner. It's a local company, I told myself. They're printed in Canada, I said. But the truth is that an Instagram ad got me (Insta is so good at ads), and I'm weak when it comes to notebooks.
I used that planner twice: once in January and once in June.
I even made a video about my notebook situation. I have felt stuck in this LEUCHTTURM1917 book where I've been writing my morning pages since May 2023. I should've been done by now, but I just don't like dot grid paper. I made that video to help me give up.
Last week, I started to feel stuck in my new planner, the one I showed off in that video, the Erin Condren that I bought back in April (and spent waaay more on than I thought—hashtag exchange rate problems), so I pulled out a Kikki K A5 rings binder that I found on ebay for an incredible deal—so I guess it all comes out in a wash.
If you can believe it, none of this solves the problem that right now, my life feels like a mess.
But at least my queer firefighter show is back. Do you need a ridiculous network procedural in your life? I just wrote an introduction to the 911 franchise.
Sunday Zine
Jam #3 is on! The deadline is next Sunday, 10am Pacific, and I didn't realise when I set that deadline it was also Daylight Savings, oops. Get your zine done early! I was catsitting again last weekend (yes, another cruise), and we had an atmospheric river here, so it was just one of those days when I wanted to hibernate (see above: life is a mess), so I skipped the stream, and I haven't worked on the zine at all, like I had promised.
But we had a stream this morning! And I finished my zine, but it's not uploaded, not yet. I want to film the upload process to create a tutorial because I want you to make a zine, too, and I know a lot of people don't know the itch.io website well. The pomodoros worked so well on this stream—muting the mic for a chunk of focused writing time—that I think this might be the format going forward. Maybe even another pomodoro stream on Wednesday?
I'm spending most of my time (read: too much) on Tumblr these days, so here is a new section of the newsletter: a few of my favourite posts I reblogged this week.
Babe wake up new (to me) Miette lore just dropped
The Miss Piggy heist movie we all need
What is your hetero guy trait? Me? I love war movies and classic rock radio. I will overload my grocery bags to avoid making multiple trips. I will eat cold pizza for breakfast the morning after eating hot pizza for dinner.
I have pizza in my fridge right now, actually. I wish I could have you all over for a pizza party. We could make zines, exquisite corpse-style, rewatch the Hallowe'en episode of 911, the one where Buck gets cursed by a mummy cowboy (cowboy mummy?), then listen to Set Yourself on Fire by Stars, which I just bought on candy apple red vinyl when I saw them play last Wednesday to celebrate the 20th anniversary.
Torquil Campbell said, before they played the last song on the record, "The whole band is going to sing and that means you because you're in the band, too."
You're in my band, too.