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Maybe I’m new here
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Welcome to the first Freshly Brewed Thoughts on Substack. This is, of course, definitely not the first FBT. The first FBT was published on September 3rd, 2015. I had just left Mozilla and was waiting for Greenpeace HR to get their ducks in a row. In 2015, I had also experienced a feral trauma. I was, it turns out, dealing with some serious change.
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“Normal, non-traumatic memories are owned and integrated into the self. These are, in a sense, like domesticated animals, amenable to control, tractable. In contrast, the traumatic memory stands apart like a feral dog, snarling, wild, and unpredictable.” David Morris wrote in The Evil Hours
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I’ve survived some serious shit, so I guess I’ll survive this whole moving platforms experience.
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This newsletter, for those of you who are new or forgot, is mine. I give absolutely zero tosses what you might think of it*. Sometimes I’m serious, sometimes I am ridiculous. Sometimes it’s fiction, sometimes it’s work related. Mostly it’s a letter to a friend.
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I’ve realised that Substack doesn’t spellcheck reliably, so sometimes I will make typos.
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*This is a bold and outright lie. Like everyone else on the planet, I need recognition. I like when people say nice things, which happens a lot (thank you, you darlings). However, once this dude in Florida said mean things and ever since I over-emote my non-existent fearlessness.
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Maybe I'm wintering
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Right, so that little intro is out of the way, let’s get back to the regularly scheduled programming. We Are Open has started some work with the Digital Credentials Consortium at MIT, and we’ve started releasing Season 8 of the Tao of WAO, which is a submission to the Journal of Media Literacies. We also are pitching for a new educational project at Greenpeace International, getting ready to keynote/panel/workshop at ePIC in Vienna, and running community building workshops with Participate. There’s enough going on.
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My sea adventures were adventures, not rest. Work has become a respite from the times in between, when the real living happens. I recall, however, times when work was not restful. When ego and pride and an unabashed desperation to “matter”, “make a difference” or “have impact” controlled my time. I remember making myself sick, instead of trying (and mostly failing) to heal myself.
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I don’t set goals anymore. If I were going to set a goal, it’d be to elbow out more space. I already give myself quite some space, I realised. Unlike everyone else, I don’t block the world out with headphones. I stare a lot. I know that the underside of a leaf is infinitely complex. Sometimes I catch myself drooling.
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We don’t know what’s going to happen, so I’m just trying to learn how to ride these waves without drowning in them. That’s not news to you, now is it?
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The Art of Disappearing > Apparently I can’t link to another Substack the way I like, it embeds a block. I don’t like that.
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Maybe I need help?
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How have you been? It’s been awhile since you said hello. Maybe today is the day?
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I’m going to be utterly annoyed at the fact that I can’t strong arm Substack into doing exactly what I want. Knowing how to write HTML/CSS has always made me feel smug about my stuff. I could float a damn image, you know? Well, not anymore.
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This isn’t how I would design a footer, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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