Spherical Thinking, Reality Distortion, Depth Perception

Into the third trimester, and my literal body-building career is going smoothly so far. Have hit australia in time to have the whole machinery tell me to slow down, and am enjoying the emergent sense of a little personality with reactions and moods elsewhere in my body than where my ‘me’ moods are.

Reality distortion

I’ve been trying to reel back from social media in the current news environment (as much as work allows), thinking that all you need to exist in a completely different dimension than your neighbour is to believe the person that tells you not to believe the other person.

Which has lead me to thinking more about the feature of some arguments I’ve seen/been part of where someone says they’ll change their mind if they’re provided with proof, but if provided with proof they say the proof can’t be trusted.

I’ve said before that I we should always try to be clear about what it would take to change our minds on a belief. And if it’s nothing; if it’s a load-bearing belief that’s part of the structure of our personality and sense of self, that’s well and good. But if we can, we should be honest about that.

One of the biggest surprises of my adult life is how political attention is. What we choose to look at, and give time to.

Because the whole of the real world, it turns out, is too big to actually see. So we have to guess the proportions and micro-harvest representative bits of what we think reality might look like, and that curation process turns out to be… quite deliberate, from what I can see. Not just random chance. But the decision to read this study or mistrust that source.

And then on a branch of that thought, turning my mind to Cal Wilson and the way she paid attention on a personal level to so many people, and the way it shaped our community.

And then as a parent of a toddler, shaping the Laser’s world by the attention we give to her behaviour (don’t respond to certain tests, reward other attempts with full focus); the kind of attention you give is so functional and pivotal in creating their bedrock sense of what’s what in the world.

Funeral and Vanta Black

One of the things about Surrey Nanosystems and Anish Kapur’s Vanta Black is that it messes with your depth perception.

I flew to Melbourne for two days to attend Cal’s memorial service, and it was very beautiful and horribly sad. The dress code was to wear bright colours in tribute to her. The shirt I’m wearing in the blog image above is the only thing I have that was colourful enough to be worthy, and the unforeseen side effect of wearing it with my black singlet and tights was that I shocked a lot of people.

You know I don’t share about my private life on social media much, so the recurring conversation I had was :

Them: [politely] I didn’t know you were back in Aus! What brings you back?

Me: [gesturing vaguely downwards and deploying a variation of one of the following] oh you know, I had to return upstream to spawn / didn’t want to have a baby on the NHS / figured I’d complete this project on home ground.

Them: [glancing casually down, double take, suddenly clocking my massive preggo ball state] Oh dear god! I didn’t see that!

Upcoming events

The Google calendar with all upcoming Patreonite events is up at the linktree. https://linktr.ee/alicefraser but for those not hooked into that, the next virtual events are below.

Writers Meeting and Workshops

I’m weekly full of smug joy at being able to witness the work and communal helping that goes on in the writers meetings and workshops. The timezone shenaniganry of this time of year means I don’t want people to miss out by having to wake up too early or stay up too late, so we’re going to try running two each week.

Because:

a) the current patreonite levels are set to all access; and

b) two 2hr workshops is a lot to run for $1 a month per person; but

c) I don’t want people to miss out if they’re in financial hardship,

I’m going to do an honour box / voluntary donation of $5 per writers meeting. You’ll get the link and come in as usual at any level of Patreon subscription, but if you’ve got enough spare money to drop some in the box, that ought to add up to enough to make it sustainable for me. If you’ve got spare, to cover someone else, that would also help your fellow writers.

Here are the writers meeting times for this week

Sunday, 5 November⋅10:00am – 12:00pm (UTC +0)

Time Zone Conversions: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231105T100000&p1=47&p2=137&p3=179&p4=136&p5=152

Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81239312136?pwd=dVJRU0h4T2REaGI3dDRWTnJydkkvdz09

Sunday, 5 November⋅9:00 – 11:00pm (UTC +0)

Time Zone Conversions: https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html?iso=20231105T210000&p1=47&p2=137&p3=179&p4=136&p5=152

Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89114153910?pwd=R1grSFBJb0kyNmd4bnY1dDhaRHhyZz09

Weekly Salon

These I’ll be alternating my morning with my evening, fortnightly. So at least every second week shooould work with a timezone near you. That’s my logic anyway.

Tuesday, 7 November⋅10:00 – 11:00am (UTC +0)

Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85865602875?pwd=RVdSSElBU1VKenY5SEd1Y1dETklzZz09