It’s easier to admire people on the internet because you see more of them immediately. Offline, creating a perceptible presence is as basic as stepping into a room; online it’s the process of registering oneself repeatedly. Interesting humans, being interesting, are more likely to provide a varied compilation of registries – if a person is both interesting and online it should be easy to tell. And then all you have to do is click follow
aardvarkwizard and Kat Asharya are interesting people who I follow. They never reminded me of each other until I started doing two things that they both advocate but now I think on it they do have vibes that come from the same sort of direction, a sort of dark metal sophistication. AW is winter vegetables and chainmail/fur battles where Kat is candlelight and scrubbed hardwood but they both evince this sort of not un-dangerous tranquility. I bet that they would both like Scarlett Thomas novels.
The borrowed activities I have recently lit are reading Jonathan Strange and Mister Norrell and wearing/thinking about perfume. Not big things, but things.
And other friends have swayed me this way; Iris to solid perfume and Valtyr vouched for Strange/Norrell, as well as having been told a HUNDRED times by my old friend Liam who I haven’t heard from in years that it was the BEST book and I should read it right now. I’m pretty bad at doing things when people tell me they are ‘so good’, but I get to them eventually sometimes. One day I will watch that ballet duck anime like Betty and Zoe said I should.
Wearing perfume (first a completely unlayered aniseed scent that I bought for Halloween because if beatniks love anything then it’s probably getting shitfaced on absinthe, and also I just.. love aniseed) and reading enormously long oldenne dayes magicke fictionne (in spaced out, now-and-then chunks) are things that relate to the skeleton of what I find really admirable or familiar about these people. It’s not that I’m trying to imitate; it’s that their example is good: I know pretty well the difference between ‘good on you’ and ‘good on me’ and it’s an odd comfort to find people in the wild who exhibit both.
Fun fact: my brother and I are really good at choosing books for each other. So much so that one year, we swapped shiny new copies of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell on Christmas day, without either of us having mentioned it prior to buying it for the other.
It’s excellent. Enjoy!
Haha, that’s great!
Did you both like it?
We did