YES

in
Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners' ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren't immune to any of this--the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

miggy

in

Semi-hesitant to share this because I'm not sure he's done (is anything, ever?), but here's my latest bit of salvaged metalwork (an old shovel, a beyond-repair typewriter, and a disused section of chainlink fence), Miggy, named as such because he was my first full attempt (Weldo's second iteration being the first partial attempt) at MIG welding (which I far, far prefer to stick). Done or not, I'm rather proud of The Shed's latest tenant. Miggy, everyone, everyone, Miggy.

a creature made of a shovel with typewriter ribbon holder eyes on a workbench

right (enough) brain

in

As I've indulged my newfound passion for metalwork and my reanimated one for cartooning and drawing, I've realized that a big part of my problem the last couple of years WRT the written word is that left brain seepage has overtaken the right brain requirements of creative work: it's the same thing that killed music for me, both when I left music school 20 years ago and the times I've tried to rekindle the flame since (and the reason I can't, no matter how great it looks, watch WHIPLASH: JK Simmons in the trailer IS my internal left brain voice, in words and in action).

Both welding and cartooning have become proving grounds not only for the import of Suzuki's "beginner's mind" but of the essential nature of letting go of all gaining ideas: the joy I've felt in practicing both these last several weeks (metalwork) and years (cartooning), in doing them for myself and myself alone and not for some nebulous accolade or token of communal belonging, has been beyond anything I've experienced.

And so I'm now trying to bring that Informalities creativity into this space, textually, much like when this site started and bore the original Informalities name: 15 minute text pieces at mid-day, after lunch, written, pubbed, posted, and forgotten, with no time for any of that left-brain fuckery to seep in. So far, so good, on that count.