📲 Earthly Body Unplugged

Dear friends,

A couple months ago, I was toying with the idea of getting off Instagram. I found myself spending so much time aimlessly scrolling without even realizing I had opened the app, and recent updates meant that I was mostly seeing posts from people I wasn’t even following.

I picked up a workbook/zine called Unplugged while browsing a local shop; it promised to give me seven days of prompts and challenges to help me reset my relationship to screens. (I just made the very Freudian typo of “resent” while writing this.) As a Day 0 challenge, the book suggested deleting Instagram from my phone for a day, just to see how it felt. I deleted it, and that was that. (I never made it to Day 1.)

Our theme for this month is Attention. Now that I’ve been off the app for a couple months, I want to tell you a little bit about what I miss about Instagram, what I’ve been happily doing without, and what I’ve been doing instead.

It feels a little funny (silly? self-serving?) to dedicate this newsletter to Instagram, but I’m realizing as I write this that I’ve been using Instagram for ten years. I first downloaded it to share a very sweaty photo I took with trans icon Laura Jane Grace after an Against Me! show, and I was hooked. I mostly shared artfully arranged photos of my library books, travel pics, and silly photoshoots I did with my friends.

It took me a long time to realize how insidious Instagram had become over those ten years. I don’t think I had ever heard the words “monetization” or “parasocial relationships” when I first downloaded the app, and I don’t think the terms “content creator” or “influencer” were common yet. I hadn’t yet developed the healthy skepticism I like to maintain for stuff on the internet, and didn’t know the product Instagram was selling was my attention, to lots and lots of advertisers.

It’s wild to think that the past couple months make up the longest stretch of time in ten years that I haven’t looked at the app every day.

I do miss some things about it: seeing my friends be funny and cool on the internet, learning what the influencers I’ve followed for a long time are up to (did asmallcloset have her baby???), getting some inspiration for what to wear and how to decorate my home, looking at rad art, learning when bands I like are touring, seeing tattoo flash before it gets snapped up.

But there are solutions for a lot of these things: actually asking my friends what they’re up to, figuring out what fashion and decor I actually like without as much outside influence, remembering that I literally cannot fit another piece of furniture into my home, subscribing to artists’ and bands’ and tattooers’ newsletters. (Make more newsletters, tattooers!)

My usage of the time I’ve gotten back really varies. I tend to open Discord now as my go-to “killing time” app. I’ve sunk a lot more time into video games, and read a lot more books. I’ve been writing more games and working on more textile projects.

Overall, though, I’m not necessarily interested in doing “better” or more constructive things with that time; I just want to make sure that I’m making conscious decisions about where my time and attention are going.

That means I have to figure out what I actually want and seek out that specific thing, rather than just mindlessly opening Instagram. Do I want entertainment? Social connection? Artistic inspiration? Something to do while I eat my lunch? A sense of accomplishment? I have to work just a little bit harder to get these things now, but I can get them.

As you might have gathered from my first newsletter, cultivating attention is an ongoing project; it takes a lot of work to pull yourself away from things that are designed to draw you in. I hope to continue this practice; I’m excited to see what other things might draw me in instead.

If the question of what to pay attention to is also grabbing your attention these days, I’d love to hear about your experiences!

Announcements & Updates

• The Queer Games Bundle 2023 runs for a few more days! You can get 400+ games by queer designers, including my epistolary game Your Friend in Witchcraft, in this bundle 🏳️‍🌈
• Speaking of which, Your Friend in Witchcraft and my upcoming collection Larkspur are both getting custom covers by rad queer artists! Can’t wait to share more with you 🎨
• Print copies of Morning Walk have arrived, and I’ll be setting up a little storefront soon! It’s so nice to hold a physical copy of my game ✨

Current Projects

• I’ve been bouncing around between projects lately, but I’m trying to put some work into an older idea called The Bleeding Mother And All Her Saints (working title: Combat Priest Battle Bracket). There’s a little preview up on Itch if you’d like to learn more!

Things I Loved This Month

• Across the Spiderverse, a truly incredible feat of animation
• Tess of the Road and In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman; they do an amazing job tackling purity culture and white savior-ism, and have more than one trans reptile character (!?)
• My cane, a rad new addition to my suite of migraine management tools (no, it’s not a sword cane, but yes, I covered it in stickers)
• from the forest floor, an instrumental album by Jenny Owen Youngs
• The new update for Wildfrost, a super cute and very challenging roguelike deckbuilder I’ve been playing on the Switch
• The movie adaptation of Nimona, out on Netflix! I loved this story in its webcomic and graphic novel versions, and the movie is even queerer

Thanks for joining me today! I’ll see you next time for a closer look at one of my games.