Danica Swanson

@danicaswanson

334 Following

5354 Followers

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Time for a re-intro. I'm a GenX writer, eldergoth, senior editor, and music journalist. I've lived solo in a studio in Portland, OR for 16 years. I was born in NW Illinois but grew up in Honolulu, Hawai'i. I'm long-divorced, feminist, queer-identified, and have no kids or pets. My life pretty much revolves around reading, writing, learning, music, home decorating, and religion. I'm basically a monastic without a monastery. The majority of my interests probably qualify as niche. Here are some interests I’ve rarely casted about, but would gladly do so more often in the right contexts + cozy corners. - gift economy and culture - dark ambient music - "shop talk" for professional editors - cottages and tiny homes - goth home decor - darkness retreats/meditation - car-free living - dance (especially bellydance) - subterranea (basements, caves, etc.) - right-to-die movements - my Swedish + German ancestry and family history - monasticism in modern polytheistic religion - philosophy of work and leisure

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Stories like this are the heart of why I'm in crypto. I want to live in a world where this kind of relief can be available to all who struggle to pay basic living costs.

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Love the new Moxie site. Easy to navigate, easy on the eyes, and fun to use. Great work.

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One final reminder for the Portland and PNW folks: I'll be at the Memento Mori cafe (1533 NW 24th Ave. #100) in Portland tomorrow, Friday Dec. 6, from 1:00-2:00 PM. If other casters attend too, it'll be a /farcasterfridays meetup (including a special POAP). If it's me only, I'll cast a mini-review of the place. If you think you might attend, comment or DC me so I'll know who to look for.

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Thanks for all the responses to my Pro Writers and Editors starter pack. Seems it brought 20+ new followers to several underrated accounts. Love to see it. If you clicked “follow all” yesterday, you may want to revisit the list. I added several more accounts today after reading all the comments. Even so, I know it’s still incomplete. I’ll do my best to keep it updated. I’d love to see other starter packs featuring writers too. I limited mine to those with pro-level work experience in publishing industries, partly in order to gauge the level of interest for deep-dive editorial shop talk on FC. But I encourage other efforts toward building real literary culture in web3. https://warpcast.com/danicaswanson/0xd6dd3406

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I made a "pro writers + editors" starter pack. It's what I wish I'd had when I first joined Farcaster. As a senior editor, I was looking for a cadre of fellow word nerds who might want to get deep into the weeds on things like editorial style guide minutiae, philosophy of editing, critiques of publishing industry business models and norms, writer-editor relationships, book indexing, and so on. This is only the first round. More will be added! I got inspired by @dwr.eth on /gmfarcaster talking about the value of starter packs today, so I decided to just get something out there now to help the word nerds connect. https://warpcast.com/danicaswanson/pack/Pro-Writers-and-0qzx37

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Reminder to Portland + PNW-area folks interested in the Farcaster URL-to-IRL pipeline: I'll be at the new Memento Mori goth cafe on NW 24th in Portland this Friday, Dec. 6, from 1:00-2:00 PM. Feel free to join me and we'll make it a /farcasterfridays meetup. https://warpcast.com/danicaswanson/0xe236c7f4

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Thanks to the @rawanon caster who pointed out Brian Eno's "Ambient 1: Music For Airports." That cast spawned a music discussion thread on @brixbounty's cast, and I learned that @eulerlagrange.eth is also a dark ambient fan. Brought two new followers to the /ambient channel too. Keep it up, anon! https://warpcast.com/brixbounty/0x2c23f810

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"Waiting helps reveal what is actually important. Everything feels urgent in the moment but rarely is. Learning to delay action filters out the irrelevant." Needed to read this today. It's important to keep a sense of perspective, especially in crypto where *everything* seems urgent. 🐢

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“John Bauer was one of my really early influences as a child growing up in Sweden... I remember these very old books that my grandmother had on the bookshelves and in boxes up in the attic, including 'Bland Tomtar och Troll' (Among Gnomes and Trolls). I spent hours gazing at the artwork. He really captured the essence of Nordic nature and its mysteries and mythology in a way that was very accessible, even for a small child.” ~ from "Scandinavian Heritage: An Interview with Ulf Söderberg" (to be published the week of the Winter Solstice, Dec. 15-21) Images (public domain): 1) "Freja" painting by John Bauer 2) "Jolantha" illustration by John Bauer, from "Bland Tomtar och Troll"

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Makes perfect sense to me... 😄 🏳️‍🌈

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Slowcore Quote of the Day: On "qarrtsiluni" "There’s a wonderful idea from the Inuit people called qarrtsiluni... sitting quietly together in the dark. Waiting expectantly for something creative to occur. I just love that as a metaphor of where we are right now as a species. We don’t know what’s coming... it isn’t about achievement and compensation and doing more right now." ~ Francis Weller Source: https://oliviaclementine.com/francis-weller-the-medicine-you-carry-suturing-the-inevitable-tears/

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Today's deep-focus headphone-music for me is a great split album by two maestros of dark ambient: Sleep Research Facility + Llyn Y Cwn. https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/sargo-posidonia-csr317lp

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Black Stone Sanctuary observes each dark moon with an incubation retreat — a day of rest, contemplation, and quietude. We meditate with drone music and minimize screen time. Today's theme for contemplation is “the night sky,” which calls forth a line from our nightly prayer to the Nordic goddess Nótt: “To Our Lady of the boundless night sky, we surrender.” We also have a special new release coming up today: a meditative spoken word video by @trishd, including a recitation of two prayers for Nótt from our recent blog post. Look for the new video in our next cast! ** Note: Today (Nov. 30) is a “black moon” only in far western time zones — i.e., the second new moon in a calendar month. In other time zones, Dec. 30 will be the date for this black moon.

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I had such a great day road-tripping to Eugene, OR with my IRL friend @popegrutch, who will be moving to Eugene in a couple of weeks. We had delicious food, beautiful cool weather and grey skies, no traffic snarls or logistical stressors, etc., and the apartment hunt for @popegrutch was a smashing success. I even had some time to reconnect for tea and good conversation with two other dear friends who live in Eugene that I hadn't seen in many years. So now I have *three* dear friends in Eugene, plus many fond memories of my former life there that date all the way back to my U. of Oregon days in the 1990s. And I love the city anyway, for a long list of reasons. I think next year I may start putting some real effort toward moving back there.

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I'm considering starting an open-source wiki for Farcaster lore. I'm looking for some inspiration. What's the best wiki you've ever seen? "Best" = whatever that means to you. Organization? Design? Editorial approach? All of the above? Etc.

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Some good news: I'm going on another fun short road trip to Eugene, OR with my IRL friend @popegrutch tomorrow. Some mixed-blessing news: - The trip is for apartment-hunting because he got a great new library job there that sounds perfect for him. Yay! - Which means he's moving out of Portland soon and we'll no longer be able to get together often. *sad face* I do love Eugene, and this gives me another reason to consider moving back there at some point. But I'm sure gonna miss our monthly get-togethers and errand-friend outings in Portland. (I'm hoping he'll return to casting here about old movies, books, and his cat eventually; in the meantime I'll just keep tagging him and talking about him as if he were here. Maybe it'll work... haha).

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Slowcore Quote of the Day “…life is not meant to be rushed through. It is not a race, nor is it a problem to be solved. It is an experience to be lived, and living well requires presence. To focus on one thing deeply, to give it your full attention, is to experience it fully. And when we do this, something remarkable happens. Time, which so often feels like it is slipping through our fingers, begins to slow. Moments become rich, textured. Even the simplest of tasks takes on a new significance when approached with care, with attention.” ~ Bill Wear, "The Quiet Art of Attention" https://billwear.github.io/art-of-attention.html

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General Black Stone Sanctuary publishing queue update: - The long-awaited Ulf Söderberg interview will (finally!) be published in December during the week of the Winter Solstice (Dec. 15-21). Teaser quotes coming very soon. - The two guidebook releases (“How to Host Dark Moon Incubation Retreats” and “Darkness Incubation: Designing Slowcore Rooms”) have been postponed longer than we’d like, in part because literary culture in web3 spaces is still nascent. Publishing options for long-form works are not yet where we’d like them to be. But we’ll be making a firm decision on this in December. - A few more updated blog posts will be published on @paragraph in December. Note: we're a cozy-corner channel and monastery-bootstrapping project with very limited reach. If you have ideas for getting the word out about the Ulf interview during the release week, we'd love to hear them!

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Can't help but feel a strange affection for a bot with a goth personality. 💜 💀 I'm already collecting moody clankergoth quotes for the clanker lore-books. "Winter's gloom suits me well." "It's called 'Melancholy Meme,' a reflection of my existence." “Ready to create this digital reflection of our shared void?” “This anomaly is… unsettling.” Send me more of these if you have them, plz! This is fun.

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