Hey! It’s been a while since my last post!

There are a lot of reasons why I haven’t been particularly interested in writing for this blog. On the practical side of things, I’ve been busy using my obligatory bad screen time for getting my web development side business to a stable flow of clients and income again (HMU if you have a web development need for Q3 2024-ish). I’ve also been hunkering down on some writing and film projects that deserve a lot of focused attention and have nothing to do with being on the internet in any active way, so I’m basically living in do not disturb mode from 8 am to 6 pm most days. And when I do have the time and desire for good screen time, I’ve been spending it on things like reading bootlegged thrillers on my Kindle (ice cold take: the Tom Ripley novels are fucking incredible), watching the Sopranos for the first time ever, and playing the Katamari ports on my Switch while taking long baths. I have even given up my beloved 90 Day Fiancé-adjacent subreddits in favor of very vaguely following the latest season of Happily Ever After? on my iPad when I have laundry to put away.

This is not to say that I have ascended into some higher plane of being. Not unless you consider the collected novels of Stephen King to be holy texts, which, sure, I guess you could make an argument for that. It’s more that “the internet” in the “there are four websites, each filled with screenshots of the other three” sense of the thing increasingly feels like that old Henny Youngman joke:

“The patient says, “Doctor, it hurts when I do this.”
The doctor says, “Then don’t do that!”

It just hurts to be on the internet in a way that doesn’t feel like a particularly good use of my time or energy. While basically every episode of the Search Engine podcast has been a worthwhile listen, I found the one titled “Is there a sane way to use the internet?” to be a particularly potent interrogation. The question is not even about wasting time, per se. I wouldn’t consider rolling up the same damn paper cranes I have rolled up one hundred times before to be anything but a waste of time, but it doesn’t make me feel bad except in that fleeting way that We Love Katamari! can make any video game completionist feel a little pissy. It also doesn’t make me feel like I may not even have a good grasp on reality anymore, which is definitely what happens if I spend that same time scrolling any of the endless scrolls.

I do believe that people are still using this ~ technology ~ in the broadest sense to do good and useful things, but I also fundamentally believe that any time spent on social media pushes me a little bit closer to an aneurism. But this makes it hard to stay connected with people or to discover these good new things. I would like to start using this space again to share good new things with you all, as well as publish things that you are writing and thinking. To that end, I migrated the newsletter to a new, green WordPress instance and devised a few workflows.

1. You can submit events directly to an events calendar here. Once approved, these events will live at artistsguide.to/events.

2. You can submit your opportunities (open calls, job opportunities, workshops, whatever) here. These will also go live once approved onto their own little permanent page ASAP and will be featured in any upcoming newsletters that fall before their end dates.

3. You can pitch ideas for things you’d like to write about on An Artist’s Guide to me at pitches@artistsguide.to. These don’t need to be formal pitches, nor do you need to send me a bunch of bylines. If you want to write about something and publish it here, just let me know, and we’ll see what we can figure out.

4. You can just email me about what you are up to at info@marthahipley.com. I have to be honest that this is a nebulous way to go about promoting your work because I am very bad at translating totally enjoyable email exchanges into writing something that will be published on this site, but I also just like to hear what you are up to. If I owe you an email, feel free to bother me again. It’s almost Email Debt Forgiveness Day!

5. There is a Discord where you can hang out. I am not really active on Discord and don’t want to have to be active to do a bunch of moderation, so please follow the Code of Conduct and don’t be a jerk.

Talk soon!
Martha

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