Allyson Shaw's Blog, page 2
March 14, 2025
My Own Personal psychopomp: revisiting Artist Mike Kelley

I’ve returned from my pilgrimage to London to see the Mike Kelley show, Ghost and Spirit at the Tate Modern, and I’ve recovered enough to process it.
A couple of days after Kelley’s death by suicide in 2012, I wrote a blog post which I revisit here. He was 57 when he exited, just two years older than I am now.
Most people know Kelley’s cover for the 1992 Sonic Youth album, Dirty, which frames forlorn handmade animal dolls in formal portraits along with Kelley’s youthful visage. Similar plush toys wound together in a monumental panel, suspended orbs, or situated alone on blankets defined Kelley’s work in the late 80s and early 90s. This work was received with the full force of biographical fallacy—critics assumed Kelley was making work about his own childhood trauma when really he wanted to talk about disposable consumer culture; he was in dialogue with feminist artists working in craft mediums.

Kelley went on to embrace the autobiographical misunderstanding of his work as a direction, and much of his larger scale work of the early 2000s is about repressed memory, popular culture and shared trauma.
It’s hilarious and still full of pathos. A trickster figure in an art world that takes itself too seriously, Kelley remains one of my teachers. (Though I feel I am not ‘allowed’ to be funny, given the subject matter I write often about and atonal nature of writing online, but I digress.) Too many of my teachers—Plath, Sexton, Woolf and Kelley—have killed themselves. As I perch in yet another dark night of the soul, I wonder what this means to my own life.
I lingered in front of his most well known work, the tapestry of found handmade objects titled More Love Hours Than can Ever Be Repaid. It features not one but two yellow macrame owls, and a crocheted alligator that has remained with me in memory all these years. The whole thing is festooned with that staple of American midwestern decor—sheaves of rainbow corn. Here is a visceral return to the tactless grottos of my 1970s childhood: beautiful, gross, paltry. I went to the show with two friends, one who grew up in the UK and the other in Canada, and all three of us related to the wax candle sculpture, The Wages of Sin. We knew these 70s-80s ornately crafted candles by heart even if we had never seen them before.

Kelley deconstructed the aesthetics of hysteria, mysticism and nostalgia. He marked out the absurdities of patriarchy and toxic masculinity and made them hilarious.
Seeing the work in the austere, high ceilinged Tate, I was struck with how low brow it felt: here were drawings that look like they were made with shit, Rat Fink demons cavorting, adolescent doodles and bad tattoo art writ large on flags.

When I first saw his work as a wayward teen, I felt as if we—he and the viewer—were in on some great prank. We were getting away with it because I got the joke. Kelley’s midwestern accent sounded like home. We both grew up in the suburbs of the American Midwest. Kelley’s Banana Man, a video performance of existential angst where Kelley, dressed in a yellow sailor ‘leisure’ suit covered in pockets, tells a story of slapstick woe. Banana Man is tied in my mind to Chicagoland TV legend Ray Rayner, whose 1970s children’s morning show featured cartoons, crafts, corny jokes and leisure suits. I saw Banana Man in 1988 and had a revelation: if I lived in a world where this art could happen, it meant I was free of all the dumb shit I’d been made to carry as a girl. Here was all the permission I needed.

In the Tate show, Kelley’s birdhouse ‘spirit collector’ sits under glass like a specimen. The howl & drum of sounds from his shamanistic ritual performance at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions space plays over it. In this room, his early work is reshuffled, creating a ghostly feeling that wasn’t there initially—adding dimension for a world still mourning his passing.

(I once exhibited my work at LACE, but it was so long ago. Unambitious thing I am, I never wrote that stuff down, and now can’t remember which piece it was. There was still a pang of what-might-have-been watching LACE’s interior projected on a wall in the Tate in London).
As an older woman revisiting this work nearly 40 years on, I now see Kelley’s sincerity, something I didn’t pick up on as a young woman. The Tate curation is apt and bittersweet, framing his work as ghost narratives.
My favourite pieces in the show were the Kandor jars. (What is it about THINGS IN JARS? something else to unpack…) In the Superman comic, Kandor is the lost city from Superman’s home-world, shrunken down and preserved in a bell jar. Kelly creates myriad lurid and inviting versions of the tiny city. In a companion video piece, Superman Recites Selections from ‘’The Bell Jar and Other Works by Sylvia Plath‘ (1999), a square-jawed Superman, played with grave earnestness by Michael Garvey, recites excerpts from Plath. Plath was an American immigrant in the UK and knew well the melancholy of lost home. The Kandor jars are iterations of the cliche ‘you can never go home again’—illuminated by a wonder particular to childhood and adolescence, or at least what we remember childhood to have been.
Are my own memories of Kelley’s work and his fleeting presence like some candy-coloured resin kingdom, aglow with loss?
The Tate show ends with Kelley’s video Bridge Visitor (Legend Trip.) A legend trip is a teenage rite of passage involving urban folklore pilgrimages to creepy sites—the starting point of many 80s horror stories. In many ways Ashes & Stones was a six-year legend trip…but I haven’t unpacked that yet. Kelley exploits the cliched, dark heart of adolescence with ‘Satanic’ vocals and a literal pissing contest. A stream of urine puddles in darkness, becoming a magic mirror to a chthonic underworld. Kelley is literally taking the piss, making something new and taking us with him. At the end, a spectral troll appears hamming it up like a low-res Butoh dancer played by Kelley himself, naked, liminal and entrancing.
Revisiting Kelley’s work was also legend trip. I have no idea if I would get him now—all-at-once—like this had I not had this decades long relationship with his work. Kelley is my own personal psychopomp leading the way-but through what? Surely away from midlife to something else more sublime.
Simon Wu’s review of the Tate show in Momus is so good: https://momus.ca/a-very-real-american-place-the-suburban-unconscious-in-mike-kelley/
Below is my blog piece from 2012R.I.P. Mike KelleyFebruary 2, 2012
The news of L.A. artist Mike Kelley’s suicide has left me reeling and bereft. The world is suddenly a much less interesting place without him.
Mike Kelley was perhaps my first real art world love. I’d shaken off my infatuation with the Preraphaelites in high school and signed up for the whole art school experience as a rebellion, as a middle finger to all the other choices I didn’t have at the time. I had no voice of my own, no medium I’d mastered. I was stumbling along, and I stumbled on Kelley.
I remember going to the Newport Harbour Art Museum [Now the Orange County Art Museum] in 1988. This guy I’d never heard of had a solo show with video of performance art like The Banana Man and Kappa (a scatological Japanese fairy). There were things made out of crocheted animals. Freud and everything else was turned on its head. My heart beat faster, looking at this show. I went back over and over. Having never been to a circus, I felt like a kid who’d been taken to see the clowns for the first time: terrified and giddy.
Later, Kelley actually came to my school to speak. He was one of the few artists and writers who meeting in person was not a let-down. The school I attended in the late 80s did indeed suck– not least because the chair at the time was sexually assaulting and ritually humiliating women students. (Later, a group of women won a lawsuit against the school and my witness statement was integral to the case, but that is a matter for another post.)
In this darkness, Kelley was a light–he was a feminist artist, deconstructing received notions of the body and framing women’s work in subversive ways. He showed up to my Art Fundamentals class looking like a sinister mod, with his black bob and pegged trousers. He was funny, captivating, and able to talk about very dark things with a lightness. Beneath it all was a sly compassion. [When I spoke to him, he treated me as an equal—in a world of bully art men this was as disarming as seeing his work for the first time. In hindsight, he was also the first person to take me seriously as an artist.]
Though I ended up working in very traditional mediums–oils and etching on zinc plates–I carried Kelley’s work around with me as a reminder of what is possible.
I can only think his suicide is some sort of medical failure– depression too often goes untreated. I end with this youtube video and hope it isn’t in bad taste– in it Mike Kelley talks about what he’s buying at Ameoba Music in Hollywood. It sums up for me his unassuming presence and his creepy fascinations and characteristically gleeful attitude toward the abject. I can’t believe he’s gone.
March 6, 2025
Rampant, Pizzled Magic

I moved to London twenty years ago. The city met me head on as I landed on English shores. I grappled in its swift embrace, alight with its endless puzzles. Here was a city that had a place for me, even as it bled me dry. In London, there is a place for everyone.
Last week I prepared to leave for London as if I were going to meet a lover, a being vast and strange, an entity that knew me once and perhaps remembers. We go back to our pasts to find the self we I left-the person we were. We look for who we were when I were in it.
In Lon-don. The two-syllable bell still tolls for me.
American novelist Herman Melville said that London was one of two places in the world where ‘a man could most effectively disappear.’ The second place was the South Seas. As a woman of a certain age, a childless cat lady in the age of neo-fascism, I can attest this works well for my gender, also. This disappearance is not an erasure, rather, a magic trick. What happens to the magician’s assistant in all her sequins and tulle? She is still there behind the illusion. She counts breaths, thinks of her supper even as she evaporates from sight. The swirling grind of London is the magician’s flourish, the tap of the hat and then—ta-da!
I can be convinced for a moment that this is all I ever wanted.
On this visit I stayed near the Thames, in the dark heart of the City (the very centre of London) with pizzled dragons at its corners, tongues out, erect. My UK publisher’s HQ on Fleet Street was a curse’s throw across the river, over the heads of teeming humanity. I used to work near St. Paul’s; my soul fodder for an investment bank. It was the only place that would hire an American immigrant with an MFA in poetry. Terrible, boring, long story short—I am a Londoner at heart. The labyrinth of old smoke still has meaning for me.

I travelled to London to see the Mike Kelley retrospective at the Tate Modern. Los Angeles artist Mike Kelley’s work has been a touchstone for me since I was a wayward teenager. Kelley was a permission-giver, a shamanistic trickster figure hell-bent on dismantling toxic masculinity. I was curious to see his work contextualised in the Tate, and whether it still resonated with my adult self. Kelley was my psychopomp leading the way-but through what? I look forward to unpacking this on the full moon and posting more here.

I also wanted to see the new Hunterian Museum, a place that was once sacred to me. It is utterly changed; perhaps I am the one changed. I will be untangling the visit to this difficult reliquary at the new moon.

I caught the final days of the Medieval Women show at the British Library, too—ultimately it was superficial—oversold and overcrowded. Perhaps I’m too close to that subject matter, as I have devoted years of my life to researching the ecstatic experience of Medieval women and am intimately connected to their stories.

By the end of it all, my toes were bruised (I might lose a nail…) and I felt absolutely haunted by it all—in the best way.
More, soon.
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Seeded Memory: What the body knows
A WANING MOON ROUND UP


Twenty years ago I wrote a novel about rebellion in a world dominated by AI. Much of the subversion took place in the character’s bodies, in their resistance to invasive tech. In the opening scene, a cadre of dancing women confront riot police. This novel wasn’t published, but it’s message seems almost prophetic now.
Climate change, dystopias and looming apocalypse are our shared reality. If we are to write anything hopeful or subversive, we must start where we are—without denying the darkness—and see beyond it. This way of seeing is felt, danced and wept into being. It is somatic. To know it, we must return to the body as a teacher. In Silvia Federici’s essay, In Praise of the Dancing Body, she sets out her argument that the body is a site of resistance:
,,,the body as a ground of resistance, that is the body and its powers – the power to act, to transform itself and the world and the body as a natural limit to exploitation.
Federici’s Caliban and the Witch had a deep influence on my historical analysis in my book about the Scottish witch hunts, Ashes & Stones. The 16th-17th century saw vast privatisation of public land, and this coincided with the witch hunts in Europe.
Capitalism was born from the separation of people from the land and its first task was to make work independent of the seasons and to lengthen the workday beyond the limits of our endurance. —Silvia Federici
We now see another vast privatisation of public and personal space—our shared online lives. Friendships and communities are now manipulated and distorted by insatiable capitalists. Creative work of artists and writers is fed to generative plagiarism machines, regurgitated in endless permutations of soulless productivity.
Some of us remember the early days of the internets; INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE was the rallying cry of DIY coders and archivists.
That is still true, but we are up against mighty foes.
I first heard about Federici’s essay in In SEÁN PÁDRAIG O’DONOGHUE‘s recent writings about techbros and psychedelics, The Techbros vs. The Elders of the Earth. This essay is a must-read for our present moment.
What does the body have to do with this? I have often turned to my own body for its wealth of somatic knowledge—as a dancer, spirit worker, and someone who must harness chronic pain as a teacher.
In pre-capitalist societies people thought they had the power to fly, to have out-of body experiences, to communicate, to speak with animals and take on their powers and even shape-shift. —Silvia Federici
A sense of loss persisted as I wrote Ashes & Stones, not only of individual lives but shared folklore and even body-experiences that linked our ancestors to other worlds, other beings and ways of knowing. This somatic birthright, now lost—can only be rebuilt from dream, sensation and muscle memory. Perhaps shared folklore once contained some of this knowledge demonised during the witch hunts. Whatever was written down or remembered comes to us through that distorted, Christianised lens. We must remake it.
(My only beef with Federici’s brilliant essay is the suggestion that all Western medicine undermines the body’s integrity. My life has been saved over and over by Western medicine as have the lives of my friends. There must be a middle road when thinking of wellness.)
Reading : The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
The Memory Police. Yoko Ogawa. This sparse and elegant novel is about communal forgetting in the face of fascist takeover. Set on an invented island in Japan, it is a Kafkaesque fable that is delicately told. Though it was written in 1994, it is heartbreaking relevant right now.
Listening to: Fiona Soe Paing
I’ve had Sand, Silt and Flint by Fiona Soe Paing on repeat since my pal, photographer Jannica Honey told me about it. Traditional ballads and original compositions from the North East of Scotland are rendered anew. Listen and you will hear the sound of this landscape . Even after I’ve left, I feel this Doric place and these songs echoing in me like peals in bells.
Watching: Smoke Sauna Sisterhood
This documentary is really intense and visually lush. It is about women talking to each other in a sauna, but it is also about the shape and texture of not only the women’s bodies, their voices and minds but also the spirit of the sauna itself. The sauna tradition in Estonia is recognised as a UNESCO intangible heritage, and the film is a personal exploration of this traditon. (I can’t unpack here the politics of women-only spaces in our current political moment. Humanity is evolving and ideas of gender as a spectrum are liberatory. Binary traditions need to be examined, dismantled- yet, many, like the smoke sauna depicted in the film, should to be honoured in living memory, especially in the face of patriarchal backlash, even as they are re-invented.
The documentary reminded me of sacred spaces that facilitate healing of both body and soul. This must happen outside of ‘new age’ commodification of this concept, beyond ‘toxic positivity.’
Once upon a time in San Francisco, there was a place called Osento, a woman’s bath house at 955 Valencia. Taking the waters there among others was transformational for me, an integral part of healing from sexual trauma. It is no more, Like so much of San Francisco that was vibrant and exciting while I lived there in the late 80s-early 90s. It’s vanished like something from Ogawa’s novel.
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memory, femicide, and the useful dead 🪶


Last month I watched She Will, an impressionistic, feminist horror film about Scottish witches set in the Highlands. Aging film star Veronica Ghent travels to a remote location to convalesce and instead finds herself transformed by the darkness she encounters there.
I missed this film when it came out in 2021, but it’s a cinematic companion to my book about how Scotland remembers the witch hunts. The book is called Ashes & Stones. She Will is a film about memory, femicide and the ‘uses’ of the dead. It is also about confronting past trauma—both personal and historical— while dismantling toxic, predatory masculinity. In the film, as in life, these things happen simultaneously. Yet their relationship remains mysterious in the film: ashes billowing through the air are called ‘witch feathers’ by the locals, and the lore surrounding the land claims the death of women hundreds of years ago gives the earth curative properties.

I am intimately familiar with the filming locations of She Will. In the ‘art class scene’ Veronica sits with her easel beside Loch an Eilein in the forest of Rothiemurchus. A boulder inscribed with witch marks lies behind her, off camera. Did the film makers know this? There are legends surrounding the atmospheric, 14th century castle on the island. There was once an underwater, zig-zag causeway linking the island to the shore, though this has never been found. Legend also claims it is the ancestral seat of the Shaw clan in the 14th century—if one believes these things.*

I loved the film’s powerful vision of bonds women share with both the living and dead. It’s also a delicious tale of revenge. I only wished it were longer, and that the character of Desi Hatoum, in a show-stopping performance by Kota Eberhardt, had been given more of a story.
The Janet Horne Memorial Stone in Dornoch is part of the film, transported to a woodland setting. I wrote a piece about the Janet Horne Memorial stone for the Association for Scottish Literature’s online journal, The Bottle Imp in 2019. Did the film makers read it? There is probably no way to know, but I like to think they did.
As part of my research for Ashes & Stones, I repeatedly visited the Janet Horne Memorial Stone. Each time I visited, it was different, surrounded by different tributes that have increased since the book was published. Janet Horne is not the name of the woman who supposedly died near the stone’s present location. Everything we know of her vague story was written down one hundred years after her death, in the notes of English occupiers who wanted to portray Highland Scots as superstitious, backward and unable to rule themselves. She is supposedly the ‘last witch’ executed in Scotland but there is no ‘true story’ of Janet Horne’s life or death, only invention.
In my research I found many photos of the stone through the ages, some from the Dornoch Historical Society and others on the internet without attribution. Here is a gallery.








*This notion is put forth in LOCH AN EILEIN AND ITS CASTLE by Alex Inkson M’Connochie. in The Cairngorm Club Journal 014, 1900.
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Against the Dying of the light

The second part of my exploration of Alison Balfour, a woman executed for witchcraft in Orkney, is available here for paid subscribers. I blog regularly for both free and paid subscribers on Substack–join today.


January 29, 2025
Making truth irresistible

In this Missive:Thoughts on moving through despair & making truth irresistiblePractical tips for making your online life less oppressiveA Mastodon primer
Despair is a land we move through. We should not be building any buildings there.
—Akaya Windwood in conversation with Rebecca Solnit
June Jordan once said her function as a poet was to make revolution irresistible. Well OK, that is the function of us all, as creative artists: to make the truth irresistible. —Audre Lorde
We are at a crossroads. Our online spaces are changing whether we stay on big socials or not. I am interested in building and fostering better places online—places that are irresistible, where truth can flourish. I’ve realised recently that I can’t do this while also showing up at the old places, despite the community there wanting me to keep feeding that machine.
Our dilemma is real. For me, every professional contact I have operates on IG. (And X, but I have deleted that account.) Others have families, friends and audiences they have built over 15+ years. Some may be able to leave all at once, but for others, this disengagement will be gradual.
My last Substack post about lifeboats off big socials touched a nerve. There was fruitful discussion—but a backlash of defensiveness. I am not proposing a boycott. Using Meta products isn’t a purity test. Staying or going is not a moral stance.
Many of us were already uncomfortable with or perpetually drained by these platforms. Those of us feeling the most pressure are usually creatives driven to promote our work so that we can survive financially.
Meta and X are giving disinformation and hate speech a permanent place in our shared spaces. Big socials are mining our connections, not just for marketing but for the dissemination of hate, the erosion of human rights and the criminalisation of healthcare for women and trans folks. [Let me be clear about what I mean below: a trigger warning for anyone not wanting to read about abortion bans in the USA.*]
‘There’s something to say about those places we are not.’ —Liz Ogbu in conversation with Rebecca Solnit on Blue Monday
This change at Meta is not sudden, though it might feel like it. Everything feels sudden these days—part of a psyops shock-and-awe strategy of despots. This hostile shift hits us where we live. The power men like Zuckerberg and Musk have been given over our lives and the mediation of our relationships is immense.
Many of our friends, allies and chosen family have already been driven out, and more will leave. This shift at Meta is another kind of gentrification. Some of us pay higher ‘rent’ to Meta—artists, writers and other creatives pay in ideas and skills we have mastered over decades. This unpaid ‘content’ is now fed to AI behemoths that devour it and spit out again.
Did I love my community on Meta products? Yes. But I don’t know if I can’t take it with me. I don’t know if that love is portable.
If we are only looking at what will please the algorithm rather than what is true, we are reduced to selfies and cynical, reactive hot-takes. Sometimes, if we really need to be seen on the platform, we pay in with images of our faces and bodies. The cost can be high in other ways: some have endured cyberbullying, censorship, unwanted attention, and cyberstalking on Meta platforms. This is about to get much worse for the most vulnerable in our communities.
Some of us have had to leave communities/families/institutions in order to survive. Gentrification, hostile environment and abuse have forced us to make a choice. Sometimes I feel I’m being driven out, just like I was by these inchoate tech bros in San Francisco in the early 90s. The thing is, I took that love of place with me. I am the embodiment of SF circa 1989. (That is the subject for another post. In the parlance of our times, IYKYK.) In other places like Long Beach, California and London, I hung on a bit longer and brought that love with me. Did I love my community on Meta products? Yes. But I don’t know if I can’t take it with me. I don’t know if that love is portable.

In a discussion around the changes at Meta, Angela Maria Spring offered some wise words. (Watch out for Angela’s poetry collection coming out from FlowerSong in the near future)
“It’s Hermit year and I think we need to begin thinking smaller again. Like hermit crabs finding new little shells and seeking our immediate communities. This newsletter is one of those immediate communities we’ve chosen. We can interact with you within your boundaries and still information and resource share. In fact, the less time we dedicate to mindless scrolling, the more time we have to attend each other. The idea that we must reach AS MANY people as possible is dangerous on multiple levels. It makes the reaching of even one person less meaningful…Our attention one of the most valuable things we possess in this broken system, let’s take it back.”

Angela reminded me that in the Major Arcana tarot cycle, this year corresponds to The Hermit. The Hermit from the Mesquite tarot, above, is my favourite Hermit card. The star inside the lantern on the Rider-Waite-Smith tarot card becomes the very essence of The Hermit. This star-in-a-jar is tiny; its confinement is also a healthy delineation of boundaries. A bright seed illuminates a makeshift lantern.
This star-in-a-jar year welcomes the return of sub-culture. It abandons the metrics of follower counts in favour of authentic connection and reciprocity. It feels small but is irresistibly true, and bright.
Our transitions to other online spaces will take tinkering, trial and error and patience. I think about my first computer in the early 90s. Artist Glen Kaino helped me set it up. He made it seem like we were making mud pies, as if nothing could go wrong. When I was up and running, I got copies of Geek Girl zine, which took the same attitude towards tech. (This zine from the 90s is archived at the Wayback Machine).
Let’s share other ways of doing things. I want to help build something else. I’m not running away or reacting out of fear. I’m phasing out big social as I make something better. Those of us that have had enough, let’s go, and nurture the spaces that hold us well. Let’s create them if they don’t exist yet.
Those of us that remain on big socials must question our habitual passivity in the face of what’s coming or perhaps already here—the exploitation of our most vulnerable friends, family and allies. Some have told me they will subvert or redeem Meta or X from working on the inside.
Audre Lorde, from her speech addressing a women’s conference in 1984:
“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
Lorde, Audre. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” 1984. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
Is Meta/X our only source of support? How does it taste to say Lorde’s words, standing where we find ourselves?
Our reality counters to the hellscape foisted on us, but we must maintain the connections and keep telling the stories that make it real. The rebellion will start with the discovery of new tools, with astonishment, wonder, and showing up for each other.
Some Tools to Make Your Online Life Less OppressiveTurn of AI in Gmail & Web Search:We need to be talking amongst ourselves and building our stories. —Charlie Jane Anders
I use Gmail, so my emails are mined for AI. I never liked the ‘tab’ sorting, so I have found a way to turn this off as well as turn off AI crawling. (It also turns off filing newsletters like this one as ‘promotions’. All emails will be in your inbox.) Here are step by step instructions.
AI Free Google search is a revelation!Use this URL work-around to see how much information is available when not filtered through AI. https://udm14.com/
Other Online Communities not tied to Meta or Venture Capital:These are online communities I use regularly and can recommend. There are many others like Ampwall (alternative to bandcamp), Ghost (alternative to Substack) and Pixelfed (not really a replacement for IG, but being touted as such). Do you use any others you recommend?
I LOVE Mastodon (see easy steps to getting started below). This is my profile on Mastodon.Bookwyrm, an alternative to Amazon-owned Goodreads. This is my profile on Bookwyrm Signal is an alterative to WhatsApp (What’s App is owned by Meta)How to MASTODON in 8 easy steps.Mastodon is a user-supported social media network. It is free to use and is also AD FREE. (Some users donate to the people hosting their servers, but this is optional). Mastodon has a chronological timeline, no algorithm, and allows for infinite customisation. It is not tied to venture capital in the same way as Bluesky. Already there? Share your profile in the comments.
Watch Mastodon explained in 180 seconds.Find an instance to join. It’s the place that hosts your account, and usually you can talk to all other accounts on the Fediverse (though many instances block fascist instances like Truth Social, etc.) My instance, Wandering.shop, is invite-only. Beige.party is a super cool instance with good folks on it and requires no invitation. You can find other instances based on your interests or geographical location. (Your instance will have a ‘local’ feed where you can see what everyone on your server is posting—like a community within a community).Populate your bio with a picture (include alt text for it in your bio). Say a bit about who you are and what you are into.First Post—make it an introduction with as many hashtags as you can think of that explain your interests or communities you’d like to connect with. Like #knitting, #Tarot, #WritingCommunity, etc. Pin this post to your timeline so it’s the first thing people see.Follow hashtags to find your peeps—search for your favourite hashtags in the search bar, and click ‘follow hashtag’—this will populate your feed with cool stuff while you find your people. I enjoy following #Mosstodon, #Tarot and #StandingStoneSunday as well as #Caturday.Have friends/chosen fam or favourite accounts? Tag the ‘bell’ next to someone’s name on their profile and their posts will appear in your notifications so you’ll never miss them.You can use Mastodon on your desktop or phone. Download the Mastodon App for free, or the Metatext app. Both work great.Retoot (share on your timeline using the little arrows-square at the bottom of a post in your timeline) anything you think is cool or interesting. That’s what keeps Mastodon humming along—people sharing others’ work.And a few more tips:—Block with abandon! Don’t like someone’s ooky vibe? Some stranger’s adversarial tone? That random reply guy lurking around?BLOCK THEM and cackle with glee.
—Check out some other tips.
—Follow blogs and Bluesky accounts via your Mastodon timeline with RSS Parrot.
—Check out Meljoann’s guide to deleting Meta and joining the Fediverse
Something to dance to while you untangle yourself from Big SocialWe have a theme song. (Thanks, @Meljoann!)
https://boyscoutaudio.bandcamp.com/track/bye
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*One ‘breaking point’ for me was hearing last year that legislators in South Carolina have introduced a bill which would criminalise abortion as murder. If a woman were convicted, she would face the 30 years without parole or the death sentence in that state. In the past FB has handed over ‘private’ chats between family members as evidence. This is not looking good. After having spent seven years with the words of women about to be executed for an invented crime, I had to really think hard about where I wanted to be.
This post was first published here.
January 22, 2025
Ploughing through the ragged sky

“It seems a crying shame no Goth band has ever covered the classic ‘I Never Go Around Mirrors.’”
A personal exploration of the Western Genre—complete with playlist. READ IT HERE.

January 9, 2025
Life Frafts for everyone

Earlier this week, the owner of Meta set out a six point plan to disseminate disinformation and allow hate speech on Facebook and IG. In a recent essay on my Substack I’ve outlined a response to the collapse of truth on Meta, including some background on the crisis and ideas about going forward.



January 7, 2025
With Light in Their Hair

On Dec. 4th a national memorial ceremony was held in Sweden, recognising the suffering of those accused of witchcraft. The power and scale of this, in collaboration with a national institution—The Swedish History Museum. I’ve written about the event, including the voices of those present. It is free to read at my SUBSTACK.
by Johan Sellgren, @witches_of_the_world_ on IG

December 31, 2024
Rife Nights & the stones are out walking

“…wintering out/ the back end of a bad year…” -Seamus Heaney, “Servant Boy”
It’s said that on Hogmanay the Stones of Stenness walk to the loch of Harray for a drink—yet none have witnessed this—perhaps until now…
The first instalment of my field notes on Stenness is up at my Substack. I explore the accused witch Alison Balfour’s relationship to what is now known as the Heart of Neolithic Orkney. This one is for paid subscribers! Become a paid subsciber to read all my Orkney field notes. Image is a picture I took of the Stones in the snow last January, 2023.