I always hated making them —pokey wires EVERYWHERE—but I am slowly starting to like it, or at least feel enough of a challenge to care.

And... on the blue crane it's fine silver, not sterling, and it doesn't oxidize. (But a very fine gauge which is nice.) Oxidizing then polishing the high points of sterling works like shading. But I'm about to order that hair-fine wire in sterling and that will make all my trees instantly better.🥇✨

Some are definitely better than others. It mainly depends on my mood tbh 🙃 —it's the last part of the process 😜

My friend brought me a bag of coins two Tuesdays ago and I can't stop. Coins were always hard—two-sided is hard, period, with wire wraps—but this works. And I like making them. 😊

I never do this, but you can buy it. 😉
www.etsy.com/listing/4298...

I do think a Beatles bio would be very difficult, but that's another reason to digitize literally everything we've got. All the relics. All the books. Because we need more biographers, more people to see different things, as we all do. It's the only way to get a more complete picture over time.

I do want to say that I never would have kept on with it at all after Fine Tuning finished if Sharon hadn't started going through the sources like a machine. She basically forced me into it by doing so much work, and making me laugh. I felt indebted to her and adore her, so I had to try.

It went from 3 pages of this to 1 page of reruns. And probably, about the women, but a big part of it is probably because we were never really part of the adoration fan club. For me, I LOVED Tune In, but I am a citation miner. I want the primary sources more than anything. And so I found out.

The weird thing is that it went off like a bomb at first, but so much of the immediate attention was from absolute haters that I just went dark. It was too much. I am inching up to going on SATB, if Robert still wants me, but almost immediately papers quit quoting him. (Google alerts let me know.)

The bias is better acknowledged, but all is fair if it's true. That's the only yardstick that matters.

The history, not the place. Never been.

I love Hamburg.

Mine too. Sweet Georgie. I know he hates Paul with a white hot passion. When Sharon & I were doing this we would collect audio clips of him turning random questions into ways to knock Paul. He's very angry.
www.tumblr.com/mythserene/7...

I have trouble imagining how it will. I think it will be harder now. Much harder. But he really did a lot of things right. Just not the main thing. But I will say this: you feel it with him. Combining the culture so thickly was genuinely brilliant. I felt like I was there.

I don't hate him and feel sadness for him as a human. At the same time, I honestly cannot believe he got away with that for so long. Just rewriting “history.” That's my problem. That he just rewrote their lives. With—apparently—zero compunction. He had to wonder every day if he'd get caught.

There should never be one historian for anything. That's crazy. The biggest problem is that the information is so siloed. I want everything digitized. But however bad you think he is, he's worse. We never got past the audacity of his lies to shape a story. It’s more like fanfic. It's sad.

Hey 😌🎸

FINALLY. I'm surprised it took someone so long to say this—to find a way to frame it—but this is absolutely correct and somehow feels like a relief to read. A simple, truthful framing that cuts through the nonsense.