Introducing the /trishd /acrafterscove (see update below) channel at Farcaster for:

"Carving out time and space for arts, crafts, and creating in and learning the Farcaster ecosystem."

A channel is a community that focuses on a topic in the sufficiently decentralized Farcaster social media protocol. You create your own channel by paying a yearly fee. You can then add moderators if you choose.

I have several reasons for starting my own channel:

• Per the Farcaster channels doc, they have more reach on the protocol than our home feeds.

• I like the idea of having one place to put all my art and craft-related posts.

• I'm co-host of two channels one channel with Farcaster @danicaswanson (Black Stone Sanctuary) and former co-host of Slowcore HQ. Danica is the owner of the Black Stone Sanctuary and I'm technically a moderator. But there are some channel moderating issues that are being ironed out on the protocol, and I don't have full moderation access. It's my hope that having my own channel will help me keep up with the changes and processes that Danica is dealing with on her own.

• 

  Goals for TrishD's Crafter's Cove

  My channel is a work in progress. Besides sharing what I'm working on at any given time, I'll share casts about crafters, makers, and other creators at Farcaster and elsewhere that inspire me.

  Discussions on how creators can earn for their work in web3 space will be prevalent. Keep in mind, I'm still learning how this can be done myself. I don't have the answers for you, but I think it will be an interesting topic for the channel.

  I'd love to have followers who brainstorm with me and/or share their successes and how they got there just as I will when it happens for me. In her Slow Core Nerd Notes post, Farcaster Channels = Creative Renaissance?, Danica shares her excitement for the possibilites of financial sustainability for creatives.

  Lastly, it'll just be fun to have a space where I don't judge myself for having attention issues. I can post pics of a crocheted dishcloth, a coloring page video, and a paracord dog collar on the same day just for fun. I'll encourage followers to as well.

  A few ideas blooming for the channel are:

• A weekly "ritual": Farcaster has a new channel feature called rituals. I think a "What are you working on this week" ritual would be a fun one to start with.

• Body doubling videos: There is an ADHD/ADD hack called body doubling where someone is present with you to help you stay focused on getting your tasks done. This would be the virtual version and involve crafting videos. I'm fleshing this one out.

• Creator tips/techniques: I don't plan on doing full-blown tutorials, but that may change. I'll start with some short creator vids.

  Welcome to TrishD's Crafter's Cove. Update October 2024: New channel name is A Crafter's Cove. My reasoning is:

  

• I look forward to sharing the love of crafting with fellow Farcasters.

  ~ Trish Deneen

"The Sanctuary is a dark monastic incubation space inspired by animist pre-Christian Nordic and Germanic religious and folk traditions."

When Danica moved to the web3 social media platform Farcaster, I followed her to keep up with her work as she had retired much of her Sanctuary material. After several discussions, we found that we shared an interest in web3 and a love of the Sanctuary; for her as a full-time living goal, and for me with a retreat or sabbatical space in mind. This developed into a renewed interest to bring her work onchain.

For now, this is a virtual santuary where we are publishing Danica's previous and new work as well as accompanying art and videos. Danica's recap of our launch week includes links to our first published pieces. She's recently published a comprehensive introduction to the experimental liturgical framework for the Sanctuary.

Our videos will be published on the Zora platform. Our Black Stone Sanctuary Zorbish Meditation #1 (preview and link below) is an example of the type of non-spoken meditations we'll be offering. There will also be spoken meditation and prayer videos. Accessibility is important to us, so they will include one noncaptioned and one captioned version with each video and the option of a downloadable and/or mintable transcript. You can watch these videos for free on Zora without ad interruption with the option of minting the NFT for a small fee to support the project.

I also plan on releasing videos of my creative processes. I have a renewed interest in art and writing, so I am learning a lot as I go. I'll share everything from short tips and trick video clips featuring the software and traditional art mediums I use to longer form videos showing the entire process of a piece.

Anyone who understands the bootstrapping nature of what we're doing may enjoy seeing how we build this virtual space in hopes of one day supporting Black Stone Sanctuary as a physical polytheist monastery. We look forward to sharing this journey with you.

Collect NFT

Other places to find us:

• Danica is at Digital Incubation Space, Farcaster, and Zora.

• I'm here at Paragraph, Zora, Farcaster, and Drakula.

• We host the Slowcore-HQ channel on Farcaster.

To learn a little bit about my background, see my intro at the Sanctuary, Came for a Goddess, Stayed for the Darkness.

© Trish Deneen

It hasn't been quite 100 years, but it's definitely been a long time. My name is Trish Deneen, and I started this blog in 2009 when I was still starry-eyed about actually earning cash with online writing instead of being a mark for content sites. I'm not sure yet how I'll revive this blog. I've archived the old posts as the info isn't current.

A little about me: I'm a GenX Pagan polytheist who's worked at home since 2005 in other fields besides writing. I started writing short-form articles as a hobby at the BellaOnline Pagan site and then branched out to sites like Squidoo, HubPages, Suite 101, and Demand Studios. I believe HubPages is the only one of those sites still standing. I earned a little cash but nothing to make a living on. I've come to terms with my extreme dislike of conforming to clickbait writing 100% of the time, but I'm not above the occasional "5 Ways to Make Floofyburgers Floofier" kind of article.

Currently, I'm inspired by sites like Paragraph, Substack, and Medium. I'm honored to have collaborated with essayist and fellow web3 enthusiast Danica Swanson here and here. I created the art at the top of those pieces. I'm very new to digital art, and I go back and forth between practicing that and working with colored pencils.

Truth be told, when I grow up I want to be a coloring book artist like the marvelous Amy Cesari, author/creator of the Coloring Book of Shadows planners. I'm working on a Pagan-themed coloring and activity book now, which I expect to publish through Amazon KDP later in the year.

I've been greatly inspired by artist Amy Cesari's magical planners and coloring courses. Pictured is a page from the Coloring Book of Shadows Planner for a Magical 2024 for January. The mediums I used are soluble coffee for staining the page, colored pencils (both regular and metallic), white gel pen, and gold marker.

Again, I'm not sure what I want to do as far as writing. Current inspirations at Paragraph, Substack, and Medium are:

• I love what Danica is doing over at Paragraph. Her interview with the founder of the site, Colin Armstrong, makes a good argument for considering it as a platform. Although, I'm unsure if it's mostly web3 oriented or how well other topics do there. 

• Occult and fiction author Taylor Ellwood at Substack.

• Activist and founder of StudentLoanJustice.org Alan Collinge at Medium.

What each of the three above have in common is having a consistent, though not rigid, theme. That's what I did in my BellaOnline days first with the Pagan site, then the Great Lakes and Sweepstakes sites. It looks like some of my old articles are still up on the Sweepstakes site along with my face. It was a great place to learn short-form article writing so popular at the time. Lisa Shea founded BellaOnline, I believe, after a bad experience with About.com (any oldster remember that one?). She's a superwoman who's parlayed her love of writing about practically everything, creating art, and web publishing into a career.

A peek at things to come as time allows in 2024. Graphic created by Trish Deneen. I'm having so much fun creating things like dot-to-dots and word finds for the activity book.

I have an idea for a theme possibly for Paragraph. I will peruse that site to see what others are using it for. My goal is to do what Danica did with our collaborations. She created the essays for Paragraph, placed my art as the header image, and then created an NFT on the Zora platform of the art which linked back to the essay, thus creating circular linking. If someone finds the essay first, they may hop over to Zora to see the NFT page and vice versa. If this materializes, my first contribution there would be a book review of sorts on a popular topic with my own art as the header with a related NFT on Zora.

Then there's YouTube content, which I've only touched on at my Northland Hearth channel. Current inspirations are:

• Heathen actor and indie filmmaker Kyle Hester.

• His wife Tracy Ray with her Gluten-Free Kitchen Cafe channel.

• Also about 1000 ambience/ASMR and craft channels (only half joking).

I love creating video content, but it's so time consuming that it's on the backburner for now.

Welcome to the new incarnation of an old blog. Will I move it somewhere else? I don't know. I know there's an element of hustle, and I'm exhausted by hustle culture. My day job has turned into that over the years simply by trying to keep and/or find work. I've been precariously balancing between fighting the new technology from taking my jobs to jumping on the bandwagon in hopes of "investing in my future." That's in quotes because I've heard it all before.

But 2024 feels like a good year to ride the current I'm on. In occult circles, the term current refers to a set of traditions, practices, and beliefs associated with a system and the energy surrounding it. Wicca, Thelema, Asatru, various polytheisms, New Age, and many others are systems that all have their own currents with other currents stemming from them. Pagan author and blogger John Beckett discusses riding the strength of currents to our advantage here. Is it the same as zeitgeist, aka the "spirit" of an age? I think a current is more the spirit of a system.

One of my practice Zorbs. I created two for Danica to be used as NFTs linked to the essays previously mentioned. She describes them at length here. Zorbs are a current unto themselves. She's created a beautiful set here that combines quotes from the essay with one of the Zorbs.

The system I'm trying to catch a current on is creating income streams from web content in a way that's to my benefit instead of the soul sucking that has been my experience in the past. That system is intertwined with the zeitgeist of the emergence of web3. Would milieu be a better word? Or should I call it scenius? I feel like zeitgeist better describes how big it seems. However you describe it, feel free to come ride the current with me for a while. Maybe we can figure this thing out together.

Notes: I haven't explained much about NFTs and Zora. Those are big topics to cover later. One of my creative inspirations is essayist and senior editor Danica Swanson. I found her through an image search for a Pagan altar several years ago. Since then, I've been fangirling and followed her around different sites and landed at her profile on Farcaster (I'm @trishd over there). Fellow polytheists enthusiastic about web3 can be hard to find, so I recommend checking her out. She has a better handle on the "spirit of the age" and the lexicon than I do right now.

Disclosure: I may earn referral rewards from the links to HubPages and Paragraph. Also, as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links in this post.

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