April 7, 2023, 6:31 a.m.
Volume 4, Resources 7: Mercury Stardust and a Big Yikes for BetterHelp
Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice
This is a public issue of Enthusiastic Encouragement & Dubious Advice. Feel free to share it!
Hi friends. I am still off from my day job and the podcast. My mother’s funeral is next week so I have been doing things for that as well as chipping away at unpacking and doing some nesting. One of my goals for this year was to make our bedroom more of a sanctuary and I’ve decided to expand that to our entire home. I want our home to give me a sense of joy and peace and not feel like a never-ending chore. It’s definitely going to take work to get there, but it’s work I’m willing to do. This week I covered our bedroom window in sheets of suncatchers from Rainbow Symphony (not an ad, I just love their products):
If you want a suncatcher with my logo on it (trust me, it’s rad), send me your mailing address and I’ll pop one in the mail once I unpack them. They are totally removable (had some up for years in our old rental and they came off cleanly).
I did manage to unpack our library and there is definitely a box of books missing but it feels so good to have all our books out where I can see them. I’ll definitely be giving a tour on Instagram at some point.
It’s a resource week so here we go!
Resource #1: Mercury Stardust aka The Trans Handy Ma’am
Mercury Stardust is “a professional home maintenance technician, burlesque performer, and award-winning activist.” Do you want to know what she really is? She is a goddamned DELIGHT, y’all. I adore her and her content so much. She gives amazing and compassionate home maintenance advice and tips on TikTok and Instagram and I cannot even begin to tell you how good it feels to learn these things without being condescended to.
It is rare that I give a book recommendation in this newsletter for a book I haven’t read yet; however, Mercury Stardust has a book coming out in August that is available for pre-order, Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust (Bookshop | Amazon). This book has guidance for over 50 project-specific home repairs as well as general guidance for maintenance. On top of that, there are helpful illustrations and QR codes that link to videos that help make this information accessible to different kinds of learners. Brilliant. I definitely already pre-ordered our copy.
Resource #2: Gross Behaviour from BetterHelp
From an early March issue of Violet Blue’s Cybersecurity Roundup I was horrified to learn that the teletherapy app BetterHelp was sharing people’s data including health data to advertising companies. This is multiple layers of abominable and thoroughly disgusting. If you’re reading this newsletter, there’s a chance you may be using BetterHelp, have considered it, or know someone who uses it so I wanted to pass this along. “FTC bans teletherapy company BetterHelp from sharing consumer health data with advertisers.”
That’s it for this week! You can shop any books I’ve mentioned in this newsletter at my affiliate shop, The Infophile’s Bookshop, and support independent bookstores. If you want to send me some snail mail, you can find me at P.O. Box 21481, Oakland, CA 94620-1481. If you are a subscriber and would like for me to send you some happy mail, feel free to give me your address.
If you enjoy this newsletter, here are ways to show your support for my writing and resource curation (other than spreading the word, of course!):