Hello.
My name is Karen Templer and I’ll be your blogger here at Collapse and Delight. I value good intel, good writing and a good debate — anything to broaden my horizons — and my best skill, I believe, as a writer, editor, photo editor and all-around magpie, is drawing connections between things (be they words, images and/or ideas) and putting them together in ways that add up to something more. Which is what I’ll be attempting with this blog.
Here, you might encounter posts about any of the many things that interest and/or concern me — creativity and literature; nature and climate change; our participatory dystopia; architecture, the notion of “home,” the housing market and homelessness; manufactured insecurity, aging/ageism and the beauty industry; consumerism, slow fashion, surveillance capitalism; democracy and equality… — and particularly about the ways in which these (and other) things intersect or overlap. If I’m doing it right, where it goes will surprise me, and hopefully you, too.
Right now there is no paywalled content and no fixed editorial timeline. I’ll simply be posting on occasion, when I have something to share, and you can see if you’re into it. [Please note that Collapse and Delight was moved to Substack in June 2026, the rest is archival content from its former home.]
If there’s one thing my years on the Internet have taught me, it’s the importance of being crystal clear about the thing I value most, which is diversity. Diversity of backgrounds, styles and perspectives, and diversity of opinion. It’s our differences, our variety, that make the world the fascinating place that it is. I can’t imagine anything more boring (or even terrifying) than a world in which we all look the same, think the same, act the same. What on earth would we even talk about? So I want to be clear that everyone is welcome here, regardless of age, race, religion or who you love.
• For some background on me, and on the creation of Collapse and Delight, see the 2024 intro: Everything Is a Blog
• I can be reached at collapseanddelight@kt.studio
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Why subscribe?
Even though currently all content is free, subscribing to Collapse and Delight will allow you to choose how and where you want to receive notifications of new posts, whether in email or the app, and it also helps me to gauge interest in what I’m doing here!
And what’s a pledge?
That said, there will likely ultimately be some features or content that is for paying subscribers. If you like what you see here and want me to (be able to) do more of it, you can optionally make a pledge to sign up for a paid subscription at such time as I enable that functionality. You won’t be charged unless or until I make that move, but pledging your support in advance lets me know what level of support I can expect.
You can subscribe without pledging by simply clicking “No pledge” in the popup. Thank you for subscribing either way!
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE
This blog is the work of me, Karen Templer, under my one-woman business entity, KT Creative Studio, LLC. All content is written by me (no AI ever) and copyright Karen Templer/KT Creative Studio, LLC, except where otherwise credited.
THIRD-PARTY PAYWALLS: A NOTE
When done well, linking can be an art form, but it’s more challenging these days due to the rise of paywalls. I completely understand and support people’s right to be paid for their work (and same here), but it does mean I’ll inevitably be linking to things you can or can’t get to depending what you subscribe to, or whose paywall limit you may have already encountered in a given month. I’ll do my best to identify sources of links before you click them, as well as whatever I can do to get you access, such as using the New York Times’s Gift Link function (which makes the content viewable without a subscription for 30 days from the creation of the gift link). But there’s an extent to which that’s now just the nature of the beast.
