It'll Never Be Enough Until You Decide It's Enough In and around the Devils Tower Lodge back in 2014, there was not much cell reception, and the satellite internet was kind of unpredictable. My friend Forest and I were there to shoot a short film, and Max Lowe was there working on a different video project. One afternoon, I walked into the living room at the lodge to check my messages and social media on my phone, and jokingly said something like, “Ooh I better check Instagram, how many likes...
about 20 hours ago • 4 min read
Friday Inspiration 475 I have said something very similar to this before in this newsletter, but: I could watch Action Bronson going around to restaurants and eating their food all day. I love to eat food, he loves to eat food, and I love to watch him eat food and talk about it while connecting with the people who made the food. (video) I was trying to find a word to describe the images Eric Kogan captures in his photography around New York, and I think “playful” is close, but I assume he...
8 days ago • 3 min read
Friday Inspiration 474 I love Nathan Zed’s YouTube videos, which are kind of short editorials about his ideas, and I especially love this one, about how trying hard is becoming cool again (I hope he’s right) (video) I certainly don’t want to tell you how to live your life, but if you ever get tired/sick of scrolling through whatever kinds of videos your preferred social media is feeding you, may I suggest finding a subreddit you like and scrolling through that instead? For example, the Things...
14 days ago • 3 min read
Race Report: Motatapu Ultra Maybe a half-hour earlier, I had thought, “What if nothing really happens during this race, and I don’t have anything to write about?” Then I fell into the river. I guess to be more accurate, I was already in the river, as I had been walking/jogging in it for almost a mile and a half—I just stepped in the wrong spot and fell kind of sideways, up to about my armpits. This was about Mile 21.5 of the Motatapu Ultra, a 52.5 km/32.5 mi race on New Zealand’s Motatapu...
15 days ago • 9 min read
Friday Inspiration 473 I kind of wondered, “is it just me, or is this a really good 3.5-minute film about a guy who bike commutes in Oklahoma City?" It has 46,000 views on YouTube, so I feel like I’m not alone. (video) This post from the Tales From Retail subreddit is about someone bringing an ADMIRABLE amount of coupons to a checkout, but it’s also possibly the most literary thing I’ve read on Reddit, and I am definitely saving it to maybe use in my writing course in the future. At first I I...
21 days ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 472 You may not be a pizza history nerd to the degree that you’ll watch this entire 24-minute video, but I am, and I would just like to point out that around the 4-minute mark, we are introduced to Peter Regas, who is just a regular guy/financial trader whose “passion job” is researching the history of different pizza restaurants around the U.S., which I think is just inspiring. Also, if you believe the first pizzeria in the U.S. was Lombardo’s in New York (I sure did),...
28 days ago • 2 min read
Reminder To Touch Grass The snow felt like it was just going to keep coming, like the news has been, but at least you can ski on snow. I pushed our shovel down the middle of the sidewalk, clearing a path, heaving piles of snow onto the parking strip. I mean, somebody was going to have to do it. I usually shovel the walk of the house next door too, and the other house, the other next door, because I might as well, while I’m out there. Nathan lives four doors down, on the corner, and we don’t...
29 days ago • 1 min read
Friday Inspiration 471 I support Van Neistat on Patreon but I don’t always get around to watching every single video he puts out—which is a bummer, because there’s always a gem somewhere in most of his stuff. I particularly enjoyed the reference to “Eastern laziness vs. Western laziness” in this one, which you could probably alternately call “Eastern relaxing vs. Western relaxing.” (video) I assume that you, like me, have had no less than one thousand instances in your life in which you had a...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Friday Inspiration 470 I have been slowly listening to Oliver Burkeman’s new book,Meditations for Mortals, and a couple of the sections of this short video draw on chapters of the book. I don’t quite know how to describe his work—it’s not quite “anti-productivity,” but he sure makes me feel better about not getting everything on my to-do list done. If you don’t have eight minutes to watch the full thing, I’d recommend watching the short section on “Productivity Debt” starting at about 3:30....
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
