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ANNOUNCEMENT: There’s a longer story about this on the DFTBA store page, but we are putting my “Periodic Table of the Elements of Adventure” on a LIMITED EDITION Nalgene bottle. You can order one from right now until midnight Mountain Time on April 5th (next Friday), and that’s it. Order now or live a life of regret. (Here’s a short video of the whole bottle so you can see the whole design)
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If you own more than one mug, and you click on one thing in this list today, let it be this brilliant piece about the worst mug in your cupboard. I was going to include a quote from it, but I couldn’t decide on one. And for the record, my current favorite mug in our cupboard is actually Hilary’s, and the worst mug in the cupboard is probably one I brought to the relationship.
I love many things about this story, including but not limited to the fact that it’s about the guy who picks up dog poop on our local trail up Mt. Jumbo here in Missoula and leaves passive-aggressive (or maybe just aggressive?) notes for people calling them out, but also that it’s 6,000-plus words, which, given the average reader’s attention span nowadays, is really going for it when you’re writing a story about a guy who picks up dog poop on a trail in a town of 75,000 people. To be fair, there’s a lot there.
Payson High School, where Footloose was filmed in 1983, is scheduled to be demolished after the end of the 2023-3024 school year. Students wanted Kevin Bacon to come back to the high school for prom, and he told them he would, via a video call into a school assembly (that was broadcast on the Today Show).
Sure, this is a map of the internet in 1973, but how does it make you feel? Because I have feelings about it. Like nostalgia, but not?
This is a super-fun idea, and I think needed for a lot of people who enjoy creating things: A free (or pay what you want) zine, How to Keep Your Hobby From Becoming A Job.
This short blurb of a blog post is kind of all over the place, references a Slate article from 2014, and also the Emily Dickinson poem “That Love is all there is,” all to say: We’ve only been roasting vegetables since 1980? How is this invention younger than I am?
[RELATED: I have made this Brussels Sprouts Roasted with Kimchi and Scallions recipe at least 15 times since I found it in November 2022, and I can all but guarantee it help you win friends and influence people]
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Writer, artist, filmmaker, columnist for Outside Magazine. My newsletter about creativity, adventure, and enthusiasm goes out to 15,000+ subscribers every week.
Friday Inspiration 512 NOTE: Like I said last week, I'm not doing a Black Friday email—this is a regular Friday Inspiration email! But if you scroll down to the bottom, you'll see a bunch of images and links to stuff in my DFTBA shop, some of which may be appropriate for someone on your holiday shopping list. There was something funky about the links I put in last week's email, and that has been fixed this week (sorry about that!). -- If you haven’t seen One Battle After Another yet, this has...
I Forgot To Stop Writing Bad Poems (For Several Years) About three years ago, I decided to start writing bad poetry on a fitness app I use regularly. When I checked last week, I had written more than 500 poems. Mildly curious about whether any of them were halfway decent, I gave them a quick read. And then … … did someone offer me a significant sum of money to publish some of my running poetry in a chapbook? No. OK, but was I pleasantly surprised to discover that I had, through persistence...
Friday Inspiration 511 NOTE: I will not be sending out a Black Friday email about all the merch in my DFTBA store, but I put a bunch of images and links to mugs, t-shirts, posters, and signed books at the end of this email (including some new stuff!), so scroll to the end if you're starting to do some holiday shopping. -- Sometimes this space gets filled by a video of a person skiing some insanely dangerous line in the mountains or a person taking on some other difficult challenge in nature,...