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​Friday Inspiration 426​

I think it’s a testament to Beau Miles’s YouTube following that he can make a 7-minute video about sorting old screws and it gets half a million views. Did I watch the whole thing? I did. In one shot. (video)

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IMPORTANT: If you missed this announcement last week, TODAY is the LAST DAY to order a limited edition Periodic Table of the Elements of Adventure Nalgene bottle. You have until midnight MST tonight. We’ve sold 200+ so far, so thanks to everyone who’s ordered.

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OK this definitely doesn’t start out as what you might call “optimistic,” but I think the last quarter or so of this essay, “The End of the Extremely Online Era,” really gives me some hope too—like maybe there will be a day in the not-so-distant future when we all just get kind of bored with scrolling through our phones, hoping for the slot machine to deliver something interesting.

Sure, you’ve seen those crosswalks where you’re supposed to grab a small orange flag as you cross the street so motorists will (in theory, at least) definitely see you while you’re crossing. But, hear me out, instead of a flag, what about … a brick?​

This isn’t anything you might call groundbreaking, but it’s still fun—and I just enjoy it when someone out there is like, “Hey, I think I’ll compile a list of all the sports teams named after technologies, and make a web page for it.”

I get it when people half-jokingly say they feel “personally attacked” by an article/online opinion. But when my wife sends me an article titled “The Pleasures of Tsundoku, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Book Piles,” I am not even sure I am half-joking when I say I feel personally attacked.

I don’t feel like the Contagious Laughter subreddit makes me any smarter after I spend a few minutes on it, but it never fails to make me laugh, and that counts for something, right? If you do not need a laugh because you also need to feel that every piece of content you experience needs to make you smarter, by all means, don’t click on this 10-second clip.

I love Matt Pfahlert’s book of concert posters he designed, and he’s got a ton of them for sale (Wilco, The National, Jason Isbell, The Black Keys, etc.), as well as a bunch of bike- and outdoors-related stuff—I think this one and this one in particular are probably most relevant to the audience for this newsletter.

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