Friday Inspiration 447



Friday Inspiration 447

I don’t usually put my own videos in this space, but I decided to make my “How I Became A Cruiser Bike Guy” essay into a video, and it seems to be resonating with a few people on YouTube, so I thought I’d share it here. (video)

Pretty interesting piece about the “top thinkers” of 1974 trying to predict what the world would be like in 50 years, and what they got right and what they got wrong. One prediction: “commuting for business purposes would go out of style. It would become more convenient to let electrons, rather than people, do the traveling…”
(Via Kottke.org)

In my recent efforts to learn how to rest better/at all, I have been thinking a lot about this Oliver Burkeman piece from early August, “What would it mean to be done for the day?

I don’t listen to baseball on the radio much anymore, but I will definitely hum with nostalgia while reading someone else’s essay about his family’s history of listening to baseball on the radio. (gift link)

This is five years old but I just saw found out about it through a meme I saw, and was happy to find out that it’s true—a New Zealand man who found out he was going to be laid off from his job brought an emotional support clown to the meeting.

Do you have to have listened to music on cassette tapes to appreciate the aesthetics of cassette tapes? Or to appreciate this monumental effort to archive the huge range of cassette designs produced in the heyday of tapes? I sure hope not.

As an “Inbox Zero” (ok, lately more like “Inbox 20” person), I cannot relate to this, but I am impressed by it. Congrats to this guy on 100,000 unread emails.

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Semi-Rad

Writer, artist, filmmaker, columnist for Outside Magazine. My newsletter about creativity, adventure, and enthusiasm goes out to 15,000+ subscribers every week.

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Friday Inspiration 523 NEXT WEEK: On Thursday, February 19, at 6:00 p.m. MST, I will be doing a YouTube livestream + Q&A session about this year’s Freeflow Institute Running to Stand Still trail running and writing workshop in June. Sign up here via this link and I’ll send you an email the morning of the webinar containing the link to the livestream and a discount code good for $250 off your course registration. Hope to see you there! -- I love that Flea (yes, Flea from the Red Hot Chili...

thumbnail from The Dream of Finishing One’s To-Do List | “Retirement Plan” (2026 Oscar Nominee) | The New Yorker

Friday Inspiration 522 For a good chunk of this video, I thought, “maybe this is a little too heavy to put in my newsletter,” and then I remembered the director is Irish, and it couldn’t stay heavy the entire time, which is probably why it got nominated for an Oscar (video) I started following Dedra Smith/Pikitsuaki Designs on Instagram a few weeks ago because one of her wonderfully clever western designs made into my feed and I thought “well, this looks interesting” (I think it was this one...

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