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​Friday Inspiration 455​

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This is the kind of stuff that YouTube doesn’t usually put in my feed, probably because it’s a very chill, short video about deciding to not take tent stakes when you go backpacking, but I love it (video) (thanks, Liesl)

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Note: I don’t accept many sponsor offers for this newsletter, but this week I was approached by AAA and it seemed like a good fit—I’ve been a AAA member since 2010. So midway through this edition of the newsletter, you’ll see their sponsorship message (which offers 50% off a AAA Membership (!).

It turns out this is actually from 2017, so maybe you’ve seen it before: A golden retriever followed a Google Maps photographer around his home island in South Korea, and as a result, ended up in a bunch of the Street View photos. It’s funny how often things like this pop back up on the internet over and over again (this Mirror article is dated March 7th of this year?).

I am not planning on doing a ton of promoting this, but I did compile a bunch of my stories and drawings about adventure into a paperback book, and it went live online this week. It’s called Contour Lines: Semi-Rad Stories From a Decade of Adventure and Misadventure. (If you’re a Patreon supporter, I’ll share info on how to get a free ebook copy of it in my next update this week or next). If you’d like a paperback or Kindle, here’s the link.​

I always appreciate the effort, and probably the inter-office conversations/debates/arguing that are required to produce listicles like this one: The 85 Best Quentin Tarantino Characters Ever, Ranked (Did I also scroll all the way to the end to see who made it into the top 10? Yes I did. And I was not disappointed)

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I say this probably way more often than I should in this newsletter, but I really appreciate the people who dedicate themselves to writing jokes in < 140 characters.

Maybe you’ve heard the legend that Jack Kerouac wrote the entire first draft of On the Road in a three-week binge, on a single 120-foot scroll of paper that kept rolling through his typewriter without interruption to replace individual sheets of paper. That story is of course not quite true (the paper part is, but the “three weeks” is sort of a self-created myth). Anyway, I thought this McSweeney’s piece was hilarious: If Jack Kerouac Tried to Write On the Road Now​

I got quite a few replies to last week’s essay about staying in touch with friends, and one of them was this video (thanks, Rob), a 23-minute on-stage conversation between Trevor Noah and Simon Sinek, in which they talked about friendship, loneliness, and how those things affect how we see the world, and how we show up. Lots of poignant stuff in a very casual chat.

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