As a person who routinely has these types of conversations with friends and family members—“she was in that one movie, with the guy from the spy movie, and the aliens came …” — I appreciate somebody taking the time to take this joke even further. (video)
If you’re a pocket notebook user (even if 80% of the content in your notebooks is things like grocery lists and illegible notes to yourself), I bet you will like this essay Marty Brodsky wrote about his many notebooks.
I’d love to hear how this idea took shape: The New York Times had author Mahogany L. Browne write a love letter to hip hop, but compose it entirely of lyrics from songs (not sure if that was her idea or their idea). I scrolled through the entire thing on my laptop (recommended), and I believe the oldest lyric in here is from 1987, and the newest is from 2022, which is a span of 35 years of music. Also: The photos are great. (thanks, Syd)
I appreciate Craig Mod’s newsletters and general approach to creating and living life, and his writing and photos about eating sandwiches and walking (hiking) Wainright’s Coast to Coast Walk, an apparently very famous long-distance route across England that I had heretofore never heard of, did not let me down.
I clicked on this Substack headline, “The Naked Cowboy’s Morning Routine,” mostly because the Naked Cowboy (aka Robert John Burke) is a busker, not a CEO or some Silicon Valley thought leader. Was it interesting? I’ll just say that when the Naked Cowboy needs to get psyched up for a day of playing guitar and singing in his underwear in Times Square, he reads from “the Naked Cowboy Dialogue, a tattered 100-page manifesto he’s been revising for more than two decades.” As Burke says in the story, “I read this every single day. I’ll do this and get completely jacked out of my mind.”
Jason Kottke linked to this post about design that people want to use even when it’s frowned upon/prohibited, using the quote “If it looks neat, people will want to take a photo with it. If it looks comfortable, people will want to sit on it. If it looks fun, people will play around on it.” But I liked this one too: “But honestly, a lot of it, I think, is just that some designers are amazing at imagining things, but not as amazing at imagining them surrounded by the universe.”
I don’t know how else to frame this, but here’s the first alternate headline I typed for this Smithsonian article: The Inspiring True Story Of The Beetle That Gets Eaten By A Frog And Crawls All The Way Through The Frog’s Digestive Tract And Exits Out The Frog’s Ass, Unharmed. I did not watch the 115-minute video, but I’m glad the researchers did, because wow, what a motivational story.
Lastly: I made a quick video about how to make a living as a creative, something that I’ve been figuring out for almost two decades now (and in that time, I have tried all four of the approaches I describe in the video).
