cliff-notes
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Love the life you have, with the stuff you have, and try to improve it a little bit each day.
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Take pictures of everything.
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Tell your friends and family that you love them.
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Talk to random strangers, connect with people, even just for a few minutes. You may brighten their day, and yours.
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Do something you are scared to do. Start small and work up to “No Fucking Way, I’m doing that” kind of stuff.
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Declutter both physically and mentally. Give something away. Clean up that pile of papers on your desk.
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Read a book with your phone on silent.
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If you want to buy something, put it in your cart and wait a day or two. Then, ask yourself, Will this still be useful in three months? Will this bring happiness? Is this thing worth going to work for?
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You can skip the pursuit of happiness altogether and just be happy.
🍿 Watched: The New Yorker at 100
A Netflix documentary centered on the New Yorker’s vaunted newsroom, this star-studded documentary explores the history and inner workings of the iconic, century-old magazine.
Remembering The Family Kitchen Phone
Tell me you had a kitchen phone with a super-long, curly cord so you could stretch it into the next room for some privacy without telling me…
What a little piece of nostalgia. I love this thing.
Bonus points if the kitchen phone was the only phone in the house. Super Bonus points if you had to deal with a party line.
If you want one, go here and sign up for back-in-stock alerts.
Cliff Notes: Q4 Photography Update
I’m going to try to update my photography goings-on every few months or so, so I have a good look back on all things photography-related.
Love. Hope. Fear. Vulnerability. Strength. Life.
Love. Hope. Fear. Vulnerability. Strength. Life. All wrapped up in the most beautiful and perfect comic. Randall Munroe knocks it out of the park. 💛
Jet Propulsion Laboratory - Space Travel Posters
NASA offers an impressive collection of space travel posters and wallpapers.
Notes from the series "The Eightfold Path".
My personal notes from listening to the first episode of the Waking Up app series “The Eightfold Path” with Dan Harris, Joseph Goldstein, and Sam Harris.
Scratch Pad Thoughts
** None of these cornerstone ideas are truly my own; I’ve read/seen them before, thought about them, changed the wording to fit my life. Try to do the same, make them your own. Write your own versions and look at them daily for a few weeks over coffee. Tweak, read, think, tweak again until they are just right for you.
I learned about this website from Ed Young’s Newsletter. I think everyone in the U.S. needs to see it.
About The Website Unbreaking:
The United States is experiencing institutional collapse at a speed and scale that are difficult to understand, especially through feeds and updates that atomize our attention. We believe that mapping the damage done and its human costs—and the pushback and resilience work already underway—is necessary groundwork for building and retaining political agency.
“That you feel something to be right may have its cause in your never having thought much about yourself and having blindly accepted what has been labeled right since your childhood.” ~Friedrich Nietzsche
This always brings back so many memories of sitting by a fire in the dark drinking beer, and someone would recite The Cremation of Sam McGee from memory.
You can listen to a pretty good audio version here:
‘The Cremation of Sam McGee’ 🔗 / alaska.org
“There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge ? I cremated Sam McGee.“
Consider adding this What is a feed page to your blog to help people who may not know what a RSS feed is or how to use it. Compliments of Matt Webb.
Just added it to mine.
‘Your World Is Burning. Here’s What You Can Actually Do About It.’ 🔗 Joan Westenberg / joanwestenberg.com
You can doomscroll, or you can create.
You can rant, or you can build.
You can theorize, or you can act.
You can wish, or you can work.
🔗 How Your Thinking Changes at 60, by Andy Hawthorne (Andy’s Blog, 25 Jan 2025, no longer online)
Then you turn 60. And something shifts.
You stop caring about things that don’t matter.
You don’t need to prove yourself anymore.You don’t need permission.
You don’t waste time on people who drain your energy.You’ve seen enough trends, fads, and “next big things” to know they all pass.
And most importantly, you realize time is no longer on your side.
Carl Griffith’s 1847 Oregon Trail Sourdough Starter
Want a Sourdough Starter that’s been active since 1847? I can’t verify that the offer is still active, but we did it several years ago. Follow the directions exactly, or they won’t send it to you.
‘Source’ 🔗 Griffith / carlsfriends.net
What TV series intros do you watch every time?
Does watching the intro to every episode mean something?
Netflix, AppleTV, Hulu, etc., allow you to skip intros. What does this say about the intro quality or the show? Or about us as humans who are always in a hurry. This behavior of skipping intros may reflect our impatience and desire to get to the main content quickly. As a designer of intros, do you get the data on how many people skip your intro? Does it make you want to change it? Why do some shows change each season’s intro and others do not? Budget? How much does it cost to change the intro each season? Is this a metric that is used at all?
Such curious questions.
What we do: We always watch the whole intro of the first episode; it can be a source of insight into the show, somehow set the tone, or even give hints, and then we don’t watch it again until the last episode. But there are exceptions. When the intro is fantastic, the show is an all-time favorite, or it seems an essential part of the show, or maybe it’s because you don’t want the show to end, and you want to watch every second of it. This has been the case for Chefs Table, Game of Thrones, Murders In The Building, Severance, Westworld, and others.
What about when the intro or trailer is better than the show itself? Maybe the folks making the intro need a raise because they condensed your mediocre show/movie into something good!
I’m talking just about intros, but the same could be said about the credits. How many times do you watch the credits? For me, it’s rare, but when I do, it’s because I want to know where it was filmed, the names of the people who made such an amazing piece of art, or the show was so powerful that you want to absorb every last drop.
Powerful article that impacted me deeply:
A Firsthand Account of What Homelessness in America Is Really Like
PSA: If you rebuild your website from the logs page and your custom CSS is not loading, go to Design -> Open Theme -> Custom CSS -> Update CSS, and your custom CSS will load. I just did a rebuild, had the problem, and that fixed it.