Friday Inspiration 538
the longest (best?) live album ever, hell is the grocery store checkout, "Please Use AI"
Fred Again.. uploaded the audio from every concert on his USB002 tour (October 3 2025-February 27 2026), and at 108 hours, it is probably the longest YouTube “video” in history (there’s no real video, just a static image). I am only about five hours into it but have told more than one friend that it it my favorite live album ever. (video)
My friend Anna sent me this: A website that takes the current weather conditions of where you live (or whatever city you enter in the box) and presents a Mark Rothko painting to match it. I have found it particularly nice to check around sunrise and sunset.
People know Tommy Rivers Puzey for a lot of things, like running really fast, inspiring lots and lots of people, surviving lung cancer, and looking good without a shirt on, but this video is probably one of my favorite pieces of Tommy Rivs content ever: A compilation of dozens of times he has stopped during a run, saying “check this out,” to point out something interesting in nature.
I prefer running by myself most of the time—mostly I tell myself that’s where I get all my thinking done, but sometimes I do like Murakami says and “run to acquire a void.” But I also enjoy running with a friend once a week, so I was interested in this article from newsletter sponsor Precision Fuel & Hydration, Buddy up or go solo? How to decide your best approach to training. One of the things that I never thought of (which felt very obvious when I read it) was that running/exercising with a friend keeps you at a “conversational pace,” which is a very low-tech way of regulating exercise intensity (aka keeping your heart rate in Zone 2, if you’re into that sort of thing). And of course a few other things. [reminder that this link will give you 15% off your first 2026 purchase of PFH products on the website]
I found this wonderful poem, “Please Use AI,” via my friend Mario Fraioli, who I believe was correct when he said, “G’damn, this was so good.”
I apologize if you’ve written a check at a busy grocery store in the past few years, but this is some of the funniest writing I have ever read about the grocery store checkout experience.
When the book you’ve written comes out, if you want people to read/buy it, you have to find as many different ways of talking about it as you can, and this piece by Joe Bond was one of the most interesting ideas I’ve seen. His new/first novel, Hope House, is set in a home for troubled teenagers, heavily inspired by the one his dad worked in for 40 years. So he asked his dad what he got wrong about the boys, and the home, in his book.
I interviewed Wendy Wagner, whose book Girl in the Creek is one of the only horror books I’ve read in the past decade or so (because we met in person in Portland and I thought “Wendy seems so nice!”), for the My Favorite Things podcast a couple weeks ago. We talked about So You Want to Be a Wizard; Twin Peaks; Carr, O’Keeffe, Kahlo: Places of Their Own; the board game Ark Nova, and The Last Christmas Mixtape, which is a digital album of 23 different covers of the song The Last Christmas by Wham! (which is still available online).
I spent almost 40 minutes scrolling through Reddit the other night to try to find something very quick, easily digestible, and fun (this newsletter doesn’t write itself!), and I finally landed on this video of a gondolier very casually and very perfectly kicking an errant soccer ball, and while it is unlikely to alter the course of your life significantly, I think you will agree that it is a quite satisfying way to spend 12 seconds of your Friday (or 36 if you watch it three times in a row like I did).
I am in the middle of writing my next update for paid supporters on Patreon (and Substack) and it’s about deadlines as a creative strategy and a “business plan.” If you’d like to read it this Saturday morning (and you’d like to keep this newsletter going!), you can join my [intentionally very affordable] Patreon here or do a [also intentionally very affordable] paid Substack subscription here.
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