Friday Inspiration 293
I think even if you don’t live in or have a relationship with New York, this video captures a little bit of what it’s starting to feel like as cities reopen after the pandemic (video) I’m not saying you have to watch all 13-some minutes of this video in which these guys weld a tandem bicycle to an old Honda Civic hatchback to make a bike-powered car, but the moment at 4:29 when the first passerby cheers for them is pretty fantastic This is pretty cool: A self-supported Tour de France Why are heist movies, and specifically Steven Soderbergh’s heist movies, so entertaining? Victor Cheng is one of my favorite recent-ish Instagram follows, mostly for his beautiful shots of architecture around Hong Kong I just finished reading this oral history on the recommendation of an old friend, and if you have any interest in the start of the careers of The Strokes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem, Interpol, Vampire Weekend, or other bands around that scene in New York around that time, you might like it too Not entirely unrelated, I have been looping Rostam Batmanglij’s new album, Changephobia, for a couple weeks now, and loving it
—Brendan The post Friday Inspiration 293 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/07/friday-inspiration-293.html July 02, 2021 at 11:54PM
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Cycling Going-to-the-Sun Road In Glacier National Park
Driving Going-to-the-Sun Road is one of the most popular ways to see Glacier National Park in the summertime. It’s no secret that, for a few weeks during the spring, you can also bicycle that same road to Logan Pass when crews are not working to plow the snow off the road. This, I believe, is a cyclist’s dream: a car-free road through incredible mountain scenery, with 3,000 feet of descending. Mike Foote and I decided to try it on a weeknight, driving from Missoula, which is admittedly a bit of a long haul on a Monday afternoon, but a fun smash-and-grab adventure. I put together a quick video of our ride from a couple weeks ago, which I hope communicates the joy of it at least a little bit. —Brendan The post Cycling Going-to-the-Sun Road In Glacier National Park appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/07/cycling-going-to-sun-road-in-glacier.html July 02, 2021 at 12:54AM
Friday Inspiration 292
If you’ve ever described running as a “monastic” activity, then this film about Yukai Shimizu, a Buddhist monk and runner, is for you (thanks, Forest)(video) Paddy O’Connell made a great story about his dad, and dad stories, for the Outside Podcast Spend a few delightful minutes with this XKCD cartoon about U.S. towns and cities that share names This rock climbing-themed board game has now more than doubled its Kickstarter goal with 20 days left, and if you like rock climbing and board games, you might like it “meet dark fish: biologists suspect that up to 95% of the world’s total fish population lives in a deep layer of the ocean that is difficult to detect and we know little about.” I did not know IKEA hacking was a thing, but now I know a lot about it I would not say I love The Fast and the Furious, but I love Shea Serrano’s writing about movies so much that it makes me want to watch the movies he writes about —Brendan The post Friday Inspiration 292 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/friday-inspiration-292.html June 26, 2021 at 02:54AM
A List Of 20 Feelings You Can Experience While Camping
This is an excerpt from the new book I co-authored with Forest Woodward, The Camping Life: Inspiration and Ideas for Endless Adventure (available at Bookshop, Amazon, REI, and your local bookstore). The title of this piece in the book is “A Brief List of Feelings You Can Experience Camping That You [Nearly] Can’t Get Anywhere Else,” and it started as a list I was making to remind myself to get out and spend a few nights under the stars. All of these photos were taken by Forest, and either appear in the pages of the book or are from the outtakes. 1. The satisfaction of finding the perfect log or rock to sit on, even if it’s not as comfortable as a chair
11. The satisfaction of being able to carry everything you need in a pack or the trunk of a car
The Camping Life is available through Bookshop, Amazon, and independent bookstores everywhere.
The post A List Of 20 Feelings You Can Experience While Camping appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-list-of-20-feelings-you-can.html June 25, 2021 at 12:54AM
How To Use A Standing Desk
not the first time something like this has happened, if I’m being honest (More stuff like this on my Instagram) The post How To Use A Standing Desk appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/how-to-use-standing-desk.html June 23, 2021 at 02:54AM
Friday Inspiration 291
Some days I get kind of down on the negative things the Internet has brought into my daily life, and other days, the internet gives me a video of a guy riding around London, DJing on a sound system mounted on the front of his bike, and I’m like you know what, the Internet is all right. (video) (A photo of Dom Whiting’s bike setup is on Instagram) FiveThirtyEight, which you may only refer to during election years, has devised an index to determine the most disrespectful home runs in baseball history I will be running the New York City Marathon and raising money for the American Cancer Society this November, and if you’d like to do the same thing, I have been informed that the American Cancer Society has a few spots available, which you can sign up for at this link. “The Indiana Jones series is filled with such set pieces, in which lucky breaks—or is it divine intervention?—spare a character whose strength and stamina are, comparatively speaking, nothing special. The reason we love Indy isn’t because he’s exceptional, or even because, like his ’80s franchise contemporary Rocky Balboa, he won’t stay down. It’s because he doesn’t want to get up.” The Wander Women, three long-time friends in their mid-50s to early 60s, are on schedule to finish the Triple Crown of American hiking in 2021 (thanks, Ryan) Why I Stopped Blogging and Started Driving Around Town Screaming Out My Window A Food Critic Reviews the Swedish Chef’s New Restaurant —Brendan The post Friday Inspiration 291 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/friday-inspiration-291.html June 19, 2021 at 12:54AM
Surely These Notebooks Will Help Me Create Amazing Things
Perhaps you know someone like me, a person who cannot resist buying notebooks of all sizes. I buy pocket notebooks for doodles and quick journaling of brilliant ideas or pithy snippets of life, notebooks slightly bigger than pocket notebooks that are arguably big enough for writing a scene from a novel while sitting in a coffee shop and gazing out the window, large sketch pads big enough to spread out on a table and draw visual representations of ideas that will surely set the world on fire. I am on the Field Notes email list, and every time I receive an email announcing a new series of pocket notebooks, my subconscious quietly whispers, “Maybe this will be THE ONE.” You know where they really get you? Bookstores. You walk around, staring up at hundreds of great ideas on the shelves, perhaps pulling a few out and reading the front and back covers, oh wow, apparently millions of people thought this one was great, and then this one was said to be great by another famous author, and this one has been around for 75 years and this bookstore still has eight copies of it on the shelves so they must sell a hundred copies of it every year, geez there are so many good ideas in this building. And then you see the spinning rack of $18.99 notebooks and you’re like Shit Yeah, that’s where all these great ideas started—a notebook. And then suddenly, you are at the cash register, with one or two great books under your arm, and a fancy-ass notebook, on the pages of which you will no doubt write the novel of the century or something like that. Because obviously the main obstacle to you creating that masterpiece was not having *just* the right notebook. It was not the lack of an idea, or the dozens of hours of mulling it over in your head and molding it into something that actually makes sense, or the hundreds of hours sitting down and actually making the thing—no, it was the lack of a notebook. When you do this exact same thing, and you get home with your fancy new notebook, you know what I’d advise you to do? Don’t look at all the other fancy notebooks that you’ve bought that have nary a fucking chicken scratch of writing in their pages. It’s like a sink of dirty dishes, or a pile of unread books, or an overflowing trash can that you’re going to get around to emptying sometime, maybe today. When I die, someone will find my notebooks. Will they flip through them and start to piece together the chapters of an unpublished novel? Will they find a drawing that is so brilliant that it will sell for six figures, then be traded amongst collectors for decades, and then land in an art museum somewhere? Maybe the preliminary sketches and calculations for an invention that could change the world? Fuck no, they will not. They will find half-written grocery lists, pencil drawings of home-improvement projects, a few notes from a phone meeting that I thought would be useful later but I spent too much time actually listening instead of writing notes so now the notes make no sense, and collections of words that make no sense to me a week or two after I wrote them. (Is that the title of a movie my dad told me about, or an idea for an essay, or a phrase I thought would be a great book title if I could just write 60,000 words about it?) There are no dates on the notebooks or on the pages, no organization system, and to-do lists appear right next to hurried sketches of things that would be completely illegible to someone who was not provided any context to explain the drawing (and honestly also probably illegible to someone who was provided context to explain the drawing). That person will also find, I am absolutely sure, several dozen blank notebooks. Will someone write a wonderful book about my blank notebooks, a la Terry Tempest Williams’ When Women Were Birds? They will not. I mean, I’m pretty sure they won’t, but I guess you never know. You know how many of these notebooks I have with me when I have a quote, great idea, unquote? Zero. I am not a New York Times bestselling author, but I do technically make “a living” as a person who makes things that did not exist before, in various media like books, blogs, drawings, posters, films, and t-shirts. And I own many, many notebooks. Where are these notebooks when I get what I think is a “good idea*”? They are on a shelf in my house, a few feet away from vessels containing roughly 75 different writing utensils. *Often to later be categorized as actually-not-that-great-of-an-idea, sometimes a really bad idea, sometimes completely forgotten, sometimes written down somewhere and misplaced, sometimes written down somewhere as an idea I will surely execute “someday” when I have more time. Probably 95 percent of ideas I have are typed into the Notes app on my phone, a much less romantic method of jotting down something that may or may not be brilliant. You dream about being a writer who sits somewhere aesthetically pleasing or at least worthy of appearing in a scene in a biopic about you while frantically writing longhand because your hand can hardly keep up with your brain as the magic happens, but really when your actual ideas come to you, people see you tapping your phone and assume you’re just another person texting their spouse from the line at the grocery store asking if you should have picked up more garlic, tweeting inane shit as @Dave674359 while walking your dog, or replying to work emails instead of enjoying that slice of pizza on the patio. I don’t know how it is for other people, but that’s how it works for me, a sloppy human who has nothing figured out. I’d love to tell you how I finally found a way to journal and how it changed my life for the better. I would love to tell you how I discovered a way to discipline myself to finally start using these notebooks in an organized yet artistic manner. I would love to show you the beginning notes of a book idea, handwritten by me in the pages of a pocket notebook while sitting on a train moving through the Alps, or next to an alpine lake where I went to Figure Some Shit Out, or in a cafe at the edge of a bustling market in a city far from my home. Alas, I can do none of those things. I could, however, show you some really wobbly pencil diagrams I made last fall while assembling gutters to hang on my house. I mean, theoretically I could show you that, but at this point I have no idea which notebook that diagram is in. I think it’s here somewhere.
—Brendan The post Surely These Notebooks Will Help Me Create Amazing Things appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/surely-these-notebooks-will-help-me.html June 18, 2021 at 12:54AM
Insomniac Thinking
I like to alternate the two for a few hours starting at 2 a.m. (More stuff like this on my Instagram) The post Insomniac Thinking appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/insomniac-thinking.html June 17, 2021 at 07:54AM
Friday Inspiration 290
This film about Slim Pickins Outfitters is a great window into a small Texas town, a couple’s struggle to keep a small business alive through the pandemic, parenting, and all sorts of other stuff (video)
Wow I’m excited for the Who Are You, Charlie Brown? documentary that comes out in *checks calendar* two weeks This is from 2016, but if you a) love or have loved a dog and b) don’t mind getting a bit choked up, it’s for you Thank you, Isak, for pointing me toward this massively time-wasting (or is it really wasting time?) list of lists of lists on Wikipedia A great Danish ad spot about helmets (thanks, Ryan) Dog ejected from car crash found days later at sheep farm, herding them I am not sure how big the Venn diagram overlap is of people who read these Friday posts and people who are interested in addiction issues, but I had a nice chat with Becca a few weeks ago for her podcast about addiction —Brendan The post Friday Inspiration 290 appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/friday-inspiration-290.html June 11, 2021 at 11:54PM
Outdoor Things, But By Unfamiliar Measurements
I have a smartphone app that converts measurement units into other measurement units. Sure, you probably think that’s pretty dorky. But let me ask you this, hot shot: how many tablespoons are in a quarter-cup? That’s what I thought. This app got me thinking about how contrived all of our units of measurement are, but how they seem to make sense when we apply them to the correct things. Like I always think of backpacks in terms of how many liters they can hold, because I can easily visualize what a Nalgene water bottle looks like, and I can visualize 40 or 60 water bottles fitting in a backpack. But what if you asked a gear shop employee, “What’s the capacity of this backpack in cubic yards?” That would be ridiculous. So would measuring a long-distance running race in chains, a unit of measurement that equals 66 feet. So I started playing around with some things, which will very likely not at all be useful to you in the future, but are included below for your enjoyment. If you text a friend asking them to go for a trail run or a bike ride and propose the distance to them in furlongs or rods, please send me a screenshot that includes their reaction. Oh, and here’s a link to that app, just in case you’re ever at a dinner party and need to communicate how much more wine you’d like to drink, but in cubic millimeters.
—Brendan The post Outdoor Things, But By Unfamiliar Measurements appeared first on Semi-Rad.com. Via Explore http://www.rssmix.com/via Blogger http://thejustinmarshall.blogspot.com/2021/06/outdoor-things-but-by-unfamiliar.html June 11, 2021 at 12:54AM |