⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

🎲 More Nothing Now: Justin Neuman watches his kids ignore the rules of Settlers of Catan and build islands instead, then asks why adult life has room for competition and streak counters but almost none for free, pointless, unscored play, the kind Winnicott thought makes life feel worth living. Read it here.

🎞️ The Moving Image Archive: A searchable library of forgotten public-domain film clips from 1915 onward, where you find footage by describing the shot you want (“oil derricks”) and every result is free to reuse, built on the idea that once synthetic video can fabricate the past, preserving verifiable history matters more than ever. Explore it here.

💤 Night Shifts: Michael W. Clune straps on Dormio, the MIT dream-incubation glove, and lets a researcher whisper “think about trees” into the first minutes of his sleep, a first-person report from the strange new field of dream engineering. Read it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

A halo on a parking lot. This is a glass bead bow, sometimes called a road bow. Fresh road paint and some pavement surfacing are seeded with tiny glass beads to make them reflective at night, and when the sun is behind you, each bead bends the light back toward you the way a raindrop does. The ring forms around the point directly opposite the sun, which is always the shadow of your own head, so it follows you as you walk and nobody standing next to you can see it around theirs. It is about half the size of a rain rainbow because glass bends light harder than water. Filmed by Karyn Scuderi, who posted it with the caption “A strange phenomenon.” See it on Instagram.

🗣 Life As Conversation

The stories we live are not monologues. They are conversations.

The shape and motion of our lives is informed by the exchanges we participate in. We put something out there, the world responds, we absorb the feedback, and reply. The world responds again.

On and on this cycle goes although it’s easy to unconsciously relate to this process. Many are confused into thinking they are to-do list conquerors acting upon a static world and if only they collect enough checkboxes they will inevitably reach their concrete destination.

It can be easy to think that a flourishing life is realized by imagining the perfect plan and executing the steps we’ve outlined. But after the first few steps, the world will have changed and we will have changed with it.

These changes may be subtle but they are not insignificant.

If we are wise, we will realize the flaws in our original roadmap and course-correct based on the feedback we’ve received. This is essential. We must not make rigid plans to force upon life but to cultivate an adaptive disposition sensitive to the openings of opportunity cascading across the field of experience. Life is always in flux.

Like we were tubing down a river with a great many tributaries, rather than assuming the stream you are in is the ultimate path, you might notice a fork in the flow and proceed down that route. Here you might encounter the spirit of what you were after with greater ease and grace than you would have otherwise.

I say “spirit” because often the imagined version of things we’re moving towards can look quite different upon arrival. It’s important not to fixate on particular forms and remain connected to the essence of what we’re after.

When we try to force things, we blind ourselves.

When we remain open, we can approach and welcome the experiences that didn’t fit the plan but reveal why the plan existed in the first place.

These letters are free and always will be. If they’re worth something to you, you can support the work here. Always optional, never expected.

🍳 The Highest Teaching

Reflect on these words from Damien Echols:

🤓 Learn This Word

Tmesis: Cutting a word in two and wedging another word inside the gap, as in abso-bloody-lutely, fan-freaking-tastic, or “a whole nother thing.” From the Greek for “a cutting,” in English since the 1580s, and older than any of us: Eliza Doolittle’s “abso-bloomin-lutely” and Ned Flanders’s “wel-diddly-elcome” are both tmesis.

🕸️ From Around The Web

Magic is real (if you know how to look)

“If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to listen, it does not actually make a sound. And there is no tree, either. It is our minds that slice the world up into objects and across sense modalities. Separate objects ( “trees”, “sounds”, etc.) are not inherent in reality, they are co-created by our perceptions. And we perceive them as such because of our affordances (thanks, evolution) and concepts (thanks, language). While deep evolutionary programs that we all share account for our generic interface of space-time and self-world, the icons we perceive are much more sensitive to our cultural backgrounds. Try googling how many words for “snow” there are in Iceland.

This does not mean that it’s all just in our heads. There are real patterns out there (and many more than we can perceive, at that). No, the moon does not disappear if you stop looking at it, but it is only “the moon” through our human vantage point. We are running world simulations but we are not in a (shared) simulation.”

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