Hey y’all,

I asked you to tell me something good and you did. Thank you for lifting my spirits! Here are 10 things I thought were worth sharing this week — quite a few actually came from Tuesday’s thread:

1. It’s a new season. At the beginning of fall, I like to re-read my friend Matt Thomas’s wonderful post, “Fall In,” about seasonal thinking and resisting the tyranny of the day.
    
   

2. I picked up Antoine Wilson’s novel Mouth to Mouth and got immediately sucked in. The kind of book that makes you want to go to bed early so you can stay up late reading.
   
   

3. On perfectionism: I am, once again, linking to my pal Wendy. People ask me about perfectionism a lot, and I’m often stumped because I have long considered myself an “imperfectionist.” (I was jealous of the great Oliver Burkeman when he used that title for his newsletter.) I am always on the lookout for traditions in which artists embrace mistakes and deliberately invite imperfection. (Sally Mann calls this “praying for the angel of uncertainty.”) As for me, I’m just trying to make something I can live with.
   
   

4. It occurred to me the other day that the Libby app I use to download library ebooks and audiobooks (and magazines! I did not know they did magazines!) is so good I rarely think about how good it is. (This may or may not be the definition of good design?)
   
   

5. A microscopic photo of vinyl record grooves.
   
   

6. I did not realize that Max Richter’s recomposition of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons was part of a series! Grateful to my pal Alan for pointing me to Peter Gregson’s recomposition of Bach’s cello suites. Wonderful writing music.
   
   

7. TV: We started Bad Sisters and the plot twist at the end of the first episode was clever enough to keep us watching. (I like dark comedies and I’m a fan of Sharon Horgan — I think Catastrophe is one of the most accurate and hilarious emotional renderings of what it’s like to be married with young children.)
   
   

8. Pizza night blockbuster: We watched the 1933 original King Kong with the boys. Great start to monster movie season.
   
   

9. I was a huge adventure game nerd as a kid, so you can bet I’m downloading Return to Monkey Island and playing it all weekend. (I didn’t know “Adventurecore” was a thing!)
   
   

10. The enduring allure of Choose Your Own Adventure books.

Thanks for reading. This newsletter is a reader-supported publication. The best way to support it is to buy my books, hire me to speak, shop for some of my favorite gear (I get a cut), or become a paid subscriber:

Upgrade to paid

xoxo,

Austin

PS. One of the harsh-but-funny responses to Tuesday’s thread was, “Uh, dude, didn’t you write a book called Keep Going?” Touché!