Hey lovely email friends, hope all’s well. The media might feel a bit monocultural right now but once again I’ve gone foraging for interesting things.

• 🎥 Studio Ghibli Releases Backgrounds for Video Conferencing and they’re delicious. See also: Got Your Back is a collection of virtual backdrops by designers, illustrators, animators, photographers, filmmakers and artists.

• 🤔 The Best Bit Of Advice About Problem Solving You’ll Ever Get: if you can pitch your idea to someone outside your field, you’re on to something.

• 🔢 Asking over 8500 students to pick a random number from 1 to 10: every number gets chosen roughly the same number of times, right? Nope. See also: far more numbers start with ‘1’ than ‘9’.

• 🏘 Let’s Stay Together: Memphis photographer Jamie Harmon took to the streets and asked his neighbours to stand for portraits of life under lockdown.

• 📺 Larry David, Master of His Quarantine: Who better than the father of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm to guide us through the thicket of being together, alone?

• 🤵🏻 Burt Reynolds is James Bond in Dr. No: Reynolds passed up the role but now an impressive deepfake puts him right into the action.

• ⛲️ An odyssey into the vanishing oases: fountains amid public housing: Hong Kong-based photojournalist Hoi Kin Fung explores the fountains of public housing estates. These areas are meant to serve as places where residents can interact with one another. However, most of the fountains are now falling into decay or even demolished.

• 🥖 Baking Bread in Lyon: writer Bill Buford takes on a boulangerie apprenticeship, which reveals a way of life.

• ✏️ Adobe Colouring Book: I’ve really gotten into colouring, and I refuse to be stopped by being terrible at it. Each week this spring, Adobe is offering up colouring pages created by some of their favourite artists.

Life’s many lessons

This week, as Paul Simon put it, I hung one more year on the line. When The Simpsons started I was younger than Bart. Now, somehow, I’m older than Homer. So to figure out where the time went, I set myself the challenge of recording some of the things I’ve learned.

1. People giving you free advice are talking to themselves, not you.
2. Be a good owner to your pet: understand their dietary requirements in neurotic detail.
3. Change lanes.
4. Burn bridges deliberately, never by accident. Cut out cancerous people quickly, actively seek out better ones. It sounds horrendous and you needn’t be proud of it.
5. Take time off. Use it to travel. If possible, choose destinations seldom visited by people of your own nationality.
6. Actively pursue media that targets people other than you. Don’t stick to your demographic.
7. Everyone who plays an instrument wishes they had learned a different one.
8. Consuming is not creating.
9. Don’t work for free. Time is more scarce than money. Treat talking about work as work. Treat thinking about work as work.
10. When you find good shoes, buy three pairs. Don’t buy bad shoes.
11. Be acutely aware of other people’s role in your own mental health. Relish supporters, demolish detractors. Also pay attention to your role in the mental health of others. Be what you’d want.
12. Beware of very attractive people.
13. Invest heavily in good friends. Put the effort in. Recognise the distinction between friends and drinking buddies.
14. Get to the point.
15. In case of debt crises, talk to creditors early. For all their faults, banks are experienced at managing debts, and they have an interest in you managing yours.
16. Write. Then edit.
17. Learn to accept compliments without batting them away. People who offer compliments deserve thanks.
18. Seek out difficult things.
19. Make a point of writing down what you did; bullet-points will do. Write down what you intend to do, whether you end up doing it or not. To-do lists are less interesting than might-do lists.
20. New Year’s Eve is dismal shit; avoid mandated celebration. To thine own self be true.
21. Talk about mental health as often as you might about physical health. People need people to be open about it, just as they do about, say, diet and exercise.
22. Beware of anything seemingly good for the planet that also involves making a purchase.
23. Winding up knowing nothing would be a better outcome than knowing everything.
24. Personality beats originality.
25. Seek out different colas. Green Cola and Karma Cola are great; Tirola Kola is excellent.
26. Games are time well spent.
27. If you take a hundred photographs or paint a hundred pictures or write a hundred poems, at least one will probably be good.
28. Accept your limitations. Know your boundaries. Admit when you’re ill.
29. Possessions own you. Accumulating stuff is a bad goal.
30. Nobody had an original thought while looking at a screen.
31. Iterate. Start small. Smaller than that.
32. Don’t obsess about presentation. Substance beats style.
33. Many tools, particularly digital ones, hamper your ability to make progress. Get as far as you can without the distraction of font sizes.
34. Beware of indulgences. they’re rarely the acts of self-care they appear to be.
35. Readiness and paranoia are not the same thing. You can get a grip and also let go.
36. Be vulnerable. It’s good not to know what to do.
37. Any success, no matter how slight, is worthy of celebration, no matter how small.
38. Networking is nonsense. You don’t meet interesting people by doing boring things.
39. Everything is worthy of curiosity. But not necessarily all at once. Pick your battles.
40. The thing about imposter syndrome is everyone’s in the same boat. You chanced your way here, as did everyone else. There’s no grand plan, only blind luck. Get comfortable with being just as much an imposter as everyone else.