Rebecca Toh answers what it means to live a beautiful life.

A beautiful picture of your life isn’t the same as a beautiful life.

A beautiful life isn’t about loving yourself or loving others but loving both yourself and others.

A beautiful life looks like a vase with scars on it because it was once broken but someone took time and effort to patch the pieces back together.

A beautiful life cannot be planned or executed perfectly but can be experienced fully.

A beautiful life is honest. But honesty isn’t possible until you learn to see and acknowledge and tear down all the walls you have built up in order to protect yourself.

A beautiful life is one lived awake, or one lived trying to be awake. A beautiful life is full of “trying.”

A beautiful life is beautiful despite cancer, business failures, the loss of a marriage, financial mistakes.

A beautiful life is knowing you are nothing and everything.

A beautiful life is something you’re already living.

Enjoy every moment of it.

A perfect list of beautiful sentiments. I wish I could live up to them.

The Los Angeles Angels are releasing future Hall of Famer Albert Pujols today, per sources. Pujols is in the final year of his 10-year, $253 million contract.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) May 6, 2021

This is incredible news. While not totally unexpected, the timing is weird and the question remains if the release also releases him from the 10 year post-playing days contract. Apparently, that contract is only worth a million a year so it is possible Pujols just gets that in a lump sum and he’s free to go become the hitting coach for the St. Louis Cardinals like I want.

I hope he finds himself in Cardinals red real soon.

Writing for The Atlantic, Derek Thompson wondered about all these batshit crazy people refusing to get the vaccine.

What are they thinking, these vaccine-hesitant, vaccine-resistant, and COVID-apathetic? I wanted to know. So I posted an invitation on Twitter for anybody who wasn’t planning to get vaccinated to email me and explain why. In the past few days, I spoke or corresponded with more than a dozen such people. I told them that I was staunchly pro-vaccine, but this wouldn’t be a takedown piece. I wanted to produce an ethnography of a position I didn’t really understand. […]

This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.

Dear no-vaxxers,

You have misplaced your trust. You are stupid.

Scientists and doctors are smarter than you about this subject. You are ignorant of this subject. Do not think your ignorance is better or just as good as others with knowledge, experience, and intelligence.

It is not.

You are being stupid. Stupid people get others killed.

Have your tried not being stupid?

It’s Star Wars Day!

Alex Damon and Mollie Damon of Star Wars Explained have updated their Complete Canon Timeline for the Star Wars saga for 2021, just in time for May the 4th, using every item of reference they could find to explain everything that ever happened in a galaxy far, far away in one hour-long video.

This is the entire history of the Star Wars canon as of May 3, 2021. The Star Wars films, TV shows, books, comics, video games, and short stories are all summarized into the most important moments in galactic history!

I’m surprised how much this video gave me chills. Excellent work.

Sunday, for me, means preparing for the upcoming week. Sometimes it’s simply mentally preparing. Sometimes it’s listing out everything that needs to get done.

The thing is, I’ll never get everything done that needs to be done. I won’t get on top of my to-do list. It is always updating.

What I can do is choose to do the things that matter most. Work or personal… what is most important to me.

I make my lists with the goal of eliminating the unimportant.

My wife has a better understanding of what drains her of energy and time. I’m still learning.

I write in my journal to focus on what’s important. I don’t always succeed, but I’m trying.

Maybe someday, I’ll have my ability to focus fine-tuned enough that I won’t ever have to write a reminder.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But someday.

Alex Roarty and Adam Wollner, reporting for McClatchy on Joe Biden’s popularity:

Sarah Longwell, a former GOP operative and founder of the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Project, said her studies of voters who supported Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020 show they are “the most optimistic group in the history of focus groups I’ve done.”

She said that has been due to the perceived chaos of the Trump administration coming to a close and a sense that the coronavirus pandemic situation is finally improving.

“Now there’s a sense of relief,” Longwell said. “Imagine there’s a car alarm that’s been going off for a long time and suddenly it’s quiet.”

Insert the Billy Eilish, “Duh” here.

On his blog, Greg Morris asks a pretty important question about upgrading and wanting more.

Upgraded my phone, tablet, computer, and anything I could get my hands on almost constantly in a search for something better. When in fact it wasn’t better it was looking for, it was an answer.

He realized he was trying to fill a hole with tech purchases, but that wasn’t working.

I wanted something to fill another hole in myself. It didn’t matter what the hole was, but I filled it with buying tech. Simply because I thought it made me look cool on the internet. Although every upgrade offered me something, these things are not what I needed. What I, and load of people like me, needed was to get to the root of what I really wanted. What was I trying to mask and fill with buying things?

I strive to find the right kind of minimalism, but curating my collections is difficult. I have outdated technology I should sell, comics I will never read again that should find new homes, and more.

All the season highlights of a year like no other.

What an incredible basketball program. I think this is just the beginning.

Scott Seiss made me laugh pretty hard with his honest answers to inane questions from customers as a seasonal employee of IKEA.

I think this one is my favorite:

Customer: I’d like to speak to your manager

Seiss: I’d like to speak to your mother. Tell her she should be embarrassed she raised someone to act like a baby in public. You want to speak to the manager? Please. The manager doesn’t know what’s going on. Haven’t you ever worked anywhere before?

I hope he never stops doing these.

Adam Grant, writing for The New York Times, explains the not quite post-pandemic feeling we are all experiencing. 

At first, I didn’t recognize the symptoms that we all had in common. Friends mentioned that they were having trouble concentrating. Colleagues reported that even with vaccines on the horizon, they weren’t excited about 2021. A family member was staying up late to watch “National Treasure” again even though she knows the movie by heart. And instead of bouncing out of bed at 6 a.m., I was lying there until 7, playing Words with Friends.

It wasn’t burnout — we still had energy. It wasn’t depression — we didn’t feel hopeless. We just felt somewhat joyless and aimless. It turns out there’s a name for that: languishing.

Languishing is a sense of stagnation and emptiness. It feels as if you’re muddling through your days, looking at your life through a foggy windshield. And it might be the dominant emotion of 2021.

“Languishing” is such a perfectly descriptive word. My wife and I often have discussions about our emotions and how we are feeling. Languishing is exactly how I’ve been feeling for months.

Katie Way had a fun assignment from Vice: try and recreate the banned Four Loko drink and write about her attempts.

To be totally transparent, I was born in the wrong generation: I should be 31 right now, because if I was, I would have taken the full brunt of the original Four Loko craze directly to the forehead. Unfortunately, I was in tenth grade in November 2010, when the FDA banned alcoholic energy drinks. So, while nobody reading this has had an OG Four Loko in over a decade, my memory isn’t the sharpest—I was probably worrying about how to get a good PSAT score or some bullshit like that when I was tentatively sipping a lukewarm watermelon flav Loko in a Safeway parking lot. (To be honest, if OG Loko existed when I was finished with puberty, I’d probably be a very different person—someone, at least, who’d gotten her stomach pumped during college.)

I wish I could get a gig where I had to try and make a boozy alcoholic beverage with insane amounts of caffeine and then write about it. I will admit a time when “Red Bull and vodka” was a drink I drank a lot.

Also, come on Katie… you definitely had your stomach pumped in college.

The INTERNET -K-HOLE is a vast amount of very amateur snapshots taken from the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, with absolutely no other context provided or needed. Mostly a whole bunch of people I’ve never seen before… but if I scroll long enough—hours maybe—I will see an image of myself somewhere, I am sure of it.

NSFW warning: a small amount of lite smut compared to the gargantuan size of the collection; however, the second picture in the latest post happens to be of a butt. The one after that is Lemmy in a hotel room. Then comes the panoply of randos.

And more butts.

Dave Perell, in his weekly Monday Musings email, made a smart observation.

Whenever I’m in a city and I need to use the bathroom, I walk into a fancy hotel.

Fancy hotels always have nice bathrooms. And if you’re dressed well and walk confidently, you won’t be hassled for using the bathroom.

The world is becoming more casual. But if you dress too casually, it looks sloppy and careless.

When you want to cultivate serendipity, stick to the “Hotel Bathroom” dress code. Always dress well enough to walk into a bathroom at a hotel you’re not staying at and get away with it.

If you remember the “Hotel Bathroom Principle” you’ll always look sharp enough to capitalize on a serendipitous encounter.

This is good advice.

Seth Godin wants you to make a plan.

What do you want to be doing 100 days from now?

What change do you seek to be making? With which skills? Surrounded by which people?

For that to happen, day 99 will need to be different from today.

And so will day 98. In fact, so will tomorrow.

If we keep focusing on ‘what’s next’ we might never get around to doing the work we need to do to get us to day 100.

I’ve never done something like this. I wonder if I would benefit? Probably.

The first new song from Prince. “Come on in… sit right down.”

Ahead of his time.

I’ve been waiting for new Prince music since he passed away. I can’t wait.

Rebecca Onion (What a great name…), writing for Slate, reviews the expert opinions on if the 2020s might copy and paste from the 1920s.

I remain very interested in the reasons the ’20s appeal to our imagination right now. Of course, it’s the booze, the sex, and the parties. But it’s also a decade with a very strong identity—and I think that helps.

I think it’s important to note, no one says, “Roaring 30s.”

I tend to think there’s going to be a massive uptick in parties as 2021 winds down and the pandemic is firmly in the rearview mirror. My best guess is this is exactly what will happen right about New Year’s Eve 2021 through 2022 and likely beyond. 

Apologies to Prince, “Two Thousand Two Zero, party overruled out of time. So tonight we’re gonna party through Twenty Twenty-Nine.”

David Roth, writing for Defector, explains the stupidity of anti-vaxxers.

That minority’s inability to take anything in stride, or to sublimate even the smallest personal comfort for the most urgent and essential collective good, invariably winds up being political, but it is also its own pursuit and even lifestyle. Some MLB players who will not be vaccinated surely subscribe to it, and live by choice amid the seething frenzy of ominous intimations and powerful enemies and heated but vexingly disconnected signifiers that comprises contemporary American conservatism. You can look at the anti-vaccination sentiments that Cubs second baseman Eric Sogard’s wife Kaycee has been posting to get a sense of the temperature of that discourse, and to see how furiously unresolved it all is. “This is absolutely disgusting,” she wrote in her Instagram story about MLB ‘s COVID vaccination protocols, which impose restrictions on teams that do not meet an 85 percent vaccination threshold. “And you will not ever convince me this is still about a virus.”

If you have ever spoken to an anti-vaxx person, you have encountered this kind of doofy rhetorical flourish, which is usually delivered, as it was by Sogard, as a devastating and unassailable conclusion. If you have ever asked an anti-vaxx person to go beyond that and say what they think it all really is about, or what COVID vaccination protocols might be about beyond COVID, you’ll hear answers like “money” and “control” that are, again, not quite as conclusive as they are meant to be. But for all the convoluted and cosmetic suspicion of the politics and the opacity of their oafish paranoid patois, this all resolves to the precariousness that all those false choices are designed to obscure-to the suspicion that it is unfair and somehow wrong that any element of their all-important personal convenience might be contingent upon or even related to anyone else’s, and to the fear that their holy ease will be threatened by some other greater responsibility. You truly will not ever convince these people that this is Still About A Virus, because they never once believed that anything is ever about more than their own sour selves, and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their comfort. That grandiose vanity is the only force capable of holding together such a disordered worldview. In that sense, and only in that sense, it works very well.

Roth writes with such skill that I’m always in awe of his output. I just love “…because they never once believed that anything is ever about more than their own sour selves and a jealous world’s conspiracy against their comfort.”

His ability to get to the heart of the matter regarding vaccinations and “muh freedoms” people is perfectly rendered behind the lens of professional baseball players.

Gabz wrote a little something that made sense to me.

It doesn’t matter what app you use, what system, or where you host your site. Whether you use a static site or not. It doesn’t matter if you have images in all your blog posts or not, how big or how small. What syntax, language, cheat code or pen you use.

Just blog, it’s that’s all you want to do. I don’t care, and it shouldn’t matter how you go about it.

Just blog.

Yup.

Sarah Morrison, writing at Vox, explains the concept of apps and websites using dark patterns to trick users into doing what they want you to do.

It’s hard to know what’s an actionable deceptive act or practice when there’s no privacy law in the first place. And it’s hard for consumers to know what they’re giving away unintentionally or how it might be used against them when it all happens behind the scenes.

It’s all deceptive practices. This stuff is insidious. The explainer showcases all the tricks so you can be smarter about it in the future.