Weekly Update #3 - May 18th 2025
In which the author dazzles readers with a routine weekly update
I bet you thought you were going to get away without a weekly update this week didn’t you? Well, think again.
thoreau is finished. In the end, it was a painful birth. I’m still not 100% after my bout of food poisoning, and so the final stretch of the editing was not the marathon it normally is, but an alternating between editing and bed (where I watched the entirety of Freaks and Geeks again).
But it is done, and now I wait. I’ll talk more about the next video in the next week or two as I prepare to head across the Atlantic to shoot it. In the meantime, I intend to soak up a lot of beauty and find my centre again, which I feel I’ve lost in the past couple of weeks.
Our very own Dead Poets Society
This week, I had the notion of starting a poetry club (see Tuesday’s blog). There were a couple of suggestions by some of our Substack members for poems and so we’ll be getting started with a little Charles Bukowski this week.
This Week’s Posts
My streak of writing ended this week with the second two days of food poisoning. But my streak of posting continued, thanks to a couple of days where I wrote multiple pieces. So this week we had:
The Gossamer Sublime: a reflection on a moment of beauty and how beauty like—as Patron Danny Lloyd pointed out—the Tao is a path we must work diligently to stay on.
Wanna read poetry together?: Tuesday saw the birth of the poetry club idea. New poems to marinate in every Tuesday
In My Parents’ Bed with Jordan Peterson: was an update on dreams. Fans of Freud will find the titular dream as amusing as I do. The rest is just as interesting (to me, the dreamer, at least)
The Self-Knowledge of AI: Thursday’s piece was a reflection on what AI can teach us about the most ancient philosophical quest: self-knowledge.
Richard Feynman on Why AI Shouldn’t Write for Us: a musing on the great physicist’s identification of the writing process and thinking.
Axiomatic: a reflection on how single beliefs can have major impacts on us and how these foundational beliefs collide with those we love and beyond.
thoreau: last but not least, after two months a new video is finished. I felt all the sophomoric growing pains with this one from the technical to the artistic but in the end I’m proud of it and have learned heaps.
Thoughts on the week ahead
This week, I want to try writing more concisely. I want to walk more and court the Camino-esque muse of walking inspiration. I also want to finish at least one short, beautiful video, and I’m starting a course on colour grading and learning how to edit in Da Vinci Resolve (this was the end of the road for me with Adobe. Crashes, crashes everywhere).
Enjoy what remains of your weekend,
James
Bonus
After waking up in the middle of the night and being unable to get back to sleep I wandered out for sunrise and thought I’d get a timelapse. It wasn’t the most colourful of sunrises (I was a bit late recording to be fair) but the fog is gorgeous.