Last week was a “get back” week. Get back to work (after a week away), get back to routine (after letting things slide in August), and get back to life at home. Now that I’m back, I’m starting to read and draw and game more, so more writing here is on the way.

Here is my very short weekly selection of what I was writing, reading, drawing, etc last week.

I hadn’t written anything or drawn anything for a few weeks and was feeling unmoored. Rather than get aggravated about what to do next, the best thing was to just start with something so I wrote about our crazy weeks to get unstuck.

After that, I was feeling excited about getting back to things and drafted some updated goals for September.

Finally, I met with my professional coach last week and wrote about building a reputation around the type of work you want to do.

Lastly, I’ve not been gaming much lately but have been looking for a new single-player adventure to get into. I was just about to start playing Breath of the Wild again but instead got curious about Elden Ring. I’m shocked by the scale of it and how fun it is to explore the world. Down the rabbit hole I go!

Here are some other things that caught my attention:

• Inside the Pain Cave – “Dauwalter, 37, is considered the world’s best female ultramarathon runner. She might just be the greatest ultrarunner of all time, period. She races astonishing distances of 100- and 200-plus miles, even once attempting a 486-mile course. She is often on her feet for a mind-bending 24 or 48 straight hours, in the harshest environments imaginable, from steep terrain and high elevation to extreme weather. Each race, she intends to go into the pain cave.”
• Inside Jiri Prochazka’s warrior path from soccer hooligan to UFC title contender – “Eight years ago, Hovezak gave Prochazka a copy of Musashi’s “The Book of the Five Rings,” a text about martial arts and a guide for life. Since then, Prochazka has followed Musashi’s ideals almost religiously. His evolution has taken him from a self-professed “very wild guy” who engaged in over 100 street fights, was in a soccer hooligan club back home in the Czech Republic and once chugged vodka out of a motorcycle fuel line, to someone who patterns his life after Bushido, a Japanese moral code dating back to the samurais. And that discipline has led him to the cusp of UFC glory. “I think Jiri was more Japanese than many of us over here in Japan,” Rizin matchmaker Shingo Kashiwagi said.”
• Stable Diffusion is a really big deal – “Generating images from text is one thing, but generating images from other images is a whole new ballgame.”