[THREAD] It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you...

Well, Toto, maybe that’s not 100% true in this case because I’m voluntarily headed to Tanzania next week to go on a safari! I’ll be gone for a few weeks, so I’ve set up a bunch of awesome articles in my stead to help guide you through this crazy world of creative entrepreneurship.

I don’t talk about it a lot, but I used to be a professional photographer in a past life, so I’m excited to dust off the old gear and take a billion photos while I’m gone to share with you. Meanwhile, here is some of my work from bygone days.

I think I was pretty good, but that’s a matter of taste, I guess. I gave it up after a wicked bad car accident prevented me from lugging gear around, but I still miss it often.

There are two ways to interact with this post.

1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll, with options courtesy of Toto’s Africa.

2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.

I’m pretty upset that I’m still so exhausted even though I haven’t worked out all month. I think I’m probably still a 1.5, but the good news is that I get to just hang out in a Jeep and look at cool animals for the next couple of weeks. This is probably the only way I’ll be able to do photography in the future since I can barely walk the dog without collapsing these days.

A new chapter of Magic launched this week. Disarming an armed assailant in a crowded building was a dicey move, especially one as unhinged as Ollie’s ex. All new chapters are free to read, but paid subscribers get access to our archive, along with over a dozen free novels, comics, and non-fiction books. 

This week I show you how to pull a Maxine Waters and reclaim your time.

A couple more posts went behind the paywall this week, but you can still read How to use Substack sections to beef up your backlist and give subscribers even more value and Kesha could break my nose and I would still listen to her new album on an infinite loop for free.

Of course, you can access all my previous posts by either getting a free trial or becoming a paid subscriber. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.

Here are some of my favorite Substacks from the week that you might like to read this weekend. I’d love to know which ones resonated with you.

• Okay, Doomers, went on a tear of amazing articles this week, so she wins the golden taco for getting a whole bullet point just for her work. If you want to seriously cut to the core of all the hypercapitalist bullcrap, she laid it all out across several posts this week. We're Running Out of Everything, but Your Rich Neighbors Care More About Your Lawn, Yes, They've Left You to Die, If You're Tired All The Time, It's Not Your Fault, Let's Stop Calling Every Generation The Most Entitled in History, The Super Rich Are Robbing Us All Blind, You're Not a Fearmonger. You're an Orchid. You Have Sentinel Intelligence, and The Real Enemy is Normal are must-reads. They are each powerful on their own, but together…holy shingles.

• took the next step beyond Googling himself and AI-ed himself with hallucinogenic results, while spoke up about nonsense startup naming conventions that made all the sense in the world, and showed bad manners written a century ago still bear weight.

•  explored rejection, encouraged excellence, and asked why. Meanwhile, in case you needed a reminder, interview with hammered home the point that working from your hospital bed is not a flex.

• studied The Artist’s Way, found a better way to exist as a writer than dealing with the looming threat of being fired, gave herself permission to perch, and wants to know if middle age is right for you.

•  asked a question that no infrastructure specialist should ever have to ask let alone answer. While collapsing infrastructure is humiliating to city planners, knows how to humiliate an economist and explains how frenemies want nothing more than to humiliate you.

•  talks about business advice she wishes she’d given more that resonated hard with me this week, laid out the case for why the personal is universal, and explains why optimization is one big sinkhole. 

• convinced me I wasn’t optimizing my newsletter enough (even though he used me as an example of good optimization) and sent me on a trek through my archives to improve my headlines and subtitles while showed me how to disintermediate my writing career.

That’s it for me. I’ll be on vacation until the end of June, so have a great time existing as a creative in a hypercapitalist hellscape without me for a while.

If you’re looking for a satire of the current state of the world, narrated by god, and dealing with karma, paid subscribers have access to my very weird book, Worst Thing in the Universe. Albert Ross is the most miserable, pathetic, and terrible thing in the entire universe. He is reviled by many, most of all God.