A few subscribers have asked me why I call this letter The Monday Kickoff when it lands in their inboxes on a Sunday. Remember that I live on the other side of the date line, which means this is coming to you from the future. My email letter, my time zone ...

With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:

Struggling with creative work doesn’t mean you’re failing — A look at why we feel lost when we struggle with certain tasks, and why that feeling can actually be a good sign.

From the article:

This creates a problem. When effort isn’t accompanied by feedback (either bad or good), all you have is a void of uncertainty. You might struggle to interpret what the feeling of difficulty means. That’s where the misreading begins. Many of us fill that void by interpreting effortfulness itself as evidence that we’re not good enough or are getting nowhere. We don’t think that the work is simply uncertain, but rather that we’re failing.

The Challenges of Writing in Space — A (very) shallow dive into why NASA (and the Soviets) chose the Fisher Space Pen for use by astronauts on their missions.

From the article:

These pens were hermetically sealed and could write in zero gravity thanks to the fact that they were pressurized with nitrogen gas to provide the necessary push to force ink to the tip. These pens were the result of considerable testing and development. And they arrived as the solution to the problem of writing in space after a period of trial and considerable error.

Living in Australia, Reading in Chinese — Wing Kuang examines how they more deeply connected with Chinese literature, and the Chinese reading scene, after moving to Australia from China.

From the article:

Catering to various Chinese diasporic communities around the world, these independent bookstores usually sell books in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese, with a focus on contemporary literature, social science, and gender studies. They have also become community hubs for a new generation of Chinese-speaking migrants, often hosting author talks, seminars, film screenings, and even stand-up comedy acts – gatherings that allow these young members of the Chinese diaspora to connect as they start new lives abroad.

Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult — Long before the internet made finding information about this subject fairly easy, anyone interested in the occult had to turn to snail mail to get their fix. And they had, for the time, a plethora of options and faced fleeced by scammers. What's new is old again ...

From the article:

The mail-order occult societies that withstood the test of time were those with the most internally consistent cosmologies, and which either sought to reanimate the prevailing esoteric currents of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries or, alternatively, moved in the other direction toward psychology and the philosophy of mind.