SHELFDIVER: DIVE 0 - May 1, 2024
DIVE 0 - May 1, 2024
Thanks to everyone who’s helping me test Shelfdiver before it goes wide next week. If you spot any problems, you can email me at seth@shelfdiver.com!
Hi, I’m Seth, and there’s nothing I love more than sharing the things I love. But modern social media frowns on fruit growing in other walled gardens, and seems to be actively fighting my attempts to make posts about the things that excite me.
So welcome to SHELFDIVER, where I’m going to point you toward some of the things I’ve loved during a lifelong journey of omnivorous curiosity. I’ll also be taking advantage of your attention to share some links to things where my excitement is still hot and fresh.
Enough drafting and redrafting this intro—let’s get started!
BOOKS ABOUT JOURNEYS
Maybe spring has awakened some wanderlust inside me, but I’ve been revisiting some of my favorite books about travels and traveling lately:
Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon: A gift from my high-school English teacher that I’ve read and reread over the years, inspiring a lot of my love for long drives down lonely roads. On a day off from the Scout camp in northern Wisconsin that I worked at during my teen summers, I took one of my first literary pilgrimages when I drove the backroads between Hawyard and Park Falls to recreate part of the Blue Highways journey (though I didn’t pick up any hitchhikers.)
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck: Steinbeck loved being a successful author, but he wasn’t ignorant of how wealth and fame separated him from the common people he had written about so well, so in 1960 he set out in a camper truck to reconnect with America. The resulting book is rambling thoughts from a rambling journey, a picture of an America changing from the one he once knew so well…and also familiar. His visit to New Orleans to watch a young Ruby Bridges brave the racist hordes so she could attend school echoes reporting from the front lines of today’s American culture wars.
From my visit to the Steinbeck Museum a few years ago, looking into Steinbeck’s truck camper “Rocinante” through the back door. Pretty nice for 2024, let alone 1960. Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl: My friend Rob gave me a copy of Kon-Tiki decades ago, and I reread it again recently, inspired by all the SV Delos videos I’ve been watching (more on that below.) Not only did Heyerdahl undertake an amazing journey, he’s also a terrific writer who turned his anthropology research project into an incredible page-turner.
The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux: I read a beat-up paperback of this book back when I was still trying to figure out where I was going in life, and even if I never followed Theroux’s rail-ride east on the ‘hippie trail’ from Europe into the heart of Asia, I feel like I sat right there beside him and the cast of characters he encountered along the way. I still hope to undertake an epic train journey someday. (Related: Duffy Littlejohn’s Hopping Freight Trains in America, which convinced me that I would probably prefer train travel from the passenger cars, even if he tried to convince me in person that I was missing out on the real trip by not leaping from moving railstock in a snowstorm.)
Computing Across America by Steven Roberts: I read this book while working at a bookstore, and it fanned the flames of my desire to travel, even if I lacked both the insane ingenuity and sheer physical persistence Roberts employed to build a rolling network-connected computer bicycle and travel cross-country on it as the first technomad. I connected with Roberts many years later during my nearly-wandering days living in an Airstream, and sent him updated photos of his bike BEHEMOTH, now a permanent exhibit at the Computer History Museum. He’s still working on releasing a new edition, but his website shares large chunks of the book and a ton of great supplementary material from his adventures.
The Thousand Mile Summer by Colin Fletcher. I honestly thought I was going to be a backpacker in my Boy Scout days, and Fletcher’s book The Complete Walker was my guide. I read all his books, and had a trail map of the Appalachian Trail hanging in my college dorm room. My life ended up following other, lazier trails, but I still love to dip back into Fletcher’s books once in a while and dream of what might have been.
Around the World in 72 Days by Nellie Bly. I’ll probably do a whole roundup of how much I love Verne’s 1873 novel and things connected to it, but Bly was one of the first to chase its inspiration, undertaking a real-world journey in 1889 to beat Phileas Fogg’s fictional record, and a fun read that needs to be included here, too.
PLAYLIST
MUSIC: “Rise and Fall” (Monkeytape 0705) [Spotify]: My monthly playlist from July of 2005, about a year after I moved to Seattle. I was still burning the playlists onto CDs and making custom art and labels for them in those days; this was the 32nd mix I’d put together, a double-disc set I made for friends. I wouldn’t meet my now-wife for another two years, but the track that would become ‘our song’—”This Will Be Our Year” by the Zombies, shows up here for the first time in my listening rotation.
Trivia: That green texture in the background is from one of my favorite sweaters at the time, which seemed meaningful at the time for reasons I no longer remember. MUSIC: THE WHO: Live at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 [Spotify]: “Ladies and gentleman, a nice rock and roll band from Shepherd’s Bush, England—The Who”. A terrific, including a full run-through of their rock opera “Tommy”, but it’s “Heaven & Hell” as the opener that always hooks me. (The concert film is also worth checking out.)
VIDEO: 3DBotMaker King of the Mountain Tournament 2 Finals [YouTube]: Racing Hot Wheels scale cars sent in by viewers down a beautifully-crafted track, elevated with perfectly executed kayfabe into legitimately fun and often exciting viewing. This particular episode includes the conclusion of the channel’s long-running Crazy Jimmy saga and a contender named “Dude Racewalker”. Tell me that doesn’t make you want to click and watch. Big moments like the Tournament of Terror or the Fast & Famous races are easy places to jump in, but I love it almost eveyr week.
VIDEO: Faulhorn 2681m [YouTube]: A thrilling first-person ride down the longest toboggan run in the world. How long? It’s a 20 minute video long, with some beautiful Swiss scenery in the background as the foreground races by. (Related fun—this high-speed tricycle race down Italy’s San Boldo Pass, and a first-person race down the “Mountain of Hell” from the icy peak to the valleys below.)
VIDEO (Channel): Sailing SV Delos [YouTube]: Brian Trautman set out from Seattle to sail for a couple months, or maybe a year. He’s still going, fifteen years later, and it’s amazing to watch him grow with his channel until a recent season - “Sailing Across the Pacific” - where what was once a bro-boat has evolved through its party days to become home to an adventuring family, setting out on the beginning of their second circumnavigation of the globe. They naturally put the beauties and pleasures of their vagabond life up front, but as I watched more videos I was pleased to see they don’t shy away from the struggles, in particular the relentless demands for upkeep and repair of their floating home…along with the occasional medical mishap in the middle of nowhere.
PODCAST: Blank Check [website]: Actor Griffin Newman and film critic David Sims go through directors’ filmographies, one film at a time, charting the films that earned the director a ‘blank check’ to chase their passion projects, and what happens whether they clear or bounce. It’s smart, it’s funny, and I love listening to episodes whether they’re about my favorite movies or one I’ve never seen.
GAMEPLAY
COMPUTER GAME: Citizen Sleeper [website]: An terrific story-heavy game where you play a cybernetic worker who wakes up on an isolated space station after escaping a mysterious past. Choices based on rolling dice seem simple at first but quickly become loaded with nuance and consequence—of your own making. A sequel is in the works, and I can’t wait.
STORYGAME: Thousand-Year Old Vampire [website] ‘Journaling games’ are becoming increasingly popular and this is one of the best, wherein game designer Tim Hutchings helps you find within you the story you had forgotten of your life as a thousand year-old vampire. My Arabian astronomer fled his homeland after becoming a monster framed for murder, hiding for years in the catacombs of Rome, and then… well, play, and see what your story might be. (Don’t miss the other avant-garde storygames on Hutchings’ site—he really makes some cool but crazy stuff.)
RPG: Maze Rats [website] If your RPG table has players who shy away from complicated rules, or a gamemaster who worries about being able to come up with the plethora of ideas needed to run a world on the fly, Ben Robbins (whose YouTube channel Questing Beast is also worth a look) has made the game for you. The rules for Maze Rats are a single page, character creation is a single page of easy choices, and from there explodes into an array of quick-roll tables that create original spells, a crazy creatures on the fly, and everything you need to craft a fantasy world rich with characters, quirks, and treasures. It’s light on mechanics by design, and ready to entertain you for a night of gameplay or a year of campaigning.
CURRENTLY
A quick list of things I’m diving into this week:
GUESTDIVE
I find a lot of stuff I love from my friends, and I’m lining up some of them to share great things here in this section starting next week!
BACK TO THE SURFACE
Thanks for coming along in these early days while I start pulling things out of my head and puzzling them together into these emails. More next Wednesday!
QUOTEBOOK
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all those words and sentences that in all your reading have been to you like blasts of a trumpet out of Shakespeare, Seneca, Moses, John and Paul.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
I don’t just collect things on shelves. The text file with my personal collection of quotes runs over a hundred pages, so I’ll close each of these emails by sharing a few of those quotes with you. Like I’ve done over the years, you can sift, save, and jettison as your mind and heart feel fit. See you next week!
"The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit."
– W. Somerset Maugham
“Do every day one or two things for no other reason than that you would rather not do them. Then, when the hour of darkness comes, it will not find you unprepared.”
– William James
“I know not how the truth may be, I tell the tale as ‘twas told to me.”
– James Mooney, Myths of the Cherokee
“The whole point of society is to be less unforgiving than nature.”
– Arthur D. Hlavaty
“I would spread the clothes under your feet,
But I am poor and have only my dreams.
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.”
– William Butler Yates