welcome | 2/7/25

Welcome to make you think, a newsletter about being alive in the endtimes. It will evolve and change as it goes and I hope we get to a place where you look forward to this hitting your inbox every week. I appreciate you signing up, and if you like it, please share it with your friends.

looking at this blank page is really making me anxious. most screens are doing that to me at the moment. probably the same for you, too.

i hate starting things by myself. it's one of the hardest things in the world for me to do. whether it's on the computer or in person, i don't like to do a new thing alone. this isn't to say that i haven't started a new thing alone, but starting it with another person/other people is a really good way to get me to keep doing the thing. if you're driving is a great example of this – i do it every week with my friends, am constantly excited by it, and in october of this year, we will have been making it for three years. i feel accountable not only to the audience that we make the podcast for but also to the people that i make the podcast with. not wanting to let john, lb, or jordan down every week is what gets me into the chair and in front of the microphone. 

in a perfect world, when i sit down to do a thing because i want to, i don't feel like i'm pulling my own teeth out. i'm afraid that i simply won't do that thing correctly. that fear stops me so so so frequently. it stops me from going places, it stops me from starting and trying things. at its worst, it stops me from doing things that i've already started doing. i hope through this newsletter – which i promise will not always read like a journal entry – i can get into a rhythm of doing a thing because i want to do it for me. that the driving force for writing or making a video or taking a photo is that i want to do those things because i want to, perfection be damned.

i hope to get to a place where looking at this empty doc doesn't make me anxious but instead makes me excited.

my goal with make you think is to get your brain to move in a different way, if only for a brief moment. i hope to show you a thing that you might not have seen, tackle a piece of discourse from a new angle, or grab your hand and take you down a rabbit hole that has an obscure nokia phone from 2003 at the bottom of it. life in the endtimes (or The Change, or The Collapse, or whatever you want to call it) cannot, will not, and should not be mired in constant agony. we still have to live, even though there are forces making that harder and harder every day. i hope to share some of my version of living with you.

i leave you with this image of a house that i walked past in kansas city when i was there in november for the nwsl championship last year. i think about the colors in this image a lot. i was running the portra 800 film sim on my X-T50 (i'll explain what those words mean in a future installment) and i think it's one of my favorite shots of last year.

unrelated to this, i think the chiefs are going to win on sunday. i want the eagles to win but i think we are just destined for a threepeat in this cursed decade.

have a good one and talk soon,

niki