So I went in and the worker did a little shudder as she’s finishing up with the last customer.

“I had one of those days yesterday,” I commiserated.

“No, it wasn’t them, I was just- it’s kinda heavy.”

I waited.

“My coworker just passed a way,” she admitted. “I just saw her name on a receipt, it hit me kinda hard.”

I nodded. I was painfully aware how little energy was in my tank, and empathy uses so much, but this is not the kind of thing I am capable of brushing off. “Have you ever read Terry Pratchett?”

She looked very confused by the apparent non sequitur. Shook her head.

“He’s a really famous fantasy author,” I told her. “Very funny. But in one of his books he has a system kind of like telegrams. And if someone dies while operating that system, their name is put into it. Their name goes back and forth across the line forever, and he posits that people aren’t really gone as long as we see echoes of them and remember their names.

“That’s what it’s like when you saw her name on that receipt, right? It’s her memory, still going.”

Her eyes got wider as I went on. When I finished she gave herself a little shake. “That’s. That’s really beautiful, thank you for that. I. Wow.”

Every single night, he personally selected messages from the roughly 40,000 letters the White House received daily. His correspondence director, Fiona Reese, later shared that he would sometimes become emotional reading them, quietly folding certain letters before sitting down to respond. The replies were deeply personal, written with such care that many recipients described receiving them as one of the most meaningful moments of their lives. One steelworker from Ohio even wrote back saying Obama’s letter changed the course of a life-altering decision for his family.

What makes this practice even more powerful is the way he approached it. Obama refused to use a computer. He wrote first drafts on yellow legal pads with a black felt-tip pen, then rewrote each letter by hand on official White House stationery. As he later told historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, the physical act of writing forced a level of attention and presence that typing simply could not replicate.

That belief was shaped by his years teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago from 1992 to 2004. He came to see democracy as something that only works when leaders stay closely connected to the real, often uncomfortable weight of individual human experiences—rather than viewing them from a distance through institutions or screens.

ITS AI!!!!!!!

You might think omg fun a choices based fanfic, the writer must have spent so much time on this! but NO IT IS GENERATIVE AI SLOP.

It requires a person to write a bit of story to get an idea then it just goes for it and generates a story around either the og “writer’s” prompts or the ones you make yourself. You can pick up on the inconsistencies right away. DO NOT FALL FOR IT!!!!!

It’s sickening to see. Ai is NOT fanfiction and it never will be!

I really wish there was a fanfic site out there that you could do this with akin to the games episode or choices but ,unfortunately, no luck as of now. And with generative ai on the rise we might never see the day we get a true, passionate, choose your own adventure fanfiction website. Unless it comes as a rebellious act against ai. (Which I am 100% down for)

The company behind glimmer claims to be ethical, they are NOT. If they truly believed in human creation and that ai could never replace the human writer, they would program a PROPER website that the user can program their own story on with preset choices MADE BY A PERSON WITH HOURS OF HARD WORK GOING INTO IT.

BEWARE OF GLIMMER.

I went home and pulled out an old tiny wooden box my brother had given me before he'd died. I'd been using it to store guitar picks I'd collected over the years, including one guitar pick that used to be his. I haven't played the guitar since he'd died, my hands are too small to play some of the chords, so I play bass and piano instead.

I went to work the next day and gifted my brothers old guitar pick to my co-worker. I told him that it'd been sitting in a box for ten years unused, and would probably sit there for longer if I kept it there. Told him that I thought he deserved to have it, because I bet he could put it to better use than I ever would. Told him I didn't feel like it was coincidence that me and him would cross paths with each other in our lives, and that it seemed suiting that we had these similar experiences but split in two halves. That somehow, I felt like he was meant to have the guitar pick. I told him that I knew he'd not played guitar since his brother died, but that if he ever decided to play again one of these days, maybe he'd be able to honor both of our brothers by using that guitar pick.

He almost cried. He thanked me. Then he went home that night and for the first time in years he played the guitar.

Unintended angels

How beautiful is it that you can sometimes make a difference in someone's life without realizing it yourself?

For example, as a photographer, whenever I meet up with people, I usually bring my camera with me. I take some photo’s whenever I see a beautiful moment. Off the cut, without really thinking about it.

Not suspecting anything, I then send those images to them afterwards. And then later it turns out that those photos are some of their most valuable images or memories.

Sometimes only years later. A portrait of a beloved pet that has since passed away. A spontaneous, candid photo of someone together with their partner, who later passed away. Because for me it goes so casually and effortlessly, that I don’t even think about it, I often don’t realize what meaning those kinds of things can have for people. How valuable such a gesture can be for someone else. I feel like we often underestimate our impact.

•

At 252,756 miles from Earth — the farthest any humans have ever traveled — the Artemis II crew shared a heartfelt group hug.

It happened right after they honored Commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife by proposing to name a bright lunar crater “Carroll.”

In a tender, floating embrace inside the Orion spacecraft, the four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — let the emotion of the moment wash over them: a mix of awe, loss, love, and unbreakable camaraderie.

Now, with the Moon behind them, the crew is accelerating homeward, hurtling back toward our planet on a trajectory that will culminate in a scheduled splashdown in the Pacific Ocean off San Diego on April 10.

Their mission stands as a powerful reminder that even at the farthest edge of deep space, where the Earth appears as a fragile blue marble against the infinite void, human connection remains our greatest strength.