#201 - Forts

1 Family Photo, 1 Dad-Joke, Many Highlights

Family Photo:
Forts

What’s stronger: the urge to build a fort, or dig a tunnel?

It feels like Calvin and Lawrence are building forts everywhere these days. Building materials range from couch cushions and blankets and pillows to cardboard bricks and cardboard boxes and storage containers. This weekend they built a fort out of the neighbor’s mulch pile. Last month, we built a snow fort together up in Truckee. When the cousins visited a couple weeks ago, they all built a mixed-media fort that covered the whole living room.

In our old house, I once had the brilliant idea of building a fort in our backyard. It was either a shed, or a home office, or an indoor/outdoor seating area depending on how you squinted. “An external room” is how I believe our listing agent described it.

Brilliant in theory, the structure was built directly onto the stamped concrete slab. When the ground was cold in the morning, the concrete felt like ice. When it rained outside, some of that water would trickle under the walls through the cracks of the stamped concrete and greet your toes.

The theory and practice of forts can be very different.

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A friend was talking to me last week about “building his mental fortress”. There’s so much detrital information: politics, sports, whatever celebrity news passes that isn’t already politics or sports. Flashing lights, scrolling pixels, is that really what we want to spend our time consuming? Is that where we want to apply our precious mental energy?

In some cases, within some limits, the answer might be yes. But we should still think about the mental fortress we have to build to keep out the other stuff.

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Dad Joke:
Pillow Fort

I built a pillow fort, but it collapsed...
​ ...I guess it couldn’t handle the pressure.

Source: Dad[AI]Base​

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Highlights:
Fortress

​How to Make Sense of AI by Cedric Chin ​

The first ground rule is that your attention is a limited resource. You are inundated with news, opinions, Substack takes, and (god forbid) tweets, which are designed to elicit responses from you. Some of these responses will be helpful. Others will not.
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At its core, sensemaking is the art of regulating attention. This is a fancier way of saying that you must know what to ignore. And then you must have the discipline of mind to ignore those things, so that you may focus only on things that will help you.
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At all times, whenever you are doing something or reading something, you should ask yourself the question: “What is the outcome I am trying to achieve here?” You may then continue with the action or consumption if you wish, but you must answer the question honestly first.
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​[S]imply noticing where your attention is going will change the way you allocate that attention.

​Ribbonfarm is Retiring by Venkatesh Rao ​

For a couple of decades, public social media, with blogs serving as a sort of network of fortresses scattered across that feudal landscape, was where the world happened. A public, grand sort of world. It wreaked havoc too of course, but a grand sort of havoc. The maturing cozyweb phase we’re in right now, while it has its own intimate charms, to be found in the warren of discords, slacks, and group DMs we all inhabit these days, lacks the raw grandeur of the public social media era.

​Substack Note by danielle (𝓇𝒶𝓌 & 𝒻𝑒𝓇𝒶𝓁) ​

the secret to happiness is hanging out with your friends, and the secret to hanging out with your friends is having clubs. like $1 margarita club and brunch club and go to the gym together club and costco trip club and raccoon hole club. having roommates or living near ur friends (neighborhood club) is also a club of sorts.

Danielle is the creator of Sit Club (like run club, without all the bad parts) and other viral pranks.

​Is it Safe? by Josh Knox ​

Calvin builds a wall of pillows to defend himself. He asks me to lay with him behind the pillow wall. Any bad outside thing will have to get through the door, over the pillows, and past me before it gets to him.

“Is it safe here?” he asks.

A thought occurs to me: I don’t know. I think so. It feels safe.

​I wrap Calvin in a big bear hug.

“Yes. It’s safe here.”

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iamJoshKnox Highlights:
Fortify Science

​Operation Carbon Speed | by Peter Agbo and Josh Knox​

Submitted for the Astera Institute 2026 Essay Competition: Identifying Systemic Bottlenecks to Science​

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