Take in the view. Take in all the things. Make notes.

Look, when the feature image for this post is the actual view from my back verandah, it's not all that hard to be inspired. However, turning that inspiration into at least seeds and perhaps a few cuttings for adventures, is a whole other story when you have 100 acres of bush property to manage, run a B&B, work on a dairy farm, and have a relationship to maintain. So, here's how I manage.

I read. A lot. From a wide range of sources. My RSS reader has over 50 feeds in it with topics ranging across reliable news and current affairs, farming, homesteading, design, DIY and maker things, pop culture, smart home, tech, and of course, TTRPGs and other gaming. I use Terry Godier's marvellous Current, which has completely changed the way I consume written material from my feeds. I can work my way through a day's worth of inbound material in about 45 minutes, sending off those I'm not interested in and opening tabs for things I want to read later or reading shorter things immediately. I also read a lot of printed material—books and magazines—and probably spend an hour or so a day after dinner doing this.

Right now, I'm reading:

• Margaret Atwood's The Testaments - it's the sequel to The Handmaid's Tale and powerfully feminist and anti-fascist
• J.J Abrams and Doug Dorst's S. - if you've read and enjoyed Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves, this is for you
• Jérôme Denis and David Pontille's The Care of Things: Ethics and Politics of maintenance - a very academic (and translated from French) treatise on the people that do the work of, and the things that require maintenance to keep the world working

I listen to several podcasts regularly, including:

• Stilgherrian's 9PM Edict which is a uniquely Australian and irreverent look at current affairs that goes deep with interesting experts
• Take 5 where music journalist Zan Rowe and music artists look at 5 songs that have shaped the artist's perspective
• Mark Fennel's No One Saw It Coming, a podcast about societal inflection points that were not seen or understood until afterwards
• And, for my TV culture discussion from the folks at Pajiba, Podjiba

I have a growing and heavily tagged Obsidian vault for things that are just about TTRPGs (or things where I can draw a relationship to TTRPGs). I have another vault for saving other material I want to be able to reference. Recent saved notes include:

• The Boring Internet - an essay by Terry Godier on the protocols and tools that underpin the internet, how they can free you of surveillance capitalism, and how you can feel less stressed by being online through making choices to use simpler tools
• Archaeologists have discovered 12,000‑year‑old dice – here’s what they reveal about the history of play* - a report on research at Leiden University on simple bone dice as old as 12,000 years and the conclusions about what they mean in social and human evolution terms
• What Cyberpunk 2077 Can Teach Real-World Cities - an essay on the urban design of Cyberpunk 2077, walkability, and the tyranny of vehicle-centric design

I've been heavily embedded in consuming pop culture since the early 1980s and listen to a lot of different music genres, watch TV across themes such as crime (but avoid copaganda), horror and weird, fantasy, and a lot of documentary and factual. Current watches others might be interested in are:

• The Boroughs on Netflix
• Restoration Australia on the ABC (Australian public television)
• For All Mankind and Margo's Got Money Troubles on Apple TV

Before moving to the bush I was a service designer for many years. As part of that career, I developed a very strong capability for systems thinking; understanding that the world is made up of systems of systems you can identify and comprehend the connections between things in a powerful way that helps to grasp your place in the world. It absolutely helps you to understand how things connect and why. Your curiosity is never sated.

Managing a bush property isn't short of inspiration either, and in a little over 5 years living here in the bush, I've learned it's fundamentally different to the life I lived in my first 50 years in cities. The way you have to think about life—chores and maintenance, going to town and how often (it's a 50km round trip for us), the things you really need, what's valuable and brings you joy and what doesn't—are not the same as when everything is close by and easy. On any day, I might be repairing a bit of fence, tidying our garden, cutting firewood from fallen trees, restoring an old tool or fixing a water pump, or building some handy thing from scrap wood (I'm designing a hardwood dice tray at the moment and will start experimenting on cheap timber soon). I also have to build my granddaughter a bookcase!

Inspiration can come from anywhere and anything. Go looking. Note things down. You never know when something will spark your creativity.