The Third Thing | Anja Semanco | Substack
The Third Thing
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Hulu used to give me ads for cars and vodka when I was in college and now it’s giving me ads for antidepressants and medications for plaque psoriasis. And it hurts. It hurts, man.
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Give a little love to the Colorado River and check out this post for me
Rafting On Borrowed Water
It’s like, extremely sexy, to love where you live.
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Petition to move the 2am urge to improve your life to a more respectable daytime moment.
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idk but if Jane Austen could write her novels with a feather by candlelight, I think you could write without using AI
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hot girls support their local libraries
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If I ever become an enthusiastic LinkedIn user please send me away to live on a farm
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wish they made thought-cancelling headphones
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THANK YOU. how many of you psychos are grocery shopping with your partner????
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This a million times over. With kids. With pets. With hobbies. What is it with people pouncing on other people’s joy? Why do we have to constantly remind people of tough aspects of everything while forgetting about the wonderful aspects of everything?
JUST YOU WAIT until your child says I love you
JUST YOU WAIT until they do a belly laugh at something you also find funny
JUST YOU WAIT until people stop telling you to brace for something awful and just let you enjoy your life instead my god
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You are not running out of time. You have to do this forever
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This hit harder than I wanted it to
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Can’t stop thinking about a woman who worked at a barn where I used to board Tex who told me Tex was really food aggressive and was trying to kick other horses and would have to be put down if he ever kicked someone. And then I discovered she was feeding him only ¼ the amount of food he needed in a day.
Anyway, this is the “food aggressi…
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I just know this is where I was meant to live out the rest of my life.
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The Colorado River is running lower than ever, but damn if she ain’t still gorgeous.
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The mind of a pet rabbit is an impenetrable place.
I owe y’all some writing but god, painting has been scratching the itch.
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This is my best life
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Instagram: You’re an old hag, buy these products to become a newborn fawn!
Substack: I’m an old hag. Join me.
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It's absolutely wild to me humans have this and then we invented jobs.
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The process
Spiral Jetty, Great Salt Lake
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Third year this hummingbird has made her nest and had her babies on our porch ❤️
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I am absolutely BEGGING everyone on the internet to stop writing articles and making social media posts titled, “The part of X nobody talks about.”
For starters, it’s a dead giveaway of AI. Secondly, I guarantee you people are absolutely talking about whatever shite you think you’re having an original thought about.
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girl needs a vacation honestly
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letting the soft animal of my body hate what it hates
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Tex update: happy, flourishing, being an all around goober
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I don’t care. I’ve started calling out AI on Substack. It’s annoying and disingenuous. If you want to just say words on the internet, DO IT. Nobody is forcing you to write, so stop using AI to do a job that nobody asked you to do.
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may all the little girls who were told they were “wise beyond their years” be unburdened and silly again
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Things I’d like to see in Utah: More bison. Less data centers.
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publishing industry folks love to say they didn’t become authors to make money, or become famous, or exert cultural influence. Not me though. I’m going for all three, get out of my way
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5 months into my resolution to “have more fun” this year and this hits very close to home.
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Unfortunately I’m the eldest daughter so I might cry while doing it but it’ll get done
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Yessss this is also the only way I find travel joyful and fun.
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this wound needs more salt
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Yes, I’m here with one more AI slop giveaway: “Here’s the part nobody is talking about…”
I am seeing this everywhere and just about every time it’s absolutely something people ARE talking about. Please. I am begging you. I’d rather read a shitty draft than something AI compiled.
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Pink bridle ✅
Pink saddle pad ✅
Sparkly boots ✅
We’re ready to rumble!
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Another AI slop giveaway: “They said the quiet part out loud.”
What in the actual freaking f*ck does this mean?????
This piece is fantastic. Social media is riddled with all-or-nothing thinking because the algorithm loves it (and, if the algorithm loves it, it means people also gave their attention to it). The human body is not all-or-nothing. You will drive yourself insane trying to follow a standard like that.
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Hi just letting you all know if your piece says something like, “Here’s the difficult part you need to know,” or “this is the hardest part, but it’s important that you hear it,” it screams AI slop. K, thanks.
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Just overheard a 20-something year old guy explaining to his mom the concept of “protein maxxing” and when he was done she looked at him and said “what the fuck are you talking about” and then I looked at her and said “exactly”
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Show, don't tell. If you have a character get hurt in your book, go to the reader's house and punch them in the eye.
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You'll never be happy anyway. Become a writer
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i might be an overthinker but some people are definitely underthinkers
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My daily mantra.
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Humpback chub!!!!
celestial little humpback chub cutout✨🐟
These funky native fish have completely stolen my heart, they’re easily my favorite fish to draw, I love their stupid little faces 👀. I really want to get back into making wooden critters, I just need the time and space to do it.
Just makin’ shapes and drawing lines while the world burns
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Looking into my crystal ball. This year someone will say “flipflops are the effortlessly chic shoe of the summer” then someone else will say “WOW way to hobble women with shoes they can’t run in” and then someone else will say “men in flipflops give me the ick”. And somewhere in the Pacific the last whatever of its species will heave its last breath
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it’s horses and drought all the way down
Normal Life Field Report #10
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I trust the version of me that keeps going more than the one that wants to quit early.
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Dream job
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Just a girl and her impulse decision living their best lives 💁🏻♀️
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The internet is great at giving advice and terrible at helping you live with the consequences of it.
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just told a guy talking on his phone in the library to shut the fuck up, and everyone applauded me, so i told them to shut the fuck up too.
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Took my inbox a little too seriously this week and had to spend some time thinking about black holes, dark energy, and the cosmos as a little palette cleanser.
Doing hard outdoor things regularly really takes the edge off normal life problems.
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The body is incredibly capable. The brain is incredibly dramatic about it.
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Sarah Dean | Well Spent.Apr 17
If having a chronic illness has taught me anything, it’s that the antidote to a body that is constantly under stress isn’t more rest.
It’s more FUN!
Resting all the time is mind numbing.
But having fun is one of the most restorative things we can do for ourselves.
and the added bonuses is we get to act like kids again!
Have. More. Fun.
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nice messy draft you got there. would be a shame if you revised too much & robbed it of its joie de vivre
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SSRI taking creative here who was also afraid of losing my "spark" with medication, but it turns out my "spark" was actually a useless black hole that only made me interesting to other people not managing their mental health.
I got on SSRIs, this is how it affected my creative practice
You don't have to be fast. You don't have to be good. But you do have to go.
Hot take: 'going with the flow' is sometimes wisdom and sometimes cowardice and you know which one yours is.
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THERAPIST: and what do we do with those negative emotions when they get to be too much?
ME: put them in my feelings wallet so I can buy books and cheese with them
THERAPIST: what?
ME: what?
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“Was it harm or was it a bummer” is a question our ready-to-be-victimized culture needs to ask itself WAY more often.
Was it lovebombing or was it simply a good time and not a long time. Were they a narcissist or were they simply a charismatic self-involved person who broke up with you. Was it harm or was it a bummer.
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My silliest boy had his teeth floated on Friday. So far my farrier, my vet, my dentist, my horse massage therapist, and my horse chiropractor are all women. And it couldn’t be a more soothing space to be a first time horse owner.
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One of my favourite things I’ve ever read is about a woman who said that whenever she had a negative thought about herself, she would shout “GUARDS!” and imagine old knights entering and carrying the thought away.
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If it's okay with everyone, I would like to be LinkedOut now
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Forever finding new ways to write about my absolute hatred of airports and the industry of mass flights and my deep love for home.
When The World Feels Too Big
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this is my favorite corner of my house
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You know when you're just sitting there minding your own business and you get like a full-body shiver out of nowhere? That's a demon jumping in to possess you and then jumping right back out after he's had a quick look around like nooooope
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It’s not just a calamity, it’s a pandemic
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Most people are not good people doing their best. Most people are frightened people doing what is comfortable. Those are not the same thing. And pretending they are is how we excuse so much ordinary cruelty.
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my nervous system works so well that im literally nervous all the time
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forgive me karl marx for i have bought
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The bar for a good day has gotten suspiciously low: fresh air, movement, no soulless LinkedIn, no stupid Teams messages
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Unpopular opinion: 'I don't have time' is a values statement, not a scheduling problem.
Activist tip: the thing about climate grief is that it's grief. It follows the same rules. You have to actually feel it before you can do anything useful with it.
Flying in 2026 be like “now boarding Zone 3,022 and we ran out of seats in Zone 3 just fyi.”
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Advice for doing the thing you've been putting off: Don't wait until you feel ready. Ready is a myth invented by people who didn't do it.
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I have never regretted a bike ride. I have frequently regretted thinking about a bike ride for too long.
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One of the best things about horse ownership is that Tex never asks me for an annual performance review.
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There’s a fine line between being informed and being emotionally waterboarded by the news.
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The only meeting I’ll be attending
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You can spend a lot of time optimizing a life you don’t actually want.
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List of things I am currently handling well
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You want friends? You gotta leave the house. You want community? You gotta leave the house. You want experiences and memories that stay with you forever? You GOTTA LEAVE THE HOUSE.
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Do I need a new routine? Or do I need to stop doing things I don’t like for people I don’t respect?
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“ I asked chat gpt”
oh yeah? well i asked Baba Yaga and she told me that she’s gonna grind your bones up
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YOU MUST LEARN TO ENJOY LIFE WITHOUT NEEDING AN AUDIENCE TO SEE THAT YOU ARE ENJOYING LIFE
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books are so cool because there are NO FUCKING ADS IN THEM
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Just rewrite every single word and then you're done
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Someone recently told me to think of my job not as my purpose, but rather as my funding for a purpose-driven life. I would love to someday fund my art WITH my art, but for now, I’ll take the funding wherever I can get it.
Creative Fuel with Anna Brones
"There is no cultural production without financial support."
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Some of the best decisions I’ve made looked irresponsible to people who weren’t living my life.
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Hot take: We don’t need lawns - we need a thriving Colorado River
Let The Lawns Die
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It’s no wonder we’re all so anxious.
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Reminder: You can be a nature writer without ever having to force a transcendent, solitary, I-saw-god experience.
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A preview of my recent post. Hang in there, river.
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I know everyone who runs a Substack newsletter is a huge nerd because we all just willingly gave ourselves homework
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I don’t think burnout is a personal failure. I think it’s a perfectly reasonable response to a completely unreasonable world.
☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️☀️
The final stage of healing is having lots of fun and not giving a fuck
about what people you don’t respect think of you.
no matter how bad it gets, may there always be bikes and friends
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I wrote a whole creative piece last year about how I, too, used to be someone who said shit like “lol why are we spending money on space exploration when we have so many problems here on Earth”
and I can’t wait until it finally gets picked up and published because frankly I don’t have a more eloquent or patient way to tell the people who are still like this that we can work on multiple forms of progress at once, that NASA is the last federally-funded bastion of public engagement with the scienc…
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You probably don’t need a confidence workshop. But you probably DO need a starting point and a mild tolerance for discomfort.
A seasonal report from the Colorado Plateau
What Happens When Winter Never Arrives
I’m very annoyed to share that movement is in fact the fastest way I know to get unstuck from myself.
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Checking in on all my Substack subscriptions:
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My hobbies include carrying nerd gummy clusters into increasingly inconvenient places.
Well shit
If we stop calling it “social media” and instead said “ad platforms”, many ridiculous aspects surface:
We construct whole identities on ad platforms
We get the ‘news’ from ad platforms
We see ad platforms as a medium to demand positive social change
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A. R. Ammons:
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Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
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In regards to corporate work, I quite frankly don’t want to win at a game I don’t respect.
This list is so fascinating (and on point) because my immediate reaction was "oh, this just sounds like college." And then had to sit with that because I'm often saying, "I don't know what happened to me, I felt so much more creative and connected in college." And, well...there you have it!
38 ways to create more than you consume, while you consume
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Sold my first originals today 🥰 getting prints and cards ordered as well for more art sales this year!
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Grateful that nothing in my life makes for a good LinkedIn post
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