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📩 In Today’s Email

• TL; DR - A quiet pause at home. Between what was and what’s next.

• The Deep Dive: The In-Between. A short letter written on December 24th.

• The Stream: Pluribus. Vince Gilligan gives us the best gift of all: more Vince Gilligan.

The In-Between - A Letter on December 24th

Dear ATN Readers,

This year I find myself somewhere unexpected… home.

I’m home for the first time in seven years. As I write this I’m having breakfast with my mom. The same kitchen with the same palm tree out the kitchen window.

It’s disorienting in a gentle way.

Nomad life teaches you how to leave, and how to arrive. It doesn’t always teach you how to return.

Home doesn’t feel any different, any bigger or smaller. Some trees fell over in a storm. The yard has opened up. My coffee mug is still there with the chip on the top.

I don’t feel feel nostalgia, just a quiet gratitude it still exists.

I know many of you are in your own version of this moment, probably not after years, and maybe far from it. Some with family, some traveling. Some staying put. Some relieved and some restless. Some simply waiting for the week to pass so something else can begin.

Where ever you are, I hope you don’t rush to assign meaning to it.

This stretch between what was and what’s next doesn’t need to be optimized. Decisions and resolutions to be held off. This in between time can be just what it is: a narrow bridge between stories.

If you’ve felt pressure to figure things out before the year ends, consider letting that go. Not everything needs to resolve on cue. Not every chapter announces its ending. Some things ask only that you stay present long enough to carry them forward intact.

A Texas Nomad will have plenty of movement ahead. There will be plans, tools, ideas, and fun waiting on the other side of this pause. 2026 will arrive whether we interrogate it now or not.

But this week is for noticing and experiencing. Where you are, who you are with, what you no longer needs to outrun.

The outrunning will come in January.

If today is loud, I hope you find a quiet corner. If today is quiet, I hope it feels earned.

If it’s just another day, that’s enough, too.

Thank you for being here this year. For reading, for trusting the pace, for allowing this space to be slower and more deliberate than the rest of the internet.

Wherever this finds you I wish you rest.

The real kind.

Because, very soon, we plan the escape.

— Edward

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🍿 The Stream

It’s going to be difficult to know what to get Vince Gilligan next Christmas after the gift he has given us for this one.

You probably know him as the creator of of Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Well, you can add another masterpiece to his Albuquerque turquoise belt, and this one is called “Pluribus.” Latin. Look on your dollar bill. The eagle scroll part.

Slow burn, high concept. The kind of idea so clean and strange that it creates its own gravity. It has already spawned conspiracy theories, always a plus for the prediction of the health of a tv show and especially wonderful when remembering that Gilligan got his big break as a writer on the X-Files.

So clean, and SO strange, in fact, that the pitch for the show sparked a bidding war.

Which makes sense. This is the kind of project networks fight over because it doesn’t look like anything else currently clogging the algorithm. It has authorship. It has, and gets away with, patience. The nerve!

Visually, the show announces confidence immediately. Shot on large-format cameras with Panavision glass, the frame is wide in a way TV rarely allows itself to be anymore. Compositions that feel considered, almost old-fashioned. You notice walls. Skies. Distance. Wolves. Soylent green… perhaps.

The color palette has a subtle, almost retro richness to it. Think restrained Ektachrome, something like old school National Geographic magazine, rather than digital gloss. Earth tones that ground you, then occasional pops that quietly destabilize the frame.

Tonally, this is where the Stephen King comparison really clicks. Not horror King. Not monsters. The other King. The one where ordinary people making small moral choices when no one’s watching.

The unease in Pluribus doesn’t comes from the question of how someone behaves when the rules aren’t explicit.

My favorite side question is a man traveling from Paraguay, northward. Learning English along the way because, well, he’s got time to do that. Not much Instagram anymore.

Paying for the gas he takes. Carrying himself like a guest. The Latin root of polite, of a man educado feels baked into the show’s moral logic. How you pass through a place matters.

Gilligan resists momentum on purpose. Episodes aren’t meant to be inhaled. They’re meant to be sat with. Even the editing feels like it pauses before judging.

Recommended time to watch: during this end-of-year in-between. Airports. Accents. That subtle difference between escape and transit. Pluribus doesn’t romanticize movement or condemn it. It simply insists that dignity travels with you, or it doesn’t.

It’s quiet, it’s high-concept, and it’s proud of taking its time.

And I’m happy to let it.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.