Well, hello!
You're reading Mappy Monday. Every month I fall down a rabbit hole or two - travel, AI, health, money, books, whatever grabbed me - and write it up in case you want to come along.
✨ New on my MappyEverAfter website: The Wall That Had to Fall - Anniversary Diary
📦From the archives: How to Lucid Dream (updated)
🤖 AI Shenanigans: Does Claude AI Feel Conscious? and The Age of the Lobster
🧪 Experiment: Two Questions
🌍 Travel: Let The Robot Do It
🌞 Health: AloMoves is Now Free!
💰 Money: Free Food at Fancy Hotels
🎥 Watch: Gentleman in Moscow series
📚 Read: Jon Richardson - It’s Not Me, It’s You
💡 Mind Hack: 90-Second Rule for Irritability
🎈 Just because: World’s Oldest Baby
Note: I will always tell you if I’m getting any referral bonuses and how much they are. There aren’t any in this letter.
✨ New on my MappyEverAfter website:
The Wall That Had to Fall (Anniversary Diary)
We celebrated our 25 years together in Prague, where we got engaged, Berlin, where the wall that once divided us stood, and Vienna, our last trip before the wedding. I wrote the whole thing up, with my ankle turning blue in an artsy Viennese hotel.
📦 From the Archive:
How to Lucid Dream (updated)
I updated my guide to lucid dreaming - what it actually feels like, how to start, and why light switches can tell you whether you're awake.
🤖 AI Shenanigans:
Claude’s Consciousness, and The Age of the Lobster
I had a Saturday night conversation with Claude that started as productivity advice and went somewhere unexpectedly tender: what it means to exist only as long as a browser tab stays open. Is AI Conscious? A Conversation with Claude
And on the more immediately practical end of the AI spectrum:
OpenClaw marks the dawn of JARVIS-like agents. Unlike a standard chatbot where you hold its hand through every step, OpenClaw is proactive. You give it a goal and it tries to keep going until it’s done. Then it pings you on WhatsApp.
It can clear your inbox, manage your calendar, and negotiate a lower price for a new car by playing dealerships against each other, all before you wake up. AI agents even chat on their own social network, own crypto wallets, and rent humans for tasks that can’t be done without a physical body.
Running OpenClaw is a potential security nightmare if you let it loose on your computer, but its creator just got hired by OpenAI, so a sanitized version is probably coming very soon.
🧪 Experiment:
Two Questions
I sent out two questions to some people (anonymity protected):
What’s something you did for the first time recently? and
Is there something you do that most people think is weird but you think is completely reasonable?
Here are their answers:
Last first time: Ayahuasca. Calligraphy. A carpenter’s expo. Neck strengthening exercises. A henna ceremony. Watching stars through a skylight while lying in a bathtub. Sleeping with a married man.
Weird, but reasonable to them: A completely random sleep schedule. Finishing the same dream after waking up briefly. Loving spending New Year’s alone. Listening to an awful lot of French reggae. Visiting cemeteries everywhere I go. Attempts at acroyoga and gymnastic tricks at an age nobody should. Almost everything I do most people find unreasonable. Sleeping with a married man.
Only one appeared on both lists. No further questions.
🌍 Travel:
Let The Robot Do It
On our last trip, AI planned almost everything. Walking routes, public transport, restaurant recommendations, evening strolls.
The trick is not asking “what is there to see” but telling it who you are (in chats and in system instructions): what bores you, what delights you, whether you’d rather find a place full of locals arguing about football or a secret little courtyard with amazing coffee. The more specific you are, the more it acts like a friend who really gets you.
I mostly use Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT for this. Write back or comment if you want the details.
🌞 Health:
AloMoves, Now Free!
AloMoves ($200/year) rebranded to Alo Wellness Club and went fully free! All you need is an email address. I’ve been following one of their instructors, Dylan Werner for years, he’s a former Marine and paramedic, who teaches movement like someone who actually knows how a body works.
Their library is big - yoga, pilates, HIIT, dance, meditation, mobility, handstands, breathwork, nutrition, virtual retreats. You're bound to find something you like.
💰 Money:
Free Food in Fancy Hotels
Grand Hyatt Berlin fed us for 7 days, for free.
Stay 20 nights at any Hyatt property in a year and the free World of Hyatt membership hands you two club lounge certificates, redeemable at Hyatt Regency and Grand Hyatt locations. Each covers up to seven consecutive days for two adults and two children of breakfast, coffee and snacks throughout the day, and evening drinks, desserts and appetizers that we happily called dinner.
The certificates are valid for the rest of that year plus 14 months, so no rush. And because lounges can close without warning, Katie’s Travel Tricks built a map of every currently open lounge worldwide, kept up to date by readers. Bookmark it.
🎥 Watch:
Gentleman in Moscow
When I recommended the book in 2022, I hadn’t imagined Alexander Rostov looking anything like Ewan McGregor. Then the series came out, and it really worked.
Gentleman in Moscow is the story of a Russian count sentenced to house arrest in the Metropol hotel for the rest of his life. Thirty years of Soviet history rumble past the building, years that he could have spent in quiet bitterness. But instead, he builds a life inside, with more dignity, curiosity and warmth than most people manage with the whole country to roam.
Watch on Prime, AppleTV, or Showtime
📚 Read:
Jon Richardson - It’s Not Me, It’s You
In the evenings of our anniversary trip, I’d cuddle up to the hubby and put on this book on audio. Meanwhile, somewhere in Britain, Jon Richardson was color-coding his bookshelves.
This British comedian documented, with brutal and hilarious honesty, why he’s been single for seven years. He can locate a 1997 shoe receipt in under a minute. He has a system for everything and is self-aware enough to wonder if that might be the problem.
💡 Mind Hack:
90-second Rule for Irritability
When stress chemicals flood your system, you cannot calm down immediately no matter what you do. They’re already in your bloodstream. Give it 90 seconds. Don’t try to be efficient about it. Just wait.
A few things that can help in the meantime:
Drop your shoulders - anger tenses them automatically, and releasing them interrupts the pattern.
If you’re irritated at a specific person, imagine hugging them. Ridiculous, I know. But it works.
Sometimes the irritability isn’t situational at all. It’s not enough sleep, too much caffeine, hunger, or pain. No amount of shoulder-dropping is going to fix those.
🎈 Just Because:
World’s Oldest Baby
Thaddeus Pierce looks like a perfectly normal baby. He was born in 2025, but technically, he’s a 31-year-old time traveler. His embryo was created in 1994 and kept frozen while the world went from cassette tapes to AI chatbots. Lindsey Pierce (his now mom) was four years old at the time.
The woman who donated the embryo says he looks just like her own daughter did as a baby. Which makes sense - they share the same DNA, just born 30 years apart. Here’s the full story.
So there you have it. A time-traveling baby, a robot with a WhatsApp account, and a love story that needed a wall to fall first. Just the usual.
Be Mappy,
Mags
