Cherry 

Best of the past week

Hey , 

I’m a little late sending this week’s edition; I was hanging out with my oldest friend who was visiting London with his second son Marcus, my godson. Neither of us is particularly religious at all but him and his wife liked the idea of their children having the possibility of another adult influence. They live near Bordeaux and I don’t see them that often so it was brilliant to wander around London and be tourists together. Yesterday we made our way to Greenwich, the Maritime Museum and the Insight Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at the Royal Observatory. There are many beautiful shots and my good friend Conor has a lovely photo selected. I recommend checking it out if you’re in London. We took the boat from there into the West End and finished the day at Hamley’s. Marcus got his own stuffed Chewbacca from the Build-A-Bear Workshop. This morning we finished their weekend with the change of the Guard at Buckingham Palace. We had an awesome fun-filled weekend!

 Sprinkles What's the GIF? 

Whipped Cream

In the news

This is unfortunately not immediate new news for everyone though this week I have more cause to mention the rising ambiance of fear in the media. This is from a few weeks ago but I just found out about the German government advising the public to start stockpiling emergency food and water in case of a terror attack. Shortly after that Czech government officials advised their citizens to start doing the same and preparing for the worst. In light of a new bomb going off in New York City yesterday this kind of scaremongering might keep going on and spreading. Thankfully there were no fatal casualties in the explosion and all wounded have been released from the hospital. It might be easy to say though it’s important to remember that generating more fear and isolating people is part of the objectives for terrorists. I believe doing our best to keep living as we always do and avoid jumping to aggressive conclusions à la Donald Trump will help stave off the worst of this ambient fear.

Caramel Fudge

What's sticky in the communications industry?

This is from a few weeks ago though I still want to share this latest Volvo advertising I really enjoyed watching, the voice over is pretty inspiring. Heineken released an impressive website for the purpose of global recruitment to the corporation. The Interview is an high value production video “choose your own adventure†style interview, presenting users with different scenarios brought to life in film thanks to the interview’s ever present host. Some parts of the video also introduce stories from actual employees. By the end, you get a personality test like evaluation and you’re invited to submit a CV to Heineken. My profile is called “The Initiatorâ€. I’ve had a serious opportunity to work for a large corporation once and it turned it down then. Never say never though I haven’t even applied for a job at this one today. You can check out the video manifesto along with an article from Adweek here.

Chocolate

What's going on in gaming?

This week I received my download code for another tabletop roleplaying game I contributed to via Kickstarter and am looking forward to reading (or probably adding to my ever lengthening reading list and hoping to find time to read it): Belly of The Beast. In this grim and strange sounding game of visceral horror, a cosmic entity called the Great Devourer has done exactly what its name implies and gulped the whole world playing characters originally come from. Luckily or not depending on your perspective, that thing is so gigantic that whole swathes of land, cities and people have survived the apocalypse and are doing their best to survive in the Beast’s entrails. Players interpret scavengers desperately working together to survive in the innards of the gigantic monster, bartering salvaged goods from their world, fighting off bloodthirsty reavers and hungry cannibals.It’s definitely not a happy sounding game and horror isn’t usually my favourite genre but the setting sounded pretty fascinating so I wanted to contribute to the project’s success and would be curious to play some time.

Vanilla

What else is interesting this week?

You may know I love food. I also love New York, and nostalgic stories of times past. Restaurants and meals carry memories, as in the Pixar feature film Ratatouille brilliantly demonstrated it when the critic Anton Ego is brought back to his childhood thanks to a single bite of the movie’s eponymous dish. In this context I really enjoyed reading Dining Down Memory Lane the New Yorker review of Ten Restaurants That Changed America by Paul Freedman, apparently a fantastic story of food passion from a historian’s perspective. Another one added to my reading list. Because I was browsing the New Yorker website again gathering links for this, I came across this fascinating article about Isabelle Mège, a French Medical Secretary who has made a life long project of persuading many of the most renowned photographers around the world to take her picture. â€œIn making the first contact with artists, she often used some version of the phrase “J’aimerais m’apercevoir à travers votre regard,†or, “I would like to see myself from your point of view.†Enjoy the rest of the weekend and please share with a friend if you enjoy the newsletter! Best,Willem

PS: The formatting of the new layout is not entirely right just yet, please bear with me and keep in touch if you see any issues in terms of design or layout.