Cherry 

Best of the past week

Hi , I’m travelling to Los Angeles for another weekend of my Partnership Explorations course so I’m writing this Sundae a few days early for a change! I’m looking forward to it. I’m almost at the end of Sapiens as well, I’ll finish it on the flight over to be ready for the book study part of the course. I kind of doubt I’ll be upgraded to first class like popular Youtuber Casey Neistat recently did by Emirates on his flight from Dubai to New York apparently worth around $21,000 but you never know. Maybe if you share this newsletter with more friends some day I’ll be Internet famous enough… Just saying. This week my brother Björn sent me the ideal ice cream news: this article on Bloomberg inquiring whether 2016 is the year of the ice cream! Is it in 2016 that more ice cream boundaries have been pushed? Well we still have a few months to figure that out but this article certainly thinks 2016 is in fact the year of ice cream – rather than the year of mobile, chatbots, virtual reality or artificial intelligence as some might have you believe. As much as I like all this other technical whizz stuff, ice cream is a lot more tangible and sensible. Admittedly we could maybe do without the Hawaiiaan Pizza ice cream sandwich born out of the collaboration between ice cream purveyors Coolhaus and Korean BBQ spot Hanjip. In case you’re still wondering, it’s a pineapple base ice cream with chunks of spam in white chocolate and Macadamia nut cookies. I’m not convinced, but then again nor am I when it comes to the usual Hawaiian pizza. Meanwhile Mitchell’s based in Cleveland has an appetising chocolate peanut butter ice cream – though he probably got his name on this list thanks to his Donald Trump themed “You’re Fired†passion fruit and jalapeño flavoured ice cream.

 Sprinkles What's the GIF? 

Don’t try this at your own hotel without training or supervision folks!

Whipped Cream

In the news

I don’t usually follow celebrity news but I could hardly miss this one. As this article claims “OMG!, screamed the Internet as one.†I didn’t precisely scream that even though I typically think of myself as a proud citizen of the Internet but I did kind of hear it.

 And that’s about all I had to say about that.

Caramel Fudge

What's sticky in the communications industry?

At least in my corner of the Internet this is important news: my friend James Whatley has just had an exciting promotion announced in The Drum. You can hear James on the mobile tech news podcast he co-hosts, The Voicemail, and I had a fun conversation with him for my podcast as well if you’d like to check it out. I wasted two minutes of my life watching this terrible advert for Apple’s music streaming service featuring James Corden. Misery likes company so I’m sharing it with you now. Go on, you know you want to click on it and check it out for yourself. That said, if you actually enjoy I’d be genuinely interested in hearing why that is. Now maybe it’s just me but I’m way more partial to this kind of fun communications: fancy tortilla chip Paqui launched a special chip so hot and spicy it’s in a coffin shaped packaing and only has one in each pack. It’s the #onechipchallenge spiced with what’s apparently the hottest chilli in the world. I love the campaign though I won’t be partaking, I had enough when I won the Red Dog Saloon’s Hot Wing challenge with the previous hottest chili in the world a few years ago. Last but not least, I tapped on an Instagram advert for the first time ever a few days ago. My wristwatch bracelet just happened to have snapped and it’s a watch advert featuring a travel themed watch on half price promotion. I remembered again a day later and typed in the EDO Collections url from work at lunchtime and bought it. Boom, advertising works. I’m not sure if my behaviour was tracked given my browser is on a different account than my personal mobile. The only downside is I suspect I’ll be heavily targeted with watch ads on Instagram for a while now. I’ve already seen a few more.

Chocolate

What's going on in gaming?

A colleague pointed me to this fascinating article about the state of PC video games piracy in 2016. Piracy is a vastly complicated question and this article sums up a lot of the forces at play when it comes to PC gaming piracy, from unbalanced pricing strategies that end up being unfair to gamers in certain countries like Bulgaria where a AAA title game can cost about the third of an average monthly salary because their price is dictated in Euros for the largest markets like France or Germany, to the continually escalating cat and mouse chase of companies creating new anti-pirating software and the people doing their best to circumvent whatever new technologies they come up with, to some indie game studios uploading their own games to pirate sources as a marketing strategy in order to get more visibility and reach a wider audience that would include gamers buying their game. Worth a read. A couple of bonus gaming news: a new Kickstarter launched for Voyage of Fortune’s Star an exciting video game project set in the my favourite swashbuckling rpg universe 7th Sea, and famous game designer Peter Molyneux is launching a new mobile game called The Trail that looks pretty interesting. In this one, players incarnate a character landing on a new continent to explore.

Vanilla

What else is interesting this week?

One of the main things on my mind is that I’m totally late with my podcast publishing schedule. It’s already the end of September, I was meaning to have everything ready and start publishing three weeks ago and still nothing. I have excuses, even valid ones, but that just doesn’t cut it. I intended to record with a new panel of people to kick off the second season and didn’t do that. I’m still kind of stubbornly trying to figure out if I have interesting bits to salvage from my first test audio bites with my digital recorder from Chicago in early July and while some of the stuff is good enough, the recording quality is generally bad. On the hand and fortunately there’s enough momentum and support that I’m not completely abandoning my podcasting efforts. I’ve recorded three new interviews in the past weeks and already had one to publish, so there are at least four new episodes coming up soon, possibly with a fifth if I manage to edit the Chicago bits together into something vaguely worth listening to. Upcoming guests are pretty exciting and I’ve had brilliant conversations with them. Probably in order we’ll have fellow London based roleplaying game podcast host Kalum of The Rolistes, New York based strategist Kim Mackenzie who among various cool initiatives started The Ladies who Strategize Slack group, web developer and game designer Brian Feister who created an open source tabletop roleplaying game system, and Atlanta based designer Maurice Cherry host of the excellent design podcast Revision Path. Other than that I came across this really interesting article about how the Internet may be as segregated as a city on The Atlantic from a few weeks ago, definitely worth a read. Lastly I found out about the pretty cool Haskell Free Library and Opera House. This lovely building straddles the U.S. Canada border between Vermont and Quebec, so half the building is in either country, with an entrance and exit on each side. It made me think of China Miéville’s excellent noir novel The City and The City, definitely recommended if you haven’t read it. I can’t say too much beyond it being a noir murder mystery kind of story with a cool twist. That’s about it for this week, have a great Sunday! Please go ahead and share this with friends if you enjoyed it! Till next week Willem