Cherry 

Best of the past week

Hey , I'm finishing the week and writing this with an amazing view of the Pacific Ocean from a friend's apartment overlooking Venice Beach from afar, where I'm staying Los Angeles this weekend. It rained heavily most of the day before clearing up, I can see the waves apparently angrily rolling, pretty agitated.I've been catching up with several excellent articles this week. Let's start with my favourite one, this excellent essay by Robert Epstein, senior psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in California, titled The Empty Brain.In it the author pulls apart this commonly accepted idea that our brains function like a computer, among other points that it processes, stores and retrieves information. It sounds like a reasonable analogy and I thought it had a lot merit before reading the piece, now I'm not sure at all. Highly recommended and great food for thought on what actually happens in our brains, how little we still understand of it.I'll compliment it with my second favourite story: The Calm Company. It's Basecamp founder Jason Fried's upcoming book about company and work culture. I loved their previous book ReWork and this article announcing the book sounds like it's going to be a fascinating read as well. He starts by denouncing the kind of working culture we live in.Suffice to say I completely agree with the sentiment of the article and I'm looking forward to the book.I'll leave you with this snippet from the article:

"It’s no wonder people are working longer, earlier, later, on weekends, and whenever they have a spare moment. People can’t get work done at work anymore.

Work claws away at life. Life has become work’s leftovers. The doggy bag. The remnants. The scraps.

That’s just not OK. It’s unacceptable."

 Sprinkles What's the GIF? 

Whipped Cream

I hadn't been watching TV series for quite a while, this week I finished catching up with the first season of Syfy's adaptation of The Magicians book series by Lev Grossman.In short it's kind of like Harry Potter starting at university / college level. I enjoyed the series and I'd like to check out the novels now. It's not the best TV series in the world, a little overdone on the teen angst perhaps, though there are some interesting ideas about magic and they seem to quickly be dealing with fairly powerful stuff.Have a look at the video trailer and see if it might float your boat.

Caramel Fudge

What's sticky in the communications industry?

I've been doing quite a bit of research in the area for the past few weeks,

this is one of the many interesting articles

about how much the leading tech companies are saving as much as of our voice data as possible to do their best to improve the knowledge base and conversational abilities of their systems, may it be Alexa or the Google Assistant.

Many are already prophesizing the kind of oral culture and fully fledged conversations we can see in the movie

Her

, and I'm sure we are going in that direction, though perhaps not as fast as some might want us to believe. By the way, if you haven't seen Her yet I highly recommend it.

Chocolate

What's going on in gaming?

I've weirdly found an opportunity to mention the inauguration of the 45th president of the United States of America in this section. I haven't even watched the inauguration speech just yet. I was flying to LA, now I landed I haven't made up my mind about checking it out just yet.Meanwhile though, I found this fascinating article about the inauguration party in Second Life. Remember Second Life? Surprised it's still around? Well it is, and they put a party up for the presidential inauguration.The virtual world that sort of is like a video game, or at least a virtual world in which in this occasion virtual London was decked out and decorated to stand in for the new US president's inauguration speech.You're welcome.

Vanilla

What else is interesting this week?

I'll finish with two other stories I really enjoyed - and a bit of shameless promotion.This is a fascinating read of the account of Xiaolu Guo, a Chinese writer and film director who moved from Beijing to Great Britain in 2002, it is her experience of adapting to a completely new language and culture.I also kept reading a little more from Neil Gaiman's non-fiction collection, The View from the Cheap Seats. The Oscars are coming up soon enough, and this piece he wrote about being a nobody attending the Academy Awards Ceremony is vastly entertaining.Here's a link to the photo he mentions at the end, studying Rachel McAdam's dress for stains.Last but not least, I'm getting back on track with the podcast, here's a new episode. It was great fun recording and I hope you enjoy checking out Ian and Kelly's brilliant stories of building and developing The Go Game, a company creating awesome live outdoors team building games for companies.As usual, if you enjoyed the newsletter please forward it to a friend! I just want more people to be reading and enjoying this.CheersWillem