Cherry 

Best of the past week

Hey , I'm going to keep this one fairly quick, I'm moving from London next week, a lot of this week has been about organising, catching up with friends and spending time walking around London, enjoying some sights.I've been having quite some fun making a variety of calls to figure out where to start in the U.S. from an admin & financial perspective in order to get my drivers license over there and a few other things, taking into account the fact that given I left the country when I was 6 years old I don't have any credit history. U.S. banks and credit card companies apparently don't tend to believe I exist. After a few days of calls and peering through websites regarding acceptable admin documents I believe I found forward to get a drivers license, we'll see when I get to Denver.The annoying thing this past week is I'm behind with the podcast again, I spent time editing a conversation with a bad sound quality, unfortunately I'm going to give up on that one. I'll record a new update instead and publish that this week.My two highlights this week are first this Mr Men children books parody that has been doing the rounds on the interwebz: "Mr President"; and second this fantastic conversation between Tim Ferriss and acclaimed designer Debbie Millman about very personal stories and overall how to design your life. Debbie also hosts the popular Design Matters podcast. Definitely worth listening to. She describes a visioning exercise looking into what's really most important to you in your life that I'm going to do today. In light of moving to the U.S. and going into new unknown adventures it seems like a good time to envision what's important to me for the years to come.

 Sprinkles What's the GIF? 

Whipped Cream

Mainstream geekery time, sorry for those bored of super hero flicks (I also say I'm bored of them but faithfully show up at the cinema for al of them): Marvel Entertainment started filming the new Avengers: Infinity War movie and released this teaser. The Guardians of the Galaxy (Space Avengers!) are going to join them in their fight against super villain Thanos!

Caramel Fudge

What's sticky in the communications industry?

Of course last week was the main TV advert day of the year; otherwise known and as the Superbowl! To me it's TV ad day with sports intermissions. That said I got busy with other stuff in the midst of my move an contrary to usual haven't watched all the ads just yet. Still here are a couple of roundups of the best and worst Superbowl ads according to The Verge and The New Yorker.

Chocolate

What's going on in gaming?

I caught up with a tabletop gaming podcast my friends from Les Voix d'Altaride in France had been recommending, called Misdirected Mark - and by the way I also recorded a couple of episodes with them, though that of course is in French.This episode, in which they discuss what creating a setting as a character can mean in a tabletop roleplaying game is a fascinating conversation, if you're interested in finding out about roleplaying game and I'd even say storytelling questions like "how can I bring the setting of my story to life in a vivid and compelling way?"As a side point, one of the podcasters, either in that episode or this one about Complexity in games, talks about his vacation in Chicago, particularly his visit to the Art Institute and how excited he was to see so many paintings from world reknown grand masters for the first time. It reminded me how lucky I am and have been to grow up, live in and visit cities like Paris, London, New-York, Tokyo, Beijing, Taiwan, Chicago, etc where so much amazing arts and culture is available. I tend to take it for granted. So yesterday I spent the day walking around London and went to the Tate Britain. I spent a while admiring the Turner Collection on exhibit and loved it.

Vanilla

What else is interesting this week?

While walking yesterday I listened to this frankly dense and yet fascinating conversation between Sam Harris and University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson.The first ten or so minutes explaining why Pr Peterson has come to be controversially infamous in the past few months is really interesting and definitely worth listening to. He posted a video of thoughts regarding a piece of legislation in Ontario he believes - seemingly correctly - not only flies in the face of freedom of speech, additionally would be difficult or impossible to uphold and something meant to be protecting from discrimination actually opening the door to more inequality. All of this is debatable, the point being that these kinds of laws are very complex to think about but the media wants to simplify everything, even though much of it isn't necessarily simple.The legislation intends to obligate people to use new and apparently not always clearly defined pronouns that aren't typically used in common parlance for people who don't want to be addressed along the lines of usual male / female gender. More about this in a variety of articles, including this one in The Globe and Mail, and more references in his Wikipedia page.Following this, the two have a two hour long conversation arguing about the nature of truth that I barely understood given my limited philosophy knowledge, and still thought it was fascinating. Try it out.If that doesn't float your boat if even if you go ahead and listen to all that, I followed it by this brilliant re-run and update of This American Life episode about Kid Logic: children following logical arguments to completely faulty and of course sweet and funny conclusions.Featuring this kind of dialogue:"So what do you think the Tooth Fairy does with the teeth she collects..?""Maybe she builds a house with them.""But why wouldn't she use traditional materials to build a house like other houses, like bricks?""Because nobody's teeth are made of bricks!"Doh. Of course.Enjoy the rest of your weekend! Remember to share with a friend if you enjoyed reading! Best,Willem