Hi ,Happy Labor Day weekend if you're in the US! Welcome to the 100th edition of Ice Cream Sundae!I have gotten good feedback for the new and shorter format, thank you to those who sent me feedback!What are you up to this weekend? I had a lovely walk around in the sun yesterday, went to the beach for a quick dip in Lake Michigan before the end of summer, and checked out the excellent Red & White Wines, specializing in natural and organic wines in Chicago. This being a tiny world, it turned out the guy there had just come from a tasting tour in Catalonia and met my sister and tasted her wines during a wine show in Tarragona.Enjoy the rest of the weekend!CheersWillem

 Weekly Combo Two or three flavours, interesting separately, fascinating together 

Here at the End of All Things (Long Reads, 20 min read)This is a beautiful piece I just have to include, particularly as it explores the background and variety of fantasy maps and cartography of many settings like Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings, and Dungeons & Dragons.I went to a D&D Adventurers League night this week and hadn't played D&D in ages. Here maps are a way to explore memories, stories, imagination. I felt a certain poetry and nostalgia reading the piece, quite a stark contrast with the harsh reality of the devastation caused by Hurricane Harvey in Houston last week.Houston's Flood is a Design Problem (The Atlantic, 10 min read)Unlike fantasy maps (at least for the geeky type like me) the realities of urban planning, design, and stormwater management are not particularly sexy. As the author explains here, I found it fascinating to learn that Houston's roads turning into rivers is actually the way the city was designed to evacuate flood waters.The cities we built and live in aren't well suited to evacuating heavy amounts of storm rain, and past the current catastrophe many people (or at least the media) will move on to the next big issue without addressing the design of stormwater management. I wonder if or how we might be able to learn something from fantasy maps to maybe make these kinds of questions more appealing to a wider audience?To support victims of Hurricane Harvey, you can donate to the American Red Cross here.