Weeknote 09/2024
The birds have flown away,
A cloud floats idly by.
We never tire of looking at each other,
The mountain and I.
- Li Bai
Verbs
Watching: Wonka (2023)
We’ve been watching a lot of films lately, and have enjoyed finding new favourites and revisiting some classics. We’ve rewatched Dune Part I, in advance of seeing Part II this weekend, and I also went back to Oppenheimer as Anja hadn’t seen it yet. Both are still utterly astounding films, I think, and both show what modern, epic, cinema is capable of. Terrible admission - I’ve still never read the book of Dune (gasp!) but I think that probably needs to change quite soon… We also watched Little Shop of Horrors, an old favourite of mine that Anja had never seen, as well as Catch Me If You Can, and Cruella - all light and fun breathers after the weight and force of Dune and Oppenheimer. Our standout film of the past week, though, was Wonka which retains a huge amount of the charm, magic, and whimsy of the original whilst delivering a top-notch script and a completely absorbing cinematic experience. It’s so good to see a film that reminds us that cinema can just be about bringing joy to an audience.
Listening: Philosophize This! and The Horne Section Podcast
Philosophize This! is a great philosophy podcast that I think is particularly good at doing extended looks at specific themes, texts, or philosophers. The recent series on anarchism has been especially good and last year’s exploration of AI and consciousness was both timely and insightful. The podcast is about to start a short series on Slavoj Žižek which I’m very excited about as he is a controversial and complicated figure in modern philosophy.
On the other end of the ‘serious’ spectrum is the return of The Horne Section Podcast. Fronted by Alex Horne (from Taskmaster amongst many other brilliant things) The Horne Section are a comedy band that frequently tours, appears on TV and radio, and have even had their own TV show. The podcast is essentially some musically talented people who are also tremendously funny, and very good friends, all pissing about together and that’s something I take great pleasure in getting to listen to.
Reading: An Atheist Chaplain and a Death Row Inmate’s Final Hours, and To Own the Future, Read Shakespeare
Two articles that I took a lot from this week, both of which seem to take pretty philosophical approaches to troubling, even deeply worrying, social issues. In the first, from the New York Times, Devin Moss, a US chaplain, spent a year ministering to a death row inmate by the name of Philip Hancock. Both Ross and Hancock were atheists - Ross trained and qualified as a humanist chaplain for the US prison system - and their conversations seemed to have focused on philosophical discussions emerging from the complex situation Hancock was confronted with. I was very much taken with the idea of humanistic chaplaincy and it was fascinating to see this particular individual’s journey, as an atheist chaplain, in tending to the spiritual/psychological/emotional needs of someone in a profoundly difficult situation.
The second article came from Wired magazine and was really about the value that the humanities and those trained in the humanities will have as technology progresses - especially as the impact of AI continues to unfold. I’m not sure I agree with all of the claims made here, and I think there is some wishful thinking in all of this that believes that somehow the humanities will triumph in the age of techno-accelerationism. But there are some interesting points in all of this around how creativity, language, abstract thinking, and interdisciplinarity are going to take on even greater significance as AI and technology begin to flow even more effortlessly into greater corners of our lives.
All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.
Building: LEGO Natural History Museum
It was my birthday at the start of this week, and I was very happy to receive a hefty box from my wife, all wrapped and waiting for me, that rattled with the tell-tale sound of LEGO. Something I very much like to do, to relax and settle my brain, is build LEGO and over the past few years I’ve become particularly addicted to a series of LEGO sets called the LEGO Modular Buildings. A whole collection of buildings that fit together in whatever order you like to make a fantastic, lively, street scene. These aren’t little things either - most of them are 3000 pieces+ and easily take a full day or two to put together. There’s something enormously satisfying about following the (thick!) instruction manual and slowly bringing one of these beautiful, complex, and joyful creations into being. I’m now a good 70% into this particular set and every detail puts a huge grin on my face. Sadly, they only release one new set per year of this collection so I’ll have to wait until December to see what new building will be joining my street.
Words
This week I’ve been enjoying lots of lovely things to celebrate being in my late-upper-mid-very-end-definitely-last-bit 30’s. We had family over for a big lunch - which I cooked - the day before my birthday, and we also went out for lunch on the actual day, to enjoy the great weather we’ve been having here. As a final bit of celebration, we’ve got friends coming over tomorrow evening as well so it will have been a successful week of festivities. It’s been a really fun birthday - gentle, enjoyable, and meaningful - and now I think it’s time to start thinking about some plans for that bigger milestone next year.
As said above, we’ve spent a lot of time this week watching films and it’s been great to go back to putting a film on each evening, after a while watching several TV series. There’s variety - watching some different every night - and we can always pick a film that fits the sort of mood we’re in rather than just falling back to watching the next episode of whatever series we’re currently into. Wonka was a real revelation and Hugh Grant’s performance as an Oompah Loompah will be a high point of 2024 for sure. We also watched some classics that Anja hadn’t seen before, and got ready for seeing Dune Part II this weekend by rewatching Part I - I still entirely love that film. As mentioned in a previous Weeknote I am using Letterboxd to track what we watch, and what we’d like to watch, and it’s such a great, enjoyable app to use. I’m hoping the news that they will soon be launching a TV tracker as well turns out to be the case.
I was excited to hear that I have been selected to speak at LXDCON 2024 in June. LXDCON is a global learning experience design convention that is held virtually across 3 or 4 days each year. This year’s theme is very much in my ‘zone of interest’ as the focus is on gameplay, gamification, and play in learning design. I will be speaking about my experience on the Erasmus+ QUEST project, on how to design and develop game-like and RPG experiences for training and learning, and taking participants through the process of exploring game mechanics in their learning design work. It’s really exciting to have an opportunity to speak about something that is both genuinely important to me as a designer and as a person and that is also something which I think is often overlooked, misunderstood, or poorly utilised in the LXD space.