My Dear Friend,
This is ThatsTheIssue No. 2 and it's a quick one. Let's start the roundtable, shall we?
Characters:
- Masahiro: Logic, Thought, Planning.
- N.T. Cloever: Emotion, Imagination, Creativity.
- The Fool: Curiosity, Conversations, Questions.
- Podrick the Podcast Chicken: Podcasting.
===
Masahiro: Hello my Dear Friends. It's the second week of our roundtable. How is everyone doing?
Cloever: Good day, brother.
The Fool: Hello hello! I have some bad news...
Podrick: Bok bok (Greetings)! ^Uh oh.
So. What happened this week?
The Lack of Foolishness and other Podcasts
The Fool: Sadly, there won't be an AntiFool for this week.
Masahiro: Your podcast? Why is that, foolish one?
The Fool: Also, there are delays on RoamFM.
Podrick: What!?
Masahiro: But what about our schedules? We had them lined up, and—
The Fool: It's Father. He's had surgery.
Masahiro: Ah. Right...we've had to take care of Father.
The Fool: It's nothing serious. Cataracts; he's recovering well. But days taken away stopped me from working on these shows and getting them done on time.
Cloever: Do not worry, brother. To take care of your family is part of your duty as well.
Podrick: It's okay! Your listeners can wait for you.
The Fool: Understood. I'll give them double the episodes for next week. Have to catch up on all of them.
Masahiro: Good man. Now. What did we discover?
Roaming, Collecting and Podcasting
The Fool: I'm reminded of something familiar: The Collector's Fallacy. Shu Omi sketched out an image on how collecting things makes us feel like we learned something.
Cloever: Materials that are collected and unused are better off thrown away.
Masahiro: Indeed. It reminds me of a draft I've had in my notes. I was comparing my need to hoard notes to Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit.
The Fool: You should get that written out then.
Podrick: Maybe make it an audio piece too?
Masahiro: We'll see. We have other essays to focus on for the time being.
Cloever: Mine is a short one: A beautiful NeoSoul guitar piece by Kazuki Isogai. It makes me wander. Calms me down.
Masahiro: Beautiful. Is that your favorite genre?
Cloever: I love many genres. What caught my eye with this is the guitarist himself. He seems to be having so much...fun.
The Fool: Indeed he is. Can we get him on a show?
Cloever: Please, if you can. Find out where his mind wanders off to when playing. I feel there is something amazing there for us to learn from. Oh yes, there is one more thing.
Masahiro: What is it?
Cloever: You know of the movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark, yes?
Masahiro: Aye. That's one of my favorite movies of all time.
Cloever: When you have time, please look at this: A black-and-white cut of Raiders of the Lost Ark with no dialogue and only music from Trent Reznor. Beautiful piece.
The Fool: This is...where did you get this?
Cloever: There is no place more magical than Twitter. laugh
Podrick: It is a magical place! I found something too. It's an upcoming web-based audio editor for everyone! It's called Sonuum and it's currently in early access. Already signed up: I REALLY want to see how this works.
The Fool: So you're telling me...this might replace Audition?
Podrick: Maybe. We need to test it out first.
The Fool: Gotcha. I'm in!
Masahiro: Test it out and see if we can pump out these episodes faster, friends. These conversations must be heard.
The Fool: Aye.
Podrick: Aye.
Cloever: Aye.
What have you been thinking about?
Masahiro: I've had a weird prompt come to my head on Tuesday.
Cloever: What is it?
Masahiro: A simple but perplexing question: How do I learn the world?
The Fool: That..sounds complicated. And confusing. What do you mean?
Masahiro: I want to learn everything. I can't. I'm limited by the currencies of life: attention, time, money and empathy (though that is an essay for another day). Therefore, I can't learn everything, but I can learn anything I want.
First, I have to develop a world around me that I seek to devote myself in. From there, I build my own curriculum.
The Fool: What's this 'curriculum' you speak of?
Masahiro: It could be anything: conversations, essays, videos and more. I define the world I want to learn in and choose to learn everything within that space. It's applying environmental design principles to narrow down what I should pay attention to. All the currencies of life can only work in tandem with the world I intentionally build.
The Fool: You could just say, 'focus on the things that excite you', you know...
Masahiro: What if it's everything? Curiosity knows no bounds. You know this well, foolish one. There is gold found in everything.
The Fool: True...
Masahiro: So we should build our world, our environment, first before diving into every single curious discovery we can find. That way, we can hold all the gold we want.
Cloever: Aye.
The Fool: Aye.
Podrick: Aye.
Masahiro: Let's come back here once things have calmed down.
Cloever: I'll be waiting by the fire, my good friend.
The Fool: Stay warm and lovely, friend.
Podrick: Until next time!
Masahiro: And now, back to reality...
...
Me: Until next time, my friend.
-N
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