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