Content I have consumed recently
It's Friday. Andrew has had to step in to present at a conference last minute. Help! I need a Substack!
Andrew is up in Glasgow presenting a talk called “How to get your boss to do something exciting” to a bunch of data nerds who were instead expecting a talk about data lake houses.
With our planned content slightly delayed, I (Alex) am sitting in a Starbucks with the most expensive cup of the weakest tea in the universe. It’s time to break out an old classic Substack post format. Read on to learn about somethings I have recently enjoyed. They may be innovationy, or they might just be good fun.
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What’s good in the world right now?
A Korean Reality TV show about celebrities playing games
Korean Reality TV is really best in class. From the incredible women playing the most intense game of capture the flag you could imagine in Siren: Survive the Island to the celebrities living on an Animal Crossing-esque island in New World, Netflix is being instrumental in bringing a whole new type of creativity to the world.
The Devil’s Plan sees 12 celebrity contestants compete in a series of increasingly complex games. The introductions to the players set the tone for the rest of the show - every single one of them is not only a famous YouTuber or KPop idol or soap star but also a human rights lawyer or a world class mathlete or a professional go player.
The games are creative. The set is just amazing. There are intrigues and mysteries and backstabbings and politics abound. At one point one of the players says “It’s like watching the fall of socialism” as they watch a rival faction quarrel and the magic of it is that they’re not wrong.
Also Seungkwan 4 eva.
A pair of books about time travel
I am on a mission to read as much sci-fi and fantasy by diverse authors as I can. There is truly so much amazing stuff out there. Recently I’ve read both Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing of the Dog by Connie Willis. They’re related books, set in the same universe, with some of the same characters but their tones are so different. I absolutely loved them both though.
Written in 1992, Doomsday Book couldn’t be more prescient about pandemics. In a near-future when the invention of time travel is on the verge of revolutionising history in universities, an Oxford student goes back to the middle ages for a research project. Meanwhile a mystery disease starts ripping through the present day putting the city into lockdown. It’s funny, dramatic, sad and amazingly inventive. As a former Oxford resident I also loved the weirdly nostalgic trip through what a city I know so well could become.
To Say Nothing of the Dog is completely different. Part an extremely funny homage to Three Men in a Boat, part mystery novel and part romance, it has crashed into my top five books of all time. I adore this book, I laughed so much reading it and it has the best first kiss in any content I have ever consumed. You don’t need to have read Doomsday Book to read this one but I really recommend you do, just to see the scope and scale of Willis’ writing.
A game about deciphering language
I love creative, thinky puzzle games like Return of the Obra Dinn and The Case of the Golden Idol. I’m getting old and I like the opportunity to stretch the old grey matter without having to also test my reactions.
I enjoy word puzzles and language too and so I was over the moon when I discovered Chants of Sennaar. Waking up in a world where the different factions of society talk completely different languages it is up to you to work out how to translate everything and work your way up to fully understanding the world.
The game tickled exactly the right bits of my brain. It’s challenging but amazingly rewarding as you piece together context clues in the world to work out not just vocabulary but also sentence structure and grammar. Definitely worth a look if you enjoy crosswords, logic puzzles and code words.
So there we go. A small subset of the things I’ve consumed lately. What have you been enjoying?