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  • DesignUp 🎈 Issue #122 > 🌻 Summer potpourri, SXSW22 update, Metaverse book recco & more!

DesignUp 🎈 Issue #122 > 🌻 Summer potpourri, SXSW22 update, Metaverse book recco & more!

April 11, 2022

As we get into the burning hot Indian summer, here's a potpourri of interestingness from the community - links about the value of crafts like drawing and film editing, and what you learn from them, SXSW22 update, Metaverse book recco, an update from the UpSide meetup last week, and more.

And the state of the world being what it is, let's keep finding the joy in the every day 🎈

In this live drawing performance and autobiographical journey, author and illustrator Jarrett J. Krosoczka sketches some life-shaping moments, showing us how drawing and storytelling can help us honor and remain close to those we've lost.

David Epstein, author of Range, shares a simple mental model that helped him to think more effectively about the craft of writing.

Dave Dunlop finds ethics and real human connection are taking precedent over hype trends at SXSW Conference.

📚 Book Recco

This month's very topical book recommendation Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson comes from Shiva Viswanathan, Design strategist and entrepreneur -

Without knowing anything about Cyberpunk or Post-cyberpunk fiction I read Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson in 1992. The story is about a hacker and pizza delivery driver decides to partner with another skateboarder courier. They discover a datafile named SnowCrash that can potentially wreak havoc if unleashed in a parallel reality world called Metaverse. Neal Stephenson coined this phrase as a virtual reality successor to the Internet (which was not in the public domain when this book was written). There is intrigue involving Sumerian civilisation, Tower of Babel, near-linguistic viruses and most of it happening in the Metaverse. Neal Stephenson's Metaverse appears to its users as an urban environment developed along a 100-meter-wide road, called the Street, which spans the entire 65536 km circumference of a featureless, black, perfectly spherical planet. Mark Zuckerburg or one of his cronies read this book. You should too.

🍳 UpSide from DesignUp

The first UpSide meetup took place last Sunday. Over the next few months, we will meet up to share and work through our side projects, ranging from NoCode-based experiences, maintaining Covid OpenData platforms, personal websites, customizing zoom backgrounds using code, data stories, sequential storytelling & making a physical college space more interesting through small interventions. RSVP here to join next time!

Here's a thread from Rasagy:

It was so good hearing about everyone’s background & projects. Quick 🧵 on ideas & questions we discussed. 👉

A side project by Atharva Patil. He says: This is the first side project I built using gatsbyjs to keep track of all the books I've read since 2013 and what books I'm currently reading. The site also includes a stats section with data visualizations of my reading patterns over the years.

🌟 Eye Candy

Designer Doug Alberts recently had an errand at the DMV (Dept of Motor Vehicles) and was so inspired by his experience he made a song about it.

Let's keep finding joy in the every-day,