Weekend Reading #91

Photo by Dan Rowden on Unsplash

This is the ninety-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 30th October 2020.

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What we're doing.

No real action this week, as we just kept our heads down. These are the most critical weeks, as we progress through our project plans and keep focused on improving our live products and building new ones.

From a fund perspective, we had some eventful days in one of our favourites, CD Projekt, as their hit game, Cyberpunk 2077 was delayed for the third time. Away from that, the volatility in the US market kept us busy and the standout of the week was Bitcoin, which despite all the movement in asset prices all round, remained near its highs.

What we're thinking.

It's hard to keep our minds off the US elections, which are upcoming next week. The media believe that Joe Biden is the runaway favourite, but we can’t help but feel it’s touch and go. Not being American, we have less skin in this game and we look forward as onlookers to the actual spectacle of the night as the results come streaming in.

This weekend is also Halloween, which is very exciting for the kids (and parents). Sadly, this year there is no trick or treating, given the extreme caution being applied in this age of COVID. We have resorted to internally rigging Halloween themed stuff inside our houses for the kids to explore. Just another example of how bizarre life has become.

Some of you may remember that a couple of months ago, we mentioned a small New Zealand based game development studio called Grinding Gear Games, the makers of one of the most immersive and long-lasting PvE (Player vs Environment) games we’ve ever seen – Path of Exile. We linked to an interview which saw their CEO Chris Wilson explain how Path of Exile was built to be played forever.

And where there is a battlefield, there are fine examples of honour and gamesmanship. Grinding Gear Games released this announcement this week, choosing quite astutely to avoid a fight with the gaming giant CD Projekt:

We were previously targeting a launch date of December 11 for our 3.13 end-game expansion. As we discussed last week, our new development methodology gives us confidence that we'd be able to hit this date with a high quality expansion. Yesterday, CD Projekt Red announced that Cyberpunk 2077 will now be released on December 10. We do not want to put our players in a position of having to choose between these two games, so we have decided to step out of the way and delay the release of Path of Exile 3.13 until January. […] In the meantime, let's all get out our Albino Rhoa Feathers and pray to Kuduku that they don't delay again.

How’s that for strategic deference?

What we're reading.

A bit of comic respite came from the FT this week, with its story about how the hottest thing in fashion right now is not what’s currently being modelled by the latest, youngest, smiley-est Instagram models. Rather, the must-wear garments of this year had once been modelled by financial services professionals at long since bankrupted or acquired banks.

Yes, that’s right, the most coveted brand names in fashion right now are Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch or Bear Stearns. It is their range of decade-old, dad-chic shirts, hats and banker bags bearing the logos of these collapsed companies that are being snapped up by young millennial financiers, many who are too young to have been anywhere near Wall Street or the City during the financial crisis.

Extraordinary if true, and potentially profitable if you once happened to be employed by one of these institutions and might have a branded gym bag or baseball cap lurking in the back of your wardrobe. Turns out, you’ve got a collectible on your hands.

And for comic respite to the next degree, one could turn to this peculiar tale of how a man in Leeds plans to circumvent the government’s group interaction restrictions and celebrate Christmas with his family. The biggest problem with his plan that we can see: the government has about 2 more months to foil it, now that it’s gone public.

We read this obscure yet fascinating article about how one of the initial creators of the Xbox combined his passions for baking and Egyptology to bake a loaf of bread by extracting ancient yeast samples from ancient pottery. The story of how he enlisted the help of a famed archaeologist and a biologist to achieve this is equally mind boggling. The result was a “4500 year old” loaf of bread freshly baked in his home oven.

What we're watching.

Mainly as a function of years gone by, we couldn’t resist the Borat sequel on Amazon Prime. It started off with a few laughs and of course it had its moments, but it was otherwise extremely disappointing. We love Sacha Baron Cohen but honestly, don’t waste your time.

On the other hand, we have been completely enraptured by The Boys, also on Amazon Prime. It’s a cool concept – superheroes who go bad. Not for the faint hearted and keep your kids very far from this one, but 2 seasons of breath taking action later, we really enjoyed it.

This weekend, after an 8-month injury break, the 6 Nations returns to our screens on Saturday with the championship on the line. The rugby tournament kicked off back in February and was then postponed (like everything else in the world) in March, postponing the final round of matches. This weekend, we pick up where we left, all be it in empty stadiums.

England have a good chance of winning the championship if they go to Rome and beat Italy handsomely but Ireland, who are playing in Paris versus France, can secure the title if they beat France with a bonus point. Wales versus Scotland is a dead rubber in terms of the tournament outcome, but it should still be a great game. All is to play for and, given how long it has been since many of these players last played international rugby, the results are mighty hard to predict.

What is easy to predict is that we will be in front of our televisions all afternoon, as Super Saturday has the remaining 3 games back-to-back throughout the day. With autumn rain and wind forecast here in London, and lockdown measures severely limiting our ability to have fun and socialise, an afternoon of international rugby on the sofa with the heating turned to full blast is the perfect antidote.

Hell on Wheels is a TV show about the construction of the First Transcontinental Railroad across the United States. It launched in 2011 but because it's a period show, it hasn't aged a bit.

The series features Colm Meaney (of Layer Cake fame) and chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its labourers, mercenaries, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile encampment called "Hell on Wheels" that followed the railhead west across the Great Plains. The story focuses on Cullen Bohannon (brilliantly played Anson Mount), a former Confederate soldier who initially joins the railroad to track down Union soldiers who murdered his wife and young son during the American Civil War. Talk about hero's journey!

We really weren't sure what to expect after clicking the thumbnail on Amazon Prime – some of these network shows can be a little too commercial and over-produced. But Hell on Wheels is fantastic. This is mainly due to solid characterisation and pacing – the writers give you time to get to know the characters. The people of this strange, ever-moving town are multi-faceted and conflicted, and all the more authentic for that.

Embarking on a new show is an investment, so it's always nice to know that there are a full 5 seasons to get your teeth into. We're only four episodes in and honestly speaking, we don't have time for 5 seasons of anything right now... but so far, so good.

What we're listening to.

An excellent podcast series we stumbled upon this week is Broken Record, from writer Malcolm Gladwell and music producer Rick Rubin. Gladwell and Rubin spend the episodes discussing the greatest music with the greatest musicians, hosting episodes with the likes of Nile Rodgers, The Beastie Boys, Bruce Springsteen, James Taylor, John Legend and Alicia Keys.

The kernel for the show is how, for generations of music lovers, the liner notes on albums were a central part of the way music was heard. You bought an album, and it came with an accompanying narrative: a digression, an aside, a backstory. We intuitively understood that great music required not just listening but conversation between the artist and the audience and the audience and the rest of the world.

This podcast restarts those conversations—in a world without liner notes—and allows the voices behind our favourite songs to explain why they did it, giving us the story behind the music.

The podcast is especially awesome because Gladwell is such a fantastic and likeable intellect and Rubin is the go-to guy for anything interesting about music. Their combo, combined with whoever they’ve got guesting, makes for a podcast that all music fans should get into.

Earlier on in our careers we came across an excellent mind in the form of Marko Papic. He was the geopolitical strategist at the Bank Credit Analyst (BCA) where he first introduced us to the idea of his constraints framework. Now, the chief strategist at the Clocktower Group, he featured on this podcast with Ted Seides. It covers the US election, China and lots of other relevant topics and is well worth a listen!

Another idea that struck us in a fascinating podcast from our old favourite Sean B. Carroll with astrophysicist Adam Riess was the idea that while we tend to be incremental in the way we evolve and adjust our views on reality, physics and the world, the real shifts forward are in fact revolutionary and often establish a fundamentally different model for how things work.