April 2020 Favorites

By Stefan Imhoff
10 min read

Stat sua cuique dies (To each his day is given)

—Virgil, The Aeneid, Book X, Verse 467

Videos

TV Shows

  • Ozark 3 N – The third season was really good. This can become the next Breaking Bad.
  • Community, 1 2 3 N – I rewatched Community, because it’s available on Netflix and still one of the funniest TV Shows.
  • Bosch 6 P – Fantastic! Bosch is just a good crime show.
  • Better Call Saul 5 N
  • Fauda 3 N – Again a really thrilling season playing in Israel and Gaza.
  • After Life 2 N

Movies

Music & Podcasts

Books

Articles

Inspiration

Stuff & Things

  • CodeTour – VS Code extension that allows you to record and playback guided tours of codebases, directly within the editor
  • Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) – Our World in Data
  • Journey – Probably the best game I’ve ever played. A masterpiece of beautiful art and music. This game has no spoken words or written text and can be played in less than 2 hours. It was released 2012 as a PlayStation 3 exclusive game, ported to PlayStation 4 in 2015 and 2019 to Windows and iOS. I played it eight times in April 2020, six times on PlayStation, one time on iPad, and one time on iPhone.
  • What’s Matt Cooking?! – Funny website by Matt D’Avella about minimalistic cooking.

Quotes

As you start to walk on the way, the way appears.

—Rumi

Jason Fried answers in a live-stream the question: How do we help first time work from home employees to ensure we are getting the most out of them? that he doesn’t like this kind of management style, but rather getting the best out of an employee than the most:

The best is not the most. The best is the best.

Jocko Willink quoting Tim Ferris (who had clinical depression and wanted to commit suicide) on The Candace Owens Show: Jocko Willink on what to do when somebody has psychological issues:

Get out of your mind, get into your body.

—Tim Ferris

Nick Law, the Vice Chairman of R/GA talks about how it’s impossible to come up with an idea if you just do collective work in teams:

We talk a lot about the connections, about the collaboration, and this space is built for it, but we’re also very mindful of these moments we just need to be left the fuck alone and get a clear mind and get laser. And so, there’s sort of this monkish piece and this sort of social piece and how those things work together is really the tension you’re dealing with because no one’s ever come up with a brilliant idea with 30 people in the room. It just doesn’t happen, you can refine an idea with five people in the room. But you’ve got to start with this sort of seed and I’ve never seen that seed appear, out of anything but one brain.

Jordan B Peterson about how different personalities keep the balance in the society:

What happened when the Spaniards came to North America? 95% of the Native Americans died. Why? Because the Spaniards brought illness. Smallpox, measles, chickenpox, all these things that the Native Americans had absolutely no resistance to. There were hardly any diseases at all in North and South America. The Spaniards showed up, within 15-20 years, 19 out of 20 of the Native Americans were dead. You never know what people are bringing with them.

And so what that means is that how should you respond to people who are outside of your circle of familiarity? Well, the answer is: One, they might kill you, in all sorts of ways. Two, they might bring with them things to trade that are of inestimable value. So you’re stuck. It’s like, how the hell are you going to reconcile that problem?

And the answer is, well we reconcile it temperamentally, roughly speaking. So half the people are temperamentally wired up to say, No, no, no! Let’s keep the damn boxes closed. Took a long time to pack everything in there and to get it into order. And the liberals say, Well wait a minute. You don’t know if you’ve got things in the right boxes, to begin with. The things that you’re keeping in there were getting stale and old. And maybe we need some new ideas and new people to rejuvenate the situation. That’s political discussion. And the political discussion has to proceed because there’s no way of solving that problem except by discussing it.