Weekend Brew

This week’s roundup covers some great reads on post lockdown topics in navigating this new world we are in, some news in the world of tech, and some nostalgia on the Mortal Kombat video game franchise. Enjoy!

Blog Postings

Some of my postings this week. One on my book notes on Rich Dad Poor Dad—a book containing a mix of helpful and questionable means to manage your money. I’ve also posted some remarks on how to keep your Task Management system as simple as possible to avoid overhead and procrastination. Your system should enable you to get things done, and spend minimal time managing your system.

Post Lockdown

The Economist posted an article detailing how CEOs must become increasingly political, and how their stakeholders (mostly their customers) are expecting them and their companies to take a stand on political issues. This certainly doesn’t make the job of a CEO any easier.

We’re in a world that’s forever changed by the pandemic, and the re-opening is destabilizing to what we’ve grown used to. Jezebel posted a great article describing how “There Is No After” what we’ve all just been through with this pandemic. This further pronounces the incredible change that we’ll continue to navigate.

Tech

Engadget posted an interesting article on tech being developed to promote Lucid Dreaming. Lucid Dreaming is the awareness that you are dreaming and can thus control your dreams. Not something I’ve ever been able to do, but have found the concept fascinating. Great to hear there might be more means in the future to help one with Lucid Dreaming, and something I might try out once the tech is there.

Sad news has been circulating the past two weeks that the Logitech Harmony remotes are being retired. I have one of these remotes myself and have loved it. Integrating its capabilities with Alexa and smart home routines has been excellent, and is unfortunate the remote is being sunset.

Finally, on the NFT front—the bubble is bursting already (not a surprise), but others such as eSports are getting into the concept of it. This has become controversial due to the environmental impacts crypto is having due to energy usage. While I understand the need to make it increasingly harder to “mine” crypto, if it can’t be done in an eco-friendly way, the concept just isn’t sustainable. I hope this problem can be solved, so the technology loses its controversy.

Mortal Kombat

With the upcoming release of the new Mortal Kombat movie, Game Informer has published a series of articles on the game series history.

These articles are packed with nostalgia, as growing up playing the first Mortal Kombat game and the many after it, I enjoyed the trip down memory lane. Game Informer ranked every entry in the series from best to worst and also ranked every character in the series—with a pretty accurate ranking at that.

The publication also posted an article on the Shaolin Monks spinoff game, a game which I loved playing. I found its gameplay, storyline, and mixing adventure with fighting styles all to be fantastic. It was also very well done in terms of transitioning the storyline and setting of Mortal Kombat 1 into Mortal Kombat 2 through the game’s progression (the game takes place between the events of these two games). This was the one spinoff that was actually well done, and I also would love to see a new one of this type get released.