Juice Pack 🧃 Edition 2023
Gracing your inbox with my top ten [juicy] updates of all forms for this month
Hey everyone! Just returned from a work trip to Hong Kong and, after some fun (but intense!) work, I decided to send you all my juicy slice of life recommendations and updates: my Juice Pack.
For a pause and breath in the inbox.
Just playing around as always.
Read on for the top ten from my Juice Pack this month.
Animal Joy
A beloved friend sent me this book and I’m obsessed. Poet and psychoanalyst Nuar Alsadir investigates the importance of laughter, which she describes as honest outbursts from our subconscious, in being fully present and the most embodied in ourselves.
Where I am right now in the book, Alsadir has enrolled herself into Clown school in Yale, wholly unprepared for what turns out to be an extremely emotionally intensive, deeply vulnerable craft. I plan on writing about this book later on, for sure.
“I overheard my then three-year-old daughter call someone beautiful. I asked, What does beautiful mean? Still close to her clown, she replied, Beautiful means most self.”
Also
“Play as an Aesthetic Concept”
I found this article randomly online and, even though it’s only about five pages, it’s dense enough that I’ll probably have to reread it a couple of times.
Written in 1968 for The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Hilde Hein interrogates Friedrich Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man and specifically Schiller’s play theory on art, which she finds:
doesn’t distinguish play and aesthetic activity clearly enough
is hypocritical in how it defines play (spontaneous activity done for its own sake)
and then values play (valuable in what aesthetics it creates).
Tower of God
Tower of God is a South Korean Manhwa that was first released as a Webtoon in 2010. I first watched the anime adaptation in 2020 and finally, three years later, decided to dig into the Webtoon.
It’s set in the Tower- a mysterious, enormous structure that no one knows where it came from and no one inside knows what’s outside of it. Heck, they barely know what’s inside of it.
Twenty-fifth Bam lives underneath the Tower with no memories of who he is and why he’s there but chooses to enter the Tower to chase after his best friend Rachel, who wants to see what stars look like and believes she can at the top of the Tower.
This is good.
A new chapter comes out every Sunday. It’s like the Matrix meets The Odyssey and then goes on a date with Dragonball Z. And I have never [IN MY LIFE] been so upset at a character in any plot I’ve ever read or watched before than I have in this Manhwa.
Read it. You’ll know exactly who I’m talking about.
Pluto on Netflix
I’ve never really read Astro Boy nor have I watched the television show from the 60s, but maybe now I will?
Pluto is
an action packed robot crime mystery
based in the Astro Boy world
super blurry in its line between human and robot
Gesicht, a German(??) robot working as a detective for Europol, gets saddled with cases that are eerily similar: serial murder of renowned human robot rights academics and world class robots… like himself.
The plot is maybe a 6/10. It’s like bad in a good way - like, you want to see it to the end but… you’re tripping all over plot holes to get there.
The combination of American and Japanese animation styles and the experimental nature of some of the fight scenes are pretty cool. And the 3D animations aren’t as jarring as some of Netflix’s other recent animation series.
5. Wim Hof
This is a life hack. Do you want to feel full body relaxation? Optimism? Immediate stress relief? Clarity?
I’ve been doing guided Wim Hof breathing every day since September. If you don’t know about this, my advice is to just slam that play button right now and try it.
The difference you feel in your body and nervous system after just one round isn’t something I can really express properly.
Creative Coding Course
I learned a bit of JavaScript during my masters in Game Design, buuuut I’ve forgotten a lot since then. And since learning is the best way to keep the mind young, I picked up a Creative Coding with JavaScript course for fun.
Even if you’ve never touched code in your life, I still recommend checking this class out. The instructor goes over basic coding concepts using very simple terms.
P.S. This is where I want to be after finishing this course:
Developing something cool
🤫 Making something cool with Laurenz. Although we’re still keeping it under wraps (for now) I wanted to cryptically share some of what we’re doing. Can you guess what we’re making?
New meow-mbers of the household
We picked these cuties up from a farm outside of Vienna last Saturday. Meet Dionysus (Dio) and Jove (JoJo).
Dionysus is named for the Greek god of ecstasy and Jove is the alternate name for the Roman god Jupiter. They’re two siblings born from different litters.
They are hilarious and loving and we love them.Shake Shake Fries
You know how McDonald’s all over the world have different offerings? Well, Shake Shake fries in Hong Kong have to be the wildest thing I’ve ever seen on a McMenu.
Did you know that in Hong Kong exclusively and seasonally (no pun intended), you can order an extra bag to shake your fries in with added seasoning? And that the seasoning selections include seaweed?
I was shook. I shook the fries. They were really good.
Though.. I feel like I should add that I had just finished a month of Keto before going to Hong Kong and everything, everywhere tasted amazing. Still though, you should try them.
Playing at Work in HK
Can’t wait to share details, but in the meantime, here I am enjoying a lucky privilege of having fun at work:
That’s it for the updates! If you loved this Juice Pack edition of Play Palais, let me know and
Thanks for reading. Take care of yourself. Let me know what your current Juice Pack is - what shows are you watching, what books are you reading? What are you doing to relax and feel okay? Comment below!
And enjoy this old Capri Sun commercial I rediscovered from 1995.