Waiting: Is economics real science?
All right, luvvies? Matt here with the Waiting edition of Ready & Waiting, a fortnightly newsletter from Foggy Outline.
The Waiting edition is all about what we’re working on behind the scenes. We don’t shout much about this stuff anywhere else, because cagey teasing gets old. But we don’t have to be cagey with you; you don’t get the wink-wink-hint-hint treatment, you get full details of what’s keeping us busy, even things that might not end up panning out. That stuff’s just between you and us. That’s trust, that is.
If you like, you can buy us a cuppa to enjoy while we’re working on all these things.
Udemy Instructor Partner Summit
8 October, 19:00WEST, Hotel Cascais Miragem Health & Spa
Mum and Dad are both attending. If you’re a Udemy Instructor Partner or you know someone who’s going that we should talk to, reply to this email (or forward it to them) and let’s organise something.
Your Small Business Board
Dad’s part of the latest cohort on this business development programme. Each meeting includes a hot seat section, where a member of the group articulates a business challenge and then has to answer questions to allow the other members to come up with potential answers or solutions. Dad’s in the hot seat for the October meeting – we’re all looking forward to getting some outside perspectives on our challenges.
What do we mean by climate breakdown?
is a course available on Udemy that’s technically Ready rather than Waiting, in that you can enroll right now; but as soon as Why isn’t solar energy powering everything? went live (much more on that in the next Ready edition), Mum started work on an update of this course. Since we first published What do we mean by climate breakdown?, Mum's got much better at animations, the app she uses has been updated significantly, and we’ve all got better at sound, so we can make some improvements there. Dad’s also reviewing the content and updating the script.
Vigil: Tailor Made
is the new Main House production on the Merely Roleplayers podcast, opening with Act 1 on Tuesday 1 October. In Vigil, we use the roleplaying game Monster of the Week to tell a story that’s equal parts Supernatural and Hot Fuzz. In Tailor Made, someone returns to town after 20 years away, to discover that something sinister has taken over her family home…
And next up on Merely Roleplayers…
The next Studio production, starting in the new year, will be Her Many Masks, a fantasy relationship drama using Alex Roberts’ card-based storytelling game For the Queen (second edition).
And this weekend just gone, we recorded the next – so far untitled – Vigil production, which is going to absolutely devastate the cast, let alone the audience.
Countryside Pollution
is a Foggy Outline animated production for Friends of the Dales, part of their campaign to raise awareness about plastic tree guards in national parks. The nearly-final animation has been going in front of various friendly pairs of eyes this week just to make sure we haven’t overlooked any backwards hands, upside-down heads, floating cars or other weirdnesses that can sometimes crop up in animation.
Courage and a reprieve
is what you’ll hear the Child pray for on this week’s episode of I Need A Miracle. Lizzie Waterworth, voice of Horrid Henry, is utterly convincing as a small child – but don’t take my word for it! Tune in at 19:00BST on Thursday, or subscribe to Apollo+ to get this episode (and the rest of season 1) right now.
Looking forward to any of these upcoming releases? Let us know on Linkedin or Tumblr, or if you’re feeling generous, buy us a cuppa to warm us while we work!
I’ll hand you over to Dad for this section:
🌾 Wild & Other – while enjoying a break in the Peak District the other week, we took the chance to visit this 20-acre farm near Chesterfield, with top quality guest accommodation for up to 15 people in 3 houses and a goal of improving the biodiversity of the farm. I think the way the site is set up means the income from the accommodation takes the pressure off the farm, so the owners can take their time to work out what is needed and gradually work towards bringing the land back to nature.
📈 Misbehaving (Richard H. Thaler) – I’ve always identified that we can’t divorce our environmental problems from the economy, so I was interested to borrow Matt’s copy of this book. This reinforced my view that economics is not a real science and it prompted me to pick up another book that's been on my pile for some time…
📉 Less Is More: How degrowth will save the world (Jason Hickel) – I've only just started this but so far, so interesting. (And based on the subtitle, I’m probably going to want to borrow this afterwards, ok Dad? –Matt)
⚠️ Planet: Critical (Rachel Donald) – I listened to an episode of this podcast on my journey home where Louis Arnoux, CEO of Fourth Transition Ltd, was being interviewed. I have not come across him before but he reinforced the point that economics is not a science and went further to suggest that economics ignores the laws of thermodynamics. He said that if we are to dig ourselves out of the environmental hole we've got into, we need to ditch economics and money! He did not get enough time to expand on his ideas, but he claims to have a solution. I'm not sure where this takes anything but it’s the first podcast I've listened to on my own and I also managed to pair my phone to the car to make it happen! This is a result in itself.
Thanks for joining us behind the scenes! See you in two weeks for the Ready edition: a round-up of Foggy Outline things you can enjoy straight away, no waiting.