Ramadan Kareem, !

Can't believe it's Ramadan time already! It's the month where Muslims fast from first light til dusk everyday for the lunar month. Every year, I plan to be a bit more organised before it starts, but I swear every week prior to Ramadan starting is crazy busy and it never happens! 😂

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In this week's email...

• Week in the Life - read on the blog
• Creative Update - randInt - Metaverse, Schmetaverse
• Charity - Helping the Homeless in 2022
• Read - Origin of April Fool's Day
• Watch - Airplane turbulence and how to avoid it
• Quote - You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Week in the life

Well, this week has been all about recovering from the last and getting ready for Ramadan. Due to staff shortages and sick leave my entire day of work was cancelled on Friday and I was ecstatic! 😀

I ended up drinking way too much coffee and having brunch before not being able to for a month during the day time. Also managed to go make a silly YouTube video and set up page for donations for the Ramadan 22 appeal.

They're not particularly big things, but lately, I've realised that most of my time goes into the abyss due to the absolute ton of little things I've created for myself. More on all that over on the blog...

Creative update

randInt - Metaverse, Schmetaverse

It's a week delayed (just like everything else last week) but finally out. This is a minisode where Chandra and I talk about the Metaverse, what ever that means!

It's also our first attempt at using a meeting software called Riverside.fm to try and optimise the audio. If you get a chance, would love to hear your thoughts on the audio quality if nothing else!

Charity

Helping the Homeless in 2022

Ramadan means it's another attempt by me to raise money for those less fortunate around town. And also the return of the silly YouTube videos too.

Last year, we ended up donating over $2000 and I'm hoping to beat that this year. Just like last year, I'll be matching donations (up to $2k this year!) so it's an easy way to double your impact. If you're in the position to do so, please consider donating...

Read

Origin of April Fool's Day

Considering the month has just begun, I thought I'd look up where the origin of the tradition came from.

Turns out, it's pretty murky and people in the 1600's were asking the same thing: where did April Fool's start?!

What I'm reading at present:

• QAnon and On- This has got to be the longest I've spent on a book! Too much going on to power through and finish for the time being.

Watch

Airplane turbulence and how to avoid it

I've started booking flights overseas again and feel like a rough ride would be a brand new experience again! 😂

This video was quite good in terms of explaining the different types of turbulence (yes, there's types!) and what you can do as a passenger to try and avoid it.

I always assumed it was a bit random and that was all!

Quote I'm pondering

“You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.”

– Gandhi

In a world of constant conflict, polarisation and endless negative news, it's hard to not become overwhelmed by it all. Reading that quote reminded me that by and large, most people are the same and want very similar things: to be safe, to have food and shelter and to be able to spend their time with the people that they care about.

Even though we focus predominantly on the negative, the majority of humanity seem to do "the right thing" most of the time. Even if you look at right now, where Russia is invading Ukraine, Yemen is suffering from a famine and China is still committing human rights abuses (and I'm sure there are many more), out of nearly 200 countries, most are still somehow functioning and relatively well, even on the back of a pandemic!

It might sound a bit odd, but trying to reframe the tragedies by way of numbers actually makes me a bit hopeful that it could be a lot worse and that people are working on making it better...

That's all for this week! It's nice to be actually on time for once!

- Raffy

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