Weekly Design Recap #8

By updating my blog every weekend with these recaps, I wanted to hold myself accountable and finish the projects I said I would. It requires much more than that, it seems, but if one of the goals was to make me feel guilty about the whole thing, it has worked indeed. Summer is almost here and that isn’t going to help either, specially as I’m going to Paris for the first time. Adulting isn’t a walk in the park.

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Things I’m working on

  • The Switch review is coming; I’ve just been too busy procrastinating, playing with it. This has also affected my other projects, and there’s no good enough excuse for it.
  • I heard of a home-office based, design position at a startup named Crossover. A 60K USD annual salary sounds pretty fantastic, right? They have you fill a questionnaire but things get rather fishy when they ask you to develop a full-blown visual campaign for a fictional event organised for them. I don’t know if it’s a regular business practice but I feel weird for giving away work for free just like that, which means I’m understandably hesitating to complete it.
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Things I’ve enjoyed

  • I know Johnny Depp is quite awful and film franchises have been stretched too thin, but I honestly quite enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean 5. I don’t even remember the actual subtitle but boy, was the film entertaining. I also loved the little get-together by the end of the story. What worries me is that there’s no sign the franchise will actually stop, because money.
  • Halfway through the second season of Fargo (late to the party, again) and my nerves can take it. Finished season 3 of Kimmy Schmidt and despite how brilliant the writing is, I felt as if the last episode didn’t quite have the drive of the first two. I might as well lemonade occasionally until the next season drops.
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Things I’m struggling with

France has a reputation for complicated bureaucracy and they do pride themselves on how reliably difficult it can be. That has contributed to my loss of motivation to carry on with my startup plans as registering for one isn’t the most streamlined process out there. But then, there’s no such thing as easy paperwork with the French and I still want to do it, so I am now relying on the local chamber of commerce to get all the help there is available. Now I just need an appointment to have someone answering questions.[/text-with-icon][text-with-icon icon_type=”font_icon” icon=”icon-book” color=”Accent-Color”]

Things I’ve learnt

As a Mexican, I need my jalapeños. Unfortunately, they’re hard to come by in France; in fact, I need to get across the Rhin river and into Germany to find these little boxes of with a mix just one of them peppers at a time. The solution for this is to have my own plant so I’m learning how to plant them. Seeded two —burnt my fingers in the process— dried the seeds and now I plan on getting that little Ikea hydroponic kit to grow them, while I prepare the seeds in moistened soil. A fun little side project if I manage to keep those sprouts alive.[/text-with-icon][text-with-icon icon_type=”font_icon” icon=”icon-headphones” color=”Accent-Color”]

Things I’m listening to

Last week’s 99% Invisible episode on the Great Alaska Earthquake was particularly hallowing. This show is so good that I actually have notifications for when a new ep is up so I can listen to it right away.[/text-with-icon]