Conferences can be great for creating energy and fueling motivation. I recently attended a creative living workshop led by Elizabeth Gilbert at Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona. I left feeling ready to take on the world.  Unfortunately, that feeling can fade when you log off the computer, step off the plane, or simply reenter normal life. For me, my feeling of confidence toward more creative projects started to dwindle and imposter syndrome reentered my internal dialogue. “Inspirational environments trigger a dopamine response that temporarily alters our baseline state, creating what neuroscientists call a peak state,” says Andrew Hogue, co-CEO of the nervous system wellness app Neurofit. “But this physiological shift has evolved to be temporary. Your nervous system naturally regulates back to its usual set point once you return to everyday life.” While it’s natural for the excitement to wane, there are things you can do to relight the fire. Here are five ways to keep the energy going: Start Small Resist the urge to overhaul yourself with everything you just learned immediately, say Corry Frazier and Melissa Pepin, entrepreneur business coaches at The Business Reboot. Instead, give yourself time to sit with these fresh ideas and see what resonates. “What aligns best with you?” asks Frazier. “Think of it like waiting 24 hours before making a big purchase—if it still feels like the right move after some reflection, then it’s worth pursuing.” Darcy Eikenberg, author of Red Cape Rescue: Your Career Without Leaving Your Job, recommends reserving an extra day after the conference for reflection. “Too often we rush back into our daily lives, losing both the energy and the value of the new learning we’ve had,” she says. “Instead, think about this extra day as the way to make sure your investment in the conference pays off. . . . Review your goals and reassess where you are and where you want to go.” But Don’t Wait Too Long While you should be mindful of your next step, it’s also smart to take advantage of your heightened motivation before life takes over. Patrice Williams-Lindo, CEO of Career Nomad, a career strategist, recommends blocking one hour the week after to act on your biggest takeaway—the idea that “hit you like a lightning bolt.”  “Capture that insight, then break it down into micro-actions,” she says. “Instead of ‘I need to build my personal brand,’ reframe it into three doable steps, such as ‘update my LinkedIn bio, post one thought leadership piece, reach out to a potential mentor.’” Share What You Learned  One of the best ways to reinforce what you learned and remember how you felt is to share your experience publicly, such as posting on LinkedIn or another social media platform, says Eikenberg.  “Writing about a conference also allows you to show appreciation for key speakers or even the organizers, all who value knowing how their event helped,” she says.  Shanna Hocking, author of One Bold Move a Day: Meaningful Actions Women Can Take to Fulfill Their Leadership and Career Potential, recommends keeping the information fresh by bringing it back to your coworkers.  “Teach what you learned to others, which extends the learning for you and your team,” she says. Measure Your Actions Results build momentum that can fuel excitement, says Pepin. “You won’t always feel the same high you did right after the retreat, and relying on a feeling to sustain is unrealistic,” she says. “Instead, commit to showing up consistently, again and again, because, in the end, discipline and persistence truly elevate your success. Williams-Lindo recommends creating a 90-day challenge. “Real transformation happens in the trenches, not just in the moment,” she explains. “Assign yourself a 90-day implementation goal—whether it’s launching that side hustle, refining your leadership style, or mastering AI tools for work.” Create Environmental Triggers Finally, consider your physical environment, which has a powerful influence on your physiology, says Hogue. To take advantage of this, choose one specific object from the conference and place it in your primary workspace.  “can help you remember the physiological feelings associated with your inspired state,” he says. “Additionally, if there were any specific scents, songs, or sounds associated with the event, these are also a very powerful way to access the associated memories.” Hocking also recommends keeping visual reminders of the retreat or conference nearby. “Display your notes, a quote, or a visual by your desk so your learning and commitment are front of mind,” she says. At the end of the Creative Living retreat, Gilbert asked us to review our notes and circle five sentences or phrases that held the greatest meaning. Then we combined them into a five-line piece of “motivational poetry.” This is now pinned to the bulletin board in my workspace. Sustainable motivation over time comes from working with your body, says Hogue. “By doing so, you can maintain your inspiration long after that latest conference or event has passed,” he says. #things #stay #motivated #after #conference

Peace Garden at UNESCO | © INFGM Located within the headquarters of UNESCO in Paris, the Peace Garden by Isamu Noguchi emerges not merely as a landscape installation but as a profound meditation on postwar diplomacy and cultural synthesis. Commissioned in the mid-1950s, the garden symbolizes the United Nations’ commitment to peace through mutual understanding and cultural dialogue. Peace Garden at UNESCO Technical Information Artist1-2: Isamu Noguchi Location: 7 Place de Fontenoy, 75352 Paris, France Client: Marcel Breuer / UNESCO Area: 2,400 m2 | 25,800 Sq. Ft. Project Year: 1958 Photographs: © INFGM and Flick Users, See Caption Details It should be a quiet, moving place. – Isamu Noguchi 3 Peace Garden at UNESCO Photographs © INFGM © INFGM © INFGM © INFGM © INFGM © INFGM © bbonthebrink, Flickr User © Patrice Todisco © bbonthebrink, Flickr User © bbonthebrink, Flickr User © Dalbera, Flckr user © Dalbera, Flckr user Park View Park View Context and Commission Noguchi, a Japanese-American sculptor and designer, was a poignant choice for the task. His biography embodies a convergence of East and West, as well as a lifelong engagement with public space as a vehicle for social commentary. By the time of his UNESCO commission, Noguchi had already engaged with landscape-scale sculptures, memorials, and playgrounds. The Peace Garden offered an opportunity to distill these threads into a singular work situated at the crossroads of global diplomacy. His selection was shaped by the broader architectural ethos of the UNESCO campus, designed by an international team including Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Bernard Zehrfuss. The ensemble called for a complementary but ideologically rich intervention, a space that could resonate as much with symbolic gravitas as with formal clarity. This garden was Noguchi’s first realized landscape design, and its execution was made possible through a personal introduction from Marcel Breuer, the chief architect of the UNESCO headquarters. Breuer not only facilitated the commission but also supported Noguchi’s experimental vision, which would challenge prevailing notions of diplomatic landscaping. Notably, the garden was completed in 1958 and spans approximately 2,400 square meters. It was constructed by renowned Kyoto-based master gardener Sano Toemon, marking a cross-cultural collaboration between modernist sculpture and traditional Japanese craftsmanship. Design Philosophy and Symbolic Intent Noguchi approached the Peace Garden as both sculptor and spatial thinker. He resisted creating a traditional memorial or a didactic allegory of peace. Instead, he crafted a contemplative void, a space that, through its absence of overt narrative, invited personal reflection and multiple interpretations. Drawing on the vocabulary of Japanese rock gardens and Zen traditions, Noguchi created a space of abstract expression that nonetheless maintained universal accessibility. The garden is composed of roughly hewn granite stones, a central water basin, and minimal vegetation. Each element is carefully positioned, creating an orchestrated tension between natural materiality and deliberate composition. This spatial language evokes notions of impermanence, balance, and introspection. The garden does not dictate how peace should be understood; rather, it sets a stage for experiencing peace as a spatial and emotional condition. In Noguchi’s words, the garden was to be “a quiet, moving place” rather than a monument. While inspired by Japanese garden typologies, particularly the stroll garden, Noguchi chose not to replicate tradition. Instead, he abstracted and reinterpreted elements such as Mt. Horai rock formations, stepping stones, and a crouching basin. These forms subtly allude to symbolic motifs without prescribing a singular reading. Noguchi negotiated directly with the Japanese government to secure donations of ten tons of stone and plant materials including camellias, maples, cherry trees, and bamboo. This act itself underscored the garden’s role as a diplomatic gesture, embedding it with botanical references to Japanese identity while maintaining a universal design language. Material and Spatial Composition Set at the base of the UNESCO building, the Peace Garden establishes a counterpoint to the architectural massing surrounding it. Its recessed layout forms a kind of spatial cloister, shielding visitors from the city’s rhythm and inviting a slower, more inward pace. The materials, chiefly unpolished granite, gravel, and water, speak to both permanence and mutability. The granite stones, irregular yet intentional in placement, recall tectonic forms and ancient spiritual markers. The central water feature introduces subtle movement and sound, enhancing the sensory richness of the space. The garden’s compositional core is its sculptural use of stone, each placement a spatial decision echoing both tectonic memory and sculptural intentionality. Noguchi collaborated on-site with Sano Toemon, whose craftsmanship adapted in real-time to the artist’s rapidly evolving vision. According to Sano, it was only after intense on-site dialogue and shared experience that he could fully comprehend and execute Noguchi’s aesthetic strategy, a testament to the garden’s improvisational and relational genesis. Spatially, the garden is organized not around pathways but around moments. There is no linear procession or axial symmetry; instead, it offers a field of relationships. Voids and solids, shadows and reflections, horizontality and vertical interruptions all work together to create a space that must be experienced slowly and from multiple vantage points. The absence of overt hierarchy in the layout allows users to construct their own narratives. It is a non-prescriptive space in which silence, texture, and light become the principal mediums of meaning. Peace Garden at UNESCO Plans Floor Plan | © Isamu Noguchi Floor Plan | © Isamu Noguchi Peace Garden at UNESCO Image Gallery About Isamu Noguchi Isamu Noguchiwas a Japanese-American sculptor, landscape architect, and designer renowned for his fusion of Eastern and Western aesthetics. Trained under Constantin Brâncuși and deeply influenced by Japanese traditions, Noguchi’s work spanned sculpture, furniture, stage sets, and public spaces. His practice was rooted in a belief that art should be integrated into everyday life, often blurring the boundaries between art, architecture, and landscape. Notable for his minimal yet emotionally resonant forms, Noguchi’s legacy includes iconic works such as the Noguchi Table, the UNESCO Peace Garden in Paris, and the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in New York. Credits and Additional Notes Style: Stroll Garden, Contemporary Japanese Garden Main Contractor: Sano Toemon, in collaboration with Uetō Zōen Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi by Hayden Herrera Torres, Ana Maria. Isamu Noguchi: Studies in Space. Tokyo: Marumo Publishing, 2000. pp. 96–109. Sasaki, Yōji. “What Isamu Noguchi Left Behind.” Japan Landscape, no. 16, Process Architecture, 1990, p. 87. Treib, Marc. Noguchi in Paris: The UNESCO Garden. San Francisco: William Stout Publishers and UNESCO Publishing, 2004. Overseas Japanese Gardens Database. “UNESCO Garden.” Accessed May 2025. #peace #garden #unesco #isamu #noguchi

RT Patrice GARCIAHi-Res Scan of a Concept Art I made for The Fifth Element in 1992."ZORG's office #8"You can Tap, Hold, Load in 4k to see details. #patrice #garcia #hires #scan #concept

Sébastien Broca, sociologue : « Les Big Tech entretiennent des relations plus complexes qu’on ne le pense avec les utopistes d’Internet » Dans un entretien au « Monde », le sociologue revient sur l’évolution des Gafam, ces géants du Web qui se disent héritiers de la contre-culture américaine mais sont aujourd’hui les alliés du pouvoir capitaliste en place. Article réservé aux abonnés Sébastien Broca, le 12 mars 2025. HERMANCE TRIAY Sébastien Broca est sociologue et maître de conférences en science de l’information et de la communication à l’université Paris-VIII. Dans son livre Pris dans la Toile, il raconte comment les géants du numérique ont récupéré à leur profit les idéaux des pionniers d’Internet. Son récit s’intéresse aux différents mouvements critiques de cette évolution, pour mieux saisir les ressorts d’un échec politique. Expliquez-nous de quoi étaient faites les utopies d’Internet, récupérées par les entreprises du numérique… Ces utopies portaient l’espoir que les technologies numériques, l’informatique et Internet, soient des technologies émancipatrices. Elles feraient advenir une société qui laisserait plus de place à l’autonomie individuelle, aux capacités collectives d’auto-organisation et permettraient d’abattre un certain nombre de pouvoirs institués, comme les Etats ou les grandes entreprises. Plus généralement, elles seraient un outil de démocratisation. Il vous reste 89.03% de cet article à lire. La suite est réservée aux abonnés. #sébastien #broca #sociologue #les #big

Monster Closet Games is a small studio with big ambitions – and the experience to match. Most of the core team has been in the industry for 20-plus years, and they’ve worked on a number of gaming’s biggest franchises, from Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia to Far Cry and Halo. They’re currently developing an online multiplayer title codenamed Project Shrine, with plans to launch on PC and current-gen consoles.“High-level, it’s a third-person co-op dungeon raider,” says Monster Closet CEO Graeme Jennings. “You and your group get together, build synergies between your characters, and raid dungeons for treasure. It’s about working together as a team.”Teamwork is at the heart of Monster Closet’s approach to game development, and the studio plans to stay tight-knit and focused. “I’d rather have 40–50 developers who love working together, who love the way we work, and who build great games because of that,” says Jennings. “I have a genuine belief that great teams, with the right tools, can build great games.”Monster Closet’s artists and developers are used to working with a powerful tech stack of proprietary solutions. Starting over from scratch meant this wasn’t an option, so in the first few months, the team carefully curated a toolchain that would scale with their ambitions.For Project Shrine, Monster Closet is accelerating production with Unity’s engine-agnostic DevOps solutions and automations, including Unity Version Control for source control and Backtrace for error tracking. We interviewed Monster Closet’s lead online programmer, Patrice Beauvais, and CTO, Thomas Félix, to learn about what they’ve been creating and how they built a tech stack designed to scale.What did you consider when you started building your tech stack?Thomas Félix: A few of us have had different experiences with live games, and we wanted to have a solid DevOps foundation that could support that in the long term. Even though GAASis not at the core of our game, we wanted to make sure we had a powerful tech stack that would help us release and iterate quickly.We all had experience with Perforce, but we’re not necessarily big fans – it works well enough, but we had been doing things that weren’t really meant to be done with it. We were also looking at Git as a solution, but then we found Unity Version Control.On paper, Unity Version Control mixed the great approach you get with something like Git, but also something much more powerful like Perforce to manage data. We were seduced by Unity Version Control’s task branch workflows; after about six months of evaluations, we decided to give it a try. At that time, we were around six or seven people. Because the team was growing slowly, it was a nice, smooth ramp-up. We’re now at around 43 team members, and so far, so good.What was your process for testing this version control system?Patrice Beauvais: For us on the tech side, we didn’t want to have half our project on Git and half on Perforce. We know how much of a burden it is to have to use and maintain two different source code management tools – it’s common with live service games where the online systems and game data aren’t necessarily fully integrated.And a team of your size just couldn’t support that type of approach – the fact that Unity Version Control can facilitate both of those workflows is helpful?Patrice Beauvais: Totally.What kinds of problems have you encountered previously using two different version control systems?Thomas Félix: In game development, you always need to build customizations for the tools you use, no matter how good they are. Unity Version Control is a great example – even though it works well, we still found ways we wanted to tailor it to our workflows. If you have to support two source control systems, you double that work, which is always painful. Someone who’s good with Git might not be as familiar with Perforce, and vice versa. Training people takes twice as long.Patrice Beauvais: For me, the worst part is integrating data between two different version control systems. If you’re using Perforce but your data library is stored in Git, that data will need to go back into Perforce, so the two need a way to interface. Even though there are many solutions, these interactions aren’t really meant to happen, and sometimes you lose the project history. A bigger team can make it work, but I’m not going to spend six months building a solution to migrate data from Git to Perforce.It sounds like your team has used many different version control systems over the years. What are the benefits and challenges of some of the solutions you’ve explored?Thomas Félix: Let’s start with Perforce – it’s super resilient, it manages data very well, and it’s not that complex for nontechnical team members. You don’t find that anywhere else, really, except with Unity Version Control. On the other hand, the big monorepos you see in Perforce aren’t really suitable for game development – fast integration, multiple branches, that kind of thing. You can manage with Perforce, but it’s far from ideal, especially if you want to build a robust CI/CD pipeline.Patrice Beauvais: Git’s UI is great for programmers, but I probably wouldn’t ask an artist to work with it. It’s not ideal for managing large files and data, and it doesn’t support locks natively very well, yet.Thomas Félix: Unity Version Control is a better solution in many regards – the UI is tailored for content creators, so it’s great for usability. We see Unity Version Control as the perfect marriage of Git and Perforce.Programmers usually want to be in Git, and you can get pretty much the same workflows in Unity Version Control. For nontechnical content creators, it’s easy to submit their data, which solves one of the biggest problems teams run into with source control.Data loss is the worst thing that can happen to us. Code is easy to handle in every source control solution, but data is always tricky. We cannot afford to lose work, and each mistake made on the data side means paying for it a thousand times later on. We try to be very, very careful with that. With Unity Version Control, it’s a win for both our programmers and content creators.Do you have any best practices you can recommend for maintaining build integrity?Thomas Félix: For a small company like ours starting out, we knew we couldn’t afford to have broken builds because we submitted bad data or code to the main branch.With Unity Version Control, we never work in the main branch. We’re always in control of it, it’s always stable, and the mergebot actually does most of that work for us. That really resonated with us when we were trying it out, and it’s one of the first things we put in place, even when we were just five people working on the main build. It’s worked really well: The main branch is almost never down, and it’s been like that for almost two years now.How does Unity Version Control handle speed when working with large files and switching between branches and workspaces?Thomas Félix: In terms of task branches and switching back and forth, that works well, too. It takes a bit of time for people to get used to this workflow – task branches are a new concept to many people, and it’s maybe not as fluent immediately for artists as it is for programmers.That being said, every week – not every day – we do catch small problems through mergebots and our CI/CD processes, but they never enter the main branch or break the build. It takes a bit of time to get used to, but working in one branch will always be quicker than working across two – not by much, but if you step back and look at your pipeline as a whole, you start to realize it’s a much, much better way of working. At least for us, as a small-to-medium-sized company, it’s perfect.So there’s a culture and learning change you have to make to move to continuous deployment, but it seems like you’re saying you’ve already caught a lot of bugs or other potential issues before they even hit main.Thomas Félix: Totally. I would never go back to one-branch development. A team like us just can’t afford to spend days debugging or fixing problems that hit main.When we interviewed Apocalypse Studios, they discussed the “culture shift” that task branch workflows can require. They were using Perforce before Unity Version Control and talked a lot about branches versus streams. What’s your take on that?Thomas Félix: Branches and streams are quite different to me. If Unity Version Control didn’t exist, we could probably build something around streams and try to get the same thing going, but it would be complex and error-prone. In Unity Version Control, it’s much easier and much safer, because branching is what it’s built for.In Perforce, streams are the equivalent of tasks. If you’re super technical, you can make it work, but I would never put that in the hands of artists. With Unity Version Control, currently we have more than 1,000 branches – most of them are archived, and we have about 10–15 open at any given time. I’m not sure I’d like to have 1,000 project branches in Perforce.What challenges do you anticipate as you move further along in development? What challenges have you faced already?Patrice Beauvais: As we mentioned, people aren’t immediately used to the task branch way of working. For artists, it’s really new to them, so we’re careful to explain how it works and why we’re doing it.Thomas Félix: That’s true. People weren’t resistant to it or anything, but it’s definitely a cultural switch. Anyone looking to switch to Unity Version Control, like we did, needs to take that into account. It’s a better way of working, but you have to be willing to think outside the box. We started fresh, from pretty much nothing – no office, no infrastructure, and a very small team – so it was a little easier for us than it might be for other studios. Building your infrastructure in the cloud sounds cool, but it comes with challenges in terms of iteration time, costs, setup, security…. In the end it’s a win, but it took us some time to get a reliable workflow up and running.You’re also using another of Unity’s engine-agnostic solutions: our verified solutions partner, Backtrace. Can you tell us what your error tracking pipeline looks like?Thomas Félix: We use Backtrace to track every single bug in most of our applications – the first ones, obviously, being the game and the Editor. We mentioned before that we built some tools around Unity Version Control – Backtrace is integrated there, too.It didn’t take long to set it up, and it gave us access to some top-class tools, dashboards, and workflows. We were able to get a lot of the things we had in place at previous companies up and running pretty easily. After being operational for around six months, we already had visibility on all the crashes in the game, the Editor, and our tools. It wasn’t something I expected to get so early when starting a new studio, to be honest.Patrice Beauvais: It’s a super good tool. At Ubisoft, I worked on a proprietary solution like Backtrace for two or three years. Backtrace is really feature-forward – it’s even faster than what I was working on, and was easy to implement. Again, we did add our own customizations for custom data, and worked to integrate it with our server, which is on Linux.Thomas Félix: We were quite impressed by the time it took to set up Backtrace. Two or three days and we were already receiving crashes, so we decided to move forward.What did you do to ensure the process of implementing Unity Version Control went smoothly?We’ve shipped a lot of big games, and we try to use that experience to think about how we can apply it in new contexts. That’s why we ended up going with Unity Version Control, and with Backtrace as well. The tricky part is making sure we don’t invent problems we don’t have – we’re not a 1,000-person studio anymore!We’re always trying to find a balance between how we leverage our experience while reminding ourselves that we’re not trying to build the next big AAA game. We still want to make something great, and to do that, we need the best workflows – and Unity Version Control fits perfectly.What was your process for testing this version control system?Thomas Félix: The tricky part was making sure we could put it in the hands of artists, both in terms of the UX and data integrity. We worked with several artists on the team to make sure they understood how to use it. It was really important to us to nail data management for our project. The more people we added to the team, the better the feedback we got – people were happy, and we knew we were onto something.How are you using Unity Version Control’s Gluon workflow for artists?Thomas Félix: We do use Gluon, but for something else, what we call the raw data – data that’s not tied to the engine. Let’s say you’re an artist and you’re modeling a mesh: You’re using the raw data, the source file, in something like Blender. This doesn’t have to reach the engine; only the data you export from it does. This data is managed in a task branch, but we manage the source files in Gluon.These files can be really heavy – character artists using tools like Zbrush can generate files that are 2, 3, 4 GB per asset, if not more. You don’t want programmers having to sync 1 TB worth of original character meshes, so we manage those in Gluon using partial workspaces. Character artists only synchronize character files, modelers will only synchronize model files, and it’s the same for audio, textures, and so on. It’s all stored in a separate repository, away from the task branch workflow.So, to recap, you’re using Gluon for scenarios where you’re working with huge files so someone doesn’t have to download the whole repo – they can just use a partial workspace.Thomas Félix: Exactly. It’s an archived version of the original data, so we don’t use task branches for that. We don’t need to have a task branch for those materials, as long as creators submit their latest work every once in a while.What advice do you have for smaller studios looking to scale up and tackle ambitious projects, like you’re doing?Thomas Félix: That’s a good question. From day one, you need to know where you want to go. For us, we started with a small team, and we knew we wanted to grow, but we didn’t want to scale to 1,000 employees – even 200 isn’t our goal. We made many decisions – decisions that we’re really happy with! – that we might not have made if we had different ambitions.Building your infra in the cloud does make it easy to scale – just be careful, because it can cost you an arm and a leg. Always try to be in control of your workflow. If something doesn’t work, do the work to understand why. Make sure you have strong foundations, basically.Looking to optimize your game development pipeline? Get started with Unity DevOps, built to work with any engine. #aaa #vets #share #advice #setting