E3 was last week and for those of you who may not know what that is, it’s the Electronic Entertainment Expo and if you’re a gamer, it’s like Mecca. Every year, game studios and indie developers descend on the LA convention center for the chance to show the games the’ve been working on, sometimes for years. E3 is full sensory overload—a barrage of sight and sound from the minute you walk through the doors and I love it. Like many kids who grew up in the 70s, I’ve been hooked on video games from the moment I unwrapped my Atari 2600 on Christmas morning in 1977. With each new console, my addiction only grew—the NES, the N64, the Gamecube, the Wii, the Xbox, all of the Playstations. My favorite console was the Dreamcast, by a long shot. I remember being at E3 in 1999 when the Dreamcast launched against the announcement of the Playstation 2. Sony had the budget (and a DVD player), but Sega had the heart. In the end, the PS2 won the battle and became the best-selling console of all time but I think for many of us, there was something about the Dreamcast that transcended Megahertz and Gigaflops.

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Here’s a short documentary on Hiroh Kikai, a Japanese photographer who has spent decades taking portraits of strangers against a the same wall outside a temple in Asakusa, Japan.

The New York Times magazine released a special issue completely devoted to love and photographer Ryan McKinley shot for 24 hours straight to capture all 24 portraits that were used as covers and distributed at random to subscribers and newsstands.

French painter Mark Maggiori brilliantly captures the mood, colors, and spirit of the American West in his drawings and paintings.

Music in this episode: The Wrong Way (Jahzzar) / CC BY-SA 4.0