“It’s chaos, be kind” - Michelle McNamara on the world.
Current events: This past week has been… challenging to say the least. Especially if you’re the sort who experiences anxiety over the smallest uncertainty.
I was originally going to write about local COVID19 happenings in this space, but it ended up being way too many words. I spun it off into a separate post, and intend to update it periodically as events unfold.
It’s hard to remember the events of the week other than the COVID19 stuff, but the first half was still mostly normal. I went out for a client meeting on Monday and did some filial errands and bill payments over Tuesday and Wednesday. For me, the crisis mostly escalated on Thursday.
Gaming: I mentioned last week how I got into Frostpunk. I streamed the second session of a blind run, but after getting a bit stressed at the news, I decided to keep playing into the early morning and finished the run without streaming or recording it. Game is pretty good, and sufficiently challenging. I finished a couple of other scenarios during the week.
I also tried a couple of other multiplayer games this week: one was the multiplayer Bannerlord beta, I got an invite middle of the week. It’s kind of meh, mostly just people spawning, running around maybe killing 1-2 other people, then dying and respawning. I wasn’t really into Mount and Blade for this kind of combat anyway, more for the simulation side. The other game was Orcs Must Die 2, which I already had in my library but hadn’t played yet, but a friend suggested it when we were looking for games to coop. Fun game, fairly similar to the first one, I think coop is the only major addition, but haven’t explored it too much so I could be wrong.
I’ve been holding off on starting any longer games since I’m anticipating the release of Final Fantasay VII Remake in early April, but now the release date is going to be near the tail-end of the Metro Manila lockdown (and with some uncertainty as to what happens after), I’m wondering if I should reconsider…
Links: I’m maintaining a blogroll now, and I try to update it every so often, but I thought I’d highlight some of the sites listed there and why I chose to follow them and have them there.
Paul Capewell tagged me in a couple of posts last month (thanks webmentions!) so I checked out his blog. I enjoy his “stuff I’ve seen and read recently” kind of posts, like this one here. It helps me find other nice blogs to read and at the very least highlights some interesting articles. I’m hoping to incorporate something like these into the weeknotes (or maybe into a separate monthly post?). We’ll see - the challenge here is actually logging down interesting things I read online, given I read a lot and don’t have the habit of noting everything. I share some of interest via pocket, which goes into the Links page, but I’m fairly sure I could do better.
One blog I found via Paul’s site is Frank Chimero’s. I enjoyed Frank’s series of “redesign” posts where he talks about design decisions for his site’s ongoing redesign. The latest post is this one on grid layouts. I consider myself to not have a “design eye” as it were, so this kind of thing is mostly educational for me.
I think I’ve known of Ned Batchelder’s blog for at least a decade. He was one of the early developer blogs I followed. He writes mostly about Python.
Testkeis is run by an IRL friend of mine who I don’t have much contact with these days (Hi Keis!), but I’m glad she’s gotten back into blogging over the past couple of years. She mostly posts about software testing as that’s her specialization.
Personal projects: Minor movement on one I haven’t touched in a while, but for the most part idle.
Site changes this week: Not much either. I added a “Pinned items” section to the front page, mostly for the Covid19 post. Let’s see if this turns out to be useful.
Next week I’m looking forward to:
- Damnit IDK, too much uncertainty.
- We originally had a quiz night scheduled, but it looks like most such events are postponed indefinitely.
- I’m sure there are infinity backlogs I could get around to though.
Here’s to hoping we survive the coming weeks!
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