Past week has been difficult productivity-wise. I mean, the isolation isn’t really a problem for me since I’m usually at home anyway. But it’s difficult to find the energy to be productive about anything. It’s like the whole pandemic situation manifests as a lingering ball of anxiety in the back of my head. My parents are prayerful and hopeful that things get resolved quickly, but I’m not super optimistic - I think it’s likely to go long.
My COVID19 Diary is still ongoing if you want more day-to-day thoughts.
When thinking about how the world is handling this pandemic, the words of one of my boardgame friends comes to mind:
“Everyone’s playing like idiots!”
That’s my excuse anyway, for no other posts this week. I did have some ideas for posts, but not the energy or clarity to write them.
Most of my time this week went into:
- consulting work (the show must go on)
- gaming: I started playing Stellaris again. New build has much better late game performance. I tried playing a Hive Mind race this time, and had a false start because apparently completing the Old Gods event and becoming spiritual breaks the hive mind. Second attempt I made it to a late game, waiting for final crisis to emerge. If I get impatient I’ll just conquer everyone else!
- gaming: friends who are also stuck at home means we’re trying more multiplayer stuff as well. Aside from the usual SC2, we’ve been doing Orcs Must Die 2 and are planning to do Left 4 Dead 2 and/or Monaco. (Shades of 5-10 years ago!).
- gaming: In lieu of this month’s Humble Choice, I got the bottom tier of Humble’s current Capcom bundle, mostly for Megaman Legacy Collection. I tried playing Megaman 1 for a bit, but it’s much harder than I remember and my hands are not so used to this controller stress and got tired quickly. Still, I might stream this in the future.
- watching: I took the opportunity to clear out the backlog of Jeopardy eps on Netflix (new sets not as good as the previous ones), and also finished up the back half of The Expanse S3. The Expanse still pretty good, but I’m not sure I like how Holden is becoming some kind of central messiah figure because of his connection to Miller. We’ll see how S4 goes I guess.
- side note: one would assume I would take this time to add some more entries to the 2020 movies list, but I really haven’t felt like it at all.
- quiz: in lieu of our regular quiz nights, two of our friendly quiz providers decided to try hosting online quizzes this week! They had different formats; one was via Zoom with people showing whiteboards at their cameras, while another was via Facebook Live with answers in the comments. Both had technical issues, but were fun nonetheless. A welcome respite and a little bit of online community interaction in these dark times.
Personal projects: Minor movement and bug fixes on one of them.
Also took some time to clean up some stuff both physically (around the house) and digitally. The digital part mostly involves moving some of my notes off the online platforms I’ve been trying lately and into plain text files in Dropbox. I’ll probably write about those online platforms I tried and why I didn’t think they worked out.
Site changes this week: Not much.
Not sure what the next week will bring, but I’m hoping as we settle further into this new normal (however long it may last), we are better able to mentally cope with it and maybe even find some source of optimism for the days ahead.
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