My COVID19 Diary is still ongoing, and I have yet to find a solution for the TOC.
Today is Palm Sunday. I’m writing this early in the morning, so IDK yet how the church will adapt the usual fanfare to this whole pandemic thing.
The summer heat has begun to settle in during the last few weeks of quarantine. I can’t sit without a shirt or rest or my arms anywhere without sweat threatening to accumulate on the contact surface. Coincidentally around the first week of the lockdown, our aircon in the only airconditioned room in the house started making funny noises so we’ve stopped using it. At least we get to save electricty?
Overall this week much less productive than the last. I felt a stronger tendency to “veg out” as it were.
I didn’t get to write any new blog posts this week (other than the weeknotes). It seems kind of difficult to get your thoughts together when your brain is constantly distracted by the state of the world. I mean, how could I ever finish a post titled “Things learned from a crisis” when things are moving so quickly?
Work has gotten a bit busier this week, as there are some things a client is asking me to do that he says are urgent, but really is little more than just saving them a bit of effort by automating stuff. I will say however that I’m amazed how strong his business still seems to be going, given they’re an industry that I don’t really consider essential. Still, more work is fine, as it helps distract me from the prevailing mood.
We did two online quiz nights again. I even managed to win one of them! These are a fun distraction (even though there are no prizes!).
Watching lately
- Season 4 of Kim’s Convenience came out on Netflix. It continues to be an light, enjoyable and easy to binge show, though the season was only 13 eps long so it was over quickly.
- I also finished watching Star Trek: Picard S1, via Prime Video.
- It started off slow, and I was worried it would be one of those conspiracy theory shows where the conspiracy part dragged on forever (X-Files may have traumatized me a bit).
- But it wasn’t! It started picking up the pace around episode 5 or 6, as the elements behind the conspiracy came back into view.
- And while Picard’s new crew seemed so motely and largely unnecessary during the first half, they each ended up with satisfying character arcs and backstories
-
(Spoilers)
although the reveal Rios’ history that ties in to the whole synth issue seems awfully convenient. - I’m glad we got to revisit old friends like Seven of Nine, Data, Riker and Troi, and even Hugh, just to see what they’ve been up to.
- I must admit I felt a great deal of satisfaction when
(Spoilers)
Riker shows up near the end with a whole armada (although realistically it seems logistically impossible for Starfleet to have put such a large number of top-of-the-line ships together so quickly)
- only 1 new movie watched this week, the first of the Hobbit trilogy. I meant to watch all three, but you know, distractions happened.
Not many links to share today, but I will say that a new update to Kicks Condor’s Href Hunt is out, and I’m still in the process of going through all the featured sites. If you like perusing people’s personal sites, this one is always fun to check out, and the current release has a ton of sites!
Gaming
New Humble’s Choice is kind of meh for me. I may pause again.
Lots of multiplayer gaming again this week. SC2 with my usual gaming group. Armello with my other gaming group. And now even my brothers are asking around if we all have Left 4 Dead 2 installed (but we haven’t gotten around to a session yet.)
No progress on Megaman LC this week.
I purchased Divinity: Original Sin 2 a couple of weeks ago in anticipation of an extended lockdown and finally started it up this week. I played a premade character first to get a feel of things.
Also, this week was the start of spoiler season for the next MTG set, Ikoria. And it’s kind of crazy; they’re doing a crossover with Toho to feature Godzilla-themed alters for certain cards. There was a leak before that Godzilla would be in the set, which seemed ridiculous, but here we are! I think the set comes out in a week, and it looks pretty sweet, looking forward to playing it on Arena.
Personal projects: Thinking of finally adding a set of new trivia questions to the trivia app. Mostly because our quizzing activity has kind of gone up while in quarantine (including random friends sharing quizzes etc.) A lot of the older questions/answers are kind of low quality too, so I want to implement some kind of weighted random selection so that newer questions are more likely to be picked. But first I need to cobble together a decent data set. Most of it will be movie and TV related I think.
Recent site changes: Not much.
It’s highly probably that our lockdown is going to be extended by at least a month. Sigh.
See Also