I stopped updating the COVID19 Diary for a few days (last update was on Maunday Thursday), and I feel like that was a healthier choice overall. It helped that nothing significantly newsworthy happened over the long weekend. (Well, there’s still thousands of deaths worldwide, but somehow our bar for “significant” has shifted quite a bit.)
Our lockdown has of course been extended to the end of April. I expect it will go beyond that though, likely the earliest chance for things to start going back to normal might be by June.
Got some consulting work done in the first half of the week, mostly setting up some automation for a client. Looks like they’ll have more to do for me next week so at least I’m keeping busy.
Also managed to do two online quiz nights again, doing more poorly this time, but still pretty fun. The second one was held last night (Black Saturday), and it was a team effort, so it involved our trivia team on an FB Messenger call while watching the quiz via FB live. FB Live sucks for this kind of thing due to lag, but we had fun (but still did not do well.)
Since it’s Easter Sunday and the folks haven’t seen their grandkids for a while, me and the bros set up a Zoom call so all the grandkids could see the grandparents, everyone all together at once. As could be expected, it was kind of chaotic, but also all kinds of fun.
Watching lately
I took the weekend to watch a few movies, notably completing the Hobbit trilogy. This trilogy wasn’t as good as the LotR one (talk about high bar to meet right?), but pretty watchable in its own right.
I also watched The Departed, pretty intense movie. Gradually building up to watching the Irishman on Netflix.
Finally, I watched this fantastic collaborative fan-made shot-by-shot remake of Back to the Future II put together during quarantine, featuring all kinds of ridiculousness: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcUUjWbVc4I
Check the 2020 movies page for my commentary.
Oh, I also rewatched the last two seasons of Community (now surprisingly available on both Netflix and Prime Video at the same time!), mostly to prep for a trivia round, but also because it’s a fun underrated show and more people should watch it.
Some things of interest:
- Al Gahaku, an AI “artist” that takes an existing photograph and modifies it to look like a renaissance-style painting. Pretty fun.
- There’s this great comic summarizing a privacy-respecting bluetooth-based contact tracing protocol. Nice way to present information for easier consumption by the general public.
Gaming
Been playing mostly Magic Arena (wasting my gold on cube sealed, really fun), Divinity: Original Sin 2 (kind of a slow burn) and a bit of Megaman Legacy Collection (currently about halfway through Megaman 3).
Final Fantasy VII Remake is out this week. I had a Deluxe edition preorder with our local game store, but given they’re all closed IDK how that’s going to work now. The store collected information from everyone who preordered so that they can give out info, but no updates yet. I suspect they’re going to try to set up some kind of delivery service, but don’t want to promise too much.
Alas even if I could get my FF7R copy, I don’t even have my PS4 at home as it was borrowed by my brother in February. I was planning to get it back right before the FF7R release, but eh, life in quarantine.
I dug up some old draft blog posts that I never published, so I polished them up and we should have some new content for the coming week (other than these weeknotes).
Other than that, I’ve been considering re-organizing how this blog/site is organized. I was recently reading Kev Quirk’s post about why he doesn’t use a static site generator, it kind of tempted me to consider switching back to Wordpress. The main problem with Hugo running this site at the moment is that the build time is quite long, so feedback can take a while. (Still the same issue I reported in November.) Anyway, I considered going back to Wordpress, and while that’s certainly a viable solution, there are some things that I’m thinking of doing that would be complicated to do in Wordpress’s data structure. Also, my gut doesn’t like the idea, although there are certainly some pros. I’ll need to think about this a bit more.
Someday, we’ll find our way back to the world we once knew, but it will have moved beyond us.
See Also