My stuff:
- This week’s pandemic notes.
- Easily the most annoying thing this week: our broadband modem conked out Wednesday night. Customer support isn’t super responsive for local telcos: I called their support line the next day (support line is not even available 24/7!), got put on hold for 45 minutes TWICE before they agreed to send a repair crew over the next day (Friday). Friday morning I got a text that the technician visit was actually scheduled for SATURDAY morning. They arrive Saturday AFTERNOON, due to traffic apparently. And unluckily, they are out of spare modems for the replacement. They promise to come back first thing in the morning SUNDAY. They come back Sunday LUNCHTIME. And I finally have internet back. An annoying experience, and I’m also worried that my mobile plan might be charged for the two one-hour calls I had to do to their support line (hopefully I can clear that up), and I’m told I can also call them up to ask for a rebate for their days we had no service, but eh, I’d have to sit through another long on-hold period!
- One would think that being offline for half a week would lead to some kind of gigantic productivity boost, but no such luck. I still had my mobile internet for my doomscrolling after all. I did manage to read/write/watch a few more things than usual I guess?
- Gaming:
- I finished Final Fantasy VII Remake (before the internet outage)! So I spent a lot of the outage (including my time on hold with tech support) playing through hard mode, already about half-way through. Still not sure I’m going to do achievement completion, but we’ll see. Hard mode is actually an enjoyable challenge, nothing too insane.
- Divinity OS2 inched along slightly as well
- won my first Trivia Royale, I can quit now lol.
- the internet outage coincided with the start of this week’s Steam Summer Sale. There’s some games/DLC I’m considering buying, but realistically in terms of backlog I shouldn’t lol. Let’s see if willpower holds out.
- the new MTG core set also came out on Magic Arena during the outage. Maybe I’ll get back into regular streaming for M21 limited.
- Quiz:
- I still tried to join the Zoom and voice chats for the online quizzes with only my tethered mobile internet, but that was kind of a miserable experience. Still, I was able to contribute a bit, though we didn’t actually do too well.
- Watching lately:
- I finished watching season 2 of Harley Quinn. I don’t think I’ve written about the show before. The whole Harley/Poison Ivy dynamic isn’t really for me, but I like the show’s take on Gotham and the wider DC universe and there’s a lot of fun characters like King Shark and Clayface. Also, Riddler was recognizably voiced by Dean Pelton from Community, and that was fun lol.
- I also did a rewatch of Spider-Man Far From Home on Netflix, before the internet problems and all. Still a pretty good movie, and watching it made me eager to get back to the MCU.
- I also watched the Sonic the Hedgehog movie while things were offline. The best thing about this is Sonic being recognizably voiced by Ben Schwartz, who apparently voices everyone blue.
- As soon as my internet came back, I started watching Ghost Fighter/Yu Yu Hakusho, which came out on Netflix (as you guessed it, during the outage)
- I also tried reading a book. It was a Discworld book. “Tried” being the operative word. I’ll write about it if I manage to get to the end.
- Side projects:
- Uh, proceeding apace I guess?
- Again: I should probably write more.
Recent links:
- The NYT threatened to doxx Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex. I don’t really follow SSC too strictly, but that seemed like a bad thing. I also read up some more on Scott Alexander / SSC because of this, and it looks like he had a lot of problematic views, so I don’t really think I want to support him lol.
- Great essay from Ankit Shah about Being Alone.
- Always Bet on HTML
See Also