Roy Tang

Still kind of busy, although there’s a bunch of things I hope I can finally wrap up this week, so I can move on to the long list of other things I want to be doing. The world continues to be bleak, so I’m still hiding from it.

My stuff:

• Forty-two. I thought about just merging these into a single post for the day, but nah, this seems better.
• Reworking the old charity side project still ongoing. I was hoping to finish all the changes last week and next week would be testing and deployment, but stuff got in the way (and estimates may have been a bit off), but the spillover is small and we should still be fine for finishing everything next week.
• Gaming:
  • Lots more SC2 coop this week, mostly in the wee hours to destress.
  • Almost impulse-bought a Switch yesterday; a friend’s logic and my inexorably large gaming backlog held me back.
  • MTG Arena: Nothing of significance, but Amonkhet remastered comes out this week so looking forward to that!
• Quiz:
  • Actually did a bit better in 1 of the two quizzes we played this week, but I think we had way more fun playing Codenames online.
• Watching lately:
  • Background watching: Jeopardy on Netflix
  • Binged the new Transformers Netflix series, since it was fairly short (six episodes). A very bleak take on the Autobots’ struggle against the Decepticons on Cybertron, and also a very obvious tie-in to the current War for Cybertron toy line since most of the main characters have toys in that line.
  • I also watched Craig Ferguson’s Netflix special Tickle Fight, mainly because I happened to have watch a few of his late night segments on YT
  • Also started watching the last season of Agents of SHIELD, since I’m told the season finale is coming up next week. First three episodes seem pretty good for network TV, hopefully I have time for the rest of the (short) season in the next couple of weeks.

Recent links: Nothing of note this week. Even though I have read some interesting stuff, I think my link-capturing workflow really needs improvement.

We are still in a pandemic!

Pandemic thoughts and updates, Aug 9 edition:

• So, NCR got sent back into MECQ, a stronger quarantine lockdown. I haven’t actually felt the difference, since I’m at home most of the time. We went out yesterday for a grocery run, and not much seemed different out there either, still a lot of cars and people out of doors. I don’t actually remember what the last MECQ was like, but I kind of assumed things would be closer to how they were at the onset of the lockdowns in March, but this feels still mostly like the GCQ of past weeks. IDK if this 2-week MECQ stretch really serves any purpose except to show the government is trying something.
• Watching mass via Facebook again today.
• • As of last night, we are at 126,885 cases (+4226 from the day before, +28653 from last week, huge jump week-on-week), 2,209 deaths (+41 from the day before, +170 from last week, thankfully not as big a jump as from last week), 67,117 recoveries (+287 from the day before, +1852 from last week, a predictably much smaller jump after last week’s miraculous “mass recoveries”). We hit record high daily deaths again over the first few days of the MECQ. We seem to have settled at a much higher average daily rate since then. Luckily, the death rate hasn’t gone up that much. We are now #1 in confirmed cases in SEA, overtaking Indonesia. The govt claims nothing to worry about, it’s only because we are testing more, but our relatively large positivity rate (around 8.6% as of this writing) implies transmission is outpacing testing? Reference.
• Worldwide, we are at around 19.8 cases (+1.8M from last week, slope holding steady for maybe 3 weeks now?) and almost 730k deaths. Caveat: these numbers are from Worldometer.