It’s September! The last six months were a blur.
It’s considered “Christmas season” over here already I guess. The local memes are that once the clock hits midnight between Aug 31 and Sep 1, your neighbor’s Christmas lights are magically up. Also of course the famous Jose Mari Chan gets famous starting September, since malls and stores love to play his Christmas songs during this time. IDK what to expect for Christmas season this year though, since we are still in a pandemic. I keep telling my mom not to get her hopes up that we (i.e. my brothers and their families) will all be able to get together as tradition dictates. It’s possible, but I’m not optimistic.
My week was kinda busy. Not really in terms of work, but in terms of… high school stuff, I guess? My high school batch hosted our 25th year alumni homecoming this past weekend. Since we were unlucky enough to have it in the middle of the pandemic, it was an online-only affair, with presentations and raffles and whatnot. And a quiz night! A lot of my batchmates did a lot more work, my participation was mostly limited to some tech stuff, since I had access to the database of registrants for the raffle, and also representing the batch at the Pisay Quiz Night held online. I wasn’t the only PQN team member, I was just the one assigned to join the zoom and show the whiteboard; I was drafted against my will due to my past quiz night experience. My other batchmates were supporting me from a Discord, I basically streamed the Zoom call to them via Discord (which is really troublesome, always has tech issues) and they fed me possible answers etc.
I actually wasn’t expecting my PQN participation to take too much time, but there was like a tech rehearsal and a dry run before the event proper, to make sure everything worked well and that all the team got it, plus my team also got together a couple of times for “practice.” I didn’t really want to take it seriously, as with all online quiz nights I’m mostly there for the fun since it’s super likely for at least some people on some teams to be googling their answers lol. The PQN is super competitive though, I suppose that’s to be expected given the nature of Pisay. We didn’t win, and I haven’t seen the final scores yet, but I guess that we finished around middle of the pack among the 22 teams, but we had a good time (more or less!) and it was fun hanging out with the batchmates virtually.
Gaming this week was pretty good!
- I started and finished Disco Elysium during the first half of the week. Fantastic game, and I was probably unhealthily engrossed in it for like 2-3 days. I was so into the whole mystery thing, when the game warned me that I was at a critical point and that proceeding further would end other sidequests, I just created a save and pushed to the finish anyway. I went back later to load and finish the other side stuff. It’s the kind of game you’d enjoy if you like getting your Speech skill to 100 in Fallout. It’s very well-written and had some really great/shocking moments. Since it has very little actual “action” aside from delving inside the MC’s thoughts, I understand that it’s not for everybody, but it’s certainly a worthwhile experience. I thought about writing a full review post, but maybe I’ll save that for when/if I manage full achievement completion (looks tough!)
- after getting distracted by Disco Elysium, I went ahead and resumed my Uncharted 4 game. I think I’m close to the end on this one, should finish it this coming week.
- already half way through the Super Mario 3D Land special worlds. Speaking of Mario, Nintendo announced a bunch of new Mario releases for the Switch this past week, which significantly increases my want for a Switch. Let’s see how long I can hold off.
- still playing my regular games with the playgroups: Starcraft 2 Coop, Blood Rage
Since it’s September, I’ve been doing my regularly quarterly data backups/exports. One of them is Google Takeout. The last one was back in April, and that last export was 27 chunks (they split it into 2GB or less chunks). The new one is 44 chunks! I suspect the huge increase is because I’ve been streaming on Twitch and exporting them to Youtube, so they’re probably part of this current export. I didn’t even export everything this time, since I don’t need to re-export data from those services I’m no longer using. One of my ongoing projects is reducing my Google footprint, so I need to figure out how to get the size of this export down.
See Also