Roy Tang

In the news this week:

• Donald Trump, who for some reason is still the US president, has tested positive for Covid19, adding even more chaos and uncertainty to the US election season. The rest of the world has no choice but to pay attention, given how much US politics affects the rest of us
• The Philippines is now #20 worldwide in total Covid cases, yay! Yay?
• Some drama about the PH congress leadership? IDK, whatever man.

Annoyingly, I’ve not been doing any blog posts other than these weeknotes during the past few weeks. It is what it is though. I guess I haven’t really had time for longer writing things lately?

I’m not work busy, but the I have felt busy during the past week. Part of it is probably becaause I’ve started doing the Inktober thing, so that’s an additional daily task. Another part of it is probably the fact that I purchased a Nintendo Switch last week!

So, gaming then:

• the aforementioned Nintendo Switch. I got Super Mario 3D All Stars and Link’s Awakening together with the purchase. I originally wanted to get Mario Odyssey, Fire Emblem and Paper Mario as well, but I figured two games (really four) was plenty for a first set, and my brother was going to lend me Odyssey anyway. I started playing Mario 64. I’m not too far in, but I found the camera really problematic, and I can’t play it for too long without getting dizzy. I also started playing Super Mario Sunshine, which was a noticeable improvement camera-wise, and I can play it for extended periods without dizziness problems, so I’m quite a bit farther along there. I hope to get back to Mario 64 eventually, but it’s no big loss if I don’t. I understand it’s a classic game a lot of people look back fondly on, but I don’t think it’s aged well, and not just because of camera problems.
• I also tried the free Super Mario 35 battle royale game. It’s reasonably fun, although when you’re at the last 2-3 players, it takes a while to get to a winner.
• Finally managed to hit the 7 wins in Zendikar Rising draft! Standard is still terrible though. Maybe I’ll just play 1 draft a week and that’s it? The MTG community was also in an uproar the past few weeks, both due to the poor state of standard and due to some controversy over an upcoming Secret Lair crossover with The Walking Dead. WOTC has implied they are looking at expanding Magic mechanics to other IPs, so the TWD thing is mostly a trial balloon, I think. Many people are upset and are predicting the death of Magic, but the game has been pronounced dead before. We’ll see what happens. I’m not personally affected (since I don’t Commander), my primary concern is the health of Standard formats.
• Saturday gaming group picked up a new multiplayer game, it’s Root, from Leder Games (and published for digital by Dire Wolf, creators of Eternal). It’s reasonably complicated, and thematically and mechanically quite different from the last digital boardgame we were doing (Blood Rage).

I mentioned last week that I was planning to participate in Hacktoberfest. I haven’t yet, and there was some controversy over the past few weeks, with OSS maintainers complaining about spam PRs due to the event. Apparently, it was the fault of a Youtube who had a few hundred thousand followers. He had made a video showing how easy it was to make PRs and win the event swag, and a lot of people were following his low effort examples. I’m not sure if I’ll still participate, though I have been looking around a few repos here and there, we’ll see.

Apparently, I haven’t watched anything of note the past week. A couple of standup specials on Netflix, that’s it. I guess the Switch took most of my entertainment time!

IFTTT, a service I’ve been using for a while now, has obnoxiously been insisting I upgrade to their Pro tier. They’re going to start severely restricting free accounts, so I’m looking to minimize my usage of the service moving forward. All of the social media syndication stuff can be handled by the new blog backend I’m writing, so that’s fine. The only things that should remain are stuff I haven’t looked into automating myself yet, mainly backing up of SMS, so I’ll probably look into that soonish. I’m not against paying for services, but in this case it’s simply not worth it for me, since I can trivially write my own replacement software for most of my usage of the service. So long IFTTT, it’s been swell.

I have no closing words of wisdom today.