Weather this past week was very bad for those of us in Metro Manila (and many other places in Luzon). Howling winds and strong rains dominated for 2-3 days of the week due to typhoon Ulysses. This typhoon wasn’t as strong as Rolly a couple of weeks ago, but it seems that it brought a lot more rains, causing flooding and loss of power in a whole lot of places. Metro Manila was hit quite badly, even drawing comparisons to Ondoy back in 2009. Even up to today I’m still reading about a ton of people who need assistance, relief or rescue.
I fortunately got off relatively unscathed. The howling winds and pouring rain meant it was heard to sleep at some point, but we experienced no other bad effects and in fact were a bit more comfortable due to lower temps. Oh, and we still don’t have cable service until today, a minor inconvenience. A lot of my friends lost power and some in the more Northern provinces were subject to severe flooding as well. It also took us a couple of days to get in touch with some relatives on the southern side of Luzon, but it seems they are fine, power issues notwithstanding.
Gaming: Still playing Super Mario Odyssey, hopefully to completion. Although given how difficult some of these minigames are for me, I’m not optimistic. We’ll see how close I can get.
Magic: Kaladesh Remastered is out on Arena! I’ve gotten started on a sealed and a draft, you can follow along via the MTGKLD tag, if you’d like.
Watching Lately:
- The Boys S2: Surprisingly the Boys kind of got a “good ending” this time, although there are still threats lurking around. I went back and reread the first Omnibus of the comic book after finishing the season, and the differences are really stark, as in the comics Butcher is really portrayed as a bastard, maybe even as much as Homelander, while in the series they’re pretty tame by comparison. Somehow a lot of the issues raised in this season feel topical too.
- Star Trek Discovery S3: Season isn’t done yet, but I went ahead and got this started. It’s quite a trip. Discovery is charting an unknown future now in the Star Trek timeline, and there are a lot of fun moments.
- Queen’s Gambit: This Netflix limited series has been getting a lot of buzz so I decided to give it a go. It’s fairly good, in a sports anime kind of way. It’s a testament to how good and realistic the portrayal of the 1960s chess scene is that for a while I thought it was based on a real-life chess prodigy. Apparently, the show is based on a novel instead, a well-researched one.
Misc: In the starting-yet-another-side-project department, I’ve been playing around with this library called the Dragonruby Game Toolkit, which I got from the itch.io Racial Justice bundle a while back. I tried building a simple platformer using a Kenney asset pack that I also got from the bundle. Here’s the WIP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDRShB4psyU. I like that I can work with the framework using only my text editor (as compared to some big bulky IDE like Unity), and it’s fairly quick to start up, as it makes a lot of assumptions for you so you don’t have to worry about things like screen resolution, screen coords, fps, etc. I don’t doubt that using Unity might have made the platforming physics a bit easier, but I did enjoy figuring things out on my own. Not sure if this is going anywhere, I’m mostly just dabbling with it at this point.
Trivia: we actually won an online quiz this past week! Amazing. We had so much fun, we even went ahead and had our own internal 2-hour trivia quiz right after: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=no0sYBcU5LA
Looking forward to: I just found out that the next book in Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive is coming out next week! That’s gonna be a huge book, hopefully I can manage to finish it before year-end (so that I can at least get my books read stat for the year up a tiny bit)
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