Archive for 2021
Posts (101) :: Photos (265)Posts
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A quote: “Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it. Always work with it, not against it.” - Eckhart Tolle The world: We are one week into the current NCR ECQ lockdown. Covid19 and the Delta variant continue to rampage through the country; the DOH reported 14k+ new cases today, the 2nd highest daily rate since the pandemic started, the positive testing rate staying above 20% for more than a week (signaling not enough testing - WHO recommended rate is 5%).
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Skyfall (2012) Bond film no. 23, Daniel Craig’s third. I watched this in the theaters back in 2012, so this is the last rewatch of my James Bond run. Back then my main complaint was that Bond’s plan in the last thirty minutes of the movie was terrible. The same complaint stands even now, especially given the eventual outcome of that plan. Make no mistake: the entire defending the house sequence is one of the best things about the movie from an action standpoint, but tactically it was terrible.
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Had some trouble thinking about what I wanted to write for this year’s birthday post. And while I was thinking about it I accidentally published an empty draft of this post earlier today. Sounds about right. I like to consider myself an optimist, but it’s been a challenging 365 days. We are still very much in the throes of a pandemic, threatening to overrun our vaccine defense with mutated variants. The entire twelve months since the last birthday have been spent in quarantine.
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A quote: “Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: Every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.” β Ansel Adams via Nitch via Swiss-Miss The world: Metro Manila is back under Enhanced Community Quarantine, this is season 3. The delta variant continues to spread, and the case counts over the past couple of days have reached peaks not seen since April.
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First, the spoiler-free review: On 6 Aug 2021 10:27am I wrote: THE SUICIDE SQUAD spoiler-free review: great, fun, violent, hilarious, possibly best of DCEU so far trailers have spoiled waaaay too much of this movie first act was ok, second act felt a bit meh, third act was great hard to comment on actor performances without spoiling things, but Daniela Melchior was great and Idris Elba took the role seriously there is a post-credits scene Full review on the blog later
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I read this quote from Twitter recently that I really liked: Blogging is creating async read access to your brain. Highly recommend. – @brian_lovin I feel like this is very true for me because a lot of the time, I write posts in an unfiltered, stream-of-consciousness manner, so in many ways it is in fact a direct look at how I think (barring the limitations of language of course).
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Bond film no. 22, Daniel Craig’s second outing. I actually watched this back in 2008, but apparently I wasn’t super impressed (and I wish I wrote more back then lol). I suspect I didn’t really like it because this movie is actually a direct sequel to Casino Royale which I hadn’t seen until this year. It picks up on several hanging plot threads, and some of the characters appear again, and Bond in this film is primarily motivated by anger over the events of the previous film.
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I read this article about how a US Democratic representative says his Republican colleagues are like WWE wrestlers (excuse me, they’re called “Superstars”) who behave differently in private versus in public. Basically their politics are performative, they act a certain way in public to appeal to their bases, but in private they don’t actually really believe in many of the things they say in public. It speaks to a certain lack of integrity and deceptiveness.
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It’s August! A quote: “Here’s the thing: there is no real life. There is no full, meaningful, “best life.” There are, at best, more and less meaningful pursuits, from your perspective, based on your upbringing, imprinting, and your own specific cocktail of longings. It is natural for us to feel anxiety about how we spend our limited time. No matter how happy you convince yourself to be, you will sometimes feel the vague ache of other possible lives.
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Some stuff I’ve watched lately. Spoilers for Gunpowder Milkshake and MotU: Revelation are marked. Casino Royale (2006) Bond film no. 21, and the first for Daniel Craig. The final era in this James Bond run, looking forward to it. Casino Royale is new to me, but I’ve seen two of Craig’s Bond films, so I have an idea of what to expect: a more serious and much less campy James Bond, grim and determined.
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A quote: “I just wanna keep being proof that good people with no hidden agendas still exist in this world.” - @diorkenn on Twitter The world: This past week in Metro Manila was very cold and rainy, which came with the attendant problems like flooding and such. There’s a typhoon nearby, but I don’t think it’s in the PAR; instead it’s just doing this thing where it drags in rains and winds via the Habagat monsoon.
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I used to do these “Watching Lately” posts to talk about movies/tv/books I’d recently consumed, but for a while I folded up the reviews into the weeknotes and sometimes via short notes but the reviews have been getting longer so I guess I’m bring the “Watching Lately” tag and series of posts back. Die Another Day (2002) Bond film no. 20 and Brosnan’s final appearance. The main question for me going in was: have I actually watched this before in the theatre?
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A quote: “The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.” - George Eliot The world: Fitch downgrades PH credit rating outlook to “negative” Pacquiao ousted from PDP-Laban by an opposing faction, just as he’s preparing for his upcoming fight. Covid-19 delta variant has been detected in the PH, let’s hope the government can keep it under control. Valve has announced the Steam Deck, a handheld PC for playing Steam games Links of interest: Hobson’s Browser: How Apple, Facebook, and Google Broke the Mobile Browser Market by Silently Undermining User Choice The unreasonable effectiveness of just showing up everyday.
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Warning: Spoilers for the just-ended season of Loki at the end of this. I have a spoiler-free review of that if you’d like. The World Is Not Enough (1999) Bond film no. 19 and Brosnan’s third. Pretty sure I saw this in the theaters when it came out, but for the life of me could not recall any of the plot details at all. Turns out it was because the plot was a bit unnecessarily convoluted.
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A quote: “You are the books you read the films you watch, the music you listen to, the people you meet, the dreams you have, the conversations you engage in. You are what you take from these. You are the sound of the ocean, the breath of fresh air, the brightest light and the darkest corner. You are a collective of every experience you have had in your life. You are every single second of every single day.
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We finally return to the MCU films, a full two years after the last film was released! Breaking a decade-long tradition, I am unable to watch it in theaters this time (and probably won’t get to watch any of the others this year in theaters either), but at least we are moving forward now, onto the next phase! Spoiler-free review first, then spoilery bits follow afterwards. incredibly good as an action movie, great fight sequences and set pieces and chases etc.
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During a company holiday party in the mid-2000s our theme was “statement shirts” and I decided to jokingly go with a somewhat tight-fitting purple shirt with the caption “ROY TANG FOR PRESIDENT”: I’m not even running yet and I already have opposition! (Click to view full-size) I'm not even running yet and I already have opposition! 8 Jul 2021 11:33amClose (This was the best picture of the shirt I could find; It’s probably still in the house somewhere, but it probably wouldn’t fit me anymore.
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Last night I watched Tomorrow Never Dies (1997). Bond film no. 18 and Brosnan’s second. Also the first one I actually saw in theaters when it came out so officially my first rewatch! That said, it was 24 years ago so while I remember the general overarching plot (Jonathan Pryce playing a multibillionaire media mogul inciting a war between China and the UK to profit off the news), I have forgotten many of the finer details.
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I was on a Twitch chat for a local streamer yesterday and someone bought up the term “comsat”, popular in local computer shop or “compshop” (also called “internet cafes”) culture. In the context of multiplayer games, it means to spy on what your opponent is doing by peeking at his screen. I’ve never heard this term used other than by Filipino gamers, so I have reason to believe it’s a local thing.
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The Bond film reviews were starting to get a bit long for Twitter/notes, so a full blog post it is. Goldeneye (1995). Bond film no. 17 and first for Brosnan. The films are starting to look “modern”, but might just be because this is the first Bond film to come out after I graduated high school and that’s what I see as “modern”. I didn’t see this in theaters when it first came out though.
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Someone gave me a copy of this book last week, just after I had finished the previous book (Excellent timing!). Einstein’s Dreams is a short book which explores different concepts of time. It’s filled with short vignettes, each 1-2 pages long, describing an alternate universe where either the rules of physics are altered so that time proceeds differently, or humans perceive time in different ways. The book is framed as being a collection of dreams of Albert Einstein in 1905 as he develops his theory of relativity - there are short interludes where Einstein discusses his theories with his friend Michele Besso.
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It’s the Fourth of July, which really only means something in the US. Over here it used to be “Philippine-American Friendship Day”, but apparently that was phased out while I was still in grade school. A quote “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts” - W. Churchill The world: Our current president and one of our possible future presidents, who are ostensibly allies / partymates have been feuding over the past week.
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Linchpin: Are You Indispensible? is a 2010 book by Seth Godin. The book’s primary thesis is that in the modern world, you have to avoid being a conforming, replaceable assembly line worker, and instead be a linchpin, someone who is indispensible, someone who goes the extra mile, who invests emotional labor into his work and his art. The book covers topics such as the problems with the “old way” of working, what it means to be a linchpin, the resistance from your lizard brain, gift culture, connection, the importance of shipping, etc.
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Dan Fornace, creator of Rivals of Aether writes: After 8 years of working in fighting games, Iβve accepted the fact that no matter how βeasyβ you make your game, pros will absolutely demolish new players. Well-known fighting game Youtuber Maximillian talks about the casual appeal of Guilty Gear -STRIVE- and expands a bit on the above: I think there is definitely a serious learning curve when it comes to fighting games.
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It’s almost July, which means 2021 is just about halfway done, and yet here we still are in pandemic mode. A quote “Each year that passes rings you inwardly with memory and might. Wield your heart, and the world will tremble.” - Doran the Siege Tower The world: Last Thursday, former PH President Noynoy Aquino III passed away quietly. This led to the usual condolences and accolades from across the political spectrum, although many noted the delay in the palace issuing a statement (I suspect it was because the current president was still asleep).
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“Our lives are like little baby crows carried upon a curious wind and all we can wish, for our families, for those we love, is that that wind would eventually place us on solid ground.” – Moira Rose I started watching Schitt’s Creek during my last game jam weekend. I decided to try it out mostly because I remembered it getting a lot of buzz for its last season back in 2020 and getting a lot of Emmy Awards for that season.
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HBO Max caused a bit of a stir among its subscribers last week when they accidentally sent out an email titled “Integration Test Email #1” to some large number of their subscribers, which spawned a lot of clever commentary and snarky remarks on Twitter. A few days later HBO Max sent out an apology blaming an unnamed intern for the boo-boo, which spawned a lot of “Dear Intern” tweets with many commiserating with the unnamed intern by sharing their own stories of mishaps from their younger days.
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Earlier today I watched Rurouni Kenshin: The Final (2021), now out on Netflix (PH, not sure about elsewhere). I don’t normally do full blog posts for movies anymore, but I’m a big Rurouni Kenshin fan, and I didn’t have much commentary on record for the first three live action films, so I figured I would write some words mostly about this new film, but maybe also a bit about the first three as well.
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Today is father’s day. If you’re lucky enough to have a good father in your life, be sure to show your appreciation. Today’s weeknotes are shorter than usual for some reason. A quote “My goal is to build a life I don’t need a vacation from.” - Rob Hill Sr. The world: The International Criminal Court is proceeding with a probe into Duterte’s drug war. The admin is all like “ha ha we don’t care, you have no basis, we won’t cooperate, etc etc”, but despite the posturing, it kind of feels like they’re a bit scared.
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Tagging this “life philosophy” because I think people should have a declared life philosophy and it’s something that should be reviewed and possibly revised on a regular basis so the tag will help me look back on this further down the line. Anyway, TLDR the new declared life philosophy is based on a tweet I retweeted a while back. So the new life philosophy is: I just want to wander through life finding interesting things
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Kev Quirk writes about why he deletes old content: This blog is intended to provide a semi-permanent, point in time snapshot of the various thoughts running around my brain. As such, any thoughts and opinions expressed within my previous posts may not be the same, or even similar, to those I may hold today. I like keeping around my content for a similar reason as above: they may reflect thoughts or opinions that are not the same as those I hold today.
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The jam A thing I did last weekend was to participate in the 2021 GMTK Game Jam. This is my second game jam, after my Ludum Dare 48 entry back in April. I was a lot more anxious about this one, especially after rewatching the video of the winners from the last year. This post is mostly about how the game jam unfolded for me. If you just want to view the game I made here’s the link.
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These weeknotes are being published a day late, for reasons that will be discussed later. A quote “The price of being a sheep is boredom. The price of being a wolf is loneliness. Choose one or the other with great care.” - Hugh MacLeod The world: Early last week, a slew of big websites went offline due to some problems at a CDN, which is some kind of testament to the problems with centralization, but my favorite part of that story was that tech news site The Verge did their reporting from a Google doc during the outage but they accidentally tweeted the edit link instead so for a short while everyone was reporting for them.
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A quote “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” – Ernest Hemingway The world: This week was the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and a recent tweet highlighted how the HK government, which used to freely allow commemorating the event, is now cracking down on the former colony’s freedoms. StackOverflow has been sold to an investment company.
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After reading a couple of Hercule Poirot mysteries, I decided to try an Agatha Christie book from outside that series. I found that And Then There Were None was one of those commonly appearing on lists of her best works, and the concept intrigued me: Ten people are invited to an island and get trapped there and then murders start to happen. Kind of hard to talk about it without spoiling too much (and what I’ve said might already have been spoilers!
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June is almost upon us, hopefully bringing some respite from the scorching summer heat. This year feels like it’s passing by very quickly. A quote There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost.
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I’ve not read any Agatha Chrstie, so I thought I’d rectify that by getting into the Hercule Poirot series of books. To start off I chose Murder on the Orient Express because I watched the 2017 movie a couple of years ago and Death on the Nile because it has a movie coming out next year. I figure it would be a good contrast of movie-first vs book first. Took me a bit under a week of leisurely reading to finish Murder on the Orient Express.
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Peter Rukavina quotes the New York Tribune about how Anticipation is the real thief of joy (as opposed to comparison): Anticipation is, in truth, the real thief of joy. The best times are always the unexpected ones. It is not the parties that you plan for weeks and look forward to that come off. There must be surprise and novelty and freshness to yield the last word in happiness and thrill.
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I’m not big on modern frontend JavaScript frameworks (mostly because I think web pages should use as little JS as possible), but when I do find the need to use one, my weapon of choice is Vue.js. I dislike React, but mostly because (a) my first experience with React was with mobile development using React Native for mobile app development, which I generally don’t like; and (b) I don’t like Facebook, which backs React.
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It’s the last week of May (more or less), and I’m mostly looking forward to a new month because I’m tired of ridiculous summer heat and I’m hoping the sun tones it down a bit in June. The one aircon we have in the house has been busted all summer, so we have been suffering through the heat and surviving mostly through stacking multiple fans and also an excessive number of showers.
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A quote “Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep.
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(This was originally a twitter thread, I promoted it to a blog post.)
Gonna attempt this today. I have poor manual dexterity so I expect it to be terrible #onepiece
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This post is being published a day late. Things happen okay? Sometimes you get busy and things need to be pushed back. The world: like the thug that he is, our dear president claimed that the arbitral award ruling in the PH’s favor was nothing more than a sheet of paper he could easily discard. He also challenged former justice Antonio Carpio to a debate over the West Philippine Sea issue, a challenge the latter quickly accepted.
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I finished reading Snow Crash in around three weeks, slightly faster than the other comparable work I’ve read this year, which was Neuromancer. Comparable of course only in the sense that they both have some kind of worldwide internet-like network as a central plot point. Otherwise, they are not really that similiar, though the review is made easier by having a base for comparison. Snow Crash is much less cyberpunk than Neuromancer, and maybe takes itself a little less seriously too?
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. This is my fourth such review, and this time I’m gonna talk about Root. This is a IRL boardgame by Leder Games with the Steam version published by Dire Wolf Digital. Root is a competitive game themed about multiple factions vying for supremacy in a forest area.
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It’s already May? April felt like it came and went so quickly. But then again, time has little meaning in this accursed pandemic. The world: The brouhaha over community pantries (as described last week), seems to have calmed down and they are now generally coordinating with LGUs for assistance in maintaining health protocols Meanwhile, the government has embarked on a propaganda campaign to assert that we aren’t the worst in terms of pandemic response in the world Certain congress people continue to promote the usage of the drug Ivermectin, which has no known effect on Covid-19, as a Covid-19 cure or something.
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In a recent STEM-focused newsletter, Noahpinion talked a bit about the myth of math being an inborn ability: Again and again, we have seen the following pattern repeat itself: Different kids with different levels of preparation come into a math class. Some of these kids have parents who have drilled them on math from a young age, while others never had that kind of parental input. On the first few tests, the well-prepared kids get perfect scores, while the unprepared kids get only what they could figure out by winging itβmaybe 80 or 85%, a solid B.
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The jam A thing I did last weekend was to participate in the 48th LUDUM DARE game jam. Doing gamedev has been a long-time elusive dream of mine, all the way back to my college years. I’ve had a number of failed attempts to get into gamedev, both solo and with other people.I’ve also played around with things like PyGame, Unity, DragonRuby, etc. I read about the LD48 game jam this April and signed up to participate.
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Falcon and Winter Soldier review (with some spoilers): more action-packed and straightforward compared to Wandavision, jumping straight into the action from the get go some great performances here, especially from Sebastian Stan (Bucky), Wyatt Russell (John Walker), and Daniel Bruhl (Zemo) Bucky and Sam have great chemistry, even though they start out annoyed at each other pacing is a bit odd at times; feels more like an extended movie than a weekly episodic series (especially compared to Wandavision, which took advantage of the weekly format really well) although a complete story by itself, this one felt more of a setup for future MCU storylines (again compared to Wandavision) while overall the season was good, I find Wandavision was the clearly better watch for me, though I suppose your mileage may vary if your preference is for action sequences Ending spoilers follow:
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I’ve been a bit busy this weekend (see below), so this post is running a bit late. The world: An ongoing saga right here in the Philippines: Last weekend, community pantries for the needy started sprouting up in Metro Manila and all over the country, largely inspired by one started in Maginhawa here in Quezon City. The central idea was “give what you can, take what you need.” Stories spread of heartwarming stories like a poor old man donating some food even though he had very little and an ice cream vendor giving away the remnants of his cart for the day to those in the queue.
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This is a follow up to “Blogs of Yesteryear”. This is the remainder of my blogroll from 2004/2005. I feel like the second half is less interesting than the first half, but I figured I might as well go through them as well. geekiness I think the blogs under this session are about general geeky topics. Absurd Genius - looks this was a tech and gaming-focused blog that featured a web portal for the PSP browser.
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I’m not sure what to think of this past week, feels like it went by quickly. I may have spent too much of it daydreaming. The world: NCR+ bubble is now one week into modified enhanced community quarantine (MECQ - an acronym that makes no sense). Cases still seem to be pretty high on a day-to-day basis, though we’re told the R number is dropping slightly, so that’s good I guess?
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Google Chrome is adding a new feature that lets their browser target you with ads without using third-party browser cookies. Here’s some more info: How to fight back against Google FLoC. But basically it comes down to: if you’re a web user who doesn’t want your browsing history to be used to target you with advertisments, stop using Google Chrome. There are many alternatives. I’m a Firefox boy myself. For site owners, you can add a Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() response header to opt-out of your site being included in the data collected about your Chrome visitors.
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A number of people I follow have been raving about Ted Lasso for a while, so I thought I’d give it a try. My thoughts: Season 1 is 10 episodes, each episode 30 minutes long. I finished all of the episodes over the span of one day! I didn’t know much coming in: I knew it was about sports, and I knew it was supposedly a comedy. For some reason I assumed it was about American football.
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dorinlazar.ro talks about programming being hard: Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: βProgramming is easy, everyone can do itβ, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. Iβm here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and for the time being everyone might be able to do it, but most definitely most should not.
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Without Their Permission is a 2013 book by Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian. The central thesis of the book is that modern-day internet breaks down barriers and allows anyone to accomplish great things without having to go through traditional gatekeepers like publishers and such. I actually read the first part of the book a few years ago, and just resumed reading the book now because I saw in iBooks that it remembered where I had stopped.
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The world: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth’s husband, has passed away. So has DMX, American rapper. Big facebook breach reported, etc. Doesn’t seem like news, really. My phone number was among the data leaked. The country is still experiencing a surge in cases, hospitals and ICUs still bursting to capacity. Yet in spite of the crisis, the president has not been around. This has prompted questions of whether he’s still alive.
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The on-site process
Got my first shot of the Sinovac vaccine earlier today at Pinyahan Elementary School in Quezon City. My appointment was for 9am, I arrived on-site a bit before 8:30am. There was a short queue outside, so I waited there for a bit.
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During a recent session of spelunking through old web stuff, I managed to find some older versions of the blog that I hadn’t found before (and hence aren’t available in the ancient archives). Screenshots of those old versions have been inserted back in the timeline. I guess it’s one of those things I never bothered to archive because in theory all of that content had already been exported from Blogspot to Wordpress and eventually to the current site.
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So after reading Neuromancer last month, I was looking for a bit of lighter fare, so I decided to work on some Discworld books and started with the first book of the City Watch subseries, Guards! Guards!. I was already quite a bit in when I was like “why does all of this seem so familiar? Are Discworld books really so same-y that it feels like I’ve read this before?” The good news is that it wasn’t true, Discworld books aren’t super-samey; I have read it before, way back in 2016 in fact.
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It’s April! Or as it’s otherwise known, March 2020 month 13. As is usual, we are suffering the sweltering summer heat. Also, it’s Easter Sunday, if that means anything to you. The world: Surprising almost no one, the PH government extended the ECQ lockdown in the NCR+ bubble. Anyone with half a brain could have told you that the one week ECQ was no way going to be enough, given what we know about the virus’ life cycle.
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It’s the last weekend of March. It feels like the month went by quickly. The world: Local covid response: The government introduced the concept of an “NCR Plus” bubble last Monday, restricting travel in and out of the NCR and adjacent provinces, in response to the rising cases. Still, the daily counts kept rising, hitting record highs of almost 10k cases daily. Even before the dust has settled on the bubble response, they decided to announce last night a reversion to the stricter ECQ.
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See also: Justice League spoiler-free review (2017) This is basically a movie that’s more than 3 years old, we’re not holding back on spoilers here. plot basically follows the same beats as the theatrical cut except this time we have a lot more team setup time (one of my criticisms from the previous version), giving the characters stronger backgrounds, especially Cyborg and Flash Ray Fisher was right to complain; in this version he’s one of the important characters of the ensemble while he was basically a minor guest character in the theatrical cut more DC characters make appearances in this version, among them Ryan Choi, DeSaad, Granny Goodness, Martian Manhunter, the Joker and of course Darkseid himself I accept this version as a better version of the original theatrical release and is my new DCEU headcanon it never would have worked in theaters anyway, given the four hour runtime.
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The world: Over the past couple of days, our nationwide daily covid cases broke 7000+, the highest recorded so far. Have to be super careful when going out for errands. Not that I wasn’t being careful even before, mind you. Just now, government has announced we are still under GCQ (see my post about the PH quarantine levels), but with more restrictions, etc. Looks like they are still hesitant to provide a stronger lockdown which would require paying people to stay home so they don’t starve to death.
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Over the past couple of weeks or so, I’ve made quite a few changes to the site, mostly focused on frontend/layout/UI changes. The changes are more or less done, so here’s a changelog entry. The main driver of the changes was this post about best practices for text websites. Not all of it applies to the site, since I do have a bunch of image content around as well, but enough that I was spurred to apply many of the points and also include some additional changes I’ve been meaning to do.
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It took me more than three weeks to get through Gibson’s influential work Neuromancer, a book that pioneered the cyberpunk genre and even introduced terms like cyberspace, ICE and “the matrix” into popular lexicon. It’s not because the book is bad or anything, it’s just that Gibson tends to describe everything very vividly, and almost all of it from the POV of our lead character Case, who is sometimes in the real world, sometimes in cyberspace, and sometimes simply just drunk or high.
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When I was much younger, I used to strongly identify as Lawful Good. Whenever I’d play any of the old-school DND RPGs like Baldur’s Gate or Neverwinter Nights, I’d find my main character almost always being a Lawful Good Paladin goody-goody type. This was back when I was younger and more idealistic and a stronger believer in “rule of law”-type principles. As the years have gone by, I’ve found that my alignment has shifted considerably.
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Happy Pi Day! The world: It’s the one year anniversary of the world’s longest lockdown. In some kind of sick anniversary celebration, local covid cases are on the rise. Yesterday, 5000 new cases were reported, the highest daily rate in 6 months or so. And now a Philippine variant has been detected. Now is not the time to be complacent, we all need to be more careful. The government seems unwilling to impose another widespread ECQ and are focusing on targetted, granular lockdowns.
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. Today’s review is for Blood Rage: Digital Edition. This is a Norse mythology themed game based on a IRL boardgame. It’s one of those “place your guys on the map” boardgame where each player vies for control of provinces. The game is divided into three ages, and at the end of each age one of the provinces is destroyed as part of ragnarok.
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March has begun. Did it ever really end? The world: Vaccination finally starts in the country, with initial donated batches of Sinovac and AstraZeneca vaccine arriving in the country. Just in time for the one year anniversary of the world’s longest lockdown. SinoVac isn’t the best choice, but many of my doctor friends say they’ll settle for it if that’s what’s available for them. I think QC is planning to use AstraZeneca for their citizens, but worrying is that AZ’s efficacy has been shown to be not so good against certain variants such as the South African one, which has already been detected in the country.
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#WandaVision spoiler-free review: Overall, I really liked it, and I think they did well with the one-episode-per-week format. The show certainly would not have been this hyped if it all came in one drop Really difficult to not spoil. If you have somehow avoid being spoiled by the internet until it all dropped, good for you! A very emotional story of Wanda dealing with the aftermath of Infinity War/Endgame good usage of the sitcom tropes fantastic performance by Elisabeth Olsen lots of fan service for comic book fans to dig into.
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Today is the last day of February. Tomorrow, we march on. The world: Biden ordered his first military strike last week. America is back, etc. This past week, embrassingly our local police and anti-drug agency got into a shootout against each other near the Ever Gotesco mall in Quezon City. Both sides claim they were doing a buy-bust, which is impossible. As usual, there is little transparency about what actually happened, and many promises of “impartial” probes and investigations.
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A while back, on a whim I purchased this indie game Knightin’ on Steam. I forget how I came across it and why I decided to buy, but no regrets. It’s a tightly-focused dungeon crawler in the style of original Legend of Zelda/Link to the Past dungeons. Each dungeon is a set of rooms you clear one at a time, until you get to the dungeon boss and beat him. Clearing rooms involves defeating enemies, solving puzzles, avoiding obstacles and opening chests.
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I read Ghost of My Father by Scott Berkun this past week. This book isn’t my usual fare. It’s a memoir about the author’s father and their relationship and family life. I’m familiar with the author’s work, but mostly in the realms of tech, design and public speaking, but this book was largely personal, and mostly talking about strangers I had no real interest in. I think the only reason I have a copy at all is because I was on the author’s mailing list and got a review copy of some sort.
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. My second review is about Scythe: Digital Edition. Scythe is a competitive game where you play one of seven factions in an alternate history post-war Eastern Europe. Players vie to control territories, hire workers, build mechs, accumulate resources, accomplish secret objectives, and other such goals.
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Last week of February is about to start. Time flies, as they say. The world: Texas (and other parts of the southern US I guess) have been hit by heavy winter storms, with accompanying power grid failures and such. We have some relatives there so it’s a concern. Meanwhile, their governor falsely blames renewables for the power problems and their senator went to Cancun. Facebook cut off Australian news links.
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Walkaway is a novel by blogger Cory Doctorow. It tells the story of a near-future world and a trend of people going “walkaway”. This term means walking away from what they call “default society”, characterized by late stage capitalism, massive inequality, ever-present surveillance, and a world controlled by what they call the zottarich, or simply zottas. Not too far from our own present reality of course. Later, the novel also delves into the near-future (?
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Over the past couple of years, I’ve been regularly playing digital boardgames online on Steam with one of my friend groups, I thought I’d do reviews of them. The first one is Sentinels of the Multiverse. We’ve played the IRL boardgame of it before during one of our sporadic in-person meetups. If you’re not familiar, it’s a comics-themed coop game where up to 4 people play as a group of heroes to beat a villain (basically comic book shenanigans).
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The world: Trump has been acquitted in his second impeachment trial, proving yet again to the world that the US is a flawed democracy dominated by corruption at the highest levels Duterte says he cannot be brave in the mouth against China. Back before the 2016 elections, somebody I used to know claimed that we needed a “rottweiler” like Duterte as president because he would be tough against China. I remember this sometimes and laugh and then am also sad.
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Lauren R. O’Connor talks about a childhood lesson about pleasure: When I was eight years old, I saw the movie Back to the Future for the first time, and I fell in love. All I wanted to think and talk about was Back to the Future. I dreamt about Back to the Future at night. I rode my bike down the steepest hill in my neighborhood and pretended I was flying, approaching 88 mph, about to zap myself back in time.
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Will Schreiber argues that decentralization is a narrative mirage: Human history is a story of increasing centralization. From roaming the plains of Africa, to settling down and building homes, to buying food in central markets, to instituting courts of law. Progression is compression. How can I make it so everybody isnβt making their own shirts? Deciding their own justice? Tabulating their own spreadsheets? I’ve argued a few times on here in favor of decentralization (see 1, 2, 3), and the whole concept of movements like Indieweb is a preference for a decentralized internet where everyone has his or her own personal site, instead of reliance on centralized large silos like Facebook or Twitter or whatever.
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A post from Austin Kleon reminded me of the proposed conceptual international fixed calendar: (Click to view full-size) 11 Feb 2021 1:53amClose Basically: each year would be 13 months of 28 days each, plus a bonus day at the end of each year, for a total of 365 days. This way, the first day of each month would always be a Sunday, the 2nd would always be a Monday, the 3rd a Tuesday, and so on.
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A while back I wrote about how I wasn’t a big fan of the recent trend of newsletters. Since then, I’ve realized Substack actually publishes RSS feeds for their newsletters, so I’ve been following a a bit more of them. I thought I’d recommend a few that I’ve found to be quite interesting/useful: Money Stuff by Matt Levine. The only non-substack entry on today’s list, this Bloomberg column covers financial matters like stock market and investment stuff.
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On 3 Feb 2021 3:11pm I wrote: Please write more. Not just on social media, FB, Twitter, whatever. Write on your own sites and blogs. On your tumblrs, wordpresses, whatever. Long-form, rambling, incessant. The world could use more sincere blogging. The above was written mostly as a response to finding so many of my friends’ old and inactive blogs in my RSS reader. I like the term I coined there, “sincere blogging”.
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“The Year Without Pants” is a book by writer Scott Berkun about his time as a team lead at Wordpress.com back in 2010-2012. This book came out in 2013, and the conceit of the book back then was that Wordpress.com, run by Automattic, was a fully remote company, something that was still a rarity at that time. It’s weird reading this book in the context of the current pandemic, where remote work is now the norm among tech companies.
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1 For a while now, I’d been meaning to go through the links section of this site and clean up/organize all the bookmarks I’ve logged there over the years (first via delicious and later via pocket). One of the first things I had to do was to go through and identify any broken links. So I wrote a quick Python script to ping the URLs and it turns out there were a lot of them, unsurprising given the archives go back to 2004.
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It’s February! We are nearing the one year anniversary of being in the longest covid19 lockdown in the world! The world: Myanmar’s military staged a coup, and have apparently cut off the country from the internet, maybe? Last night during an international voice chat, the two of us who were in the Philippines were suddenly dropped/disconnected and one of my first thoughts were “Wait, is there a coup happening in our country RIGHT NOW?
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It’s February tomorrow! Somehow, the world still turns. The world: Somehow the most viral world news this week doesn’t seem to have been about any kind of politics, but rather about capitalism. The Gamestop/stock market brouhaha was a sage of retail investors on reddit going head-to-head with hedge funds over the stock price of a dying gaming company (among others) that dominated most of my feeds for the week. It’s actually a lot more compliced than that.
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Wow, January is almost done. Wouldn’t you know it. The world: Biden inaugurated as US president, world celebrates US getting rid of Trump. Biden isn’t exactly unproblematic, but he is at least sane and boring. There will be time enough to criticize him later, for now let them be enjoy victory. My expectations of him are at least moderately higher than the ones I had for Trump the internet gets inundated with an inordinate amount of Bernie Sanders memes locally: the govt continues to bombard us with controversies, this time stirring up a red-tagging hornests nest by abrogating the DND-UP accord, paving the way for militarization of campuses and stifling of free expression Links of interest: Someone made a Mandalorian trailer in the style of old-school spaghetti westerns.
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Discussions on tech censorship came to the forefront in recent weeks due to the aftermath of the Jan 6 capitol insurrection in the US. I’ve been writing down a bunch of thoughts about the complicated issue, let’s see if I can hammer them into a blog post. (I also wanted to defer posting about it until after the Biden inauguration, in case more things of interest happen.) Here’s where I am now:
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I finished the book The End of Everything (Astronomically Speaking) by Katie Mack. I got a Kindle copy on sale on Amazon at the top of the year, figured it was a good way to kick off a year of hopefully reading more books. This is a short review. I figure it’s probably not a spoiler to tell you the book is all about how the universe ends. Or at least, the many possible ways it could end.
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This is 2021 week 3. Or week 2. Two and a half? How do calendars work? The world: relatively calm compared to the chaos of the previous week. However in the US, a storm may be brewing over Biden’s inauguration next week locally: still a lot of confusion/inconsistencies around the vaccination plan. Or at least some senators think so. Meanwhile, we are close to breaching 500k cases. Links of interest: I’ve been reading a lot about personal note taking recently, in a bid to find ways to improve my own systems.
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We are barely more than a week into 2021 and it has already been quite a year. The world: the week started off with something as innocuous as a guy going viral for making his daughter work six hours to figure out how to use a can opener and open a can of beans. I can’t explain Bean Dad, but it was so weird and surreal the way it took over the internet for a while.
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I used to collect quotes a lot. Maybe I still do. Here are a couple of collections I’ve posted online. Tang In Cheek - a list of quotes (allegedly by me) Email signatures - a list of quotes I used as a pool to randomly select an email signature from. I rarely send email these days, and when I do it’s usually web-based, so I can’t use these anymore. There’s probably a better way to organize these.
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One habit I now have that I wish I had started much, much earlier in life would be conducting regular, periodic reviews. These reviews are a sort of written introspection of the time period in question, the target audience being future me. I’m reminded of the important of this because I had been going through old files the last few months and I really enjoy reading through some older entries and basically traipsing through younger me’s mind.
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A while back I saw this tweet talking about drawing memes from before the internet, and I was reminded that was a thing we had around here too when we were kids! We had our own version of that “giraffe in the window” drawing, except the one I remember was made so that you could switch the answer to “cat hugging a pole outside the window” to troll whoever you were asking to guess:
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Word clouds! They used to be a thing right? I was reminded of them yesterday and I wish I had thought of this in time for the 2020 year in review, but here we are. I thought I’d generate some word clouds for the blog anyway! Here’s the word cloud for all my blog posts for the year: 2020 blog post word cloud (Click to view full-size) 2020 blog post word cloud
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I’ve been using the Flipboard iOS app as my daily morning news reader pretty much since I first got an iPad. It offered a nice, magazine like UI where you can flip through pages full of images and short article blurbs until you can find something you want to read. The past couple of years and iOS versions though, the app has been performing terribly. Crashes a lot, reader view often fails to load, or flickers and reloads continuously and so on.
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It’s a brand new year, a brand new week, a brand new day. There’s no real reason to believe 2021 will be a better year, but we can choose to try to be better, and maybe that in itself is better. Last week’s New Year’s Eve transition played out pretty much as expected. We just stayed at home, actually had an early media noche dinner (around 9ish) and observed the fireworks for a little bit.
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It’s always weird for me when people do their “year in review” or “X of the year” any time before Jan 1st of the next year. You’re making Dec 31 feel left out. It’s one thing the Oscars get right. Anyway, here’s my personal year-in-review, such as it is. Essay-writing section It’s probably impossible to talk about 2020 without talking about the Covid19 pandemic that has ravaged the world. My country is sadly still under a state of quarantine/lockdown, I believe the world’s longest.
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Happy New Year! Something I’ve gotten used to as the New Year rolls in: make a checklist of things to do for the new year. I generally copy stuff over, but the list changes a bit every year. In no particular order: Ponder why peopleΒ give so much significance to the transition between an arbitrarily-chosen pair of 24 hour periods Take stock and reflect on the past year Count your blessings for the past year and be grateful Greet your loved ones and friends and anyone else you hold dear.