Roy Tang

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.
• impossible to discuss the last week without mentioning the violent attack by Trump supporters on the US capitol upon incitement by the president himself
  • Watching the events unfolding on the news gave me the same feeling as watching the 9/11 twin towers assault almost two decades ago.
  • the subsequent condemnation and consequences not just from US politicians but worldwide, including Trump himself subsequently getting booted off/banned from almost every social media service (of course sparking many opinions about the first amendment and the disproportionate control by tech giants over the public sphere).
  • there’s talk of second impeachment and 25th amendment calls (I know about the 25th amendment mostly due to Air Force One), although Pence has thumbed that down. If Trump faces no consequences for this one, they might be looking at something much worse down the line, possibly as soon as the Biden inauguration on the 20th.
  • there’s consequences for the actual rioters though: many are being identified on social media and some have already been fired from their jobs. Nascent social media app Parler, used to coordinate the attacks, has been booted off Apple and Google mobile stores AND off their Amazon webhosting
  • Also, gootecks showed himself to be once again a MAGA idiot supporting the violence, so his emote got banned from Twitch, which was a weird piece of news.
• Yesterday (Saturday) was the feast of the Black Nazarene, a big deal in Manila. It was reported that up to 400,000 devotees crowded the streets of Manila in what is probably a COVID19 super-spreader event. I mean sure, we held back and stayed at home for Holy Week/Easter/Christmas but somehow we can’t avoid celebrating the Black Nazarene. This when our local case counts have been rising since the holidays. Sigh.

Links of interest:

When I started these weeknotes, I sometimes put in a section with recent links I’ve found interesting during the week. It kind of died off, mostly because I haven’t been good about going through my backlog of feeds and sources to get much content for the section. I’m bringing it back here as a regular section (for now), so that (a) I force myself to go through all that stuff at least once a week; and (b) people who aren’t super interested in what’s going on with me have more stuff to read in these weeknotes. I also considered just having a separate weekly “linkblog” post with the links of interest section, but figured maybe I’d check first if I can keep up with the volume needed for that sort of thing? Also, a lot of these are available on my links list, which I also share to Twitter/Masto as they come, so if you follow me there, you might have seen me tweet some of these, and this is just sort of a weekly recap. Anyway, for this week, here we go:

• for gamers, the wonderful Persona 4 and 5 soundtracks are now officially available on Spotify
• for people who like old-school blogs and personal websites: Robin Rendle writes a nicely-formatted post about newsletters and writing on the web, Desmond Rivet wrote about using his blog to manage his thinking back in Apr 2020, and I realized I never shared this 2019 post from Matthias Ott about personal websites.
• For self-improvement, ideopunk talks about 100 tips for a better life. Probably not all of these are for you, but maybe you’ll get some stuff of interest
• For optimists, it can be nice to know there are quite a few bits of good news in 2020, in spite of everything.
• This video about lockdown productivity came out early on in the pandemic, but a lot of the advice still seems sound
• I enjoyed this old story about a guy who gamed one of the earliest game shows by studying the RNG patterns.
• Some recent Twitter threads of interest:
  • Apparently, it’s a thing for teens to disbelieve in Hellen Keller, wth
  • We are told that abusers and white supremacists absolutely do not believe their own bullshit.
  • How to determine if something is a sandwich?
  • Someone compiled some ridiculous 2020 headlines of the year.

My stuff:

• hey, the new daily habits I kicked off starting the New Year are holding strong so far. Well, except for daily blog posting, I missed yesterday. But I never claimed that as a resolution, so maybe I don’t count that.
  • Daily sketches in the sketchbook album. They’re not super good, but maybe you’ll like that kind of thing.
• Watching:
  • I binged season 3 of Cobra Kai in under 24 hours. Still greatly enjoying it, despite the high school drama. I really like the evolving dynamic between Johnny and Daniel, and the callbacks to all 3 Karate Kid movies.
  • For my background watching I started Spectacular Spider-Man on Netflix. Not bad for a kids’ show, covers most of the mythos fairly well, though I’m disappointed at how Peter treats Gwen like a sidekick given in the comics she’s the love of his life. I’m only halfway through, maybe that changes later? I always felt Spider-man was better as a serialized TV series than the constant movie reboots. He has a lot of nice street-level villains and supporting cast that can only feature in a longer storyline than blockbuster movies can afford. Oh well.
  • Star Trek Discovery Season 3 finale was this week. Nothing too exceptional, I mean, we knew they were going to pull out a win somehow, there were very few surprises. Star Wars wins 2020 I guess lol.
• Gaming:
  • Fire Emblem Three Houses still ongoing. I actually took a few days break this week because I felt like I was playing it a bit too much lol. I think I’m fairly close to the end though.
  • MTG: Kaldheim preview season kicked off this week, but nothing too exciting for me so far, though there’s a lot of interesting cards of course. Lore-wise, I do like how they translated a lot of the Norse myth stuff into card form.
• Books: Been reading Katie Mack’s “End of Everything”, it’s pretty interesting so far, but I’m less than halfway in, not a good rate. To help reinforce my book reading, I’ve switched up my evening meals reading from the day’s news to whatever book I have on tap at the moment. It works I guess, but I eat quickly, so I don’t get to read much per session.
• for the past week or so I’ve had some kind of strange muscle (?) pain in my upper left bicep, but only when I hold up the arm or stretch it at certain angles. It’s kind of annoying, like I slept on it wrong. I thought it would just go away on its own, but now I’m thinking maybe it’s one of those old age things where things just hurt randomly and you have to live with it?!? Friends recommended trying a warm compress and/or self-massage on the arm, gonna try those out.

Looking forward to this coming week:

• WandaVision kicks off on Disney+! I think we’re getting two episodes this week.
• more Kaldheim previews