Roy Tang

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. If you want a more in-depth look, I recommend Matt Levine’s Money Stuff column over on Bloomberg, he covered the whole thing for most of the week. You can start here.

Links of interest:

• Tony Hawk, age 52, can still hit a 720, probably his last one ever. I think it’d kind of a bittersweet blessing to be doing something you love and knowing that it’s going to be the last time you get to do it.
• There was this excellent series of posts by Hillel Wayne comparing software engineering to other engineering disciplines by interviewing people who have crossed over from other fields into ours. It addresses interesting questions like whether what we do can really be called “engineering” and what can software engineering and other engineering fields learn from each other.
• USA has been downgraded from a democracy to an anocracy. This was the first time I heard of this term, anocracy.
• Facebook says they want to deprioritize political content. We’ll see if that holds, given that generating political heat is good for their engagement metrics. But if such a thing were to happen (and applied to the PH), it would seriously reduce the reach of government propaganda.
• Speaking of Facebook, they appear to have recently banned someone for criticizing them.
• I have yet to read through all of it, but there’s this metafilter thread full of all sorts of recommendations: What do you always recommend to people.
• This set of Wikimedia guidelines about how to handle mistakes is great and people should apply it liberally to most situations.
• Chris Kiehl talks about software dev topics he’s changed his mind on after the last 6 years.
• Rands talks about doomscrolling at scale using Tweetdeck, an app I’ve always recommended.
• Andrea Zittel: These things I know for sure
• The current US senate’s President pro tempore has appeared in multiple Batman movies!
• How homogenous is Japan?

My stuff:

• Daily sketches in the sketchbook album, somehow I still haven’t fallen behind.
• Watching:
  • I started watching the current NCIS season (TIL Fez from That 70s Show is a cast regular there now!) and also a bunch of Mike Birbiglia standup specials on Netflix. I do have other more interesting series on my backlog to watch, but somehow I found myself falling back to procedurals and standup comedy. The main reason is that these things don’t require a lot of attention, so I can leave them running in the background while I do other things.
  • I will admit I was a bit meh on WandaVision episodes 1-3 (and even for the rest of the MCU offerings this year), but episode 4 was just fantastic and has renewed my MCU hype. If they manage to hit this level of quality for their other series, we have a lot to look forward to. It makes me a bit sad that the Netflix series/Agents of SHIELD never received the kind of MCU integration these series are getting, but what can you do?
• Gaming:
  • A lot of gaming for me this week!
  • Played three whole games of Civilization VI over the past week, two of them before the latest New Frontier Pass drop even. I won one game with the new Civ Vietnam. (I streamed a bit of this game if you want to watch me be dumb.) I’m glad I got one already, because I’m not sure I’d play them again, as the terrain restrictions are very challenging. The Corporations mode is nice, but I feel like I haven’t yet maximized it too much. It does feel like I’ll be enabling this by default from now on.
  • Because of reasons, I purchased a copy of Princess Maker 2 Refine on Steam. I played a bunch of the original game back in the day, and it was weird reading through the old guides on GameFAQs and some of them would have advice on configuring old-timey things like config.sys and such. Anyway, I played almost 5 hours of this in one session, which was really bad for my eyestrain. This was one of the first calendar-based life sims I played, maybe it’s the reason I really enjoyed the Persona series? I’m not sure why I found this game in particular so engaging, as it’s kind of like watching spreadsheet numbers go up.
  • Kaldheim is out on Magic Arena! I only had time to do a Sealed so far, but I expect to be drafting (and streaming on Twitch) a few times a week.
• Books: Still reading Scott Berkun’s The Year Without Pants.
• Finances: I don’t talk about my finances a lot in this space, but I will note that a couple of weeks ago I started investing in the US markets via an app called eToro. I got lucky with an initial trade that had a bit too much leverage for my taste, because I wasn’t reading too carefully. Luckily the NASDAQ spiked that day so I made it out with a bit of profit. I used a bit of that profit to buy-in a minimal amount of Gamestop, trying to cash in on the trend, unfortunately I couldn’t get in on a low price. Well, I can afford to risk (and lose) this profit, so that’s fine. I just hope the Gamestop thing doesn’t crash the markets entirely, that would be just my luck for such a thing to happen just when I started.
• Quiz: We were still ahead in the AboutQuiz league going into this week’s Price is Right-themed game, but we only finished 5th this time, so IDK if that will still hold.
• Had a lot of family errands during the week as well, mostly financial stuff and helping my folks with medical appointments and such. I think this was the week where I had the most trips out of the house since the pandemic lockdowns began.

Site updates:

• if you follow this site via an RSS/feed reader (both of you), you may want to know that I’ve added a daily feed to the site, it will cough up a single post per day with a summary of all the things I’ve posted for that day.

Looking forward to this coming week:

• new WandaVision episode!
• There’s a new thing I’ve been meaning to learn/get into, hoping to get started on it this week.