Roy Tang

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.

Links of interest:

• A couple of Zelda-themed videos I enjoyed for some reason:
  • Life as a Bokoblin - A Zelda Nature Documentary
  • The Legend of Beavis. This one is super dumb.
• I enjoyed this short webcomic series about crop circles
• Smolcss.dev: Minimal snippets for modern CSS layouts and components
• For everyone who likes NPM, there was this fun story this week about attacking private source code repos by creating public versions of their private dependencies, so that NPM would pull those new public versions instead.
• How to Write a Novel, According to 10 Really Good Novelists
• Twitter’s Jack Dorsey imagines a decentralized app store for social media algorithms. The article is sparse on details and I don’t know how accurate it is, but I do like the idea, if only because I hope somebody implements just the chronological timeline algorithm everywhere.

My stuff:

• Still working on that secret thing I’m learning.
• I wrote a bunch of actual non-weeknotes blog posts last week, so go check them out! Or don’t, I’m not your mother.
• Daily sketches still ongoing in the sketchbook album, somehow still managing to keep up. I make no pretense that the sketches are actually good.
• Watching:
  • I’ve been watching a lot of old Brooklyn Nine-Nine eps, still haven’t caught up to the latest season already on Netflix. Was announced last week that the next season, only 10 eps, will be the last one.
  • Also started trying to catch up on The Expanse. This series is so hard to binge because each episode feels so heavy and dense I feel like I need time to absorb and reflect. Would have been perfect to be watching the eps weekly as they drop.
  • WandaVision on the other hand continues to be really effective/frustrating with their cliffhangers
  • This note summarizes how I feel about these three shows.
• Gaming:
  • Kaldheim drafts are continuing, although I find I’m much worse at this than Zendikar Rising. Despite being so terrible, I am considering throwing gems away on the Sealed Arena Open next weekend, seems like it could be fund (although there’s a good chance of instant regret!)
  • There’s this small indie game I bought a while back called Knightin’, I tried it a bit, kinda neat.
  • Been getting back into Fire Emblem Three Heroes, on my second run at the moment.
  • Couple of gaming things this week that I’m interested in:
    • Street Fighter V made their initial previews for the first drop in season 5. The season pass includes something that lets me random select on ranked! I’d love to that, and I’d love to play more SF5 despite being so trash at it, except the real problem is I find it so hard to find online matches (possibly because I’m so bronze tier). Still, tempted to get this pass.
    • Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury for Switch released this week. Was initially not interested since I already finished 3D World on WiiU, but I saw a preview that made Bowser’s Fury look like a significant addition, so now I am once again waffling about whether to throw money Nintendo’s way
• Books: Still reading Cory Doctorow’s “Walkaway”
• Quiz: We were terrible in this week’s About Quiz, mostly due to the abundance of PH-local questions which we always find difficult. We finished second last, but I think we still manage to retain first place in the league, by a razor-thin margin.
• Started to use an electric massager and doing arm rotations and other weird exercises to help loosen up my left shoulder and maybe regain flexibility and alleviate muscle pains. Here’s to hoping it works!
• My eyes are a bit tired. Quite possibly from playing too much Fire Emblem.

Looking forward to this coming week:

• yet another WandaVision ep.
• new One Piece later today
• I think we should also be getting details on the next Civ6 New Frontier Pass drop next week? It should just be a free update for this month though.
• Oh Ash Wednesday is this week, I wonder if they’ll provide an alternative for people who still don’t want to go to the actual church…