Roy Tang

Programmer, engineer, scientist, critic, gamer, dreamer, and kid-at-heart.

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Weeknotes 2021-02-28

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. People speculate that at least one of the parties involved really was dealing drugs, and they got into a shootout because they were afraid of being EJK’ed.

I don’t have any of these today, sadly. This is why I don’t have a newsletter, I’m unable to promise regular content lol.

My stuff:

  • This week was busy with family and medical errands, so not much else was accomplished.
  • Still sketching.
  • Watching:
    • WandaVision penultimate ep, people still liked it, but it was a bit meh for me. Still looking forward to next week’s finale, as there are still so many things to wrap up!
    • Started watching Star Trek: Enterprise, the last of the non-animated Trek shows I have yet to watch. (I haven’t seen the TOS animated series). It’s Scott Bakula! Their uniforms here remind me of something like modern astronaut wear, so I assume they wanted something closer to “modern day” Earth to bridge to the Star Trek future. It’s interesting because at this point the relationship between the humans and Vulcans isn’t well established, there is no federation, no prime directive, etc, so we get to see the beginnings of those things later on I guess?
    • Also watched a couple of movies this week. First was Space Sweepers, a Korean space sci-fi adventure on Netflix. Entertaining enough, though the plot is easily predictable and the villain seemed like a moron. Great visuals and special effects, miles apart from anything local cinema has to offer. One-inch barrier of subtitles, etc.
    • Second movie was Once Upon A Time In Hollywood. This was a very laid-back, relaxed movie, unfolding mostly as a series of slice-of-life vignettes of what life was like Hollywood in 1969, with no real plot urgency to speak of. The climax sort of just happens through no real actions by the main characters. Fairly long, took me four sittings to get through. Was surprised to find out later that it was based on a true story of a massacre that took place at that time, with Margot Robbie playing a real-life actress who was the victim in the actual massacre. The story unfolds a bit differently, probably due to the presence of fictional protagonists Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth (portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt). Bruce Lee also makes an appearance!
    • Last week was also the premiere of Superman and Lois on CW. I still like these positive portrayals of Superman better than something like Snyder’s Man of Steel, although I’m a bit meh on the premiere overall. Everything about the teens gives me Smallville vibes. They had a really big missed opportunity to match a scene from the opening sequence with a classic comic cover.
  • Gaming:
    • Played a bit of Civ6 now that the Barbarian Clans mode has dropped. Restarted a few times with Kublai Khan before I got a decent start. Not super impressed with the Barbarian Clans mode so far, seems like the main effect is that we get more city-states going into the endgame. Will probably still try it out for a few games.
    • Second Fire Emblem Three Houses run still in progress, finally got to the Edelgard decision point, and went as I planned.
    • Have been trying to figure out why I’m having so much trouble finding matches in Street Fighter V. Still no luck though. I want to indulge myself by getting the season 5 pass, but it’s not worth it if I can’t actually find matches.
    • Always annoying whenever this happens, but next month’s PS+ games include FF7 Remake, which I’ve already played and finished. Good for everyone else though! New content was also announced for the PS5 version of the game, which is also annoying since it’s probably goinna be a while before I bother with a PS5 (maybe waiting for a smaller version!)
    • Edit: One of my loyal readers pointed out I failed to mention that we played a few games of 4-player Free For All in Starcraft 2 last Saturday. I won one and some undeserving people won the other two.
  • Books: Finished reading Scott Berkun’s Ghost of my Father. Then started reading pioneering cyberpunk classic Neurmancer by William Gibson. Kind of a challenging read, I’m inching through it slowly.
  • Quiz: We managed to win the AboutQuiz league, just barely. Yay us!
  • Managed to sneak in a few minor upgrades to this here site, mostly CSS and rendering improvements on the frontend.

This coming week:

  • WandaVision finale!
  • The Flash season premiere
  • New One Piece later tonight!
  • supposedly vaccination in this country will finally kick off!
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