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. Meanwhile, we continued to hit record numbers of new cases, our 7-day rolling average now the highest in SEA since the pandemic began. It’s like we’re in the same situation we were in last year, except the numbers are much, much higher. And yet our leadership is like “It’s not so bad, even France has lockdowns!". Sigh.
Links of interest:
- Austin Kleon reminds us that we all need something to look forward to. (Arbitrary stupid goals!)
- I was fascinated by this article about how Lee Child writes Jack Reacher novels on the fly, mainly because that seems like the sort of “less work” approach I’d prefer when writing
- a curiosity: Benford’s Law, or the law of anomalous numbers
- In defense of doing nothing
- I spent a long time working with Java projects, so this long list of new features from Java 8 to 16 was interesting to me. After reading this, I asked my old workmates what version of Java they were now using, and they were still on Java 8, the same version as when I left there 6 years ago! Time flows differently in the enterprise universe I guess.
- My friends were amazed I hadn’t seen the Long, Long Man japanese commercials before.
- I enjoyed this case study by Elsa Charretier of a Hawkeye comic book panel by David Aja. Probably helpful in my own sketching! Subscribed to her channel as well.
- Sony announced that they will be shutting down the PS3, Vita and PSP stores. End of an era really. A lot of people are complaining about content that will be forever lost, but I’m sure that there are people working to archive this stuff and make it available through other means. Wink wink
My stuff:
- Still sketching!
- As a person with comorbidities (hypertension), I’m in vaccine priority group A3, right after senior citizens (A2s). And since the stock of AstraZeneca is limited, QC is now allowing A3s to go ahead of A2s, so I was able to book a vaccine appointment on the 27th. Its a ways off, but I’m hoping that means they’ve learned to streamline their on-site processes by then, so hopefully things go smoothly. It’s weird to have booked a schedule even before the more at-risk parents though.
- In a bid to minimize having to go outside, we decided to try ordering groceries online via Metromart. The first-time experience wasn’t great; we had to buy from a different grocery (since our usual one wasn’t available), not all the regular items we needed were there, and some items were way more expensive. And worst of all, I ordered Tostitos cheese dip and they bought spinach dip instead!! The weird thing is, there were some other items that were out of stock that they called me about (even though I explicitly set that if there were missing items, just don’t buy them??), yet for the dip, they just went ahead and bought a different flavor. I ended up having a long convo with their customer support about how disappointed I was, and somehow despite saying there’s nothing they could do, they later ended up offering me P100 store credit as compensation. I guess it will be useful if ever we decide to try this again. Anyway, we ended up doing a supplementary grocery run yesterday to cover the items the online delivery didn’t get (and the cheese dip!)
- Watching:
- Only one movie watched this week, continuing the James Bond run: On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969)
- Supergirl has started up again, carrying over baggage from the cut-short previous season, same as Flash. The writing was marginally better though.
- This week’s Falcon and Winter Soldier was pretty good, though I still found Wandavision more exciting overall.
- Gaming
- I tried grinding to Master Rank in Eternal on the last day of the month, but I ran out of time with half a level to go. Sigh. Arena I didn’t even bother and ended the month in platinum.
- Played a couple of Civ6 games, mostly achievement hunting.
- Played a bit more Iris and the Giant, now down to 1 achievement remaining, but it requires going through all the secret levels, I think?? That might take a while.
- This week’s multiplayer games with friends: Blood Rage, Sentinels of the Multiverse, Root, and Orcs Must Die 2.
- Books: Finished reading Discworld’s Men at Arms!, maybe I can write book review(s) this week. Need to find a new book to read, probably a nonfiction one this time.
- This was the second Holy Week in a row where we were just stuck at home all day.
This coming week:
- new Falcon and Winter Soldier, Invincible, One Piece, etc
See Also